(Twenty Years) Part 1: A Foot In The Door

November 30, 2007 marks 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

"If you reach back in your memory
A little bell might ring
'Bout a time that once existed
When money wasn't king
If you stretch your imagination
I'll tell you all a tale
About a time when everything
Wasn't up for sale"

-- Tom Petty, "Money Becomes King"

In the middle of October 1987, I was an eighteen year old kid attending classes at Lakeland Community College during the days and dividing my free time between writing short stories and motoring about aimlessly, listening to WMMS at stupendous volume in my reconditioned 1977 Camaro (a birthday gift from my father that summer). Despite what it sounds like, life wasn't exactly a non-stop party: I was a pretty square kid who was still years away from drink and smoke, I kept out of trouble barring the odd speeding ticket, my circle of close high school friends had recently broken up as everyone scattered to their respective universities at the end of August and I was really only going to school out of lack of anything better to do.

That said, I still think back on this period as one of the happiest times of my life. I suppose most of that feeling has to do with a near-total lack of things to dwell upon and worry about: I didn't have a care in the world, I was living at home rent-free, Lakeland was being paid for by my parents (as long as I actually went, of course), and I was absolutely giddy with this new and completely alien feeling of being able to do whatever I wanted whenever I pleased for the first time in my life. Hell, I didn't even have a full-time job for crissakes (the one great benefit of going to school). I might have been a bit bored, perhaps, but I certainly had nothing to complain about otherwise.

I had only started working about six months earlier when, sick and tired of being flat broke all the time (and unwilling to do housework for an allowance), I applied around a few places within walking distance of home and wound up being hired as a bag boy at the corner grocery store. It wasn't glamorous work, wearing a tie and slacks while filling shopping bags, gathering carts and cleaning up BBQ sauce spills in aisle six, but I could have just as easily been slaving over a fry vat at Mr. Hero instead, which is what made dealing with the indignities of the supermarket job tolerable.

What really soured that first job, however, was that I wasn't happy at all with being forced to join the UFCW and giving up a portion of my earnings to them, especially when this was going to be nothing more than a summer gig before I started school. Despite the exhortations of our local union head, I had zero interest in joining a strike line (which was on the horizon as the summer got going) and standing up for my fellow bag boys nationwide. By early July as the strike date began to approach, I was ready for a change of scenery and started looking for a job where I could not only keep all the money I made but also have more free time to hang out and see movies with my friends before we all went our separate ways.

In a flash of insane inspiration, I settled on the idea of trying third shift factory work. I was already a night owl and hated getting up in the morning so the hours would be no problem at all. Better yet, I would be completely free to spend some glorious sunny days hanging out with my buddies. The little fact that I had forgotten to schedule time for such silly things as, you know, sleep didn't cross my mind initially. Only when I started conking out in the middle of a matinees and being unable to remember what day it was most of the time did I realize that maybe third shift work wasn't the answer, but by that point the romance of being up all night every night was enough to keep me going, if the work itself wasn't so hot ... and it wasn't.

My first third shift factory job was at a true portal to Hell called Rainbow Plastics. This was one of those jobs that you knew was going to be a bust about halfway through your first day. Even on cool, dewy nights, that shop floor was hotter than the tropics and the air was thick with the stench of vulcanization. With the machinery always running, it was jet-engine loud in that place at all times: conversation at anything less than shouting volume was impossible. My nights were spent repeatedly opening a sliding metal door, donning a pair of oven mitts, peeling a plastic blob off of a steaming hot metal mold, closing the door of the machine and starting a new plastic mold running, and then breaking off usable plastic widgets off the hot mold I just removed from said machine before the new mold completed. Rinse, spin, repeat. Amplifying all of this misery was the fact that the shop floor was lit by the same kind of orange sodium vapor lights you see lining freeways and major roads, which really drove home the idea that I was chained to a blast furnace in Hades instead of some nondescript industrial plaza on Tyler Boulevard.

Needless to say, I didn't even last two weeks at Rainbow Plastics: in fact, I think I called in "sick" the first Friday after I started. Using a temp agency, I switched over to another factory gig at TriDelta, which was far more accommodating a work environment in that it was well-lit, air conditioned, and far quieter (if also twenty times more boring than even my previous job).

Most of my duties at TriDelta involved piecing together metal and plastic widgets or assembling/testing furnace gaskets via computerized workstation (which often involved a few minutes of downtime while the system ran tests and sorely tested my ability to stay awake and alert). While having the muzak system locked onto a local "lite rock" station meant hearing Suzanne Vega, Cutting Crew, Carly Simon, and Los Lobos' version of "La Bamba" about 600 times apiece, I managed to stick it out there for the rest of the summer before achieving the dubious honor of getting myself canned on my last day of work: I'd finally succumbed to circadian rhythms and dozed off at my testing desk, just as the first shift manager was making his early rounds. Ha ha.

While at Lakeland, I pulled in a little bit of weekly spending cash from a temp gig folding Sunday papers at the Lake County News Herald every Saturday night, while other expenses were drawn off money I'd saved over the summer. As with my summer jobs, this wasn't exactly fulfilling or challenging work, but at least now I was allowed to wear headphones while I worked, and believe me, that made plenty of difference on its own.

As I mentioned earlier, my attitude for school was all wrong, and it didn't take more than a couple of weeks for me to drop my first class. I can actually remember that first instant during a typically interminable Psychology lecture when my I suddenly realized that I didn't really have to be there at all as attendance was elective and no one had a gun to my head (the fact that it wasn't my money being thrown about here, of course, had never crossed my mind). That first day I skipped out was the beginning of the end of my college career right then and there, though I would put in the odd spurt of activity off and on over the next six years as circumstances arose. Looking back from now, I probably should have taken a full year off before even attempting college on any level: I was too intoxicated by the absolute freedom I'd felt after 12 years being forced to attend school to get myself into any kind of serious learning mindset.

With my savings starting to dwindle, I knew a full-time job over the approaching month-long Christmas break would be a must. I also knew that I couldn't return to factory work (or any facet of the food industry, for that matter), and I decided that I wanted to try working in an area I felt I'd actually be good at for a change, which is when I started seriously considering applying at a record store. I'd been gravitating towards this idea ever since graduation, really, and seeing as how my life had been utterly dominated by a fascination with music for nearly six years to that point, I felt I had a pretty good chance of getting at least a foot in the door at any place I tried.

Much as it shames me to think about now, it would be a cop-out not to admit that I'd applied at all three record stores that were in the Great Lakes Mall at the end of 1987. Slick and modern and tucked away in a far distant corner of the Higbees wing, Camelot Music was full of striped ties and collared shirts, coming off as pretty tight and regimented, while the more austere, neon-lit National Record Mart made little to no impression on me at all. As eager as I was for a shot to work in music, however, I would have jumped at the chance to work in either of those places.

It was to my great relief that it was the smallest, oldest, and dingiest record store in the mall that gave me a shot. Unlike the other two stores in the mall, Record Den was the kind of place I felt I could hang out in even if I wasn't behind the counter. Despite being located in a leased space at the front of J.J. Newberry Co. (an old-school department store-sized five-and-dime that went from "quaint and old fashioned" to "eyesore" over the summer Great Lakes Mall was being noisily renovated), there was a "cool" cachet about that tiny little store that had seduced me the first time I set foot in there a couple of years earlier. Record Den was not at all slick and modern, and the aisles weren't patrolled by mannequins with perms; it was a rundown-looking hole in the wall stuffed to the ceiling with CDs, records, tapes, buttons, posters and whatever else could be squeezed into their alotted floorspace. Best of all, the people working there were fellow music freaks, nearly all of them regular, approachable people who happened to share the same passion as me.

Getting a gig at the Den wasn't easy. While Camelot and NRM basically handed you a blank application and handled the whole process in the fashion I'd been used to with other jobs ("thanks, we'll call you if something comes up"), Greg (the manager of the Den) seemed to make it a point to continually blow off potential employees in a kind of psychological test to see how badly they really wanted the job. It was frustrating to be told to come back next week time and time again, but with NRM and Camelot not making any offers of their own, I was up for the challenge. Finally, during one visit I was handed a pen and a xeroxed "rock aptitude" test Greg had devised years earlier. It was 100 questions, mostly in the vein of "Who recorded Dark Side Of The Moon?", "Name all four members of The Beatles," "Name 3 current Top 40 songs" (heh, God help me on that one these days), "Who recorded 'Maggot Brain'" and the like. I took the test on a bench outside the store, hoping to make a dramatic impression and sell myself as the temp they were looking for. My plan worked: I absolutely nailed the sucker and was officially hired a few days later, with a start date of the Monday after Thanksgiving.

My Christmas job was locked in.