First Job a story submitted to an author friend pitching a story by Gia C. Manalio www.lifeissurreal.com When I was 15, my neighbor offered me an under-the-table job at his car wash. It wasn’t in the “best” neighborhood, but I was a young punk rocker and I thought that would fit me just fine. It would be so punk rock. On the first day, I got my orientation. Harold, a very large black man covered in gang tattoos, took an instantly liking to me, kissing my hand in greeting. At first I was a little taken aback, only because I was deathly shy and had a hard time talking to people. But he was so nice and we immediately became friends. Or moreso, he took me under his wing, telling me that if I had any problems with customers or anything, all I had to do was call his name and he’d be there. And I knew this was true. He and my new boss showed me my work station, the cash register. They then showed me the security system, the baseball bat under the counter. They told me never to hesitate if I needed to use it. So every Saturday morning at 6am, my father would drive me out to this car wash, where I would sit at the register, freezing my butt off, in the damp, soapy, musty car wash. It wasn’t even totally inside, although there were a few partial walls and a room surrounding me. As you might imagine, this was not the glam job for an idealistic 15 year old punk rocker, who still was a bit girly. Especially since Friday nights were for football games and hanging out with friends. That early, smelly, cold Saturday morning job, where every day I had to worry if I’d have to bash someone’s skull in, was seriously just not cool. So eventually I turned 16 and got a job at a local Flower Time. It wasn’t too bad and once you worked there for a while, you didn’t smell the fertilizer anymore. Until the one day, during a Christmas rush, a smallish skinny man stood in line at my register with one hand in his pocket. When he got up to me and saw the register open, he put his hand in it. I went to close the drawer and he said, “I’m just going to take this money.” Good enough for me, I was 16 and couldn’t see the other hand. There was a whole line behind him. As cool as I tried to be, I was totally shaken up and not old enough to realize that when they told me I couldn’t go home and had to stay and help with the rush I should have told them to stick it up their ass. Days later, a large man came in and while at my register said, “Aren’t you the girl who got robbed the other day? Yeah, I saw the whole thing.” I was too stunned to say anything clever about his, um…decision not to help me. I wish Harold had been there, Harold would have helped me. But alas, this was a different job and anyway, Harold had gone to jail. Later, I got in trouble by management when I couldn’t identify the man in a mug shot. He had punched in the nose between the robbery and the mug shot so he looked a totally different guy. And like I really looked at his face anyway…hello… It wasn’t much after that that I quite my job at Flower Time and went to work at CVS. A drug store. I won’t even go into the irony surrounding that one.