Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 32-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Continued from Vol. 365
I shop in small grocery stores where the doors never close, and I’ve often wondered how those poor cashiers can stand it in the winter. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but the December wind did blow in from the street, and although I didn’t have my glasses on, it seemed to me like the guy on the sidewalk with his hand out asking for money from customers leaving the store, was staring straight at me, smirking. And, at that moment, it did seem like he had the better gig.
On day two, a supervisor told me he’d be moving me to another till.
“Thank god!” I muttered. I’d heard they took turns to avoid having one person stuck at the coldest till all day. I was ushered from till number one to till number two and told that the conveyor belt had broken, so I’d have to ask customers to push their groceries forward—and I’d have to reach for them. While reaching may seem like a simple enough action, doing it for six hours is not good. Plus my wrists were now hurting a lot from the twisting to scan the barcode action that the trainer had warned us about. I didn’t go back after Christmas. I sent them a farewell letter that included some recent news I’d received about an L.A.-based film producer who wanted to make a documentary about … well, my life. I told Whole Foods that I needed to go to L.A. immediately to begin working on the film. No reply. Since then, the L.A. filmmaker has stopped communicating entirely, and I’ve been hired at two other places. I left a kooky dress store with a terrible shoplifting problem after the first day, knowing I just didn’t have it in me to defend the garments with the same intensity the owner demonstrated. Furrowing my brow at crackheads with an unwavering glare that intended to prevent them from trying to slide hoodies down the front of their pants was not going to take me to retirement. On that same day, I was hired at Home Depot, but they weren’t offering me enough hours to live on. They’d only scheduled for between six and eight hours a week to work in the garden center. But none of this bothered me, because I was on an upswing with my real work. I was painting a lot, and some of it was selling!
“Step Into My Sphere” from the album Who Shot Elvis? (Matador, 1996) (download):
