Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (11 page)

Eric became a cashier, replete with dress shirts, slacks, and snazzy ties. I became the world’s fattest stock boy.

I was a spoiled-au-gratin suburbanite more used to picking up the latest 45s at Wyatt Earp’s than hauling ass and merch around acres of decaying departments, but I soon learned what “plus sizes” were and that “petites” could be fat as long as they were short and that “juniors” ain’t nothin’ but a number.

I do not remember my first day, just my mother’s warnings about driving on Pierson Road—a deathtrap—and about walking alone from the parking lot into the store, but I know I spent a lot of my time early on being absolutely petrified. Physical labor was the furthest thing from my life experience, and while I was working with some kids my age-ish, I was also interacting with full-fledged adults, all of whom were mid-career, not mid-sophomore year.

About 50% (forgive me if I admit I haven’t consulted that era’s Census to confirm it) of the store’s patrons were black, which was 100% more black people than I was used to encountering outside the black jocks at my dad’s school. Even with my limited interfacing with the urban clientele (meaning I was really just supposed to haul clothes out to the floor), I learned right away that you can enjoy interviews with Lionel Richie on
PM Magazine
and be an outspoken non-racist at school, but that’s not going to buy you comfy acceptance. “But I stick up for you guys all the time with my friends!” just doesn’t give you strip-mall cred. You
will
be called a cracker if it’s 1985, you’re white, and you’re working in Flint.

My actual job was
simple
, but it was not
easy
. I was to show up, take all the boxes and rolling racks of new merchandise out to the floor, and feed empty boxes and old hangers to the gigantic, noisy trash compactor in the back. Impossible to fuck up, but a devastating mission for a heinous corpus like mine. I had to master the art of manipulating heavy racks down crowded aisles, removing stacks of clothes on hangers without getting them all tangled up, and can I just tell you how many times I envisioned my inexorably slow death by compactor? I remember how dank it was in that thing when I had to climb in and slide down its throat to wrench free an errant box, wondering how possible it was for a coworker to turn it back on without realizing I was inside.

As I struggled to fulfill the basic requirements of what it meant to be a stock boy, I got to know a group of people I will never forget and yet many of whom never got to know the real me at all. Three were straight-laced girls with monogrammed sweaters and delicate cross necklaces, so sheltered they seemed oblivious to matters of sex, not to mention racial politics.

One day, I got into a heated argument with them when one of them suggested that black and white people should never make babies together because there was a good chance the babies would be polka-dotted.

“I’ve
seen
it,” Dana insisted, wide-eyed. “So I know it’s true.” The other girls agreed.

“You might have seen a baby with an actual skin condition called vitiligo, but that is not from mixing races. It’s not like a soft-serve ice cream machine,” I told them. They refused to be moved on the subject. They were the kinds of girls who would go to school dances with other girls and get mopey that not enough white-people music was being played. I don’t think they would have been down with burning crosses; they were just in their own, comfortable worlds and incurious. At least when I knew them.

The girls’ inability to think beyond what they knew was never in sharper relief than the Halloween we all spent at Dana’s house. We decided to watch the classic 1963 horror film
The Haunting
, probably because it sounded scary to my work clique and to me sounded like a good chance to flesh out the Robert Wise films I’d seen. After it was over, everyone talked about their impressions of the film and I marveled at Claire Bloom’s character being such an obvious lesbian in a movie that was then already over two decades old. Everyone in the room stared at me like I’d just suggested we finish the job Hinckley had started and assassinate Reagan. Then they laughed, roasting me for reading way, way too much into the movie. If they couldn’t see the lesbianism in that movie, I knew they’d never suspect I was gay. I’d have to suck a cock right in front of them. And would’ve.

Another girl at the store, Kelly, attended an all-Catholic high school called Powers and passed for square, but was secretly cool. She invited me to see a-ha out of town, a trip on which she introduced me to her pal John, who she thought I might like meeting. John was the first gay person I met. Actually, it wasn’t acknowledged that either one of us was gay, and I’d already met tons of others I couldn’t be sure really were, but when I met him, it was the first time I thought, “This dude is gay like me.” Why? Well, like I said, we were going to an out-of-town a-ha concert. And we had a meaningful conversation about why Stacey Q was musically superior to Regina, both of whose albums we owned.

But if my back-fat-breaking work at The Fair Store opened me up to a new world of semi-adult interactions that helped me along my journey to becoming confident enough to come out—kind of like how WWII brought small-town boys together and hastened the gay-rights movement—it also challenged me in more ways than the physical.

I worked with two dudes, Gary and Rob, who were straight bros and whose talk of getting drunk and attempting to ball chicks was only entertaining until the subject of homosexuality would come up. Rob, a tall, well-built farm boy type with a disarmingly boyish grin, was resolute that homos had to go.

I would argue with him tooth and nail from within my closet, but he always had the last word, if only because he’d often leave even me speechless.

“Nope, Hitler had it right…except he should’ve done it with the gays.”

Of course, Hitler
did
do it with the gays. But just hearing his contempt made me think twice about climbing into that trash compactor anytime he was around. It was tough talk coming from a dude who had a strong opinion on why Madonna’s “Causing a Commotion” had stalled at #2 for a second week, but Rob was like that—extremely affable, then maddeningly stubborn. At Christmas, he bought me the Dead or Alive album
Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know
and still had no clue I was gay. I’m assuming he’d guessed Pete Burns was, but people are sometimes willingly blind to what’s before their faces.

I had my first non-school crush on one coworker, an assertive, slightly older, straight boy with slick hair who informed me I’d never continue avoiding alcohol through college—and I still wonder if my lifelong sobriety is in defiance of him. I’ve never had a drink aside from a few accidental sips, so if he’s reading this: I win.

Cocky as hell, Bob was a handsome chap, one to whom I’d have gladly lost any of my virginities, but he also scared me because he seemed well aware of my designs.

At the end of one evening, I flirtily told him I couldn’t wait to go to bed.

“No, I will not go to bed with you, Matt,” he shot back, (cock-)teasing. But he did take me to my first-ever big-boy concert: Eurythmics’
Revenge Tour
. Lying on a blanket at the outdoor venue Pine Knob with him, elbow-to-elbow, as a gigantic zipper parted a leather curtain at the start of the show was…confusing, let’s say.

The Fair wasn’t all that fair. As one of only a couple of stock boys, another being a circumspect black guy named Stacy, we were directed by our battle-ax of a supervisor, a raspy-voiced old lady who seemed to relish her position of impotent importance, to ignore a phoned-in bomb threat and not to leave the store. Instead, we were told we should look around for the bomb. Not being a bomb-sniffing dog with no choice in the matter, I left and went to Wendy’s. Nothing exploded, not even my fledgling career as a stock boy, as I was able to return to work the next day like nothing had ever happened.

They also made us work on the weekends every so often so we could peel-and-stick mailing labels on store circulars, something that took hours and hours. Their mailing list probably went back to the ‘60s, and considering the clientele was so predominantly black, some of the names were rather attention-getting for a group of whities named after the apostles or things like “Missy.” One of the names was “Angus Bigmeat,” but the jury’s still out on whether it was a prank.

The worst part of my job was discovering how barbaric adults could be given half a chance.

I didn’t like The Fair Store either, but when the women’s room was defaced top to bottom with fecal matter (complete with obscene inscriptions), it made me question the depths of depravity and despair that existed outside a world where kids like me got to have jobs for spending money and could go on class trips to Paris, France. (Which I signed up for but didn’t go on because of terrorism fears—and this was before Lockerbie. I honestly don’t even know what world event caused this concern.) Whoever had done the deed had taken her own poop in hand to write epithets on the bathroom wall. Bad penmanship, too. And definitely not a mode of venting with which I was familiar. They asked me to clean it up but I countered with, “That’s maintenance—I’m a stock boy.”

But for all of its drudgery and for all the bullshit opinions I had to deflect from otherwise sweet people, my time as a stocky stock boy was invaluable. It altered my expectations of life by helping me stand up for myself and forcing me to be social.

By the end of it, more than just my expectations had been altered—even though I’d spent more than my fair share of time hiding mid-way up the conveyor belt that connected the first and second floors to avoid doing extra work, I’d done enough manual labor to lose all my baby-elephant fat. I was ready to go off to college lean, mean, and anything but the machine my isolationism had threatened to make me into before I’d been thrust into
The Real World: Flint, Michigan
. It’s bizarre to think that a job where I was one step above the shit-cleaners could transform me inside and out.

You could buy almost anything at The Fair Store, but what I took from it I got for free—and I’m not even talking about that wicked Forever Krystle perfume display I spirited out under my shirt.

A few years later, when I returned to Flint, I went to the city’s premier gay nightclub, The Copa. This place was like a little slice of NYC back in the day, including appearances by Grace Jones and Studio 54-caliber dance moves. It was toward the end of its reign by the time I’d mustered the nuts to go inside, and who did I immediately find amidst the flashing lights and throbbing Hi-NRG music but two of the guys I’d worked with at The Fair Store who I’d never known were gay.

“Oh, most of those guys were gay,” one of them told me of the back room staff. I felt like one of the giggling girls I’d worked with watching
The Haunting
while not really seeing it.

Nowadays, straight guys are so open-minded they’re a six-pack of Red Bull away from going gay.

The allure of seducing a straight guy is about as easy an itch to scratch as it is to type Craigslist.com into your browser and hit return. Whatever challenge it once held is gone, girl.

Back when I was in high school, though, surrounded by presumably straight boys and men at every turn, it wasn’t just a fun erotic goal to try to get a straight guy into bed, it was pretty much the only conceivable way to have sex with another male. After all, who around me was gay? No one. (Well, lots of guys, according to my current Facebook, but none I knew about. in the ‘80s.)

The first great love I felt—and it was probably less about love than it was about closet-fed lust—arrived toward the end of high school when I laid eyes on Andrew, a charismatic brat who was both an academic overachiever
and
a soccer jock (no one played soccer in Michigan, so I’m not sure where he found people to play it with).

I was hooked on him from the beginning. I was so filled with a need to reason out my theory that he was gay that I bought a generic journal and began writing in it daily, titling it, “Personal Thoughts and Related Poetry on One Disturbing Theme.” My unwilting boner was said theme.

I think that hoary title broadcasts that I figured I was heading toward becoming the Tennessee Williams of Flushing, and that my private teen-years diaries and papers would shed light on an early love. Instead, my private diaries and papers make me want to gay-bash my teenage self, they’re so soaked in melodrama and puppy love.

The way I wrote about Andrew embarrasses me so much I just know I have to share it: