A Long Jewelry Story with No Happy Ending

I am not a fan of jewelry. It might be because I have so many other needs or interests that it strikes me as a waste of money. It doesn’t seem practical. Jewelry just hangs there.

I do a lot of computer work, and bracelets bang against the keyboard. Rings twist around and get in the way of the keys. I wear a name tag all day to move through security doors. A necklace seems superfluous. It itches my neck. I have a difficult time with clasps. My favorite bracelet had a magnetic clasp. It snapped together. But I carry so many purses, book bags, lunch bags, and stuff, in the course of traveling, it got tangled up in the straps and broke.

Pins punch holes in my clothes. I have a utilitarian pair of hoop earrings that don’t hurt when I’m on the phone and I never take them off. I have a plain gold wedding band. The morning of my wedding, my husband presented me with a small diamond engagement ring that didn’t go with the band. His family had shamed him into getting it, even when he told them I didn’t want one. We were set with matching bands. Whenever I see it in the jewelry box, I get sad. It represents coercion to me, not my wedding. Despite knowing me well, he believed someone else who said I would like something he knew I probably wouldn’t.

I have been in my husband’s family for 16 years now, and surely in that time I have mentioned I don’t wear jewelry. I show up for things sans jewelry. I don’t talk excitedly about jewelry. Either they don’t believe me or they aren’t listening, or they think I can change. My husband is no help. When they tell him what they’re getting me, he never says, “Don’t. She won’t like it.” He says nothing. So I get jewelry.

I was now in receipt of three new beads for a bracelet I no longer had. There’s a commercial running where one woman admires another woman’s charm bracelet and she excitedly defines who she is by the charms on the bracelet. There’s a soccer ball! (Because she drives her kids to soccer? Or does she play soccer?) There are YouTube videos where you see a bracelet full of beads and a narrator tells you what each one means to her. I can see there is effort here to define me with these beads. One is my initial. One is a cat. I have cats. The other beads are generic.

But I no longer have this bracelet. Putting the charms on and then fastening it to my wrist proved insurmountable last year. A charm would always fall off and roll into the best hiding place it could find. They banged into the keyboard. Charms would snag sweater sleeves. I couldn’t just slip it off. I had to wrestle with the clasp, and when it broke my fingernail down to the quick, I was done with it. I sold it on eBay to a woman who needed it to fulfill her daughter’s 16th birthday wish.

The bead market on eBay is weak, so I risk the after-Christmas rush and try to return them without a gift receipt since the barcoded price tags are still on the charms. Kohl’s is ready and waiting, with directional signs to all the return stations.

This is how Kohl’s sells things. They put a tag on the item with an outrageous price. Then they put up little signs on the racks that translate the tags into sale prices. If the price tag says $58, it’s “on sale” for $24. So I knew going in I didn’t really have $80 worth of beads, but I might have enough for a blouse. I did. I had $58.50 worth of beads. The tags on the blouses said $58, but the little sign on the rack said $58 was actually $24.80, so I had enough for two blouses!

Heady with success, I decide to try to return a diamond chip tennis bracelet to JC Penneys that I actually got two years ago. It was still in the gift box, except the barcode and price were peeled off. I had looked it up that first year on JCPenney online where it was selling for $75, but figured there must have been a sale in the store. On both eBay and Craigslist, there are many dozens of similar bracelets and people aren’t buying them.

I wait my turn at the jewelry counter and when the saleswoman greets me, two women start shouting that they had been waiting “an hour.” They have not, but they were there before me so I shrug and my clerk goes to help them. They have thick Eastern Europian accents and severe Communist-era haircuts and blocky builds. The older woman wears an old fashion headscarf. The younger woman wants to see a ring. Then another ring. Then another. They settle on one, but want to pay on credit. They have no cards so have to fill out a new credit application. The clerk and I wait. They turn it in. The clerk asks to see their ID. They have none. No driver’s license, nothing. The clerk says she will have to check with the manager.

This clerk has Mad Customer Service Skilz because I know she knows the answer is going to be NO, but the ladies stand there like there’s still a chance. The answer is no, the clerk says very apologetically. They leave without any visible disappointment. I am convinced they knew all along. I develop a backstory that they are actually Romanian gypsies and they were hoping the counter would be so crowded today, the clerk would leave the tray of rings out, get distracted, and they could pocket a few. Because why else would this woman who has no cash need a ring so bad the day after Christmas that she will go in debt for it?

Well, turned out she wasn’t the only one. While I wait for this most patient of sales clerks to look through pages of inventory photos trying to find a match for my mystery bracelet, a short, obese woman with over bleached, frizzy hair comes up asking about layaway. There is no layaway for jewelry, fill out a credit application, she is told. She does. She has two rings on every one of her fingers, including her thumbs. I am not kidding. She smiles at me. “I can’t believe you don’t want that bracelet,” she says. “Give it to me!” And she waves her ringed fingers at me. Multiple bracelets jingle on her arms. I can’t believe she is going in debt for more rings the day after Christmas. On the other side of the counter, I see an elderly woman intently filling out a credit application.

There is some kind of need and loneliness going on here, these women alone, shopping for themselves, the day after Christmas. They don’t have gift cards, or, apparently, money or a credit card. They fill out applications for new loans. My sales clerk can’t find my bracelet in the inventory. I don’t tell her it’s from two years ago. I just smile and say, “it must have been regifted then.” The woman with many rings suggests again I can regift it to her. The clerk with the Mad Customer Service Skilz says if I can find it online somewhere with a price and an inventory code, to please come back.

I look at the bracelet. Apparently for some it is a cure for every kind of sad and lonely. It is worth borrowing money to get. And yet, I can’t see it. It works no magic on me.

You may think this story ends with me giving it to the woman with all the rings, but no, it doesn’t. I am still trying to figure out an alchemy that will turn it into something I need, that will cure my sad and lonely, even for a moment.

My Career in Education

I was a junior in high school when I got my second job. It was an unusual job. I was in an unusual high school, the International School of Bangkok. My father, in a mid-life crisis, had joined the foreign service division of the Voice of America and it was our first overseas posting.

My mother was beside herself in anger at leaving her home state of North Carolina. Her blood pressure shot up and literally never came down until she stroked out at age 57. My brother, who had just started middle school and wanted a major league sports career, felt he was being deprived of his future, even though his Little League record was less than stellar. My sister wasn’t going because she was in college and engaged to be married.

I was the only one happy to go. I hated North Carolina. I hated my high school and fellow students. And my very inadequate boyfriend was already on the other side of the globe in Vietnam, next door to Thailand. We would see each other twice a year instead of once. It was fine with me.

One morning, just as I was beginning my junior year, a student job was posted to teach English as a foreign language at a business college. I was used to having my own money. I had been working since I was 15 at a movie theater in North Carolina. I had played teacher to my dolls as a child. I thought I could do it. I had nothing better to do on Saturdays. I took the address and negotiated the bus trip across Bangkok to the school offices.

The bus cost a single satang to ride, equivalent to less than a penny, so it was the most economical way to travel, although the buses were always full and you seldom got a seat. People actually hung from the doors and windows and rode on the outside. Sometimes there were caged chickens on the bus. I could also spend a whole 25 cents and take a samlor, which was like a golf cart with a back seat. Or I could go deluxe and spend a $1 and take a blue Datsun cab. But that would be wasteful. The cab drivers, thinking I was a tourist, would ask for $5 or more, and I would have to use the little Thai I knew to tell them I was on to their tricks and knew the going rate for locals.

The head of the business school looked like Buddha in a business suit. He sat on a rug on the ground, surrounded by cushions, incense, and statues of…I guess Buddha and other gods with many arms and legs. I was lucky I wasn’t sold into white slavery. My parents had no idea where this school was that I went to every Saturday. If I had disappeared, they wouldn’t even know where to start looking. I never knew the name of the school. The English on the sign just said Thai Business College.

He hired me on the spot. I thought life was always going to be this easy. I would teach three classes every Saturday morning. I would take attendance. They would listen to an English-speaking person speak. I would turn in grades. I only had to grade them on attendance.

The first year was exciting. The students were thrilled to meet me and treated me with respect even though I was a few years younger. The movie “To Sir With Love” was very popular in Thailand then. They called me Sir. They gave me love. At the end of each semester, they gave me little gifts. We took turns reading out loud from their text books and I would correct pronunciation. They would ask me to explain the lyrics to popular songs. It is not easy to explain the meaning of “yummy, yummy, yummy, I have love in my tummy” by Ohio Express or “do wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo” by Manfred Mann. I tried. They would laugh. They looked at me like I was a fascinating animal in a zoo. They had many questions about American life.

The hardest part of the job was taking attendance because the English translation of Thai names are very long, full of vowels and consonants that phonetically sounded like gibberish. They would laugh at my attempts to get through the roll call, but that was essentially their grade so it had to be done. I never got to the point where I could identify them by name. One hour a week wasn’t enough time to connect, and they all looked alike to me. Everyone’s hair was straight and black. They all wore the blue pants and skirts and white shirts and blouses which were the Thai school uniform.

And I had 120 or more students, divided up into three classes each semester. I made $30 a month, which I picked up in cash from the Buddha superintendent at the end of each month when I turned in my attendance records.

It was a princely sum since I could have a dress custom made for my measurements from a magazine picture, including the fabric, even Thai silk, for $5. A manicure was 50 cents, a pedicure 75 cents. I bought a fake hairpiece for $15 and I could have a mountain of curls and hair loops built on my head for $1.25. If I slept carefully, it would last the whole week. It made me look six inches taller. Shoes and handbags were as cheap as I could get the price down. I had a set to match every dress. Jewelry was a pittance, and we’re talking blue star sapphires set in silver. My family had a live-in maid who cleaned my room, made my bed, and washed and ironed my clothes. Kongkao was paid $25 a month and a bag of rice. Life was pretty good.

Things were great until the end of the second year when I had disruptive male students in my class. This was unusual because the Thai culture is built around showing respect for authority. In American schools, disruptive students were sent out of the classroom. I tried that. Everyone was shocked. Having a conflict was embarrassing to everyone, even the ones being evicted. Face was lost. Theirs and mine. They got cocky and challenged it, but gave up when I held firm. The good atmosphere was ruined after that. Everyone became nervous and uncertain. We laughed less.

I was glad the semester was ending and since I was leaving for college back in the States, I turned in my resignation and didn’t teach the summer session. There was no love for Sir anymore. Buddha Superintendent was sad to see me go. I probably lasted longer than any other American high school student – two years – and had been diligent. The way it ended soured me on being a teacher and I never taught anywhere again.

Attacked by the Japanese, Order & Chaos

It started with an email from Apple saying it was curious that I had purchased the Order and Chaos app, an online game, from a computer I didn’t normally use in the middle of the night. Was I all right?

No, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my purchase, so I rushed to my computer to change my password, only to find my iTunes account had been taken over by some kids in Kyoto, Japan and left in shambles. Whenever I logged in, iTunes would dissolve into the Japanese version. Although my name and address was the same on my account, my city and country were now Kyoto, Japan. And I didn’t recognize the credit card.

They didn’t steal my money as they replaced my credit card with a card that would work in Japan, which changed my country code in the process. Nothing I did would move my iTunes account back into English. Because the credit card number had come up as fraudulent – the billing address didn’t match mine – Apple was insisting I settle that matter before I could make any changes to my account. And I couldn’t. Every time I entered one of my credit card numbers, it rejected it because it didn’t match my billing address, which was now Koyoto, Japan. And I couldn’t fix my address until I entered a valid credit card number. I was stuck in a loop.

How come it was so easy for my hackers?

Apple doesn’t make it easy to reach a human in iTunes support. They have robot operators who sound very human -- the precursors of Siri -- and many press 1 for this and press 2 for that choices that solve most routine iTunes problems, but "My Account Was Hacked by Japanese Kids" was a choice in any menu. I futilely hit every button and verbally requested “A human” at every menu, and finally, a voice came on saying there was a 5-minute wait for a human. By then I was already two hours into my attempt to fix my iTunes account, so this seemed like a blessing. As is often the case, the wait time is exaggerated to discourage you from holding. A human came on almost immediately after I agreed to wait.

I explained my dilemma and the young man with a Valley Girl lilt to his voice asked for my computer serial number. Do I have to turn the computer upside down to find it? And why do you want it? This isn't a computer hardware problem. He insisted he needed it. We found where it was hidden, three clicks into the About This Mac panel. He told me my 90 days of free telephone support had expired.

Well, I know that. I’ve had this computer a couple of years, and it isn’t a hardware problem! I don’t need support to explain something to me! I need these damn Japanese kids out of my iTunes account! He agreed that fraudulent activity was its own category and politely forwarded me on to another young man with a Midwestern accent. We both agreed this was a baffling crime since they had stolen nothing from me except my ability to use my iTunes account since it was frozen over the issue of the unpaid app purchase. “iTunes accounts are free,” he said, puzzled.

(My husband later suggested that maybe the credit card was stolen so they needed to weld it onto an account that couldn’t be traced to them. It was only a 600 yen purchase, which is about $7.74.)

It was a struggle to delete the purchase and forgive the debt, thus enabling me to change my address back to the United States and reenter my own credit card and reset my password. The first half dozen tries failed, and finally my guy had to kick it upstairs to another team of computer wizards. He would come back from hold and say, “Try it now.” I would try it and say, “Still in Japan.” This went on for another two hours. When we finally landed back in the United States, it rejected my credit card. The account was now flagged for “unusual activity” due to all our finagling. I was locked out. It took another 30 minutes to override that.

At the end, when the Apple guy should really have been tired of dealing with me, he patiently sat through my long tirade about what I had gone through to connect with him. I wanted an explanation of how this happened; how did the hackers do it when it was so difficult to undo it? And what was the point? He didn’t know and offered no theories. And so ended my 4.5 hours with Apple support.

But I have to say, they were good. The robot support menu would have solved most things. The first Valley Boy was good about recognizing a special situation and letting me go through the phone support portal despite being out of warranty, and the iTunes team really put in a morning’s work releasing me from Japanese attack. They should have been at Pearl Harbor.

Naturally, I had to google Order and Chaos and see what was so special about this game. The logo is one of those big-eyed Japanese anime kids in medieval dress. Then I googled "Order and Chaos hackers" and found complaints going back to the beginning of the year of similar iTunes robberies for this game and a Texas Hold ‘Em poker game. What the hackers were stealing were credits. Apparently many people don’t feel safe leaving a credit card open on their iTunes account so they purchase gift cards and enter the credits. Someone with a list of iTunes user names and passwords could write a program sweeping through the accounts and downloading all the available credits with purchases for poker chips or extra powers and weapons for this Order and Chaos game. And then they could resell them as virtual goods.

The credit card number that replaced mine was probably just a bogus one to sweep my account into Japan since it only worked for yen purchases, and the point was to steal credits, not actually use the card. At least that’s my theory.

And the other weird thing was I had just read in Steve Jobs’ biography that his favorite place in the world was the Kyoto, Japan gardens, and I had made a mental note to google it and see the pictures, only to wake up and find my iTunes account had gone to Kyoto without me that same night. Odd? Mystical.

My Hollywood Career

My first job was at a movie theater concession stand. The second I turned 15, I got my worker’s permit and applied to the first place that appealed to me. I was hired on the spot. I thought life was always going to be this easy.

An actual crone in the actual ticket booth
of the actual Pitt Theatre

The Pitt Theatre had been my social life since I was 11. We moved to a small North Carolina college town from the outskirts of New York City, and I might as well have landed on another planet. With my coarse, dark hair and harsh accent, I was immediately ostracized by a population of school girls who looked like cheerleaders and blonde boys with Mercury astronaut buzzcuts. So I spent the weekends in the two movie theaters in town, the State and the Pitt, one across the street from the other. My mother would drop me off. I’d see the 1 p.m. show; cross the street and see the 3 p.m. show. Then I would walk a block to the library and wait for my ride home. It was easy to do. A child’s ticket was 25 cents back then. I saw everything, and if the movie at the second theater was not to my taste, I saw the first movie twice. This was a time when you could spend the entire day in a theater. No ushers ushered you out.

The Pitt was the nicer of the two, so I went there first and asked to see the manager. I did not have to answer 20 questions posed by a panel of three. We came to terms immediately. I would report after school every day and work until 6 p.m. On weekends, I would arrive in time for the first show. I would sell candy, popcorn, soda, and snowcones. Snowcones were tricky to make, so I was glad they were seldom ordered. I was thrilled.

The elderly theater owner was also the daytime projectionist, and his elderly wife opened the concession stand each day, stocked the cash drawer and supplies. Another elderly woman sat in the ticket box. By hiring me, the owner’s wife could now leave as soon as I arrived and have the rest of her day free. I worked until the nightshift came on, another husband and wife team who worked as projectionist and concessions and closed the theater after the last show. Another old woman was in the ticket booth at night.

There was seldom anything going on during the 3-6 p.m. shift. I would serve less than a half dozen customers. The theater did inventory by cups, so if I bought a cup at the beginning of my shift, I could refill it several times for free. Candy was carefully counted at the end of the night and had to match the cash drawer, so you couldn’t stuff your face without paying. But there was a nice assortment of 2 cent candies, including Tootsie Roll Pops. A chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop, sucked slow, could last a long time.

From the concession stand, I could hear the movie, and if I opened the door in the back, I could see it. The 3 p.m. show would be underway by the time I had squared away my few customers, and my shift was over halfway through the 5 p.m. show, so I heard all the movies backward those years, the ending first, then the beginning. To this day, I prefer to watch films that way. And I like Tootsie Roll Pops.

Weekends were busier, but less fun because the other woman was there all day, too. I had to share my private little candy world. But I also got to work the much busier evening shift, sometimes as late as 9:30 when the audience for the last movie of the night had settled in.

I worked there for almost two years, until we moved. Whenever someone paid with a Kennedy half dollar, I covered it with my own money and took the Kennedys home. It was a flawed savings plan because my hefty bank deposits of Kennedy halves were exciting to look at, but when you withdrew your money, you didn’t get Kennedy halves back. I guess I could have asked for them, but in the end, my treasure trove didn’t matter. It all went to buy my incredibly bad boyfriend his first car, a Ford Falcon stick shift I couldn’t even drive.

My fondest memories:

The movies changed every week, but “Sound of Music” was so popular, it played for an entire month, and we even added weekend shows. There was a lot of overtime. People dressed up to come see it. I heard the soundtrack so many times, for years afterward I could sing (badly) the entire score.

I lived in a college town, and the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns would actually bring in business during my slow day shifts. College boys came to the matinees. They seemed exotic and dangerous and laughed at the over-the-top gun slinging.

On weekends, if there was a kid movie playing, too many parents would drop their kids off unattended. Sometimes they did it for horror movies, too (which looking back, were not that horrible compared to now). The scared kids would hang out at the concession stand with me rather than go inside the theater, all full of fake bluster and bravery.

Once in a rare while, the crones who sat in the ticket booth took time off. Usually the nightshift concession woman took over the tickets and I was called in to work night concessions, but if it was a really big movie, everyone thought she could handle concessions alone better than me, so I got the ticket booth. This was the most exciting thing, to be in the box, the face of the theater, distributing the magic tickets. It was even more heady when kids I knew from school, the cheerleaders and Mercury astronauts, had to stand on line for me to sell them a ticket. Somehow I felt vindicated.

Even though it was released in 1962, the film “Phaedra” with Anthony Perkins and Melina Mercouri played during my concession years. It was a racy movie and something of a local sensation. People almost wore hoods and masks when they came to see it, as if they were in an adult bookstore. The plot was the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon seduces his son from a previous marriage. It was adults-only, but no one thought to ban the 15-year-old girl working the concession stand. Even so, the film seemed so erotically steamy to me, I could only bear to open the back door of the concession booth briefly to see what was going on. Recently I watched it on Netflix and couldn't even sit through it, it was so tedious.

When we moved, this job was the only thing I missed about living in that town. I could have gone far in the movie business.

Hush Up

I used to cover the Hanover County Planning Commission for the Mechanicsville Local. The poor Planning Commission had to approve all the proposals from everyone who wanted to build something new, and listen to the complaints from everyone who had already built what they wanted in the county and didn't want anything else added.

The Nimbys -- Not in My Backyards -- were as united as any political party. Their platform was Stay Away From Me. They usually showed up at the public hearings with the Utopians, those who believed in a world according to their own rules and tastes that protected their God-given "quality of life."

The Nimbys and Utopians shared the same basic argument, no matter what the proposal was. Nobody wanted anything in their neighborhood. Everyone had a quality of life they wanted to preserve, an existence that was like living on the moon: no noise, nothing, for miles around them.

At one hearing, a neighborhood was up in arms about a new store in an existing shopping center that wanted to have gas pumps in its parking lot. It would destroy their quality of life, they said. One man told the Planning Commission that he could already "hear" the Home Depot, which was across the road from the proposed gas pumps, both about a mile from his house.

After the hearing, I drove to the Home Depot to hear what it was saying. What message was it sending out, and how did you hear it? I didn't hear anything coming out of the Home Depot, and I was parked across the street. How could he hear something from a mile away, a mile that crossed dozens of other houses with televisions, music, barking dogs and lawn mower noises?

I tried to write sympathetically about these residents whose quality of life was soon to be destroyed by gas pumps, but then I remembered I lived two doors down from a 7-Eleven with six gas pumps. Two doors! Six pumps! I had forgotten about that because I never heard them, and they were open 24 hours a day.

It made me reflect on what was spoiling my quality of life in bucolic Mechanicsville, what noise did I hear if not the gas pumps?

It was the birds, the damn birds in the woods around my house. They woke up before I did and tweeted with much enthusiasm, waking me up. They disrupted my quality of life.

The second thing I heard was cars. I was always amazed at how many people had to be at work at 5 a.m. because when I woke up at 4:30 a.m. (damn birds! Shuttup!), I heard traffic whizzing by at a steady pace. I blamed it on the early shift at the hospital, which was across the street from the nontalking 7-Eleven gas pumps. The hospital shifts were disrupting my quality of life!

The third thing I heard was NASCAR. I lived close enough to Richmond International Raceway to know when there was a race in progress. All day long, it was rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. But if the television was on and the air conditioner was humming -- which made the pots on my stove vibrate -- I didn't hear race cars. I had to stand outside and listen. Rrrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrr. It disrupted the quality of my standing outside and listening life!!

And the last disruption was the train. Decades ago, my suburb was a little town far enough away from Richmond -- if you traveled by Model T or horse -- to have its own train depot. The site of the station was just blocks from my house, and although the train didn't stop there anymore, it still came through the neighborhood several times a day. All the windows in my house rattled when it did, and the engineer blew a horn to let folks know he was coming through, get off the tracks! The train rattled along right beside a newly built, upscale neighborhood of $300,000-plus homes and was much louder than gas pumps, but the train was there first. The people came later with their 4-bedroom McMansions, four to an acre, 2.5 baths, whirlpool tubs, entertainment rooms over the two-car garage, and interest-only mortgages that would soon be underwater when the housing market collapsed.

The Utopians, and even the Nimbys, considered the train, as well as gunshots and buzz saws "country noises," while Home Depot and gas pumps were "city noises." There's a difference, you see.

Ugly Girl Thinking

I decided that the night we'd go to the State Fair would be the same night my husband knew the guys in the band that was playing, as if he needed an extra incentive to go out with his wife. I still think like an ugly girl, like I am not enough and I need to offer something else in order to deserve a man’s time.

After an hour or so on the midway, and after he stopped three times to talk to friends he encountered, he went backstage to wish the band a good show. With any luck, he’ll come back out and we can go home. The sun had set and it was getting cold. But the bandleader told him, “We’ll call you up to do a song.” So now he was out front waiting for the call-up, which came an hour into the show. With any luck, he’ll take his bow, come down and we can go home. But he stayed on stage, playing guitar, for the last hour of the show. So I wandered around behind the stage and across the field, and around the rodeo, and across the field again, alone. Even married, I can’t get a date.

For awhile I sat on a bench, staring at the ferris wheel lights and realized I had set myself up. I did it to myself. I could have just as easily picked a night when he didn’t know the band playing. Then I would have had his full attention, and we would have left when I was ready. But, I think like an ugly girl and give up control, even when I have it.

Then, the lights of the ferris wheel dislodged an unpleasant memory. When I was 15, my mother gave me permission to go to the North Carolina State Fair, which was a two-hour bus ride away in Raleigh. A boy I had been dating irregularly for four months lived there and he was meeting me at the bus station. He was 18. He was not someone I had fallen in love with. He was just a boy. He had asked me out. I went because at 15, any date is good. Why my mother allowed me to go will remain one of my life’s mysteries.

We went to the fair, and we left with an hour free before my bus back home. He invited me to wait it out at his place, a single room he rented at a boarding house. I foolishly went. He wanted to make out. I had made out with a boy or two before and managed to stop things before they got out of control. This time I could not. Let me say this: it is possible for it to happen and you don’t realize it and don’t really feel anything unusual. It is possible for it to happen without you removing your underwear. I wasn’t even sure if something had happened, but I had a bad feeling, and when I got home, it was confirmed. There was the telltale blood stain of a broken hymen.

I was 15. He was 18. This was technically statutory rape, and since I had not agreed to it, it was arguably genuine rape. But teenage girls don’t think that way. I never told anyone. I just stepped sadly into adulthood. I wrote some mournful poetry about not being ready for this in a notebook I have to this day, despite numerous moves and housecleanings. A notebook I have never shown anyone, a notebook I need to destroy before someone settling my estate finds it. (I keep thinking I may turn out to be Emily Dickerson. But, seriously: posthumous fame – what good is that?)

Two serious problems developed. The first was: every date with this boy after that became a struggle. I had done it once, why not again? The toothpaste was out of the tube. And usually I lost. I could only win if the geography of where we were made it impossible, or if my father was following our car on the date, which he sometimes did. I had to listen to all the ridiculous teenage boy lies like being in pain if he didn’t get relief, and using a condom was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. I did not have enough self-respect to say no and risk losing him.

I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Teenage sex is awkward, uncomfortable, and full of guilt, embarrassment and fear of pregnancy and parental wrath. I wasn't even sure I wanted him as a boyfriend anymore. But I thought like an ugly girl, that this might be my only chance to have one. After all, it took me all the way to 15 to land him! The first one to call back for a second date! What if that never happens again? It didn’t occur to me that I might do better than him when I was 18, or 22, or 30, and I should keep my options open.

And the second problem was: despite it being the swinging ‘60s and the summer of love and all that, I had been raised in my mother’s morality and the Baptist Church and truly believed that you get to do it with one guy and that was it...if you were a nice girl, if you wanted to go to Heaven. No matter what. You made your bed, now lie in it. (A decade later when I brought my second husband home to meet my parents, my mother greeted me at the door with, “So now you’re a whore.” True story.)

So there it is. A trip to a state fair put in motion a situation I could not see my way out of. Fortunately or unfortunately, just weeks after the deflowering, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, so the struggle to not have sex before I was ready or wanted to was conducted only twice a year when he was on leave. When he got out of the army, we went to colleges in different states. Our relationship was in its fourth year when we finally lived in the same town, saw each other frequently, and realized we didn’t like each other at all and never had. He was, from beginning to end, a terrible boyfriend in every way.

But by then it was too late. I was pregnant at 19. He went on to live the life he had planned. My plans went completely off the rails. Our pathetic shotgun marriage didn’t even last a year, and even as I was going out the door, having finally caught him with another woman, he convinced me to co-sign a loan for him. Like an ugly girl, I did.

It was not possible to fully enjoy the college experience when I was limited to night classes and had to rush home to the baby. The career I planned required a lot of time to get started, working nights and weekends, being available to cover a story in some distant place at a moment’s notice, moving from town to town to advance your career. It was going to be very difficult to do as a single mother.

And I couldn’t muster the determination. I kept hoping I had enough talent to make it happen in limited circumstances under multiple handicaps. I did not. I watched women with far less talent and desire move ahead just because they could move without strings attached.

And I continued to think like an ugly girl and give up, give in, and sell myself short. I accepted terrible dead end jobs and stayed in them. I married another person I should have left after a few months, and stayed put for years. Thinking like an ugly girl is a hard habit to break. I need to stop going to fairs.

My Cloverleaf Mall and Peaches Story

As soon as we entered Cloverleaf Mall, I’d let my toddler run loose. Sears and Penneys, the anchor big department stores on either end, would eventually pick up my toddler and start broadcasting over the PA that they had a “little girl” who had become separated from his parents, or “Scott has become separated from his parents, please come pick him up.” My son was neither a little girl or named Scott. Because of his curly hair, sometimes they just assumed he was a girl, and if they asked, he would tell them his name was Scott, which he preferred to Jeff. I have no idea why. (When he became an adult, he changed his name legally, but not to Scott.)

In any case, I knew it was him so I would leisurely go collect him. I was never reprimanded or arrested. They cheerfully handed him over. Becoming separated from your parents in the mall was not uncommon then and the announcements over the PA were routine. Things have changed very much.

There was a Ruby Tuesdays and a Piccadilly Cafeteria at the entrance to the mall, and a two-screen movie theater on the right side of the intersection. There was even a dentist. I went there once for a toothache. They charged me to have every tooth in my head x-rayed by this robotic machine that circled my jaw, flashing my head with radiation, then the dentist found a popcorn skin lodged between my teeth.

I spent many hours in Cloverleaf Mall. The Sears there was a home away from home. At one time, they even sold Apple computers. This was between the reigns of Steve Jobs I and Steve Jobs II, when such blasphemy was allowed.

My second husband knew nothing about cars, so the Sears auto shop in front of Sears regularly charged us to replace our struts. We knew nothing about struts or why they needed to be replaced so often, but we always agreed. Now, I always call my third husband, he goes “what the hell? Put them on the phone,” talks to the auto guys, and the next thing I know, they’ve changed their mind about what I need. No more waving muffin tins and pizza pans at me and telling me my animatron defibulator is malfunctioning and my car is unsafe to drive until I get it fixed.

My third husband spent many more hours in Cloverleaf Mall because even though he lived deep in Chesterfield County, down a long and winding country road that was near nothing but Lake Chesdin, he regularly hung out in Cloverleaf Mall. Just to hang. To sit there and walk around. Just to see who else was sitting there or walking around. It was a Fast Times at Ridgemont High sort of thing.

Chesterfield Towne Center was Chesterfield Mall back then, and derisively called Chesterfield Morgue because nothing was going on down there. But between the loitering teens, urban decay creeping up Midlothian (it eventually murdered the Red Lobster and Steak and Ale on the other side of the overpass years after it killed off the original version of Target/Walmart, a store called Carousel across from WWBT that was half department store, half grocery store), Cloverleaf was in the line of rot. I don’t even remember what was across the street now except for the Best Products, Friendly’s and Peaches. Peaches always had that overpowering incense smell. And at one time, you had one of their crates. You know you did. Maybe you still do. I still have a Peaches cassette crate, full of tapes. I need to throw them out.

Here’s my bonus Peaches story. I worked for them one day. I’m not sure if I was never put on the schedule for a second day or I quit, but one day was enough. You couldn’t bring your purse into the store and leave it in the employee lounge. You had to leave it out in your car during your shift. Any personal items you absolutely had to have with you, you were required to bring them into the store in a see-through plastic bag. At the end of the shift, we all gathered at the door where the shift manager inspected our plastic bags for contraband, activated the security alarm, and we all scurried out at the same time. No one could leave earlier than anyone else.

But even that wasn’t so much the problem as my eyesight. My job was to stay out on the floor and keep checking that the records and CDs and cassettes were all in the right places. I needed my reading glasses to do that. But if a customer asked me where something was, and I looked across the store to find the sign, I couldn’t see it. I needed my distance glasses for that. And I immediately figured out that the behind the counter, check-out jobs went to the favored few who had been there for ages, so moving up at Peaches was going to take much longer than I had time for. My shift manager was very nice, actually cute in a way, and gave me a four-track Ricky Nelson CD (he had an office full of samples) at the end of my shift as a present. I still have it. It has “Hello Mary Lou” and “Travelin’ Man” on it. But I was done with Peaches. I never got paid for that day. Peaches, you owe me money.

My Porn Store Story

The porn store on The Boulevard sits on a median strip, so it looks like it is practically in the middle of the road. My run-in with the store was literally a run-in.

Sometime between 1994 and 1995, I was driving my 1983 Toyota Corolla south on The Boulevard, having just gotten off the I-95 exit. I had 2,000 copies of my newspaper, the Richmond Music Journal, in my trunk, fresh from the printing plant in Ashland, and was starting my delivery route. In my personal life, things were not going well. I was unemployed, on food stamps, and living on credit card advances. I was in the middle of a divorce. No doubt I was preoccupied.

In any case, I was at the stoplight directly across from that porn store when I saw a light several blocks ahead change to green and in response, I pressed down on the gas pedal even though my own light was still red. An old white work van T-boned me. My car went into a spin into the parking lot of the porn store where I slid into the three cars parked there. My car was totaled and I had inflicted damage on four others. I was unhurt. Luck.

Stunned, I knew I had to call the police and get the paperwork done for all these other drivers to sue me. This was a time before affordable and commonplace cell phones, so I went into the porn store to use their phone. Rubber dicks were hanging on all the walls. I explained to the attendant what had happened and could I use the phone, but before I was finished, three men ran out of the store, into the parking lot, and drove away in their damaged cars. Luck.

They did not want to be part of a police accident report that placed them in the parking lot of the porn store in the middle of the day. They’d rather repair their cars on their dime. So that was three of four problems solved. The police came and took the reports. The tow truck towed away my car and the van that hit me. Then I realized I was in a real pickle. My newspapers were in the trunk of the car, newspapers I needed to deliver that day so I could collect the advertising revenue. And I didn’t have the newspapers or a car.

I went back into the porn store and looked up the nearest car rental business and called. Now I needed a ride. A customer in the store volunteered to take me. It is a miracle I am still alive. Yes, I got into the car of a strange man I met in a porn store. Luck.

His car was even older than my ’83 Toyota and was a sea of garbage. It was obvious he never had passengers because he had to do a lot of cleaning just to clear the seat. My legs were still almost knee deep in debris. Off we went down Broad Street to the car rental place. My side of the conversation was moaning about my bad luck and bad driving.

I don’t think he had much experience with real women outside photos in a porn store because he seemed excited and eager to be of service, but still tongue-tied. Finally he rustled through the debris on his dashboard -- coins, food wrappers, tickets, paper – and came up with a sad and sticky looking piece of gum. He presented it to me. “Would you like a refreshing piece of gum?”

No one has ever offered me a “refreshing” piece of gum before. I never forgot it. It was like the most awkward courtship ever, but I did want to arrive at the car rental place so I accepted it, and despite all its dubious history, took off the wrapper and put the gum in my mouth. I dropped the wrapper on the car floor where it was sucked in the muck.

He did deliver me to my destination. I thanked him. He did not ask for my name or phone number or to see me again. That was Courtship 102 and he had barely passed 101 that day. I would have said no, anyway, but politely. Luck.

The end of the story is I rented a car with my credit card, drove to the junkyard, transferred my newspapers from one car to the other, hugged my Toyota good-bye with much weeping, apologized for killing it, delivered my newspapers, and then drove the rental around to dubious car lots on Midlothian Turnpike until I found a 1989 Mercury Tracer for $3,500, which I bought with a credit card cash advance check. Then I filed for bankruptcy, so it was a free car. Remember, I had no job. Luck.

I drove it for 10 years. It had a bend in the top of the antennae, which eight years later, made it recognizable to its original owner who left me a note on my windshield. He had driven that car back and forth from Roanoke when he was going through a divorce and put so many miles on it, he sold it after four years. I probably put another $6,000 into it to keep it running until I finally found a stable job in 2002 and could buy another car.

Also, after the accident, despite only one of the four drivers filing a claim against me, Allstate canceled my insurance. Not only had I had an accident, I was driving while divorced. Divorced women are an increased liability. We are preoccupied and usually drunk. We are suicidal and distracted. All the other auto insurers gave me outrageously high quotes. Remember, I did not have a job. I was trying to figure out what to do when my Allstate renewal bill came in the mail. I called my agent. I thought I was canceled?

“Pay it quick,” he said. “It’s a mistake, but if you pay it and they accept it, then they have to cover you for another year.” I dropped another credit card check in the mail ahead of the bankruptcy. They cashed it. I was never canceled again. Luck.

Every time I stop at that light across from the porn store, I get a grip on myself. Watch the light in front of you, not down the street. Pay attention. And so far I have safely gotten by it every time. Luck.

A Better Job Interview

Job interviews are difficult. Three people with a list of 20 basically irrelevant questions take turns asking them. They methodically write down your answers.

They already know you are qualified to do the job. They decided this from your resume. That’s why you got the interview. This is the swimsuit part of the job pageant. They want to look at you. They want to decide how you’re going to fit into their office based on your appearance, voice, behavior.

The questions reward people who are good at lying on their feet quickly and convincingly. Every answer may be utter baloney, and the interviewers don’t know that.

This gets you a new employee who will be able to call in sick, even when they’re not, and make you believe it. Or provide a creditable explanation why a project isn’t progressing, even when it’s not remotely true.

Then they usually end the interview by asking if there’s anything you’d like to know about the job? I know asking about benefits or hours shows you’re only interested in helping yourself, and not the company, so that’s the wrong thing to say. I don’t know what the right thing to ask them is.

I do know you can’t ask any of the things you really want to know, like how crazy are my co-workers and bosses? Most of the jobs I’ve had, I wouldn’t have applied for them if I didn’t think it was something I’d enjoy or could do. But when I’ve quit, it’s always been because the people were insane.

How many women in your office are childless and what positions of power are they in? If you have kids, a childless woman is not going to comprehend how you have to juggle your priorities. And if you are not raising kids and you are surrounded by women who spend 80 percent of their work time raising their kids by telephone, it is going to drive you crazy.

Who smokes and are they management or peons? If management smokes, the peons who also smoke are going to be sharing quality, relaxation time with the bosses out on the sidewalk half a dozen times a day. They will bond on a level the non-smokers cannot hope to obtain. This is such a truth, it’s been an episode of “Friends.” And if your boss doesn’t smoke, he or she, and your nonsmoking co-workers are going to perceive the smoke breaks you need as wasted time.

How many people in the office wear excessive amounts of cologne, and how close will they sit to you? One cubicle dweller I worked with even took issue with the smell of gum or mints. I have despised jobs where co-workers frequently went out for Chinese, but didn’t stay out with it. They brought it back to their desks where the stench hung in the air for the rest of the afternoon. Microwave popcorn poppers can make a whole floor smell like a movie theater.

Who is a cleaning fanatic, and how much power do they have? The cleaning fanatics tend to be the same group that likes to celebrate birthdays, promotions, and departures with baked goods. Any excuse for yet another office cake is seized, but then they chase you down the hall with a vacuum cleaner because you dropped a crumb.

Are you being hired to do the job as outlined, or are there Secret Hidden Responsibilities, like watering the plants? I once had a boss who hired me for my computer skills but yelled at me every day because the office plants weren’t thriving.

How crazy are the coffee people? The Office Coffee Militia have notes pinned around the coffee area with warnings to pay for every cup, clean up after yourself, don’t leave cups in the sink, turn the pot off when the coffee is low, whoever takes the last cup has to make the next pot, and so on. Half their day at work is spent making coffee, complaining about the coffee area, policing other people’s coffee habits, or obsessing about the coffee situation.

Are the bosses big picture people or little pickers? In the big picture view, the job is getting done. It’s getting done well. It’s getting done on schedule. But that’s not enough for little pickers. They may want you to come in exactly on time. Not five minutes late, but exactly, and this may become an obsession. They may put a stopwatch on lunch or breaks.

Or they may require dozens of little progress reports, explanations of how your time was spent, budgets of how you expect to spend your time next week, time off requests in triplicate and signed by three levels of managers. The evidence that the work is actually getting done is not good enough. Staff meetings are spent discussing disappearing pencils or toilet paper supply. It’s like the Caine Mutiny Court Martial where the captain becomes obsessed with whether or not someone is stealing the strawberries from the food locker, right in the middle of World War II.

These are some of the questions I’d like to ask at job interviews. I want to know the personal quirks and habits of everyone who is going to sit near me, or make decisions about how I get the job done. I’m spending 40 to 50 hours a week with these people. I’ll see them more than my family. But if you actually asked questions like that, they’d think you were insane. You’d never get hired. And yet, it’s the basis of  whether or not you’re going to be successful and effective in that position.

Speak English

Does it bug you that every time you want to get $20, you have to tell the ATM machine you don’t speak Spanish? Or every time you call your bank or credit card for a statement, you have to select “1” for English or “2” for Spanish? Or that all the signs in Home Depot and Lowe’s are now in English and Spanish?

I thought the United States was a cultural melting pot. You get in the pot and melt into a fairly homogenized stew, and somewhere along the line it was decided the stew would speak English. But now you don’t have to.

One way to jumpstart everyone into learning English as quickly as possible is not to have all this coddling with options! At least, that’s what my grandmother would say. Nothing infuriated her more than the proliferation of Spanish. She was living in Kissimmee, Florida, and Southern Florida might as well be a part of South America, so much Spanish is heard. I’ve been to supermarkets there where every magazine at the check-out was in Spanish, driven through shopping districts where all the signs were in Spanish. You could get along very well without ever learning English.

Things weren’t so accommodating when my grandmother came to this country from Italy in 1916 at age 12. Because she didn’t speak English, she was put in a first grade class, despite being a preteen, and expected to figure things out from there.

 “Padrones”—self-appointed negotiators and problem-solvers for Italian immigrants—would visit the neighborhoods and conduct their English business for them for a fee. My grandmother’s family hired one to register the births, and he’d take his commission and make a stop at the corner bar first. By the time he got to city hall, he had forgotten the name of the baby he was supposed to register, so he’d make up a name, much to the surprise of my relatives when they had to get their birth certificates years later for military service or marriage.

My grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage at 14, got divorced when she was 22 and had four children. She supported herself for the rest of her life as a hairdresser. That required she learn English to talk to her customers, and by necessity, she did.

My grandfather did not. He came to America as a teenager and died in his eighties, and all that time he lived in Flushing, New York, he learned very little English. How could that be? How could you live in New York for 70 years, listening to the radio, watching television, and not learn English?

How? Because he lived in an Italian neighborhood, all the tenants in his apartment building were Italian, his first and second wives were Italian, every one he worked with at the wire factory was Italian. All his friends were Italian. He completely insulated himself from life in an English-speaking country. He never learned to read or write Italian or English.

I can’t tell you a thing about him, even though I lived with him for a year when my son was a baby and had breakfast, lunch and dinner with him every day. Our conversation in all that time consisted of a daily commentary on my non-supporting husband back in Virginia—“eessa bum,” and a daily weather report, “eessa louse day.”

My grandmother remarried him platonically 45 years after she divorced him just to torture him to death, and yelled at him in Italian all day. Sometimes he would mumble something back.

 “What he’d say, Nana?”

 “He says he’s going to chop up my car with an ax.”

It would have been nice to find out why—or maybe when—but he wasn’t talking, not in English anyway.

One day I visited Ellis Island—by way of the internet—to find out something about him. I had to guess at what his name was since I knew him only as Sam. I tried Saverio Matera, and there he was. He left St. Marco via the port of Naples on a ship named the Ancona and arrived at Ellis Island, April 6, 1914. He was 16 years old.

Eighty-six years of family history, 70 of it spent in America, and he couldn’t tell me anything and I can’t tell anyone anything about him now. Somewhere along the line he should have learned some more English. The ATM machines in Flushing now probably ask if you want your transaction in English, Spanish or Italian? Maybe even Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Klingon. I noticed the other day my ATM was now offering Russian. There is no large Russian community where I live. Why is this? Where does this end?

No need to melt in the melting pot now. We’ll keep you handicapped in America by accommodating your language requirements for some things, thus limiting your opportunities and keeping you segregated from the rest of us and even your own American-born family members.

Art - Real or Imagined?

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir of her time with Robert Maplethorpe, from their amazing meeting – really, in a city as big as New York, how do you accidentally run into the same person three times in a short period in completely different places? – to right before they both became famous and went their separate ways. Just Kids was an astounding book. Some people just know exactly when and where to stand for lightning to strike.

Through the book, I again encountered the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Smith's hero, and someone who had also hovered over the life of Jim Morrison, another person I once studied for his uncanny ability to attract fame and fortune through poetry while in the middle of self-destructing.

I was a student of Morrison in the pre-Internet era, so this time when Rimbaud reappeared as the mystic inspiration and king of all poets, I researched him, only to find a callow, decadent youth who wrote the bulk of his poetry in his late teens and was burnt out by 21, dragging out his last years in the usual mayhem, decadence, poverty, and illness.

What do teenagers know? Smith and Maplethorpe were barely out of their teens when they spent hours together drawing sketches, making necklaces out of tackle shop beads and feathers, and taking Polaroids. And all this activity is somehow high art, important art, creating a world that is on a higher artistic plain.

When does the humble Polaroid become art? The difference between their photographs and the thousands on Facebook seems to be lighting and background. Plain, uncluttered, stark backgrounds, good natural lighting, an unsmiling person with a prop or two, that’s art. (It also helps to not have a television to drug you, so you actually do spend every evening cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages.)

So I examine my soul because I am unable to appreciate Rimbaud’s poetry. It seems so Anyone Can Do This. So much poetry is the recitation of things happening in nature that you then internalize to an emotion. My despair floats along the breeze like the withered maple leaves of fall. You are hopelessly in love. You are filled with desire to live life only on your terms, even if it means starving and dragging down everyone with you. You let go. You seize the day. You see the light. You plunge into darkness. You quoth the raven, nevermore. You contemplate a fork in the road and take the one less traveled by. Housework drives you crazy, white Godiva, I unpeel dead hands, dead stringencies, and then stick my head in an oven.

Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted, he wrote on her headstone.

Really, poet laureate of Britain, that’s all you’ve got? What does it mean? Anything you want, I guess. It’s the fun of poetry, to decipher it through a lens of your own experience and take it anywhere you want it to go.

Like Jackson Pollack’s art, it seems to be an acquired taste. Why are the same ramblings, or the same splatterings, art in some people’s hands and not in others? It must have something to do with believing you are an artist. If you believe hard enough, hard enough to starve and disrupt and annoy, you’ll convince enough people that you are an artist. My Polaroid picture is art. Yours is a Polaroid picture.

Maybe I have just never believed deeply enough in my own Polaroid pictures. How often are artists discovered that have no idea they are creating art, other than Smithfield the pig? Smithfield the pig meet Jackson Pollack. No, you discover yourself and just convince everyone else.

So, in the spirit of believing, I went back in time to discover myself and pulled out a book of my poetry, written between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was in my tender Arthur Rimbaud years, so ignorant of life that I was still comparing my new emotions to nature, the starry nights, the gentle breezes, the babbling brooks, the silence of a forest, butterflies in a meadow. How amazing to be 15, to have only been on this planet such a short time, in a body still growing, being controlled by a brain with so little information. Everything really was new. If a born blind person suddenly sees, how do they put anything in context?

I try to see art in it, but there’s been too many years, too many experiences, too much pain since then to appreciate how first love felt, why some callow young boy would be so damn important or inspiring, or why losing my virginity left me so thunderstruck and conflicted, when girls today toss it out the window like fast-food wrappers. All I can think now is I must have been crazy insane to feel this way about things that ultimately became irrelevant. Well, if I had drank or drugged myself to death a short time later, or stuck my head in an oven, and left behind these crazy poems, I guess they would be pretty damn relevant.

Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, the musical poets of my youth -- if they had lived, would they still find truth or beauty in their songs? Or would they be as embarrassing to them as my poems are to me?

In a book of astounding sentences in Just Kids, one of the more astounding ones to me was when Patti leaves her bookstore job to apartment-sit for a musician/lover who is touring with Blue Oyster Cult. When she gets to that part of her story, she remembers that it was the last time she ever had to “work” for a living at a day job for the rest of her life. She was barely 21, if that. It was all music, poetry, art, and writing from then on, because she believed she was doing great work at all of that, and so did others. She never punched a time clock again. Not that life was easy all the time after that, but it was art. And for her, it still is.

What It Takes to Get a Job

The last time I was on unemployment benefits was 2001. I was laid off in August and didn't go back to work full time until March 2002. I had to put in job cards every week to show I was actively looking for work during that time in order to collect my unemployment check.

Tonight I found the notebook where I kept my job search records. It is an interesting saga of what it takes to actually find a job. Here's where I applied.

1. Pamunkey Library
2. Style Weekly
3. WHAN Radio
4. Virginia Department of Emergency Management. I had worked part-time here from 1997 to 1999, and a couple of months after 9/11, my old part-time job opened again, so I went back for awhile. Even so, the salary and hours were low enough that I could keep applying for and receiving reduced unemployment benefits.
5. Hanover County Sheriff's Office
5. Randolph-Macon College (I was willing to be a receptionist, but no.)
6. Cavalier Telephone
7. Some mysterious "marketing specialist" ad in the paper
8. Department of Conservation and Recreation
9. Henrico County Schools
10. Hanover Department of Social Services
11. Henrico County Leader
11. Christian Children's Fund
12. VCU - the position advertised was director of Alumni Relations. I was an alumni.
I could direct. But no.
13. Richmond Times-Dispatch - The job was taking in the wedding and engagement submissions. I had a degree in journalism. Didn't even get an interview.
14. Hanover County -- anything they had
15. Hanover School Board - anything?
16. VCU Health Systems -- position was public relations practitioner IV
17. Kwick Kopy -- Yes, I will make copies and I will make them quick, but didn't even get an interview.
18. Time-Life Customer Service - I have applied here at least four times in my life and gotten interviews, and even though I have done customer service by telephone for a bank and a mail-order pharmacy, they still refused to believe I could service orders for the complete World War II series.
19. Channel 12 - the position was assistant to the vice president
20. University of Richmond - anything
21. PharMerica
22. St. Joseph's Villa
23. Diamond Springs Water
24. Richmond Coliseum
25. James River Associates
26. Bon Secours Memorial Regional Medical Center -- admin associate in the Surgical Care Center, unit secretary at Meadowbridge Transit Care. I even applied to work in the gift shop, but no
27. Copier Care Company
28. Northside Magazine
29. Richmond Voice - I can do newspaper page layout better than anyone they have ever had in the past 15 years. I know how to size a photo without stretching it into distortion! But no interview.
30. City of Richmond, Office of the City Manager
34. Virginia Department of Fire Programs. I got an interview here, but no. Years later I would work with the guy who got the job.
35. Virginia Department of Health
36. Supply Room Companies
37. VCU Department of Student Affairs
38. March of Dimes - I got an interview here and if I am not mistaken, the person vacating the job had been hired as the new editor of Style Weekly. They had loved him, and his shoes were going to be hard to fill. And not by me. It was a no.
39. Virginia Community Policing Institute
40. Bankruptcy Court
41. Hanover Herald Progress
42. Capital Mac
43. Richmond Metro Visitors Center
44. Virginia Blood Services
45. New Kent County Planning Commission - I remember driving out there and thinking this would be a very long daily commute. I guess the no was a blessing.
46. Tobacco Company -  Got an interview. They had a position that marketed their nightclub events. "Sex and the City" theme nights were big then. Are you a Carrie or a Miranda! But no.
47. County of Henrico
48. Inside Business
49. University News at VCU
50. Girl Scouts of America
51. Salvation Army
52. Valentine Museum
53. Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Administration
54. Glen Allen Cultural Arts Center

One of these places, I applied for the job in November and didn't get an interview. But in January, I got a call out of the blue about another job in the same office. They had kept my application on file. I know they always say that, but you don't really believe it. That was a part-time job, so I worked downtown in the morning and rushed over to VDEM way down Midlothian Turnpike in the afternoon, grabbing a $2.25 hot dog and soda along the way. I paid $10 a day to park in the Coliseum deck just in the mornings, which was crazy, but the only way I could make it work.

In March, I had to interview for my own job when it was upgraded to full-time. I recognized some of the other people who were interviewing from other job interviews or from working with them in previous jobs. I pretty much knew I had a 99 percent lock on getting the job because I was already doing it at the place. I was sitting in the chair. But the other five candidates didn't know that. I felt sorry for them, as I saw them come through, so hopeful. It dawned on me that many, many times, I was just one of the people Human Resources was interviewing as a fake-out, to look like they were actually trying, when all along, everyone already knew who was getting the job.

The journalism/public relations field for a long time was the same crowd of people who just kept rotating around. Several of the people who got the jobs I didn't get during that time ended up working where I am now. We all go 'round and 'round.

About four years later, the job I had originally applied for in November opened again, and I interviewed for that and got it. Again, I was already in the office. I was actually doing that job and my own and had been for months. And yet they interviewed five other people along with me.

So that was a very long trip to my current position.

Since then, there's been hiring freezes and no money in the budget for raises and I've been stuck in 2006 career-wise, except for completely recreating my job to be social media managing since the rest of it went extinct like dinosaurs hit by meteorites. Public relations and marketing in the 2000s was what journalism was in the Woodward and Bernstein years of the 1970s. Everyone and their grandmother playing Farmville on Facebook is now a social media expert.

Probably Less Human then Human

Sometime in the mid-90s, I became entranced -- for the first and last time -- by White Zombie, more specifically, one particular White Zombie song, "More Human Than Human."

And somehow -- my boyfriend -- who we shall call B -- acquired free tickets to a White Zombie concert at the Nissan Pavilion in Manassas, which required we ride on a local radio station bus to the event with other ticket winners.

My boyfriend had a friend who listened to his radio all day long and had become the master of speed dialing. He was almost always able to win concert tickets by being caller No. 9 or No. 7 or whatever the number you needed to be. And that's how we acquired the tickets. He actually won twice for this concert, and since you can't win twice, he gave B's name for the second set.

B and I boarded the radio station bus at the Arboretum. C and his wife, J, were leaving later and driving themselves.

Much to my surprise, as soon as the bus pulled away from the Arboretum, all the bongs came out. I thought pot was illegal. The bus proceeded to Manassas in an internal fog, and we were late getting into the Nissan because the bus driver got so lost, we ended up in Washington for awhile. Must have been the fumes.

The amphitheater was packed; the bands were loud, and by the time White Zombie came on, I was exhausted from the crowd, the fights breaking out, the noise, the vomiting, everything. And we hadn't even been there very long. I vaguely recall White Zombie had a scary and profane stage set that upset my Baptist/Catholic sensibilities. I am thinking it must have been Christ on the Cross imagery that was blasphemously displayed. I have blacked that memory out. In any case, as soon as they finished "More Human Than Human," I was ready to go. It started raining as we retreated to the bus.

Back in the bus, it was almost as bad as the amphitheater. Refugees who were already too drunk, too sick, and too beaten up had already returned to the bus to continue being drunk, sick and angry. Some of them hadn't even made it to White Zombie. Just as we settled in our seats in this Hell Bus of vomit, I spotted C and J walking through the parking lot. We scrambled off the bus. There was much rejoicing, as we had not known they had won more tickets and were going to be there. They offered us a ride back to Richmond. By now, it was raining hard.

So off we went down the highway, and just like in the bus, the bongs came out and I found myself once again encased in fog and everyone except me was pretty mellow. I was particularly unmellow because it was dark and raining furiously. Visibility was zero. J was driving. I was terrified.

As the rain came down harder, C would give J words of encouragement about what a great driving job she was doing, and reward her with a nip off a flask he pulled out from under his jacket. So now I was hurtling through the rainy night in a carload of people who were stoned and drinking. And I was pretty sure when we collided with whatever we were bound to collide with and die, I'd be the only one who would feel it. It sucks being the sober one.

But that night, we did not. We were delivered back to the Arboretum where I retrieved my car and went home and lived to tell this tale.

I don't think about it much anymore, but it was one of the few adventures of my life since I tend not to walk on the wild side. I pace through life with training wheels and a helmet -- not that this trip to see White Zombie was even all that wild.

But tonight, someone on my Facebook feed posted a Morphine video, which made me go to iTunes to look up Morphine, since it seemed there was a long-forgotten song of theirs I really liked at one time, and iTunes suggested I might like Les Claypool, too, which I sort of do, so I clicked on "Winona's Big Brown Beaver" just to hear it again. Then iTunes suggested I might like White Zombie, and all this memory, so long buried, rushed back.