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.