FOR CERTAIN self-important novelists and CEOs, the blue-collar biography has been a staple affectation for decades. Before writing his unreadable novel or founding his unscrupulous corporation, Joe Blow, the dust jacket or business-magazine profile tells us, “worked as a private detective, a truck-driver, a canner at several Alaskan fisheries, and a shepherd in the Uinta mountains.” It shames me to say how long I’d been reading such bios before I realized they were baloney from start to finish. The clear giveaway was that the jobs listed were always picturesque and independent. You never read descriptions like: “Steve van Novelist cleaned the toilets in a shopping mall after he got out of high school.” Or “Gerald R. Boss-Feller spent 14 years taking out the garbage in a barber shop.” The variety of jobs was fishy, too. Real working-class people don’t just hang up their grommet guns in Syracuse because they want to enjoy the clean air in Utah for six weeks. What these biographies ultimately say is that the subject had interesting “work experiences” (as opposed to jobs) between terms at Princeton.
What rescued me from this temptation to self-aggrandizement was the towering crumminess of my early jobs. I mopped the aisles and stuffed the dumpsters at a Star Market in Massachusetts for $2.65 an hour. I did not feel I needed the dough. My father used to tell me when I was a kid that if he ever struck it rich, he wouldn’t tell me. The lesson he meant to convey went way over my head, but the statement I never forgot. Thenceforth, I assumed that our never taking vacations and handing down our clothes and always getting a doggie bag at restaurants were all part of some J.P. Getty-traveling-incognito shtick my dad had.
Maybe I needed the dough more than I realized. It’s only now that I consider that if my dad had happened to strike it poor in those years, he wouldn’t have told me that, either. And everyone seemed to be striking it poor in 1978. That was what gave dumpster duty its “real” working-class flavor. There were men at the Star working overtime to support families on not much more than I made. They were petrified of losing their jobs. What’s more, there were many stigmata of low-wage labor still omnipresent in the 1970s that kids of my background even five years younger have seen only in museums. We punched timecards, and they were authoritative; my pay may have been described by the hour, but it was computed by the minute ($31.76 for 11.983 hours). There was the hop-to-it 15-minute coffee break (for which one got paid) and on certain shifts a 30-minute dinner break (for which one did not). There was the shift manager, and the bright red apron that said “Star Market” across the front. It was, to put it mildly, not the article that gave rise to the saying I love a man in a uniform.
I was the lackey in the Star hierarchy. My job was to stand in slimy solitude on the freezing, rainy loading dock and pile the dumpster with the gamut of garbage a supermarket generates: corrugated cardboard, old sign-age, chicken and fish carcasses, and lunchroom and bathroom detritus. Once or twice a night I would be summoned into the store proper, and that was to swab. These trips were frequent. Perhaps children threw up in supermarkets more in 1978, perhaps it’s that virtually everything then was made of glass, even soft-drink bottles.
The Star Market was not a backward supermarket–on the contrary–but it was living on borrowed time. Supermarkets of 1978 probably resembled those of the Harding administration more than today’s. There was the illiterate handmade signage (Lamchop “Fresh” 2day 59c), spray-painted onto white foolscap and masking-taped to the windows. There were paper bags (no plastic), vegetable cans of ribbed tin (with glued-on paper labels) that could be stacked only pyramid-style, and a bakery section that had danishes and the local raisin-and-molasses squares known as “hermits” but no fresh bread.
And that job I was in had no more chance of surviving in its 1978 form than the old hunt-and-peck ka-ching! cash register or the pickle barrel. Young men would wander in every shift to ask if the store was hiring, and they were indeed willing to bag groceries for $2.65 an hour, but they didn’t want my job. For good or ill, in the logic of the new economy, my job was meant for someone who had escaped the Khmer Rouge or the civil war in El Salvador. No one had thought to offer it to those people yet. Until that moment came, it was a job so humble that only a slightly privileged kid who was going off to college could afford to take it.
–Christopher Caldwell
