Hardware In Hard Times

I worked at my local lumber dealer for half a year. It took a while to appreciate.

Life has a grit to it. You’ll never polish circumstances to the sparkling sheen of your mind’s eye; life will always tarnish the way things go.

On one hand, you have the kind of hiccups that hurt no more than a mosquito bite. I mean things like saying “you too” to your waiter in reply to “enjoy your food,” or the occasional slip of the finger I have when I write, leading to a recoil when I spot an error few others, if anyone else, will.

On the other hand, you have cataclysms, such as the international intermission which smothered our livelihoods five-and-a-half years ago. Forget life hiccups, this was a life fracture. (Yeah, I realized I had to get a little crafty when introducing the beaten-to-death events of 2020.)

No, I didn’t witness the death of a loved one, or suffer the illness myself, but I had to sacrifice what would have been a killer time as a college freshman. One of my “consolation prizes” arrived in the form of a crisp, red shirt and a sprinkling of sawdust. There we have it: life’s tarnishing. At the dawn of 2021, with everyone still paranoid, ma told me to get my lazy ass employed for some extracurricular motivation, effective immediately.

I had been living a pretty pain-free existence (all things considered) as the sickness clamped down, knocking out virtual classes in the comfort of my grandparents’ impressive Florida home. Nestled in a gated enclave seemingly outside of the real world, I had a smooth start to my college career, if far from ideal. I knew this cushy status wasn’t going to last forever — you can only spend so much time with your elders — but how would I kill the remainder of the pandemic? After the holidays, an answer materialized. The matriarch told me, in as many words:

“Ring’s End is looking for people. Go. Go!!!”

The calm of the stock room, which I wouldn’t savor until later.

Her demands were not an easy sell. Ring’s End is a regional chain of hardware stores, founded locally in 1902. I had been to the Darien outlet no more than three times, and I had no knowledge of how the joint worked. Working at Johnny’s Records — a peerless memory, ripe for a future Substack dissemination — this was not.

As you might expect, I got the job. Any place that shoos in employees with an absence of pushback is usually worthy of suspicion; in this case, I believe it was merited. Calling my role a “job” amounts to a lethal exaggeration of reality. Here’s the actual task I was gifted: sit out front of the popular paint area, which was a little short on space, and monitor how many people were in there at any one time, so that gathering restrictions could stay enforced. If necessary, form a line.

Fucking sucks, thinking back on it. First off, it was a retail gig, and customer-driven environments are not my forte. My bread and butter is more cerebral, and less reliant on acting as a “cop” figure; I have a massive amount of sympathy and patience for anyone working retail or, God forbid, food. With everyone pissed off due to an unprecedented (remember that word?) virus, and me doing the lamest thing imaginable to help police things, my mom’s “great” idea wasn’t.

Fortunately, the restrictions began to lift after a couple of months. I was told to stay on, but start working in the stock room. Finally, real co-workers, something with a bit of an old-school vibe, time could pass quicker…this was more like it.

One of my colleagues, Bernie. Check out the holster for my box cutter!

For the most part, I just had to interact with other Ring’s End employees, so my patron paralysis dropped to a minimum. I began to have moments of genuine enjoyment as I performed my to-dos. Dissecting pallets of goods to fill the shelves, operating the conveyor belt, tearing down boxes — during the best of times, the atmosphere reminded me of a Tom Waits song.

I met some pretty cool bastards on the job. Leo, for example. An older, diminutive Filipino man, other Ring’s End folks whispered in hushed tones about Leo’s former military career. In serving his homeland, I was told, he racked up multiple kills.

Chris was another favorite; one of my brightest memories at Ring’s End involved assembling a wheelbarrow with him.

I elected to end my hardware tenure on June 16th, 2021, having worked there longer than I would have at any summer job in between years of college. Trouble was, I opted not to tell my mother about my decision. Did I still leave the house and act like I was walking to clock in? Yes. Did she find out after a couple of weeks? Yes. Was she furious? Yeah, yeah, but it makes for a funny story now.

My last day felt like a victory. I had evened the scales of circumstance by finishing a job I would have never chosen on its highest note. On the whole, Ring’s End made for a nice, if unusual, feather in my college cap. Call it a coat of paint on a seamless start.

I still wear the crisp, red shirt sometimes.