Retail Hell (2 page)

“Not often,” he replied, “But if you want to get a discount on them, you should work here. Employees get 20% off.”

I did a double take. What? Was he shitting me? Twenty percent off? Department store salespeople get discounts? On Calvin Klein jeans? I could not believe my ears. I felt dizzy.

“Even on the Calvins?” I asked.

“Yes, even on the Calvins. It’s on everything,” he replied, “I got a pair for only fifteen bucks.”

I almost passed out.

“You know what else?” he said, “They also automatically give you a credit card when you start, even if you’ve never had credit before. All employees get an eight-hundred-dollar limit.”

Break out the smelling salts. A CREDIT CARD!!? I didn’t have one, but I had wanted one for a long time. Badly.

Was that all I had to do? Work at the department store for discounts and
credit cards?

I suddenly saw myself with a closet full of Calvin Klein everything. Put me on the cover of
GQ
!

“You know what else?” Preppy Sales Guy said, leaning in, “Major studs shop here.”

His gaydar was on target. I gave him a sheepish smile and said, “Wow. I hadn’t thought about that before.”

After that, I only had one question: “Where’s the personnel department?”

A week later I landed a gig with the department store and was in Retail Shangri-La, with Visa card in hand, surrounded by fabulous designer clothes and potential dates. It was not long before I had my very own CK jeans, and I proclaimed, “The only thing coming between me and my Calvins is a cute boy.”Along with my dream jeans, I racked up pieces from Perry Ellis, Ralph Lauren, and Lacoste; a Swatch watch; Wayfarer shades; and the ever-popular Sperry Topsiders. My fashion planets had aligned. The world was at my feet. And I looked damn good!

Working in men’s sportswear was my first retail job (aside from selling lemonade and movie tickets), and it wasn’t particularly hellish. In fact, sometimes it was quite retailicious: flirting with cute male customers, taking long breaks, gossiping about coworkers, having vodka collins lunches, creating hip displays, opening boxes of clothes I wanted to buy. In the stockroom I had an entire rolling rack acting as my own personal hold shelf. It was loaded with merch I planned on buying as soon as it all dropped to 75% off and funds became available in my checking account.

Of course, there were hellacious moments, like a customer reaching into the middle of a table of sweaters and yanking from the bottom, knocking them all over like dominos after I’d just spent an hour folding. Or a customer yelling at me because he wanted a Polo shirt on sale the day after a sale ended. Or the scary old man coming on to me in the fitting rooms, asking if the Speedo looked good on him.
Ewww.

Good times, bad times — through it all, my retail genes were raging. Although there was no pressure from the store to make sales because we weren’t on commission, I had a way of talking men into buying loads of clothes. I had mastered the art of sales-associating in Men’s Sportswearland. Because of my stellar retail skills, my manager deemed me her assistant — with no pay raise. My pay raise consisted of all the extra hours I’d be working.
Umm, say that again? Extra hours?

And just like that, my honeymoon with Calvin Klein was over.

Every day was a twelve-hour day with mountains of paperwork. I directed merchandise floor moves, set up all the sales, handled tedious transfers, counted merch until my head hurt, stayed late, and came in early. The store began to feel like an unforgiving, chaotic, and demanding dungeon, with customers yelling and complaining, markdowns always needing to be done, phones ringing, registers breaking, and my manager freaking out every five minutes.

I became a slave to retail. My love for writing and watching films took a back seat to the store. The pay sucked and my credit card was maxed, but it didn’t matter at the time because I still lived at home, and most of my hard-earned money was spent on partying and new outfits for partying. As days slipped into years, my life became an endless, monotonous cycle of reporting to the store, hanging clothes, moving clothes, picking up clothes, ringing clothes up, and shopping for clothes. I was barely putting pen to paper. My movie muse was dead. The store had me by the balls.

That is, until I went to see
Fatal Attraction.

Remember it? Glenn Close plays the jilted lover of Michael Douglas, and she stalks the shit out of him, going so far as to boil his kid’s pet rabbit and then pretend to drown in a bathtub. For me
Fatal
Attraction
was pure cinematic genius. Audience participation at its best. There’s nothing like hundreds of people freaking out and wetting their pants in front of a theater screen. I wanted to write something just like it. My imagination reeled. And just like that, I went back to movie-watching binges, reading scripts, and writing out my ideas.

The Retail Slave I’d become was suddenly wide awake.

Time to revive my Million-Dollar Screenplay dream.

I decided to abandon the slimy retail riverbank and float downstream to a place I was sure had sandy white beaches, picturesque blue skies, lazy palm trees, and half-naked men serving bottomless margaritas. The day I left Reno it was pouring rain and cold, but my head was filled with California sunshine and visions of becoming a Hollywood hotshot — a rich and famous screenwriter with a private office on the Universal lot next to Steven.

But there’s a fine line between heaven and hell, and little did I know I was about to sell my soul to another store.

A really Big Fancy store.

The devil made me do it.

Leo DiCaprio opens the envelope and says,
“
And the Oscar for Best Original
Screenplay goes to . . . Freeman
Hall —
Love in a Fitting
Room.”
Applause
thunders across the Kodak Theatre. As I reach center stage and the Oscar is
handed to me, Leo gives me a friendly guy-to-guy hug. The dude is total
actor candy. My speech kicks ass. I thank director Ron Howard for not getting
angry when I slipped my script into his shopping bag. I also give a shout-out
to God, my mom, my sister, my acupuncturist, my fifth-grade teacher, my beta
fish, Sid Vicious . . .

“EXCUSE ME!”

What?

Who is that?

Excuse me, but
I’m
not finished with my acceptance speech. Be quiet.

“EXCUSE ME!”

There it is again. Sounds like a woman. Whatever. Some jealous screenwriter
in the audience. As I take my Oscar backstage, I am so glad I
didn’t
cry. Tom Hanks pats me on the back. Meryl Streep winks at me. I feel a little
lightheaded.
Oprah’s
people stop me. I promise my first interview to her, of
course. Jennifer Aniston bumps into me.
She’s
smoking hot! Hugh Jackman
bumps into me.
He’s
smoking hot! Jerry Bruckheimer approaches me and says
he wants me to write . . .

“EXCUSE ME! You
do
work here, don’t you?”

Crap.

I really wanted to hear what Jerry had to say
.

Suddenly it’s all gone. The stage. The audience. Leo. All of it. Gone.

Another Academy Award dream lost. Oprah wouldn’t want to interview me any more than she would an Olive Garden dishwasher.

My Oscar night fantasy evaporates into the unnatural yellow glow of track lights bouncing off mirrored columns while Celine Dion goes on and on about her heart going on and on. The Kodak Theatre’s slick stage is replaced by worn carpet the color of moldy oatmeal and a maze of glass fixtures and shelves holding overpriced designer handbags. My fingers are not clasped around Oscar’s gold body, but instead around the leather straps of a Coach signature satchel. I am in the middle of the handbag department of The Big Fancy, where I work as a sales associate.

I may as well be a million miles from Hollywood, even though the Kodak Theatre is actually mere miles away. No award ceremonies or after-parties in my immediate future . . . only a tangle of handbags to be tidied for tomorrow.

It’s five minutes to closing. I get out of my head and reposition my eyes toward the counter. The late-night interruption of my Tinsel Town dream had come from a short, plump thing with bacon-colored hair so greasy it looks like she just came out of the shower. Her clothes are disheveled and she sports orange safety-goggle-looking glasses in need of cleaning. A beat-up Big Fancy shopping bag sits on the counter in front of her.

Return time.

When I arrive at the counter, the greasy little hobbit immediately turns all bitchy. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, peering at me over the top of her orange glasses. “I was asking for your help several times and you just stood there like you were in a trance.”

“I was. The Oscar trance.”

And if you
hadn’t
bothered me,
I’d
still be there, at the
Governor’s
Ball
showing off my statuette, drinking champagne out of
Leo’s
shoe.

The Greasy Hobbit is not interested in my trance.

“I need to return,” she says. “There’s also a wallet inside.”

I open the bag and immediately recognize the white plush Ferragamo dustcover. A large $2,000 calfskin tote bag and $500 wallet sat inside. Greasy shoves a receipt in my face.

Of course, my eyes immediately go to the salesperson number: 441064.

Fuck me with a handbag. It’s my employee number and I don’t even remember selling it to her. The last thing I need is a huge return. The day had been slow with sales and busy with problems. Her return is going to be the nail in my coffin.

To make matters worse, the outside of the $2,000 Ferragamo tote isn’t exactly in “I never used it” condition. Its days of immaculateness are long past — scratches, dents, and scuff marks are scattered across its body. WTF? Had she loaned it to Edward Scissorhands?

“This bag has been used,” I announce, repeating a line I say often at The Big Fancy.

Greasy peers at me through the orange glasses, attempting to turn me into stone with her goblin eyes, “I’m telling you I didn’t use it, the scratches must have been there before.”

“And
I’m
telling you
there is no way you would have paid $2,000 for a bag with scratches.”

“Well, I did,” she says, “I just decided not to keep it. I never used it. I don’t know what I was thinking spending that kind of money.”

I bite my tongue. Greasy didn’t buy this Ferragamo bag. No lie detector needed here — I remember who purchased the Ferragamo a few months ago. The buyer had been a tall blond woman who had sucked the life out of me. A total Therapy-Digger. During our lengthy time together, I had showed her every handbag in the joint while she spared no details of her train-wreck life: She was overworked at her job, hated her coworkers, had an elderly mother in rehab and a teenage daughter who wasn’t speaking to her, and — the topper — she had just discovered her husband was having an affair. Apparently she found some photos of him in a pair of pink lace panties. It wasn’t clear if the other woman was a woman or a man dressed as a woman.

Oh yeah. Good times.

The writer in me had wanted to take notes, but the Retail Slave in me had just wanted her to be gone. The whole session gave me a headache. I had played the good little sales associate, offered exceptional service, played her shrink, and then told her she needed to buy the bag to get back at her panty-loving husband. Proclaiming the Ferragamo the bag of her dreams, that’s what she did. And now some
other
woman was here returning it all beat to shit? Like a thousand times before, I am about to become the casualty of another Therapy-Digger, but decide to go down fighting.

Not so fast, Greasy Little Hobbit,
it’s
late and my feet hurt.

“But you didn’t buy this bag.”

“Yes, I did!”

“Umm. No you didn’t.”

“Are you calling me a liar? I told you it’s my bag.”

“Well I’m the original salesperson and you’re not the woman I sold it to.”

Busted! Greasy Hobbit sighs and rolls her eyes behind her smudgy glasses. Then she sort of snarls her lip at me.

“Whatever,” she says, “It’s my sister’s. She gave it to me and I don’t appreciate being interrogated. I want to return it.”

“I’m not allowed to take back used handbags.”

“What are you talking about? I never used it!”

I point to several mauled areas of the Ferragamo.

“That’s ridiculous. I return things all the time and I’ve never had a problem!” she says, ignoring my observation,“I have my receipt! I know the policy at this store. You have to return it. I never used that bag.”

We’ll
see about that, Frodo.

I quickly open the Ferragamo and pull out the paper stuffing. Sure enough, I find makeup stains smeared across the bottom. I show them to her.