Joseph Zitt

(Sorry for the extended NoJoe… I’ve been crazily busy, both with the retail Christmas deathmarch and with too many projects of my own. Stay tuned for info on an upcoming San Francisco performance of my “Moses (for narrator and string orchestra),” as well as some book publications within the next few months. “The Book of Voices” is continuing as well, with 34 episodes online so far.

One of the biggest projects has been creating a book from my blog entries about my retail job, tentatively entitled “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Here is the opening chapter, written over the past few months:)

This customer, at least, was only in the early stages of emotional meltdown as she approached the information desk. Her long black hair flowing over an equally black, perfectly tailored jacket and black silk blouse, the legs of her elegant pants (also, of course, black) flapping behind her in the wake of her stride, she came to an abrupt stop at a search station.

As I came around to the front of the information desk, I saw her poking at the keyboard, mostly at the Backspace and Enter keys. She tried a wide variety of misspellings of “Judaism” before clenching her right fist. It looked like she was going to try to punch some
sense into the computer.

“Can I help you find anything?” I asked.

“No, I’ve got…Well, no, it’s…You know what I need? Can you find me a book that tells me why I keep ending up going out with Jewish men?”

That was a new one. “Well, we can try a few different searches. You might find something in the relationships section, or maybe under Judaism…” I could picture a book that might be useful, but not clearly enough to spot what it was. (Later, I discovered that I had been remembering Vicki Weiss and Jennifer Block’s What to Do When You’re Dating a Jew.)

“You see, the thing is, I’ve always gone out with Jewish men. And when I was a kid, sitting on the curb, it was always me and the Jewish boys. I wonder if it’s that I view the whole world through business. I think Jewish guys…do you think Jewish guys are ambitious in business and that’s what attracts me?”

“Well,” I said, “this Jewish guy dropped out of high-tech after a couple of decades and is now working in a bookstore.”

She shrugged and sighed. “I guess that kills that theory.”

We wandered over to the Religion section. She took copies of Judaism for Dummies, a book on intermarriage, and a book on Jewish business ethics. I started to suggest more things, but her Blackberry summoned her to a higher calling and she strode off to the coffeeshop, arguing with someone over her Bluetooth connection. (At least I hope she had a Bluetooth earpiece under all that hair — she didn’t seem to be prone to talking to invisible people without the use of technology.)

I probably wouldn’t rank very highly on anyone’s scale of ambition, at least if they were measuring it in financial terms. At almost fifty, here I am, scrambling along in an expensive city on a bookseller’s wages after a moderately extravagant life as a technical writer and programmer. Where I had once had a three bedroom house to myself in Dallas, I am now living with several others above a ramshackle monastery outside San Francisco, with my own bedroom crammed with boxed and unboxed stuff that spills over into our common room. Where I once had a CD buying habit that had me buying at least a disc a day in stores, plus about a hundred dollars in CDs every couple of weeks by mail order, I now have developed a knack for finding great things (at least according to my own eccentric musical tastes) in the dollar bins at the used CD joints in the city. Where I had eaten practically every meal at restaurants or take-out places, I’ve now gotten down to a schedule of eating good, quick breakfasts at home, cooking a huge dinner once a week (I can knock out a sumptuous meal for four for under ten dollars, if needed) and freezing leftovers for the following week’s lunches (though I do eat my midnight dinners out more often than would be perfectly frugal).

But on a more important scale, I’ve achieved my ambitions. I get to hang out in a book and CD store all day, talk to people and help them find things that make them happy, and I even get paid for it. After jobs that had me spend every waking hour chained to my computer, I am ordered to go home when my shift is over, giving me time to work on my writing, other creative work, and to relax (if I ever learn to do that). After years of piloting a desk, sitting in a box and yelling at a box, I’m in constant motion, walking around the sales floor (as well as up and down hills on the way to and from the store), in better physical shape than I’ve ever been before. I’m noticed for doing work that I’m actually good at, rather than living with the constant worry (that still pops up in nightmares) that people would notice that I really didn’t know how to do my jobs and was continually improvising hacked together kludges to get things done.

Most of all, taking a breath and looking at my life in general, I can say that I’m happy. I still have frustrations and disappointments, but I can go to bed most nights with the sense that I’ve done something to make someone’s life better.

Doing this work has put me in a different social class than I had been before: I’m now one of those people wearing a name tag, ringing up purchases or answering questions at the information desk, that people often don’t see or recognize as people until they need us (and they often make it seem that we have offended them by being in a position to help).

I can understand where they are coming from in this. In my previous life, in the extravagant phases when I was paid too much for tech work and in the extended stretches of near-penniless unemployment that often came between jobs, I think I’ve been each of the people that I now find that I have to summon some compassion to handle:

• I have been the arrogant dot.com guy, sure that the cashier to whom I was speaking must be some kind of pitiable failure to be working a cash register late at night.
• I have been the guy stomping around the sales floor, certain that the employees must each be personally incompetent because they haven’t dealt with my search immediately, sometimes trailing too closely behind a worker who is helping others so that I can pounce once he is free, sometimes tempted (but only tempted) to stand dead center where the aisles meet and yell, “Does anybody work here?”
• I have been the guy who glares blankly or barks at a store worker who has approached with an eager offer to help when I just want to be left alone.
• I have been the guy who, having finished what he came for, stands around inside the front of a store, not wanting to venture out to walk home in the rain.
• I have been the lonely, lost guy in a new, strange city, scraping together pocket change to buy his hometown newspaper.
• I have been the guy in the bookstore coffee shop, sitting with a foot-tall stack of magazines and a single cup of coffee for hours, sometimes dozing off, sometimes failing to put the magazines back where I got them.
• I have been the guy flipping through the CD racks all evening, not ready or able to buy anything, but not ready to go home and face an empty house.
• I have been the guy following a worker around, talking nonstop about irrelevant matters while he tries to help others or get his tasks done, not quite admitting that I am there not because I need a book but because I need a friend.

Trying to establish more of a web presence in the days after my last dot.com job ended, I started a blog in September 2001. At a variety of web hosts, using a variety of programs, I’ve been blogging ever since. I’ve built this book from blog posts, starting soon after I came to the San Francisco area in mid-2002. I’d written these posts either on my weekends (which happen midweek) or upon coming home from work, usually after midnight, unable to sleep until I’d blogged about the surprises, joys, sadnesses, and the sheer weirdnesses that I’d encountered that day.

I work the closing shift most of the time now, shutting things down and reshelving books and CDs after the customers have gone. As I recall, I ended up reshelving most of the books with which the customer with the earpiece wandered off. I think she got Judaism for Dummies, leaving the rest in the cafe along with a stack of business and fashion magazines and some general trash. Sometimes I find customers exactly what they want; I hope that sometimes I find what they need. And helping the store make a profit is probably a good thing, too.

But what I look for is the human contact, the communication, the chance to help people leave the store happier than they came in. Here are some of the stories of some of these people, and what happened when our lives crossed on the floor of this large and often crazy store.