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:)

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As the evening dragged on, several of us wondered aloud over our headsets once again why we were open so late on a Sunday night. Almost all of the paying customers had wandered off by nine, two hours before closing. The remaining swarm consisted mostly of jetlagged European tourists who would tend to wander about and not buy things, and of our regular denizens. Most of those were draped over our most comfortable chairs, either sleeping, staring belligerently at any who dared to approach them, or nattering to people we couldn’t see. They had made sure to mark their territory by moving their chairs from where we had left them, usually placing them in the flow of traffic. In the passive-aggressive way that seems to be becoming an American signature, they simply acted as if they were entitled to do whatever they wanted, to say whatever they wanted, and to leave as much of a mess as they could.

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The customer was fidgeting with a DVD when I came over to him. “Can I help you find anything?”

“Actually, I have a question for you,” he said. He spoke quickly, not quite agitated but clearly wired, and with an accent that sounded vaguely West African or Caribbean, though I couldn’t pin it down further than that. “What is the difference in relative mass between this DVD and an empty DVD?”
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Up on the music floor in our store, we can play music either from our iPods (if we have the album being played in stock and if it doesn’t contain offensive language) or with the CD player hooked up to the sound systems. Each provided us with possibilities and problems.

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The Moses project is on. I’ll be performing it with the Toms River Multigenerational Orchestra on Sunday, April 1. It will be a private performance, at a residential care facility somewhere in Jackson, NJ, and I won’t be able to invite people to the gig. But I hope to get a useful recording of the performance, and to be able to post it online.
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The regulars didn’t show up to the store tonight. Tracksuit Guy, Mr Duffle, Opera Man, Crutch Lady and the rest all took the night off. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and all the amateur drinkers and those deranged by apparently unaccustomed partying showed up in force. The expert denizens knew to keep a low profile and wait for the frenzied to stumble back to their suburbs and their SUVs.
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The Dancing Man came sailing up the escalator in our closing hour. The sounds of a Yemenite singer, mixed with disco beats, greeted him as we tried out Madonna’s new live album on the overhead system.
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The music that blasts from the children’s shop next door to and below ours often gets stuck in my head, bursting back into my consciousness when least welcome. Today, it was playing the original “Someday My Prince Will Come,” Adriana Caselotti’s implausible vibrato slicing through the grinding groan of frustrated traffic and the half-conversations of crowded, isolated people, only some of whom had telephones. On Saturday, it was the impossibly cheerful music of an imagined old world, a sort of Chipmunk Klezmer of the Damned.
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Christmas is over. And, as predictably as the taking down of Christmas lights and the half-off sales on the foot-tall black, gold, and fuchsia plastic trees, it’s time for the retail workers to get sick. I’m no exception.
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After many months of working afternoon and evening shifts, heading outside to go to work in the morning can be quite disorienting. All the shadows are on the wrong sides of things.

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