Shop Till You Drop

Chapter 8

“Do you even know what a Sapphire martini is?” the young man demanded in a supercilious voice. His pretty pink choirboy face was disfigured by a nasty sneer.

If this rude young man had applied to Helen for a job, she’d have shown him the door. Instead, she was asking him for work, and she knew she didn’t have a chance.

“Uh, it’s blue?” she said uncertainly.

“It’s only like the unofficial gay drink,” the choirboy said, pitying her ignorance. “If you want to tend bar on Las Olas, you’d better know what gays drink. And straights, too. Do you put coffee in a mudslide? Can you make a margarita? A rum runner?”

The choirboy kept hitting Helen with questions he knew she couldn’t answer. Then, when she was thoroughly beaten, he returned the job application she’d painstakingly filled out. “Come back when you know one end of the bar from the other,” he said. His tone implied that would be the thirty-first of never.

Helen’s confidence was going downhill as fast as a real mudslide. She used to evaluate intricate pension-payment plans. Now she did not know what kind of gin went into a martini.

Helen was determined to find another job. She would not work for a thief and a drug pusher. So on her day off, Helen put on her black suit and went looking for work. Instead, she found a series of humiliations.

Helen didn’t want to dip into her precious stash to fix her car, and that made her search harder. She had to find something within walking distance of her apartment. This morning, she’d already walked three long miles in the hot sun. Her feet burned from the sunbaked concrete sidewalks. She had a blister on her right heel. Her suit was sweaty, which meant another dry-cleaning bill.

After the choirboy sneered her out the door, Helen approached the next place warily. This bar looked like some place where Myrna Loy would drink, right down to the chrome cocktail shakers. It was dark and cool inside, and Helen was grateful for that. At least she’d get to sit down while she was being insulted.

The bar was opening for the day, and the bartender was busy cutting up limes and lemons for garnish. She was a cheerful blonde with sunfried skin and a smoker’s rasp. She gave Helen a club soda on the house and some free advice.

“You’re wasting your time looking for a bartender’s job around here,” she said, her voice like an emery board on the eardrums. “You have to know somebody to get these jobs. You might want to go to bartender’s school. We hire some of the promising graduates.”

Helen thanked the woman and wondered how much bartender’s school would cost. An MBA was not much good to a mixologist. She’d better give up on bartending.

But Helen could—and did—read, and in South Florida, that seemed a rare skill. Maybe she could sell books. Helen tried Page Turners, the snooty Las Olas bookstore, next. The store manager didn’t look old enough to go into the bars that had rejected Helen. But he turned her down, too.

“We’re not hiring at present,” the underage manager said, “but we will be happy to take your application.”

The kiss-off of death. How often had Helen heard those words in human resources? At least he didn’t say she was overqualified for the job, another inhuman human resources phrase. The underage manager added a new twist of the knife.

“We are expecting openings soon on the night shift,” he said. “We pay six seventy an hour. The night-shift booksellers are expected to clean the store and the toilets.”

“Toilets?” Helen said. She’d thought book selling would be genteel, if underpaid.

“Yes, but you can also take home the leftover café sandwiches,” he said.

Helen wondered if she’d have any appetite for them after cleaning the toilets. The manager was wearing a white shirt and silk tie. Would she have to dress up in a skirt and heels to clean toilets, like a woman in a 1950s TV commercial?

Helen thanked him and walked next to the headquarters of an elite maid service. If she had to clean commodes for a living, she might as well get a job where she wouldn’t have to dress up.

For six dollars an hour, Helen could clean toilets all day for the maid service. But it would help if she knew Spanish, the manager said. Then she could make six twenty-five and be a team leader. Helen didn’t speak enough Spanish to order a taco in a Mexican restaurant.

Terrific. In two years, her career options had slid from director of employee benefits to toilet team leader—and she wasn’t fully qualified for that job.

By three o’clock that afternoon, her job hopes were in the commode. Helen decided her battered psyche could stand one more interview. She’d remembered enough about job searches to save the best for last.

The ad she saw in the paper was intriguing: “Job opportunity in the food service industry,” it said. “Enjoy fresh air and sunshine in a casual beach-like atmosphere. No experience necessary. Generous tips for willing workers. Transportation provided.”

No experience. Transportation. She was willing if they were.

Helen had called that morning and made an appointment for three-thirty. But when she saw the office, her spirits fell even lower. The office was on a seedy street off Las Olas. Many of the buildings on the dismal little street were abandoned or boarded up, slated to be torn down for a new high-rise.

This office was clearly temporary. There was no company name on the door, no secretary in the waiting room. The only furniture was two white plastic lawn chairs. The mint-green walls were decorated with dirty handprints and Snap-On Tool posters of busty women. Helen did not think they created a professional workplace environment.

The inner office door opened and a hard-faced young woman with spiky cranberry-red hair came out. She was bursting with health. She was also bursting out of her short-shorts and white halter top. “Bye-eee, boss. See you tomorrow,” Miss Cranberry said.

“Show up dressed for work,” a man’s voice called out. “Not that outfit. The one we discussed, yes?”

There seemed to be some professional standards, Helen thought, and her dying hopes fluttered a little.

The man who came into the waiting room had luxuriant hair everywhere but on his head. He had little patches of hair on his fingers, little bushes in his nostrils and ears, a dark pelt on his arms and a thick curly black mat on his chest. Gold chains were tangled in his chest hair, and Helen wondered if he’d have to cut them out. But by the time the hair finally made it to his scalp, it was thin and straggly. It seemed exhausted.

The hairy man did not introduce himself. He lumbered back into his office like a bear into a cave and sat down behind a card table piled with papers and Manila folders.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “Glad you could make it. Take a seat, yes? Take a load off those pretty feet. Nice heels. You can wear those to work, yes?” He had some kind of accent, but Helen couldn’t place it. Latin? Latvian? Russian?

“What kind of work is it?” Helen asked, sliding into another lawn chair.

“Food service, like the ad says,” the hairy man said, hands drumming on the paper pile.

“What kind of food?” Helen said. Why am I interviewing him? she wondered. Was he testing her people skills?

“Hot dogs,” he said. “All-American, the hot dog, yes? You will serve them at lunch time under a big sun umbrella to hungry men. Good tippers. And we pay seven dollars an hour.”

That was the most she’d been offered all day. “Plus benefits?” Helen said, hopefully.

“Many benefits,” he said, smiling. He had another patch of hair under his lower lip. “Fresh air. Sunshine. You’ll meet many fine gentlemen.”

“Don’t women eat lunch, too?” she said.

“Some,” he said, and shrugged.

“And it’s on the beach?”

“On a roadside, but like a beach,” he said. “We will take you and the food cart there in the morning and pick you up in the afternoon. Now take off your blouse, please, so I can see if you are qualified for the job.”

Helen was sure she’d heard him wrong. “Your blouse,” he repeated, pointing a hairy finger at her chest. “You will unbutton now, please?”

Helen picked up her purse and stood up. “I’m at a loss to see what removing my blouse has to do with a food service job. I am terminating this interview.”

“Do not be angry, dear lady. You seem to have a nice shape, but I need to see how you would look in a bikini. That will be your job uniform, yes?”

“No!” Helen said.

Searing anger fueled her long walk home. Food service. Fresh air. Beach-like atmosphere. Horseradish! She was supposed to wear a bikini and sell hot dogs with mustard and double entendres. She’d seen those pathetic women on god-forsaken South Florida roads, surrounded by a pack of slavering men. She’d be leered at by truckers and tormented by bugs. How could she let this happen? She’d been a woman with a silver Lexus and a closet full of power suits. Now she was being asked to peddle hot dogs half naked.

She had wasted her time and her day off getting nowhere looking for nowhere jobs. She would have to go back to work for a crook. Helen would never get free of Juliana’s.