This afternoon I was headed to the liquor store to grab a Foty a Colt Foty-Five when I saw some tanned dude sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of John’s untitled liquor store—a place of such rarified refinement that it does not require a designation. It is simply the door in the brick wall where one goes in to purchase any of a dozen domestic brews, three types of vodka, five types of rum, and my favorite, the 3 bottles of Argentine wine for$12.
The guitarist has an audience of one and an aluminum beer bucket inhabited by a handful of change. It was Sol…
“Hey Jimmy nice to see ya!”
“Hey Sol, how are you making out?”
“Well, with summer over the painting work dried up so now I’m playing for change.”
I dropped a dollar in the bucket and made small talk with my one time employee. Sol and I have some history.
I hired him on Christmas week of 2007.
On New Year’s Eve he called from jail and asked me to bail him out after missing a couple of days, so I fired him over the phone.
On Christmas week of 2008 Sol came in and filled out an application, on which he cited me as a reference and put for his reason for termination, “Fired due to stupidity.”
After warming up to Sol in my mind for justifying my actions I gave him a call and asked him, “Why did you get locked up last year?”
“Got in a bar fight. Like I wrote on the application, stupidity.”
“Did you win.”
“Fuck yeah dude!”
Possibly useful, Check.
“Did you fight the cops?”
“Fuck no dude!”
Not a complete idiot, check.
“How long were you in prison?”
“Six months or so.”
Can handle working with the ex-cons on the night crew, check.
“Will you work night crew?”
“Ahhh…”
He will call out and I will fire him, but three out of four ain’t bad.
“Sold Sol, for ten dollars an hour. Be here by midnight and don’t get pissed off after you call out the third time and I fire you.”
“Thanks dude. You’re not the total asshole everybody says you are!”
I’m really going to dislike firing this guy.
Sol’s work was mediocre.
Sol’s attendance was so terrible that I moved him to day turn which meant a cut in his hours.
However, by this time I owed Sol, because the racist redneck floor contractor who did the floors at night and picked fights with the black dudes and screamed at the cashiers that they were whores and who I could not get rid of because he blew the owner on occasion, finally picked a fight with Sol, and Sol did not back down. Wind-eroded white trash is good for that. Sol made this guy cry, which resulted in him mouthing off to me, and no mere redneck mouthed off to the White Devil in front of the field hands without suffering economic death—gone!
I owed Sol for three terminations. On three occasions—which was the going rate for a loyal man who put his ass on the line for the White Devil—when I should have fired Sol, I sent him home instead.
Then, after numerous dress code violations, on the night before Thanksgiving 2009, at 7:07 p.m. Sol was wearing his black hooded sweat shirt on the sales floor. I stepped up to Sol and asked him to remove the unauthorized attire—which was supermarket robbery attire to be exact—and he slammed a case of banquet turkey and gravy with dressing down on the tile floor and grunted in a rage, and growled, “I’m fuckin’ cold man!”
“Look Sol, you have had a year to comply with the dress code. And besides, I work more frozen food than you do and I do it in this white button shirt.”
Sol then began to simmer and pump his hands in some Yoga calming motions and said on a quick boil, “Well excuse me Jimmy, but I was not fucking surgically altered to stock fucking frozen food—and no, I’m not a fucking workaholic psycho who prints in all capital letters when he writes up the poor bastards that’s slave away feeding these fat fucks!”
In awe at Sol’s articulate vitriol I got close enough so that the lady hovering around wondering who to ask for the location of the cranberry sauce display would not hear and intoned, “Sol, you have to leave.”
“Leave, leave! You’ve already cut my hours to the fucking bone Jimmy.”
“Sol, I need you to leave. We can talk about this…”
“No Jimmy, I’m not leaving.”
“In that case your employment is terminated.”
Sol looked to the ceiling and flexed his hands like Samson considering the pillars of the Philistine hall, “You’re firing me again, on the night before Thanksgiving?”
“You are correct Sir, have a nice day.”
Now Sol was hanging his head and pacing dejectedly toward the front door as I turned to the lady who was shedding tears for him…and felt like a total heel.
Three months latter I denied him his unemployment by masterfully getting him to yell at me in front of the hearing officer.
In August of 2010, having resigned, and seeking a low rent apartment, I called a friend who ran a boarding house in the ghetto, asking for a second floor room.
He said, “I’ll have an opening in two weeks as soon as a kick this asshole out. I told him I’d give him two weeks when I had had enough. He knows he’s an asshole.”
The next week I stopped over to visit Steve in his first story office where he runs his mechanical supply company. He took me upstairs and showed me a bed with a busted frame and hundreds of cigarette burn holes and a huge sweat stain in the bare mattress on the hardwood floor next to a pile of cigarette butts a foot high and two feet wide, underneath of which he assured me there would be an ashtray.
“Look at this shit. There are even chicken nugget sauce containers on the porch roof. The fucker just tosses his trash out the window. The worst part is this ugly broad that lives up the street pays his rent for him so he will fuck her. Christ the last time I had a perspective client in the office [which was directly below this room and had no drop ceiling] I’m trying to close a deal and this dude is not only fucking her so hard that the floor boards are creaking and the bed frame banging, but he’s ‘yeehahing’ and cheering himself on. I had to spring for lunch just to close the deal.”
Steve then took me downstairs to the rent payment calendar and drew a line through three letters S…o…l! So in the end I not only put Sol out of work, I had his landlord put him out on the street so I could live in artistic squalor.
It was this point that Sol chose to bring up as he strummed his guitar, “So Aldo tells me you’ve got my old room.”
“What can I say dude, it’s the best room in the house. I kept your spirit alive as long as I could though. The last chicken sauce container did not wash off the roof until last winter.”
“Dude, you fired me twice and got my room and only a buck in the bucket?”
“In my defense Sol, when I fired myself, I lost six times as much money as you lost with both of your job losses combined.”
“It’s so good to see you man. Aldo told me where you train—I can come watch you guys beat the shit out of each other with sticks, maybe even take a swing at it myself?”
“Anytime brother. See you around, I have a funeral to catch.”
That’s Sol.
The worst thing about managing a low end workplace, is by the time you’ve turned your help over a few times, you could have staffed a C-list version of The Expendables out of all the coolest characters you sent to economic purgatory.
I’m so glad I’ll never fire anyone again, and I think Sol knows.
Sol's a good man, in my book. One of my brother's longtime friends, don't know where their friendship sits now due to my brother's herculean ability to burn his bridges with such brutal efficiency that he surely missed his calling as a demolitions expert.
I was there, watching you speak to him the night you let him go the second time. You could've told me to pick up his work, throwing up frozen freight and rotating product between the two frozen food coolers, but instead you made the shorts-wearing guy do it. I still remember that, all these years later.
Oh, and your handwritten script is the Devil's Typewriter, that is no lie. The one time you wrote me up, I still have chills about it, reading that blocky, ugly text detailing exactly how I'd fucked up of the course of my short tenure as an officer worker.
It was a humbling experience, to be sure. I recall when I was following you down the steps, through the warehouse when you were asking me if I'd like to work Seafood instead—it was not a question. I could read between the lines: it was work in a different department or have my hours slashed to nothing. Even still, I was angry, both at you and at myself, so I growled out, "No." You turned around on your heels, leveled yourself with me. I don't think you'd ever seen me that angry, and I surprised myself. But I looked you right in the eyes and said, "But if that's what it takes, then I'll do it." You understood what I was going through, and thus you gave me another chance.
That was probably the first time in my life where I really felt like a man. I wasn't perfect, I had made my fair share of mistakes, but I wasn't going to let those mistakes define me. I was being given another chance and I don't back down from opportunities. In the end, it all worked out for me, and I thank you for giving me the chance to grow as a human being.
Thank you James. You are one of the reasons—one of the big reasons—that I am the man I am today.
Thank you Adam, for making me feel justified in my cruelty, and for remembering the shorts-wearing-guy I sent into the freezer to wall the Oncur entrée drop shipment!
And he thought I was going to give him the day off for breaching dress code!
Actually, the reason why I was so hard on you was because you were a fighter—a karate guy. I figured if you could eat all of that Americanized Korean shit and make it to work on foot without getting robbed and beat like the rest of the guys then setting a higher standard for you would be good for everyone, and it was.
Every time I let some hopeless moron slide because I knew he was drowning in the shallow end of the gene pool anyhow and did not want to be the bastard to hold his head under, I would feel weak momentarily. Then I would tighten up the Windsor knot on the tie that only had a knot that slid because of putting your catholic education to use fitting my new ties after throwing out the dirty ones, and consoled my cruel self, as my underlings slunk off unproductively to wherever they hid when I was making your life a living hell, and thought, "No problem. You're still the White Devil, and they will fear you again as soon as they see the next dirty job detail you dish out to Swinder!"
Thanks for checking in Adam. we miss you up here in Harm City—I bet you even have a tree in your yard.