Gems that sparkled

GEMS THAT SPARKLED

 

I believe it was my youth or being grateful that I was still employed after not only the earthquake but the Christmas season. But I always felt like I was part of the family of people who worked at Shreve & Co.

 

There was one employee who was 89 years old and had been working at the store for over 56 years. Miss Lackey. She was still quite tall though slightly bent over. Her hair was white and kept in a tight bun and she wore thick glasses. When you entered her department, she would chime, “Good afternoon Sir” …then she would squint to focus and realize it was not a customer and then lose her friendly expression and murmur, “Oh, its just you…”

 

She woke every morning at five and took three buses from Oakland where she lived to the store until she retired.  She was a self proclaimed virgin but at 89 years old, I am not too sure anyone was interested in that trivial and sad fact. She made the best lemon bundt cakes and would leave them in the basement for Jun, our manager. We would eat it entirely before he got back from a truck run but he would never tell her.

 

There were many stories about Miss Lackey but we respected her because of her age. But with old age comes surprises, like her screaming, “EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!” because her bowels had overreacted as she was guided to the restroom.

 

We also had Sally who was the store’s receptionist. Sally used to work in the basement until she could no longer go up and down the stairs due to her weight. I think she weighed in at 500 lbs. Her husband would drive up the alley next to the store in their Suzuki Samurai and then she would slowly get out of the passenger side and balance herself around the hood of the car and walk cautiously to the freight elevator wheezing from the exertion. She would then ring the doorbell of the elevator which we could hear in the basement.

 

We would then send the freight elevator up to street level for her to get in and then she would ride the elevator to the mezzanine level where her desk was.

Many times the delivery trucks would be stuck behind her husbands car as she went through this ritual and they would honk for her to hurry up. She, always the lady, would tell them to go fuck themselves as they sped by. The distance between the elevator and her desk was only about twenty feet but it would take her the most part of about one minute per foot to go the distance to her desk.

 

By the time she arrived at her desk, she would pant for about ten minutes until she could settle down to answering the phone and running the inventory of the store. By the end of the day, she would have to go down the stairs backwards as the freight elevator was closed. So she would go step by step down the stairs backwards hanging onto the hand railing for dear life, literally. Once she reached the sales floor, she would then balance her way across the floor and out the door and sit on a tree planter where unfortunately some Japanese tourist would usually take her photo. She would suffer through the humiliation with a smile.

 

Once the store had a bomb scare and the streets were cornered off and the entire store had to be evacuated. By the time the box had been opened by the bomb crew, Sally had only been able to get down the stairs and to the end of one of the counters.

 

As she turned back to head up the stairs, I asked if she wanted to go out to the alley and I would send the elevator for her, but she said it hurt too much to walk that far. So she spent the most part of an hour crawling up the stairs on her hands and feet.

 

Sally used her bra as a temporary safe. It was always shocking when you ask where a $400,000 diamond ring had gone and she would say,”In the safest place in the store” and in response to your blank stare, she would reach in her bra and pull it out.

 

Though I had started in the shipping department, after the Christmas season was over, I asked if I could transfer to the Service Department. I had to interview with George, the manager. Jun, my Korean manager interrupted the interview and said, “George is gay so don't bend over around him.”  George had a lot of class so ignored him and gave me the job. Partly to get me away from him.

 

George was a handsome man. This was 1989 so ground zero of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. George did not see any reason is going out because he said all the handsome men had already died because they were the only ones getting sex.

 

George was a classical music fanatic and knew almost any score. Towards the end, George had met a new boyfriend who as also sick and George joked that they would probably die at the same time and were thinking they should be buried in a double coffin in the 69 position.

 

As amusing as that was, that is when I realized that people who know they are sick are in a different dimension to the rest of us.

 

When George left on disability as he could no longer stand working as he thought it was a literal waste of his time, I took over as the manager for the Service Department. Though the service department is on the ground floor, my office was in the basement. And it was under a metal door which is how the shipments used to get into the basement from the street before we installed Sally’s elevator. Unfortunately the metal door on the sidewalk was now the new home to the guy who tap danced on it from morning until evening singing, “Keep on smiling, just keep on smiling and the whole world will smile with you.” He apparently made quite a bit a money doing that all day everyday and it drove me crazy.

 

The office was dark and dank. It also stunk badly. I always thought it was because the building was so old.

 

Mark Hsaio worked with us. Mark was Chinese American and had gone to Julliard and was a professional pianist.  He worked in the service department with us and only washed his hair on certain days of the week to save on shampoo. His boyfriend Lee was fat and nasty but had once been a male model. Mark decided that he was reaching 30 and it was time for him to get serious about his piano playing and wanted to go back to New York. Lee was cheating on him by dating a Korean movie star who was rather flagrant when in the United States. He would wrap his arms around Lee and scream, “You are the best rooking guy in the whore prace!” and when I repeated that to Mark it made him laugh because he couldn’t cry anymore.

 

Mark was in New York and was stood up by a friend at a bar called the Townhouse in the upper east side. Next to him was an older gentleman who had also been stood up. They struck up a conversation and now have been together for almost 20 years. At one point Mayor Rudi Gulliani lived at their house when he split up with his then wife. Mark washes his hair more often now.

 

The customer is king, so the mantra goes. It is embarrassing though, when you are witness to the behavior of some of the customers to each other. One man had brought in his most valued treasures which he insisted on having appraised for his insurance. I thin there was a diamond horse shoe ring, maybe a few other rings and a bracelet. He was very nice to me and quite talkative. An older man, possibly southern accent. Just then with his treasure laying on the glass counter, he looked to his right where there was a young African American gentleman waiting in line. My customer instinctively bent over his treasure and shielded it from the guy next to him putting up his arm so he could not even see what he had. In a hushed but still loud enough voice, he asked if there was somewhere private we could meet motioning his eyes towards his neighbors as if I would understand.