The blue house we lived in was where our bed beheld the birth of ziggy's puppies. I was away on a bus on the way across the bridge to work, meanwhile my friend slept in and awoke to our dog giving birth literally on top of him. That was when I had failed to get a job lifeguarding because I didn't pass a test to become an asshole-certified lifeguard, even after nearly drowning myself for a weeks worth of swimming to the deep end for the 40 lb. brick and holding it an inch above water the whole way to the shallow end of the pool. My eyes were red and sore, I could taste chlorine, my legs and arms were tense from grief -- my grandma had just died, and I was trying to get by without her financial assistance causing me to be in a completely destitute position regarding money for food and rent. So I followed my mother's pristinely impossible advice and signed up for a weeks long lifeguard training course, and at the end of it all I failed.
So then, I completely forfeited any social cause for dignity and resigned to apply for a big box store-- something I had previously sworn I would never do again - after working for a Target in Springfield during black friday week I found out my grandpa was in the hospital and was nearing death, and I first faced the penalty of losing my position on account of an actual emergency- I didn't go, and my grandpa died...
So then I tried to just get any possible position - broke and poisoned as I was; I applied for Joann's Fabrics because I hoped to find a way to live, and I had no alternatives. My mother made off with my grandma's inheritance to the grand canyon and who knows where... and I was hired to be on the pre-opening crew for a new store location across the river on the other side of the bridge.
I was waking up at 5:00 and catching the 6:20 bus to the other side of the bridge for a 7-3 shift or an 8-4 shift. I wouldn't be able to catch another bus until 7:20, which was after the 7:00 shift, or wouldn't make it to the 8:00 shift either. So I would arrive super early and smoke cigarettes by the bus stop and watch the grey mornings get brighter but not more colorful. Early part of 2012, here. And the shifts, once they opened the doors to the windowless warehouse where we took our places, were long, brutal, and with nothing to eat most of the time.
At first we set up shelving which is not as simple as it sounds. It required memorizing a piece of paper with very small holes as a map and charting the same number of holes on the shelf in order to assemble it with exactly the dimensions holes as defined by this very tiny piece of paper in a very large room lit with very bright and flickering fluorescent lights.
Then, inserting the fixtures, as I learned hooks are also called, into the proper hole as determined by the chart or piece of paper that is tiny and filed specifically for each different shelf of the store, one would be required to try to memorize different patterns of holes and fixtures to try to increase the rate of comprehension of placement for each particular fixture by the individual setting up that shelf of the store. With the added pressure of an oncoming due date for the store to be set up by, the nights went later and later, and the monotony became more grueling and tedious. My brain was actively taking a beating with the sheer computing power it was being demanded to perform at such low levels of application.
At first we just built the fixtures and the shelves, but then it was a lot of opening up boxes and putting things away. I worked in the buttons section one day, which I learned was intensely more tedious than working with the bats of fabric. Piece by piece, one would pull a button from a box and try to identify by matching through memory with the pictures posted on the fixtures on the shelves, and piece by piece each fixture would fill up with the buttons. It was immense in scope for one individual to take on, which was overshadowed only slightly by the inevitability of that being the only way any sections in the store were built, piece by piece, one by one.
The ribbons section was equally disarming with the level of detail one was presumed to remember in order to assemble it, with many textures and types of lace and ribbon on rolls, literally thousands of rolls, and to be arranged in predetermined arrays defined only by the number on the barcode, sometimes as obscure as a number found within a larger set of numbers at the end, to identify which roll of ribbon went where. That was also just a one person job. I found this job so eerie in the sense that at first there were no customers, just lost, stressed and confused new employees with one hand holding this tiny dot map and the facial expression of a exasperated squirrel and the roll of ribbon or single button on a piece of paper in the other. Just. Trying. To. Locate. Where. It. Goes.
They had these little handheld computer things that became very helpful in some applications, but at times there were programming issues and no one knew what went where. Pallets upon pallets fresh from the semi-trucks filled the back room to the ceiling with crap for crafters! Straight from China! Near the back room was the acrylic paints and canvas section, which was empty up until the last minute. I remember looking at the chart for that section and seeing that big blank space where eventually they set up an easel on display, and wondering what it would be... the paints aisle with nothing... perhaps a painting.
Well I spent most of my time organizing fabric by bat along the walls that lined the sides of the windowless warehouse by hue or shade or color, which was less straightforward the more complex a pattern became. In this practice, of rainbow-ing everything which is a little misleading, (their rainbow started with hot pink and ended with mauve) there were a few of us ladies who were the color coding team. This work consisted of conforming the transitions of displayed fabrics to the demands of a small piece of paper with vague instructions-- double checking eachother's opinions of how well we excecuted the transition given the pallets we had access to at the time, and endlessly redoing eachother's work because someone found a whole other pallet somewhere in the store that needed to be put away.
Not to neglect the baking section, which by this time had grown immensely distorted to me... at least the mythos around baking had become by this time exponentially delineated to different guidelines than I had been aware existed prior to my experience with the two baking positions I had held. The baking position at the coffeeshop ended unexpectedly when under a firestorm of hell for the infraction of my whoopie pies weren't shaped perfectly round before placing them in the oven to bake ( which a detailed knowledge of chemistry could have eliminated, by virtue of the leavening properties of the baking soda were bound to cause the whoopie pies to rise ever so slightly and thus generating an expansion and causing a roundness to occur as a result of the baking process, but she was unable to accept this as a possible outcome), and my utter failing in my attempts to dissuade her beliefs that my whoopie pies were irredeemable led me to a point of frustration which I was unable to contain and I ended the working relationship abruptly.
When I took my paycheck for $2,102.00 to the bank it bounced like a rubber ball, **cking my credit forever and ripping me off for the summer of rainbow I left to bring some solidarity to the working class. Long ass days worked with nothing to show for it. That was the impression I had of the life a baker leads.
So, perhaps that informs my impression of the baker's corner section of the Joann's Superstore.
I was a lover of flour stained aprons and coffee stained recipes... so working at a place which claimed to be the bakers corner in the pasty white fluorescence on aisle 5 complete with the plastic and multicolored baking utensils two sheets to the wind about a bowl and a wooden spoon... I digress...it was a perspective-changer. I helped build the baking section of the store as I did with probably near to all the sections of the store, little by little, hole by hole, fixture by fixture.
I was working organizing different sized cookie sheets in the baker's corner section and it was a mixed feeling of regret and disillusionment about the lifestyle of actual hands on work I had left behind. For people reading Martha Stewart Living, these silicone cupcake tins shaped like a toaster oven comes in purple!! But the attainability of a life where I could utilize these utterly useless kitchen supplies was bereft of my reach, and would I ever reach it, inevitably I wouldn't appreciate them because of the life of affluence which would have to premeditate the ownership of such purple toaster oven shaped cupcake silicone molds. A catch-22 in the most unlikely of places. I tried to ignore the immensity of the barf bubble that loomed overhead for any and all inheritors of the baking tradition, but I was too busy trying to make ends meat by cutting fabric at the cutting counter, or returning lost items to their hook-fixtures. The life of a wall flower. Or, to quote the baddest bitch, "broke hoes don't talk".
While I was ignoring the barf-bubble that was swallowing authentic inherited cultural traditions, sometimes when I would work they would have me stock the candy in the shelves that surrounded the aisle where people were supposed to wait in line to cash out. This task was only mentionable for two reasons, the smell of candy when there is no food in your stomach is very appealing. The second reason is nostalgic-- I found it noteworthy that their collection of candy was extensive and had such classics as sugar daddies, sour patch kids, pop rocks, and bubble tape! Lame, but it smelled SO good. Just btw.
Once the store was all set up, it was only a matter of time before I was laid off. These out of town ladies from "headquarters" blew into town to rub the store manager's nose in the dirt and generate an atmosphere of pure oblivion and saccrine "sincere" sanctity, which they did without batting a fake eyelash on that full face of makeup walking in 10 minutes late for the floor meeting at 8 in the morning. I was one of the unlucky ones who never fit the mold and by St. Patrick's Day the leprechauns were going up and I was going out.
That was the time that ziggy gave birth, though-- when I still worked at Joann's. I still have pictures of her litter, 5 baby Ziggys, and Ziggy was still very young herself! The girl, Sara, and her brothers, Horace, Bernie, Harry, and Leroi. The most beautiful puppies you've ever seen running around the bathroom floor at the blue house.
If I thought that b**ch who ripped me off for $2,100 taught me how to bake I had no clue what kind of lesson was in store for me when I would come to be a baker for a Bagel and Costa Rican Cuisine Restaurant.
The owners were the nicest people you could come to find in a town like this, they opened a sandwich shop on the main street and hired me on the spot. He liked that I had brought my own pen to the application and she had won several competitions for baking --just to give you a portrait of the kind of motivated individuals they are.
The two first met each-other at a comic convention in the 1970's. He still has the portrait he asked to take of her outside the entrance in his wallet. She was dressed elaborately and with class as a lady of the sea, a mermaid perhaps. He was also a fan of graphic novels with grandiose ambitions in the hypertext, and the two kept in contact, and after some time married and settled in southern california. She used to volunteer to help Sea Lions down the San Diego coast, but she truly baked some specialties for her man at home.
A chemist in her precision and knowledge of all the processes she went to undertake in the kitchen, the woman employer was full of factual insights about the processes the ingredients were experiencing. From the bonding of the gluten in high gluten flour and rye flour, to the structures the egg compounds are shaped as they become fully scrambled or whisked from their freshly cracked state to an infinitude of wealth of knowledge on the subject of chocolate cakes, pies, kugel -- any question one might have pertaining to baking she would have an answer, a reference, a tip of the trade, and even (if one was lucky) an anecdote.
She trained me in how to prepare the key lime pie - real lime juice, sweetened condensed eagle brand milk, graham cracker crust, heavy whip cream cheese topping.
Then I got to learn all the cream pies - vanilla and chocolate cream pies, epic chocolate cake with chocolate chips, orange cake with icing orange zested, banana cake iced with heavy whip topping.
Bagels and Sandwiches were their lunchtime fare, and gourmet Costa Rican cuisine was on the menu for dinner.
A chef showed me the technique for rolling out the bagels - like a hand, using a pastry cutter i etched 5 fingers and rolled each finger out like a snake until it wrapped around my hand and then with the quickness, I used a back and fourth pivot of my weight distributed to the hand rolling the bagel dough to unify the two ends of the dough in one fell swoop to leave the roundest imperceptibly rolled bagel for the next stage of preparation:
boiling. After rolling 2 dozen bagels, I would boil them 8 at a time for as long as it took to sing
camp town races doo dah day doo dah
camp town races doo dah day
all the doo dah day
and then using a slotted spoon I would flip them over, singing once more,
camp town races for approximately 30 seconds-- and then into a preheated oven at 375 or 425 degrees for 10 - 20 minutes, and that there was my first batch of bagels! It was a few more times before they didn't look so stretched, or not round as much as almost cube-like in the manipulations shaped from hands-trying-to-keep-dough-connecting-to-itself-on-certain-parts-more-emphasized-where-the-dough-itself-was-broken. Alternately, if they had risen too much they could resemble wrinkly boobies with no hole in the middle whatsoever, but a concave wrinkly non-nipple.
The most common problem I faced with my bagels was the too long and skinny and rolled too widely - so the hole became too great and so it was more pretzely than bread bagel consistency one.
The chef was a very great teacher but there were dynamics I failed to anticipate with grace and I probably presented myself as foolish and eager, dumb and gullible as I could have done. I was working as both front of the house and baker, two different positions.
I suppose the common conception of waitresses is image conscious, self obsessed, ego maniacal model/actress/too good for stripping but still placates the patriarchy for her own materialistic desires underdogs of the service economy; while bakers are conceived on a lower level of regard by the masses, despite the even more overworked and under-appriciated position they assume at insane hours in the pre-sunrise blackness to slave for pennies on the dollar around hot ovens all day for no tips. Well things were very comfortable at that place, no pre-sunrise hours. But still, it had rough spots, like any ball of dough.
I was still smoking and would go sit out on the bench in the morning after sunrise and saying goodbye to Ziggy's puppies, often stepping over several sleeping bodies sprawled across the living room floor after a long night of gaming on the 360, or the pS4 and down the rapunzel staircase, downtown to let myself into the store with my own key, and making the bagels and getting them in the oven.
Organic American Spirits and Cafe Bustelo Coffee and the lingering sweetness of coconut cream pie were the constellations in my tastebuds.
Soups were also a thing of great interest to the couple who owned the Sandwich shop, the owner woman made an INTENSELY good Matzoh Ball Soup. It was the stock method she employed, that was amazing. I also remember the Green Lime Curry Soup, The Borscht aka sweet and sour cabbage soup, and others. None stood out to me as so life affirming and ultimately perplexing than the Matzoh Ball Soup, however, when faced with a choice between it and another item I loved that they made there: philly cheese steak.