Low Income Life, Part 5: Life Happens
When I got fired from the Krispy Kreme at 1806 N. Kings Hwy in Myrtle Beach the summer of 2006 (after asking for a raise), I’d already moved from the Aquarius Motel at 204 Mr. Joe White Avenue in Myrtle Beach. I was living at OceanSide Villas on 4th Avenue North & Flagg Street in Myrtle Beach in a studio apartment at the time, not far from another gas station on the south end. They were in need of graveyard shift cashiers, so since it was within walking distance I took the overnight gig (I think they paid me like $7.50 an hour).
The hiring manager was a fat, sloppy looking white chick with a five o’clock shadow (it was so weird to me how she seemed to just ignore the fact that her beard was growing more day by day). This is who made out the weekly employee work schedule, even though the store manager (the person who in my experience usually does it) worked there on a separate shift.
The bearded chick worked the morning shift, so she paired me up with this real, real pretty Bulgarian girl who’d been there all summer and would be training me on the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift since she was about to leave the job to go back home overseas.
Myrtle Beach gets visited by a lot of foreign students every year who work all summer, then leave. This Bulgarian girl was one of them. She was really easy on the eyes, curvy in all the right places, but I didn’t make any advances towards her. I just wanted to do my job. She trained me, and that was it. But she was hot, man, sooo fine…smoking hot!!!
Okay, where was I…oh, alright.
So, the following week the fat supervisor with the beard decided she wanted to work with me at night to see how I was doing, and my eye candy had officially gone sour.
There was a sitting stool at the register, slightly outside of the camera’s view, where she sat two or three feet to the right of me examining every register button I pushed, and every move I made. I felt like she was like right there breathing down my neck, ya know, like two feet away from me the whole shift. I’d worked the same types of registers for years, but even after another week she still felt the need to ‘monitor’ my performance.
One customer came up and tried to walk around the side of the counter. He wasn’t trying to steal anything, but, even though he could reach the item himself, I was supposed to be the one to retrieve items off the rack with the cigars, condoms, etc. and hand them to customers (I guess folks stole those items a lot).
Anyway, when I remembered to politely stop him from grabbing them and got them for him myself, my bearded, overweight female boss said ‘Good job’ and grabbed my ass like she wanted to fuck me, and gave me that look.
Dog, I was totally grossed out to say the least. When the store manager came in the next morning around 7:00 am I stepped outside on a smoke break with him. I told him that I wasn’t trying to make anyone lose their job or anything, but that and I didn’t like that shit. I told him that I couldn’t prove it because the stool was right out of the camera’s view, but that it had happened.
He laughed (which to me was rude, because if it was a female reporting something like that about a man, it more than likely would’ve been dealt with differently), and asked me if I was serious. I said yes, and I told him that if he wanted to see me work the register that he could watch, but I felt that I was ready to work by myself on the late shift, and had been ready days and days ago.
I didn’t want her thinking that she could just do that, and if I didn’t say anything she might think that I liked her doing it. What happens when my girlfriend comes to the job? What if the beard lady gets jealous that I have a girlfriend, and cuts my hours or something?
I asked him if possible could he just keep us on opposite shifts, and he agreed. I guess he told her what I said, and each week for the next few weeks she scheduled me a day less and less until I was down to just a day or two.
It may have been because it was now the dead season (approaching September 2006) and the hours were always cut like that in the fall. Or, it was because he’d told her what I told him, I don’t know. Either way, my unemployment insurance that I’d be collecting from the Krispy Kreme in a little while would bring me in more money than the minimal weekly shifts she was now scheduling me anyway, so I began looking for another job once I saw that I was the only worker there that was having my hours cut like that.
I couldn’t find another gig and ended up losing my apartment at Oceanside Villas. I called my sister, who’d moved back to Kingstree to Lanue Floyd, the same housing projects (but different apartment) that my mother lived in. My sister had an extra room with a single bed in the neighborhood. That was fine with me…I would’ve slept on the couch.
I almost moved back in with my mom (which would have been a huge mistake), telling her that it would be about 6–8 weeks until my unemployment kicked in, which was true. I would be getting about $180 a week, way more than I needed to live in Kingstree, SC until tax time. But she was still as money hungry as ever.
After trying to stay there one night, we got into an argument and I moved across the housing projects to my sisters’ spot.
I showed my sister the same unemployment insurance paperwork from Krispy Kreme, and promised that I would pay her with interest as soon as my checks started coming in the mail. She knew I needed her help, and she agreed.
I thanked her and just told myself that I needed to take this time away from work to get my life together. I’d never been fired for no reason before like at the Krispy Kreme, and I needed to start going back to school so that I wouldn’t have to deal with those types of jobs forever.
Again, this was the fall of 2006.
(Click here to read Part 6 of the story…)
