GRABBINGSAND

The news was still unconfirmed when I got in the car last night. The LA Times said sadly yes, but CNN was waiting. NPR had moved on to Fresh Air, so I switched to Magic 107.5 FM. And just as I did, I heard the low rumble of an anxious crowd, then a drum roll. Some horns. Then a voice asking, “Can you feel it?” Again, “Can you feel it?!” Thunder. Then there it was. That bass-line, those keys, more horns.

1981LA Triumph Tour -Jacksons Can you feel it

Randy Jackson sings first, one of his few turns out front, but everybody is waiting for that moment. His part. And when it comes, the crowd soars.

Never owned a sparkly glove, though I knew more than a couple of kids who did.

I had a Michael Jackson jacket.  There were two kinds available, but mine was the relatively less expensive one.  The “real” jacket had actual metal mesh on the shoulders, but this one just had plastic imprinted to look vaguely metallic.  It still had all the zippers, though.  And it was black, not red.

For some reason, my Mom acquiesced to my asking and paid far too much at the Merry Go Round in Eastgate Mall.  It wasn’t an easy fashion statement to make in my hometown, certainly.  So I wore it for maybe a month, maybe less. After I retired the jacket to my closet, I never saw it again.  Maybe it ended up in a church yard sale.  But it was mine for awhile.

I’ve said so often that the 80s were hard on adults, but they were brilliant for little kids.  And as I posted a little over a year ago, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was an integral part of that brilliance, at least for me.  I was ten when the album came out, though I might’ve been eleven by the time I had my very own album.  Vinyl, of course.  (I wouldn’t have a cassette deck of any kind until 1983.)  I’d play it on this white plastic turntable from Sears.  It had two detachable black speakers, but to call it stereophonic is probably a stretch.

My parents were so patient with their strange little boy.  While I had other kiddie albums, Thriller was the first “real” record I owned.  And I played it all the time.  Over and over. 

I have so much love and appreciation for just about every note and beat and line from Thriller and Off The Wall … and even the Triumph album he did with his brothers in 1981, just before his career and life went supernova.  Everything since just hasn’t affected me in the same way, BAD included, though I do have a certain fondness for 1992’s “Remember The Time.”  No, the irony of this is not lost on me.

The simple fact is that I’ve missed Michael Jackson for a very long time. 

What makes today different is I’ve a greater hope that perhaps his music can be relieved of the burden of so many tabloid moments, too many scandals, manufactured and actual.  A celebrity’s death always pulls admirers out of the woodwork, people to say they’ve always been a fan, never-say-die.  So I take these many outpourings of grief with several grains of salt.  But this is one time where the art of an artist deserves consideration apart from the artist himself.  Just as Rich from FourFour says about the “Scotchguarded perfection” of Jackson’s hits, so I believe about each of his incarnations. He chose to reinvent himself, either to satisfy his fans or to fill a personal void. And he did so more and more drastically each time.

I’ve never understood the latter day Jackson, mask-faced, gaunt and sometimes veiled, but I’ll always be a fan of that smiling young man in a tux on the Off The Wall cover.

That’s the Michael Jackson I choose to remember.

(Cross-posted as a comment in this MeFi thread.)

I worked for Waldenbooks when I was in college. My store was one of two such franchises in Hamilton Place Mall, the first two-story mall built in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The upstairs store was closer to the food court, which might’ve been why we experienced more teenager traffic than the downstairs store. More teenagers means regular patrolling the Erotica section, disheartening requests for Cliff Notes from late-coming summer readers, and — best of all — very special Special Orders. These very special Special Orders were always for one of three books. None of these books were regularly stocked, though only one of the three defied categorization entirely. These books were, in increasing order of awesome: The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey, The Anarchist’s Cookbook and … The Necronomicon.

The placing of the Special Order always went the same way. A Creepy Kid would step into the store with a determined look, avoiding the eyes of anyone working behind the counter. He’d go through the store from section to section. Science Fiction? Gaming? Religion? Occult? New Age? But what he wanted was not to be found, not without speaking to somebody with a Waldenbooks badge. And so, Creepy Kid would wait until there were no paying customers near the counter, then he’d make his approach.

“Hey.”

“Yes. Help you find something?”

“Yeah. Um …”

“Looking for some Cliff Notes?”

“What? No. No. Do you … You guys carry …”

At this point, I’d lean a bit over the counter, knowing what I was about to hear.

“… The Necronomicon?” Said at a whisper, like the password to a speakeasy.

“You sure? Well, alright then. If you’re sure. I’ll have to … Special Order it.”

Normally, these special orders would never be completed. I’d get to the part where I needed a phone number, and that would be that. As this was the early 90s, teenagers just didn’t have cellular phones. And even a phone of your own at home was rare. So I wouldn’t get a phone number, and they’d walk away disappointed. But sometimes, a Creepy Kid would be brave enough to hand over the digits. Special orders didn’t require any pre-payment, so with all the information we needed to submit the order, the request would be sent to Ingram. Five to seven days later, the Necronomicon … or The Satanic Bible … would arrive in our store. And as we would for any other special order, we called the customer to let them know.

“Hello?”

The voice on the line was hardly ever the Creepy Kid, but usually their mom.

“Yes, hello. This is Thomas with Waldenbooks … yes, the one in the Mall. Right.”

“Oh, okay. How do you do?”

“I’m great. And I’m calling to let … um … Billy? Yes, Billy. If you could let Billy know that his special order of copy of The Satanic Bible has arrived.”

A pause.

“The Satanic what?!?”

“The Satanic Bible. By Anton Lavey. Oh, and we have his Necronomicon as well. A book that collects the …”

“I’m sorry. I have to go and … speak … to Billy. Thank you … very much.”

“Okay. Have a good day!”

While I was there, not a single Special Order’d Necronomicon or Satanic Bible was picked up by any Creepy Kid.

I was never cut out to be a good waiter. So while I’ve had a number of different jobs, only one of them involved taking orders by hand and picking up tips.

Like I said before, I followed a decent manager from a fast food job to a somewhat slower food job. The Pizza Hut was about a half a mile from the Burger King, situated right on the busy intersection of Highway 27 and Battlefield Parkway. (Practically every street in my hometown refers to the nearby Chickamauga National Battlefield, the Parkway being only the most obvious.) Next door to the Pizza Hut was a Wendy’s. It’s still there. The building that housed the Pizza Hut remains as well, but it is now a Mexican restaurant.

Waiting at the Hut was better than working for the King for a number of reasons. For one, the pizza business involves a lot less grease. For another, there were far fewer dreaded tasks at closing. Give me a half-hour of vacuuming the floor or stretching cling film over the salad bar leftovers any day. Better that than scraping thawed-then-refrozen meat bits from the bottom of a burger cooler.

On afternoons when the Hut wasn’t so busy, we of the wait staff had only to keep the wait station relatively clean, make sure there were always bread sticks in the warmer and marinara in the heated dispenser. We were allowed the luxury of munching on the occasional chunk o’ bread stick when the convenient opportunity presented. And when lunch time rolled around, a waiter was entitled to a free Personal Pan Pizza of their own making. This meant that you could walk your own unbaked crust down the prep line in the kitchen, pile on whatever ingredients worked and place said crust onto the oven conveyor thing.

Oh, yes. My second job had that in common with the first. Food cooked while journeying through a gigantic, stainless steel box. Only the Pizza Hut oven was about three times the size of the BK broiler.

An interesting bit of trivia. Do you remember the Pizza Hut Priazzo? That was the big, new dish when I worked there. It was a pizza pie, literally. Crust like a pie shell, filled with ingredients and cheese, then another sheet of dough blanketed over that. And to solve the problem of how to ensure that all of those inner bits were cooked, the cooks would take this thing that looked like a spiraling cast iron comb and stick the teeth into the top layer of dough. This would conduct the heat into the Priazzo and give it this signature pattern when removed at the end. Neat, eh?

The only problem with the free Personal Pan Lunch was that I was a soft drink snob. Actually, I still am. Pizza Hut was a Pepsico property and as such they served only Pepsi products. So I would bake my Personal Pan, then walk next door to Wendy’s, where I would order a large Coca-Cola to wash it down. To split the difference, I would sit on the parking lot curb between the two to have my meal.

I made decent enough tips for kid in high school. Then as now, you had to enter your tips into the computer at the end of your shift. In theory, the sum of our rather paltry hourly pay ($2.10, I think) plus the hourly average of our tips would pass minimum wage muster. And as reported, it did. Barely. As actual, I don’t think anyone ever reported all of their tip take.

The tables you wanted to take for tips were the worst to clean up. Softball and baseball teams. Coaches would pay, which would be an accounting nightmare. But as everyone gathered up to leave, the adults would never confer to determine just who would leave a cash tip. Often, you’d end up with duplicate tips from any coach or assistant coach who felt the least bit obligated.

Some tips were just odd. An aspiring gospel singer came in for lunch with her grandmother. A teenager most likely in junior high, she left me her demo tape. Can’t remember if I listened to it or not. Her name? Britney Spears.

(No.)

Here’s the weirdest story. One night late in the summer, I served a couple at a table. Dark-haired, both of them, I would guess they were Cuban by way of Florida. Actually, I’ll just come out and say what I thought at the time. The guy looked like Tony Montana. And he called his knife and fork his “little friends.”

(No. He didn’t.)

But what he did say was more interesting. He and his date finished their meal, got up to leave and left an okay tip. But on the way out, he got my attention. I walked over and he asked me, quite vaguely, if I would do him a favor. Through my over-sized glasses — thank you, late ’80s — I’m sure I blinked and gathered enough of my young Methodist courtesy to say, “Excuse me?” He repeated himself. He asked if I had a car and wondered if I could do him a favor, presumably involving said car. I remained polite in my state of subtle Stranger Danger and said something like, “Oh, yeah, well … I’m closing today, sir, so I’m going to be here until at least midnight or so, so you know …” He took this new bit of information in stride, said that he would’ve paid me for my trouble, then just nodded and stepped out the door to his waiting companion.

Anyone care to guess what happen’d around midnight? Just before we closed, Not Tony Montana returned, dateless. This time, he was more insistent, telling me that he really needed to borrow my car. Why? Because he had to go downtown (Chattanooga) to get some things, to (and I quote) “pick up some tools.” If I’d just let him borrow my car, my not-so-prized 1976 Ford Grenada, he would give me $100. If I wanted, he said, I could even come along for the trip.

This time, I managed to channel some of my Dad’s deep well of resolve where bad ideas are concerned. $100 would’ve been a nice bit of change for the 16-year-old me, but there was no way I was going to let anyone drive my car, much less somebody I didn’t know. And I wasn’t about to hop into my own car with someone who just needed to get some “tools.” So eventually, Not Tony Montana left. Disappointed and maybe a little more than pissed off. In his own car.

And yes, I still wonder why he needed my car. Tools? TOOLS?!?

Pizza Hut was my second and last hometown job in good old Fort Oglethorpe. After that, I left for college in Athens.

Athens, Tennessee.

This post was inspired by Rusty’s meme-establishing “Jobs I’ve Had” series, a trend also followed by Garrett and Sara and Nikki!