Nice Recovery

by Susan Juby

  The managers at Delectable Desserts soon realized that table service was not my forte, so they taught me to make drinks: cappuccinos, lattes, and so on. It turned out that my churning nervous system, which went on high alert due to sleep deprivation at around ten, made me a highly effective barista. I could turn out perfect drinks faster than anyone they’d ever seen. This was because I was in a state of near panic for most of my shift. Christ! I’d scream internally as the orders piled up. I can’t keep up! I’m going down!

  I’ve always had a flair for learning certain rote tasks and that’s what coffee making is. And I’ve always been a harsh worrier. Unless I’m well ahead, I feel behind.

  Double D used to get busy at around eleven o’clock, and it stayed busy until three or four in the morning. That whole time I frantically poured espressos and steamed foam as though the penalty for wasted motion was death. When the doors finally closed in the early morning hours, I’d be on the verge of collapse. My feet hurt, my head ached, and I reeked of coffee. The espresso beans I munched like popcorn throughout my shift didn’t help.

  But on the plus side, I didn’t think about myself or drinking even once during my time at Desserts. I was pure worry in action.

  I’d walk the eight blocks home with streaks of dawn light cracking through the smog, go to bed, and wake up at 8 a.m., put on my all-black outfit, and head to the yarn store. Before long, I was a mess. Almost as bad as I’d been when I was drinking. I felt hung over all the time as well as irritable. I wasn’t eating properly. But I was also deeply invested in the idea that the people I met in recovery who didn’t work were morally suspect. My ability to hold down two full-time jobs at once meant that I was different and probably quite a bit less screwed up than they were. Plus, there was the money. I was making myself secure! Work was something I could control, and I controlled it with a vengeance.

  I came by my approach honestly. As noted, my brothers and I had been indoctrinated in the importance of work practically since infancy. I knew a lot of people for whom work was the only thing standing between them and oblivion.

  The ten commandments of work, at least according to my mother:

  1 You must have at least one job and preferably more by the time you are seventeen.

  2 You must take pretty much any job you are offered, so long as it’s not seriously against the law.

  3 You must not ask how much you will be paid. To do so is rude. You’ll find out when you get your first cheque.

  4 It doesn’t matter how much you are paid. What matters is that you work. At least two jobs.

  5 It doesn’t matter whether you are qualified for your work. You’ll learn. Because work is the most important thing in the world.

  6 Even if you are in danger of dying of a hangover, you should still go to work. Throwing up during your shift is what the employee bathrooms are for. (Naturally, we weren’t breeding surgeons in our family. Also, I may have made this rule up.)

  7 People who don’t work are bad. They are unlikely to get into heaven.

  8 Heaven is a place where everyone has good jobs. Lots of them.

  9 Job satisfaction is not the key. Neither is job performance. The essential thing is having a job and going to it.

  10 Retirement is a myth. When you finally quit your main job, then you are free to get all different kinds of jobs that are suitable for older people.

  I was clear on all these rules, but more and more people at meetings were dropping hints about how I might be using work to avoid my feelings. I rejected that theory outright. The people who refused to get jobs so they could focus on their recoveries were the avoiders. I was the facer!

  When people in meetings said that recovery had to come first, that anything I put in front of it would be taken away, I ignored them. At least until I couldn’t any more.

  I lasted about a month with the new schedule and then it all went to hell. First, perhaps due to my increasing spaciness and holloweyed, brain-numbed presence, the owner of the yarn store became convinced I was stealing from her. I wasn’t, but there is no real way to prove you’re not a thief once someone is convinced you are. Once accused, you will forever be the girl just waiting for her chance to steal from the till. Perhaps Calvin told her I was trying to stop drinking. It’s possible that in her mind, which often seemed almost as fuzzy as the yarns she preferred, that meant I was an embezzler.

  All I know is that it all came to a head one afternoon right before I was due to leave for the day.

  My boss was flipping through the bills in the open cash register.

  “There was a ten-dollar bill in here,” she said.

  I paid no attention. I was trying to decide how I was going to get home without passing out from exhaustion and heat stroke.

  “Did someone take it?” she insisted.

  Calvin said he hadn’t seen it, and something in her voice finally got my attention.

  I said I hadn’t seen it either.

  “Susan, are you sure you didn’t see it? Because it was right there a few minutes ago.”

  I felt my face flush. I still had the habit of feeling guilty, no matter what I’d done.

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “Well, then I don’t know where it went,” she said, accusingly. Calvin’s eyes widened as he looked from me to the boss.

  “All I know is that there was ten dollars there a few minutes ago and now it’s gone.”

  I opened my purse and pulled out my wallet. “Look,” I said, nearly yelling now. “There’s nothing in here! I don’t have it. I didn’t take your stupid money.”

  She said nothing and I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  I patted myself down. I was wearing tights and a black T-shirt and slippers. No pockets.

  “I don’t have it!” I protested again. “Hmmm,” she replied.

  Calvin gave me a sympathetic look, and I understood that my time at Yarn Inc. was over. I was falsely accused. I was shattered. But I was also fairly relieved. My career as a knitting impersonator ended.

  When I’d been sober for ninety days, Calvin came to watch me take a chip at the meeting near my house. He clapped twice as long and as hard as everyone else and I was grateful for every minute I’d spent at that store.

  A few weeks after that, I quit Delectable Desserts too. I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t cut out for that much coffee consumption. Also I was worried that I might have a stroke if we had another very busy Friday night.

  Still, I wasn’t quite ready to give up compulsive work. After all, I prided myself on my ferocious new Calvinist work ethic. I immediately got a job managing a record store. Never mind that I’d never worked in a record store before. The guy doing the hiring clearly hated the corporation for which he worked (a chain with head offices in Montreal) and liked my new, thigh-high boots in equal measure. During my time at Yarn Inc. I’d turned myself into a mod and the look was exactly right for my new gig.

  I loved being the manager of a record store. This, I would think with great satisfaction when I arrived extra early each morning, is why I stopped drinking! I wanted to lead a fulfilling life. I wanted to be cultural. It was hard to be cultural when you had a habit of falling down in the street and being unable to get up. Rule number one of being cultural: Be ambulatory!

  The other best part about working for Frugal Records was telling people what I did.

  “Me? Oh, I’m the manager of a record store.”

  I’d always aspired to be a music snob, but thanks to the brain damage I inflicted on myself with my drinking, I didn’t have the memory for it. But my manager title made people assume I knew what I was talking about. I was less keen to tell people what music store I worked for. It would have been better to be employed by an independent, but one of them might have wanted me to be qualified.

  Frugal Records was located on Bloor Street in the Annex. The neighbourhood was populated by students, academics, professionals, restaurant and bar staff, the homeless, and everyone in between. In other words, it wa
s a downtown Toronto neighbourhood. A group of street kids liked to panhandle near the store. These latter-day punks were more punk than the seventies originals, if you judged by number of piercings, height of Mohawks, and numbers of rips per garment. This, I thought, is what it’s all about. Authenticity! Real life! And I’m finally sober enough to appreciate it!

  Some of them may have been representative of the hard-knocks life, but I’m also fairly sure some of them were suburban kids slumming it. They were objects of great wonder to me.

  Frugal Records’ head office used to fax us a play list every Monday. This was a list of records we were supposed to play. Quality was not factored into the decision. The first month I worked at Frugal Records we had to play Milli Vanilli, Cher, and a Doobie Brothers greatest hits album. Not exactly the hot list of an aspiring music snob. Our store was equipped with speakers that piped music out onto Bloor Street, which served to amplify the noise and my embarrassment considerably. The bands on the list didn’t really go with my boots or with my new sober but cutting-edge and alternative lifestyle.

  When the punks started to congregate outside the store, I tried to play music I thought they’d appreciate. The punks scared off paying customers, but I didn’t want us to have the kind of customers who’d be scared of genuine street youth. I played The Replacements, which I had to buy somewhere else, Hüsker Dü, Jane’s Addiction, and the Pixies. Whenever the punks said “Hi” to me, I was thrilled.

  They started coming in asking me to play their tapes, which we definitely didn’t carry. I blasted Dayglo Abortions and Dead Kennedys and that further served to keep the customers out in droves.

  In fact, the only customers who weren’t scared off were the ones who stole things. Interestingly, it wasn’t the street kids who had the light fingers. It was older people, men and women in their thirties and forties. They came in with large canvas bags and would spend hours poring over the shelves. They never bought anything and it took me a long time to figure out they were ripping us off. News of the incompetent new manager at the Frugal Records on Bloor Street spread through the professional shoplifting community and soon I had lineups of shoplifters out the door.

  As I cottoned on to the level of what my regional manager referred to as “shrinkage” in the store, I tried to stem the tide of CDs and cassettes going through the door but couldn’t. I followed the thieves around, but they didn’t care. As soon as I went to the counter or the bathroom, they’d shove things into their bags and leave. I didn’t think I was allowed to ban them based solely on my suspicions. Didn’t I have to catch them in the act? And even if I did catch one, what was I going to do about it? Tackle them? Confront them? I was not one for confrontation. At least not while I was sober.

  My sober dream job was becoming increasingly stressful. It wasn’t just problems with punks and thieves, I also had no idea how to manage my staff. I had two, who, like me, had also been hired by the previous management team. There was Helene, a French-Canadian girl who dressed like Pocahontas and had enormous breasts, unfettered by a bra, that she liked to rub against people. Then there was Nelson, a nineteen-year-old Ian Astbury look-alike who, I’d been told, was a good worker. He got over that as soon as I became the manager. My tall boots and severe bobbed haircut (so long, spiral perm!) were not enough to command my staff’s respect. Like the shoplifters and the street kids, Nelson and Helene seemed to sense that I wasn’t entirely confident in my managerial abilities and they took advantage. They would leave the store a mess, forget to deposit the money, and defy every request I made.

  As a person who was newly sober and just learning to trust myself to meet even basic responsibilities, this was daunting and frustrating. How could I make people respect me? Why wouldn’t anyone do my will? Didn’t they know my fragile self-esteem was hanging on this job?

  I decided to add another element to my repertoire of compulsive behaviour. I stopped eating. Not completely, but enough so that I dropped fifteen pounds in about three weeks, leaving me emaciated and pale. Food I could control, even if I couldn’t keep my staff in line. The flirtation with anorexia was blown to hell when my student teacher friend came home from a trip to Europe.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded. “You look like shit!”

  I thought I looked quite svelte.

  “Your eyes are all black underneath and your skin is the pits. Are you eating?”

  I shrugged. And started eating again. I was lucky that she was so direct and that it was not an ingrained behaviour with me because eating too much or too little food is a substitute addiction/ obsession that bedevils huge numbers of newly sober addicts and alcoholics.

  As time went on, the cash never balanced at the end of the day if either of my staff had touched it. Finally, I received a personal visit from the regional manager.

  “Susan,” she told me that afternoon. “I like you.”

  The regional manager was a blond woman with feathered hair and she wore a hip-length blue leather jacket.

  “Good,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “But they’re starting to ask questions down at head office,” she said. “The financials are a problem.” She looked out the front window of the store where a group of seven or eight punks had set up camp with their dogs and “Help Me, I’m Homeless” signs.

  “I’m not sure the store’s going in the right direction,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve tried … I mean, I asked Nelson and Helene to be more careful when they cash out. I try to be here, but I’m already working twelve hours a day.” She nodded as I spoke.

  “I know,” she said. “Staff. It’s never easy.”

  “And there’s this one night. I have to, well, I have to go to a meeting. It’s important.” I decided that the situation called for radical honesty. That’s what the recovery people were always talking about. Maybe it would work. Honesty would be a new approach for me.

  “I’m in recovery. I have to go to my home group.”

  She leaned in and shook her head, saying, “That’s great. Good for you. So young and you’ve already figured out you couldn’t do it on your own. That’s amazing. Just amazing.”

  My confession was not only warmly received. It inspired her to make her own confessions. Right there in the store, which at the time was only thinly populated with shoplifters.

  She told me she’d been raped when she was a teenager. That she never got over it. She told me the “honchos” at head office were pushing her too hard. She was on the edge. She told me that we, as women, needed to stick together, to support each other. She told me not to worry that our cash was out every time I let Nelson or Helene close. She told me not to worry about the punks in the doorway or about the play list. She’d smooth things out with head office.

  We exchanged a hug before she left and I felt renewed. The emotionally open, sober (but culturally alternative) life was the one for me. I was on the right track and making progress, even though being the manager of a chain record store wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.

  The following week I came in to find the safe empty and Nelson and Helene both wearing new cowboy boots.

  I checked the accounts book. No money had been deposited the night before. I ran to the front to confront my lying, stealing asshole staff.

  “The money!” I yelled. “Did one of you deposit it?”

  They shook their heads. Helene also shook her giant chest under her suede vest with the fringes.

  “So where is it? Who’s been in the safe?”

  “Don’t know,” said Nelson, his long sheet of dyed black hair falling into his face until he brushed it off with a finger adorned with at least three silver rings.

  Helene stared at me open-mouthed, her Indian princess braids accentuating the vacuous expression.

  “I’m not kidding, you guys,” I said, starting to come apart. “That’s two days’ receipts missing because you two forgot to make the deposit the night before, too.”

  Now both Nelson and Helene stared at me. I realized that t
hey hated me and they didn’t give a shit what I said.

  I was so screwed.

  Summoning all my courage, I called head office. In an effort to sound like a team player and successful branch manager, I played Doobie Brothers, who were on the approved playlist, loud enough for the person on the other end to hear.

  “This is Susan, in Store 14. I need to speak with Denise. We have an issue here.”

  I was told that the regional manager would be with me that afternoon.

  I tried to reassure myself that after Denise and I had had such an honest heart-to-heart about very private matters, she’d be on my side. She’d help me fire my mutinous staff and give me some tips on hiring better, more obedient people. But it wasn’t Denise who walked through the door. It was a man in his forties. He had male pattern baldness and a team jacket advertising an NHL team.

  “I’m Rick. The new regional manager,” he told me. “Where’s Denise?”

  “She had a total fucking crack-up last week. Right after she came back from her visit here. I don’t know where she is. Not in her job any more, I can tell you that.”

  “Oh.”

  And soon Rick was interviewing me, then Nelson, and then Helene in the back room. When it was over, Nelson and Helene had both pointed the finger at me and Rick believed them.