simplerich

bird’s egg, a photo by simplerich on Flickr.

Spring is here in Iowa late this year and while the temperatures say spring the summer storms we, and the country are getting say that summer isn’t far behind.

I’m still on my vacation and enjoying it still. I got a kayak and have enjoyed kayaking on local lakes, creeks, and soon, rivers. (Not super soon, rain = flooding & rivers are deeper than creeks. I’m enjoying myself but I’m not foolhardy!)

But, my vacation needs to wind up soon. I’d told myself I’d take a week of camping before I ended the vacation but the weather hasn’t cooperated in giving me a week of warm without days and days of rain. Last week was warmish but this week is raining, storming. Soon, though I need to get back to the working world. I haven’t missed it yet. I’d wondered if I’d be bored after almost a quarter of vacation. I haven’t been bored. I’ve travelled. I’ve read. I’ve written. I’ve taken up a new hobby and quit a bad habit (smoking, as of right now it’s been over 15 days since I shoved a cigarette in my face.) I’ve been hiking, walking, and exercising in an attempt to minimize the weight gain during my quit and while I’ve gained 5lbs I don’t see it getting to be much more than that. I’ve gotten closer to friends I’ve made recently and re-kindled friendships & familial relationships that had fallen to the wayside over the years as work kept me out of town and away from friends & family. What I haven’t done is become bored.

Someone said that boring people are the ones who get bored. My lack of boredom so far seem a good indication that I am, perhaps, not a boring people. That’s encouraging to me. I’ve wondered.

One of the things about taking all this time off is a little bit meta in that I’ve been that guy that works at that store for almost 20 years. Finding how who I am without the job has been fun and honestly, I was a little worried I’d have an identity crisis. Perhaps I did a bit and that’s why I haven’t been blogging as much as I sorted out who I am if I’m not my work. Because the job’s gone and I’m still here.

What’s the future hold? I’m not sure. I am sure that if I took a job tomorrow I’d like it to be one in which I am a cog in a much bigger machine. I want to be a little spinning gear and not one of the driving gears. I did my time as the motive force behind something giant and it was good and I was good at it. I want to go somewhere though where I can start at the bottom, or at least lower down, and work my way up. I’m pretty frugal as exhibited by my being able to afford to take this long off work without stressing over money, so I don’t need a lot of money. I learned a long time ago from something I read that there are two ways to be rich either make a lot more than you spend or spend a lot less than you make. I’ve done both and fortunately I learned how to do the second before I had to. There’s a lot of freedom in that.

So, I’m still here. I’m happy. I’m getting ready to start looking at doors to see which ones I want to step through and I’ll keep you posted. I’ll post more frequently now. I took some time away to be me for a while and now that I’ve settled that, as existential as it sounds, I think I’m ready to be me here too. I was worried if I were coming back here too often I’d relapse into old-me. He was a good guy, but he’s gone now. The new me isn’t necessarily new & improved, just new & different. I’ll let you decide if you think he’s improved or not. For myself? I’m happy with me now and I’m happy with the years I put in at the old job. They were good years and I did a good job at it. I don’t regret it.

I’m doing some research for my next book and was talking to a friend of mine who recently got out of prison for something drug related. I’ve known him since he was ten or so and he was always an angry kid and was in and out of group homes for kids. Kid jails. Homes for wayward boys. I don’t know what they’re called. Here we called it “The boys ranch.” I’ve talked to him about his time at prison and I have a feel for what his prison experience was like.  Today was the first time I ever asked him about his time at the boy’s ranch.

“So, compared to Anamosa, one of Iowa’s two maximum security prisons, which was worse? The boy’s ranch or prison?”
Without hesitation, and emphatically he answered, “The boy’s ranch. It was terrible. The other kids there were animals and the cops (He calls all guards and employees of prisons regardless of the age of their guests cops.) were more abusive and mean at the boy’s ranch.”

He talked about kids torturing & bullying each other behind the cops’ backs and he talked about guards who would slam the kids to the floor or walls saying they were “restraining” them but they’d taunt them before and after with threats of violence against them the next time they need to be “restrained.”

“Some of the kids needed it, but if they were having a bad day you were just as likely to be thrown against the wall because of something someone else did as not. Some of the kids would piss all over themselves so when they got tackled or taken down they would at least get pee on the cops because they couldn’t do anything else. You can’t fight back or it’s worse for you.”

We talked for almost an hour and he was willing to talk about it and didn’t seem to be embellishing  His stories matched what I’d heard from an old employee of the place (Who I plan to interview as well later if he will.) At the end I asked him a question that was important to me now. Remember I knew him then, before he went to that place that sounded, by all accounts, like it should have a lot more cameras and be viewed off site by someone with some authority and no connection to the employees there.

“Thinking back to back then and how angry you were. Is there anything anyone could have done? Anything I could have done or your parents could have done that would have made a difference to you? Were you wanting something you weren’t getting or… what could we as adults have done so you wouldn’t have wound up there? Anything?”

“I was really angry all the time. I lashed out all the time. I honestly don’t know if there was anything that would have helped or stopped me from going there. Maybe if I’d had more friends or something that I could talk to, but I wouldn’t talk to them and I pushed my friends away all the time. I’d get mad at them and we wouldn’t just fight and get back together. I’d go thermonuclear on them and burn the bridges. Then I’d blame them for it.” 

“You’re older now. You’ve gone through some anger management classes and I see sometimes on Facebook you go from being like we are right now, calm and laughing and in a good mood to really pissed at the world and lashing out again. If I see that should I call? Would you call me? What can we do to help? We know the pattern from before that this winds up with you in jail. I’m not saying if you go away it’d be my fault. You’re responsible for how you react to things. I may make you mad, but what you do in reaction to that is on you. But is there anything I could do to help? Or should I just shut up, leave you alone and let you work through it?” 

“I’ve talked to Mom about going to get some more anger management classes. I’m still on her insurance so I should go while I can afford it. But you can’t do anything. I don’t really think calling’s a good idea. I don’t want to do something to mess up our friendship. You’re the only person who has never let me down. You’ve always been there for me and if you can’t do something you say it. You don’t break your promises. That means a lot. I wouldn’t want to mess that up. I mainly just need to get over it. Usually I go to sleep and it’s better the next morning. You’ve done plenty for me. I couldn’t ask for more from anybody.” 

“Well, the last thing and I’ll stop. You’ve been really good at calling me if you’re at a place where you decide you’re in danger of making bad decisions, like that apartment where when I dropped you off I said, ‘This is a pretty druggy neighborhood. You sure you should be here?’ and you called me at 2 in the morning that night asking for a ride. You are never bothering me when you make those calls. Honest. I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. You know that better than me and I’m not your mom. If I think it’s a bad place I’ll say it but I won’t stop you. But I do want you to promise that if you’re in one of those situations you’ll call me. Don’t think you’re bugging me or that you’re imposing. You’re not.”

He said he’d call. He really is a good kid and I wish only the best for him.

When I think of Shakespeare I think of the tenth grade when some of our class took a bus up from Mannheim Germany up to Stratford upon Avon in England and spent part of a week there watching three of Shakespeare’s plays in the town itself. I remember the bus trip up only because of the pictures the teacher took while we were there and on the trip back. It was 1983 or 1984. I have both years written on the backs of the pictures. The cold war was going strong. There were two Germanys. Maggie Thatcher and Reagan were best of friends in a weirdly successful three-way with Germany’s Helmut Kohl.
What I knew about Shakespeare I’d learned reading Romeo & Juliet in the same teacher’s class that was running us up to England to take in some more of the bard’s work. I think we’d watched a movie of it, but it was the early 80′s so Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t feature at all.

The first play we saw was Taming of the Shrew and it was a very traditional version with period costumes and was exactly what I thought a Shakespeare place should be. I was part way back in the theater and could see the whole stage really well. I loved plays. I’d seen some in the past but nothing like this. There weren’t mics. These people projected. They filled the entire theater with their voices and presence. When watching TV, as the show starts I’m aware of the edges of the television itself. If it’s a good one show, I quit noticing the TV and my field of vision, my attention really, becomes just that little screen on the idiot box. This play was like that. I was hooked. We all were. The archaic words, the dated insults, they all washed over us and, like a riptide, pulled us back into them, into the play.

The next night was NOTHING like the first night. I’d never heard of the play showing the next night. It was As You Like It and I had no idea what it was about other than our teacher’s synopsis. When we arrived at the theater our teacher went to the window and came back with tickets, “Want to move closer?” Of course I did! We wound up stage right in the second row. I could have reached out over the heads of those in front of us and touched the stage. They were, with the exception of the row directly in front of us, the WORST seats in the house. They were awesome! The play itself was completely different from a traditional performance. The costuming was all bright neons & shockingly garish colors. The sets were sparse, minimalist, and the play was carried by the language. At first I was appalled but then it happened again and the words reached out and pulled us in. I wasn’t the only one that noticed this. We commented on how startling it was at first and then how we quit noticing the costuming and the lack of a set when compared to the comparatively lush set the night before.

What was most shocking to me was the amount of SPIT flying from these performers’ mouths! They were projecting. They were reaching the very back rows of the theater with their voices and they weren’t yelling. They were projecting! It’s the first time I’d ever seen the difference up close, and seriously… it was close. And when they’re projecting their lungs are really blasting out the air and carried on their wind was a copious amount of spit. It went everywhere and I had an excellent seat to see it spraying the stage and each other in the stage lights. All safely on stage right… they never looked at us to talk! The front row though? Yeah. They should have worn plastic sheets like at a Gallagher show.

The last play was Merchant of Venice and my seats weren’t memorable and honestly, neither was the production. I was jaded by then, having seen two plays already. I remember only that they talked about a Jew a lot in the play and I was surprised by that.

That trip was where I figured out that the theater wasn’t boring and that a good story wasn’t about the sets or the trappings or the things around the story. A story, a good story, is about the words, the story, and interesting, memorable characters. Nothing else matters. I don’t know if that’s what they meant for us to learn while watching As You Like It but it is what I did learn. They’d done everything they could to make that play as un-Shakespearlike as they could without messing with the words, the story, the characters, and it was just as riveting as the more traditional displays.

I’m a writer now and I try and remember the lesson of that trip and focus not so much on the stage setting as on the words, the story, and the characters. Those are the things people remember. Those are the things that bring people back for more. I’m not saying I’m Shakespeare, but I am saying I could do worse than try and learn from someone who did an amazing job at making me forget that decades later while people messed with his sets & costumes it was his words that would transported me, us, to where he wanted us to go.

Oh, and this picture? Please… forgive the unfortunate hair. Really. I couldn’t do a thing with it and didn’t have a clue what to try.

One of the things I’ve never talked about online is where exactly I worked.

There were a variety of reasons for it. One of them was that the company adopted a pretty draconian social media policy so I didn’t talk about it because it wasn’t worth my job for people to know and sometimes I’d say something that might have been considered less than complimentary and that is/was, under the policy, a fireable offense. Which is funny. Freedom of speech is the foundation of the business the company I worked for engaged in. Without it they’d have the doors shuttered in days, hours maybe.

I worked for Romantix. When I started it was Goalie Entertainment, an innocuous name that gave no indication that it was one of the leading adult book store chains in the country. I started as an overnight clerk in a little store in Fort Dodge, Iowa and worked my way up to Regional Manager with 25 stores in a bunch of states (East of the Mississippi plus Texas) and then through the company being sold and then the name change and the stores & areas being redisctricted, torn apart & sewn back together over the years I wound up being the Central Iowa DM. That included Missouri as well as it happened. Our District names are always more serving suggestions than hard and fast rules.

So, yeah. Romantix is the answer to the longest running question I’ve not answered for the longest time here online.

As you can imagine, with 19 years of time in the adult retail end of things there is a book’s worth of stories I could tell but I probably won’t. As surprising as it will be to most to hear this, the adult part of the business wears off pretty fast. It’s not as interesting, funny, etc as you might think. Sure, that first week or month, I was seeing things I’d never seen before… but the new wears off fast and soon when I was looking at a wall of erm… toys, I was seeing where it needed to be straightened or worked. I’d notice good selling items in the wrong spot and slow movers in the prime space. The interesting wore off of the product long ago.

One of the questions I’d be asked most by customers was, “You must get real freaks in here huh?” Oddly, they never seemed to include themselves in that group. And mostly no, I didn’t get a lot of freaks. I got normal people either in couples or singly in looking for something they could have fun with either together or by themselves. The thing about the “freaks” was in MY stores I knew who they were… when you run into them out in the world… yeah, they look just like everybody else.

Maybe there’ll be stories later but I doubt it. Not because there aren’t some funny ones, there are, but because honestly… it seems a little disrespectful to violate the implied trust my customers were giving me when coming to my stores to shop. They expected discretion and they’ve always gotten it. I don’t see that changing now just because I don’t work there any more. To tell tales now would be tacky and rude I think.