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Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time
It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man
'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man
"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson
My Uncle Richie had a buddy who owned some gas stations where he worked on Saturdays to make some extra cash. When I turned 14 he got me a job at one of them - a Getty Oil station on Sunrise highway near the Green Acres shopping center. Eventually my brothers and cousins ended up working there as well. I ended up working there for five years.
One of my first Saturdays working I got off on the wrong foot with one of the shift managers. The full-timers all had uniforms with their names stitched on the shirts. As a part-timer, I didn't rate a uniform, but wore my own clothes. Getting set to leave for the day I saw a uniform shirt in what I thought was the trash. I picked it up, took it home and washed it, and unstitched the name "Red" from the shirt, pretty proud that I had my own uniform shirt. The following Saturday, after reporting for work I found myself facing down a very angry Red, who was grabbing me by the front of "my" shirt and was demanding to know why I was wearing "his" shirt! I learned that day about the concept of a commercial uniform laundering service. I didn't have to deal with Red for much longer though. He and some of the other full-timers were selling drugs from the station at night and were caught by an undercover Nassau County cop.
Back in the seventies credit card transactions for minor purchases were rare and debit cards didn't yet exist, so the majority of our customers paid in cash. The guys on the pumps were given a "bank" - a wad of singles and fives, as well as a roll each of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. The manager would take readings off each of the pumps, where a dial logged the number of gallons and dollars sold. At the end of the shift another reading would be taken and the difference between the two readings would determine the amount of money we should have to turn in. In addition to fuel, the station also had a small store where cigarettes and cases of soda were sold. Later a refrigerator was added and gallons of milk and cold drinks were sold. There was no cash register. Might not have even been a calculator at the counter. Purchases of items other than gas were tracked on a sheet of paper and added up at the end of the night. At the end of each shift the manager was responsible for adding everything up and balancing the cash receipts with the various hash marks indicating sales. There was a calculator in the back office - one of those museum pieces where you pulled a lever like on a slot machine to get your total. The back office itself was a converted bathroom. The manager's "chair" was the old toilet!
There was no such thing as a self-service pump. Three or four of us were out in all weather conditions. We were not welcome in the office or the garage, but we did have a little shack that we could find a little shade in the summer and get us out of the wind in the winter. In the winter we did our best to bundle up, but there was a limit to how heavy your gloves could be since we were handling money. The standard solution was to wear two pair of cotton work gloves and warm our hands on the tail pipes of the cars. When sweat and condensation started to make the gloves damp, we'd switch them out with a pair that we had warming up on the furnace in the back of the garage. Just before opening, a guy with a small snowplow would clear the lot, but we had to deal with customers who would brush all the snow off the roofs of their cars. On at least one occasion we shoveled it all into the back seat of one such inconsiderate bastard. Some customers thought that emptying their ashtrays onto the ground was good idea. I don't know how many realized that we were scooping up the butts and depositing them back into their cars, but they eventually stopped!
"The Getty" featured a colorful collection of characters. When I first started I rode to work with my Uncle Richie (known as "Dick" - when his son, also named Richard came to work, they were known as "Big Dick" and "Little Dick", which my cousin wasn't at all happy with). When he cut back his hours I caught a ride with John S, one of two Armenian brothers who lived around the corner. There were seven Tonys working there. One of whom, Tony Z, didn't have a surname starting with "Z" and wasn't actually named Tony, but was hiding income from his ex-wife. There was Tony Beard, the assistant manager who I remember most for stealing the girlfriend of Tony C. The head mechanic was also named Tony, who we referred to a "Wire Brush Tony". The nickname came about due to his tendency to exaggerate what was wrong with a vehicle in order to jack up the cost, which we called "fucking the customer with a wire brush". Jack, the other mechanic, got his son Jack Junior a job in the garage. Jack Junior was usually high - my most vivid memory of him is seeing him comb his hair with a fork after eating lunch. Another father son team was yet another Tony and his stepson Rob. For the longest time I thought Rob's last name was "Ramsey", but found out later that the other guys were really calling him "Ramesses", a brand of condom - a clever way to call him a "scumbag" without him realizing it. The aforementioned Tony C, along with two fellow Italian Americans Dino and Gino, were habitués of the Long Island disco scene. When not at work they could be seen decked out in polyester suits, wide collared shirts open to the navel and plenty of gold chains, and of course perfectly coiffed hair. One Saturday afternoon Gino taught us all a disco line dance in the midst of the gas pumps. An unsavory aspect of Dino and Gino was the way they viewed women. They were both engaged to "nice" girls who we never saw. They also both had girlfriends on the side, Dee and Betty, who would hang around the station when the boys were working. One night my own girlfriend stopped by to say hello. I was "counselled" by Dino and Gino that I shouldn't "allow" her to come to the station, because it wasn't a place for respectable girls.
As befitted an operation so awash in nepotism, the regular night manager was a ne'er-do-well uncle of the owner by the name of Rocky, also known by the pump jockeys as The Raisin. (Rocky had recently moved north from Florida and was well tanned and very wrinkled). Rocky didn't do much. He'd sit in the back office all night doing who-knows-what, paying little attention to what was going on outside. My brother Mike would sometimes shut the station lights off early, making it look like we were closed, leaving only the light outside the back office lit. We'd loaf around and drink beer and Rocky never, ever, noticed. Two girls from the movie theater next door would come hang out on break, whom Rocky would flirt with. We christened them "The Raisinettes". But the most interesting of all was Station Manager Al Kramer.
Al Kramer was a six-three former Marine who liked to yell. He intimidated the Hell out of us younger guys and we did everything we could to avoid his wrath. We just called him "Kramer". One of Kramer's pet peeves were people who parked on the station lot without buying gas, blocking the pumps. When he saw it happen he would emerge from the office, the door banging against the outer wall, almost coming off its hinges, as he bellowed at the poor soul who unknowingly violated Kramer's rules for parking. One early Saturday morning we found a man sleeping in his car on the side of the building. Instead of waking him up and asking him to move we told Kramer that we had asked him to move and that he refused. Kramer stormed out, started kicking the man's car door and screaming at him to get his car off the lot. We had to find our amusement wherever we could. As mean as he could be, Kramer always stuck up for us if a customer complained. I was once accused of shortchanging a customer, a quick reading and a count of my cash on hand cleared me, but the customer wanted to know how Kramer knew I didn't pocket the money. Kramer asked him how he knew he wasn't about to get a boot in the ass.
Somewhere along the line the elder generation of employees started leaving for "real" jobs, and Kramer started giving some of us younger guys, including me and my brother Mike, responsibility as shift managers in the evenings and on Sundays. One of the first of the new generation of night shift managers was a guy named Gino (different guy than the other Gino, who actually was named Eugene, or Gene). Gino II had a habit of leaving work in the middle of his shift to visit his girlfriend (since "nice" girls don't come to the station!). One evening, while Gino was off romancin', he left me in charge. Kramer must have suspected something was up; he called while Gino was gone and wanted to talk to him. Thinking I could cover his absence I told Kramer that Gino was in the bathroom. Kramer surely knew I was lying and said he would wait. This was decades before the ubiquity of cell phones, so there was no way I could reach Gino. Fortunately, after a very uncomfortable 5 minutes on the phone with Kramer, Gino showed back up. Shortly thereafter Gino was no longer scheduled for manager shifts and I was.
This was my first management job. I don't mind telling you, I wasn't very good at it. Working there at the time were two brothers, John and Steve VS. Their last name was Socci, but the "VS" was due to the fact that they lived in the town of Valley Stream and we already had a "John S". Steve and I, for some reason, didn't get along. It was probably due in part to my inflated sense of being in charge and Steve's resistance to being told what to do. One afternoon shift change we got into it. At the end of shift everyone had to turn in their cash to whoever was working the counter. This involved tedious counting of change. I don't remember all the details, but I vaguely remember that there was a line of customers buying cigarettes, several workers trying to cash out, and Steve had a line of quarters stacked up 4 high each strung across the counter. Something ticked me off, I can't recall what, and I knocked over all of Steve's carefully counted stacks of coin. Steve vaulted the counter and proceeded to beat the crap out of me until some of the other guys separated us and made me sit in the back room until Steve left to go home. I had a few other run-ins with other workers, in retrospect probably due to my overbearing approach to supervision of people who didn't really need to be supervised. For some reason they still scheduled me as a shift supervisor.
My brother Mike did a much better job as a shift manager than I did, mainly because he realized that as night manager, all he had to do was count the money at the end of the night and let everybody do whatever they wanted to, as long as people who wanted gas got their gas. One of the things that Mike liked to do was change people's names. They had hired a kid named Mike to work with us. My brother proclaimed that he was the only "Mike" and renamed the guy "Ed", which became his name for as long as he worked there. "Ed" had a girlfriend whose name I forget after 50 years, but she was renamed "Trixie", after Ed Norton's wife on The Honeymooners. A lot of guys had their names changed, but the most long term change was a guy named Denis. Since there was already a Denis, Mike renamed him "Sid", which became the name his friends called him even after he became a wealthy businessman years later. As far as I know he's still called Sid.
We had a lot of private jargon among the pump jockeys. "Rubberhead" was a favorite insult to customers we judged to be stupid, as well as "pork nose", which we applied to the usually obese, arrogant, assholes who we felt treated us poorly. One of our competitors, I think it was Exxon, had the slogan TFGB (Thanks For Coming By). We decided GTFO (Get The Fuck Out) was more appropriate to our attitude. Someone made a sign with the letters GTFO on it and tacked on to the outside of our little shack. Occasionally a customer would figure it out! We also had a couple of first generation Italians working at night, who would insult customers in Italian, but do it with a smile on their face so the customer was (usually) unaware of the insult. We all competed at telling people that they were idiots without them realizing that we were telling them they were idiots. It was a skill that would have a lifetime of useful application.
But all good things come to an end. For me it was my adherence to Kramer's "don't park at the pumps" philosophy. A customer, who was not gassing up, blocking the pumps to go in and buy some cigarettes. I asked him to move. He ignored me and attempted to go inside. I stepped in front of him to block his progress - he poked me in the chest and told me to move, whereupon I hit him. And I hit him a couple of more times. Of course I was (rightfully) fired. Not the last time I was fired for an act of violence. A few days later the Nassau County Police came looking for me, since my victim had filed a police report. The shift manager Rocky referred them to my brother, who declined to give them any information. When he got home and told me that the police were looking for me, my father, an NYPD officer, took me to the police station and made me turn myself in. I wasn't charged, probably out of professional courtesy to my father - the closest I have ever come to being arrested.
Shortly after this incident I found another job, this time as a stocker a Pergament Home Center, unloading trucks and stocking shelves.
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