Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 8

FC: Of course.

I: How many do you want?

FC: Just one. How much is it?

I: Pick your price.

C: Do you want a straw?

FC: Please. [Handing over fifty cents] Is this okay?

I: Sure.

C: Yeah.

FC: Well, thank you!

C: Thanks.

[FEMALE CUSTOMER leaves]

C: How much you think we have?

I: I don't know. [Shakes money box]

C: More than yesterday?

I: Maybe. I'd say forty-two somethin' each. That's my guess. What I'm starting to think is we make it so-we make so much money that grown-ups might even try it.

C: Crazy. I doubt any grown-ups would try it, because you wouldn't get-you can only do it during the summer.

I: Well. You can do other things for the rest of the year. Sometimes I go around the neighborhood and collect like cans and bottles to recycle them and get a little money for that. But not much. I was in a professional play thing once. Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of the Sign of Thor. I was a street urchin named Wiggins.

[Laughter]

I: Acting's probably better than this because you get new friends and stuff. I think the best job would be to be a video game maker. I don't know. Designer person.

C: Video game tester.

I: That's cool.

C: And all the ones you don't like you-I mean the ones you like, you'd be like, "Oh, I hate this. [Laughs] I'll have to keep this with me. I hate this one. I'll take it."

I: [Laughs] It stinks.

C: Say it stinks!

I: The only thing is the hours are pathetic. They're like- you have to do it, like, eighteen hours a day. At some places. I like saw that in magazines and stuff.

C: You'd get like, seizures.

I: Agggghhhh!

Mom put me on the schedule when

I was sixteen.

HALLMARK GIFT SHOP SALESWOMAN.

Nicole Norton.

I'm a sales a.s.sistant at my mother's gift shop in Knoxville. I change seasonal displays, paint cute bubble letters on signs, stock cards, run the register, eat candy, stuff like that. [Laughs] It's a Hallmark franchise shop-"CASH," I call it-"Carol Ann's Suburban Hallmark, Inc." [Laughs] My mom's name is Carol Ann.

I got the job by default. Mom's owned the store since 1980 and I've been ringing the register since I could reach it. I started getting paid when I was fifteen and Mom put me on the schedule when I was sixteen. Since then, I've worked here regularly all through high school and on and off through college and afterwards, sad to say, whenever I wasn't doing anything to further my "career." It's been a good filler job for in between my real work and studies, but I think it's maybe lasted a little too long. I'm about to turn twenty-three. [Laughs] Fortunately, I've found a career-oriented job in Phoenix with a graphic design company, so I'll be going soon.

I hope this is it and I don't have to resort to working for my mother again. Not because the work sucks, but because, well, I think I have a different agenda than Mom does. Her talent is in sales-mine is not. My talent lies in the creative side of the brain. I'm basically an introspective person. Which is good for problem solving or displaying dishware, but not the best for dealing with b.i.t.c.hy customers. Customer "relations" doesn't come naturally for me-I've had to learn it. And it took me a little while to get into caring which d.i.c.kens pieces are retired and which collector's sets are limited editions. I care now, but I'm not sure that's such a great thing.

Also, and maybe this is just me, but morale is kind of low here now. It's a different market than it was twenty years ago. Having a gift store is too compet.i.tive and the huge companies like Hallmark are totally undercutting the smaller stores that bear their name. The problem is Mom carries about twenty percent Hallmark merchandise-the rest are gifts from other companies-but Hallmark wants you to have at least eighty percent their stuff. Then you get to be a "Gold Crown" Hallmark store and you get big price breaks on the merchandise, special promotions, and all of their advertis.e.m.e.nts are for Gold Crown stores-so basically, you get free advertising. If you're not Gold Crown, it's like you're the enemy. They keep raising the costs on their merchandise and they sell their cards and gifts via the Internet and catalogs, which further undercuts you.

Mom is struggling with where to take the business in the wake of all of this, but honestly, I don't see how the situation's gonna improve. I guess at some point maybe she'll break away from Hallmark, but their merchandise still sells well and our customers expect it. There are ladies who come back year after year for collectible ornaments and buy all the new ones that Hallmark makes and just love them-and that, after all, is why she's in business: to give people what they want. At the same time, Mom's not about to go Gold Crown. She's an individual. All those stores look the same, sell the same thing, and have no personality whatsoever. Gift stores are all about being personal, and Hallmark punishes its stores for having personality or deviating from the norm. Isn't that just f.u.c.ked up?

So there's my little rant against Hallmark-the Wal-Mart of the greeting card industry. [Laughs] If you want to know what sucks in the world, go into any Hallmark Gold Crown store! [Laughs] I'm sorry this is such a personal issue with me, but that's the way it is. I have a lot of resentful feelings toward them as a result of the way they've treated us.

But otherwise, you know, it's a perfectly nice job. Mom and I keep a "professional" relations.h.i.+p while I'm working, and that's pretty easy to do because basically we have a good personal relations.h.i.+p. I mean, I love her and, you know, I admire her. I mean, she's obviously been doing something right staying in business twenty years without the help of Hallmark. In fact, I think I work harder for her maybe than I'd work for another boss. Partly to avoid the stigma of being seen as like the "boss's daughter," but also because she's, like, she's Mom. So I'm always doing stuff like Windexing windows, vacuuming, taking out the trash, cleaning the bathroom, just to help out.

I make just over minimum wage, which is okay to live on if you don't have lots of bills, which I don't. And I have a very flexible schedule-Mom works around me-and I get discounts on the cute c.r.a.p. I have tons of stuff that has collected over the years and I've had two garage sales! I am not proud of this. I have more knickknacks and cute things than any twenty-three-year-old should. [Laughs] All these North Pole Village pieces and Hallmark ornaments. [Laughs] And Mom, it's like, you should see her "collections." She gets a lot of them as gifts or whatever, but it's out of control! Before we moved out of the house I grew up in we'd joke that when Mom died we'd open the house to the public as a pineapple museum-she collects anything with pineapples on it, and the last count was over a thousand, not including the wallpaper.

So anyway, mostly it's fun. Mom makes it fun. The only time the job is really tough is at the holidays. Then people just get kind of nuts, especially at Christmas. Like there's this one customer who does most of her Christmas shopping at the store and she does it all at once. She spends about five hours going through her list with Mom, then she wants us to wrap and deliver all of her gifts. We're talking like a hundred and fifty wrapped gifts! n.o.body in the store likes her because she is such a high-maintenance customer-but she spends lots of money, so we try not to p.i.s.s her off. But then wrapping and sorting all of her gifts takes about twelve hours-and we have to do it at night because we can't waste time on it during store hours. I mean, we'd just have to shut the place down. So, like, for the past five or six years now, it's been my job to accompany Mom in this overnight adventure. [Laughs] The whole time we are cussing her and cussing each other-it's just a miserable experience! And that's Christmas in retail.

Honestly, last year I had an interns.h.i.+p at a graphics company and I wasn't working here and it was the first Christmas in my life that I truly enjoyed-just because I wasn't at the store. All I did was help that one night with the wrapping and I had the best holiday. I mean, some years my family didn't have time to put up a tree! It's sad. Mom says if everyone worked one Christmas in retail they would be a lot nicer because they would realize the h.e.l.l that it is. And it's so true. It's just a nightmare. Literally half our floor s.p.a.ce gets transformed into the "Christmas store" and this year, we're gonna start decorating it in July, so that it can open on September first! I don't know what that's gonna do to the customers. It seems like every year people get worse, like the day Christmas season starts, everyone goes crazy. They turn into mean, demanding monsters. [Laughs] I'm gonna be writing my mom a happy postcard from Phoenix when the season starts.

You know, talking about this, it's funny, because I'm not sad to be going, but at the same time, this job has affected me more than anything else in my upbringing. I mean, I was practically raised here. I worked with so many of my friends here. Back in high school, my mom would hire anybody I liked-my social life was working here. And I used to [laughs] bring guys here sometimes. I think my most embarra.s.sing moment was this time I brought my boyfriend in one night. We were both living at home and had no privacy-and you know, it was those crazy h.o.r.n.y years-so this was a place we could do whatever we wanted. But this one night, I guess we were here for a couple of hours, and at work the next day, the bookkeeper lady asks me if I was at the store the night before around midnight-because the trash guys came to empty the dumpster and a car that looked like mine was blocking the dumpster. She said she had already asked my mom, who knew nothing about it-so did I know? At the time, having to explain it to my mother was awful. [Laughs] But now, it just seems so funny, you know? My mom and I even joke about it sometimes.

I'm leaving in a couple of weeks. I'll miss my mom, the fellows.h.i.+p. She's like my family and friend-I consider her both. I have moved around a lot and we still have remained close, so I know we'll always be close, but I'll miss being around her every day. I won't miss the store because I'm ready to do something else, be in a more creative job environment, but still, it's like I said-it's weird, but I kind of grew up here, in a Hallmark store, you know? I did. [Laughs] Take it or leave it, but that's who I am. [Laughs] I wear the Hallmark crown!

Who do you fear?

GUN STORE OWNER.

Rob Key.

I'm one of those people that is cla.s.sically unemployable and unhireable. I have a problem with authority figures. I have a problem with discipline. Most jobs I've run across, I mastered within a few weeks and got bored as s.h.i.+t. It's hard to go to work for anybody if that's the way you are.

In the 1970s, I was a social worker for some private inst.i.tutions. Not the state. I had a bunch of positions. The last thing I did was I was a staff coordinator for a local psychiatric hospital. It ended because I had some conflicts with the administration. That was a long time ago, far, far away. I've done a lot of things in my life since then. None of them related to the gun industry except my shop. My background? What does this have to do with the gun industry? I want to talk about the gun industry.

I needed a job. Guns were a hobby. And they just grew into my livelihood. At the time I made a conscious decision to get into them as a business, I wasn't intending to open a gun shop. I wanted to be a gun manufacturer and it was my goal, essentially, to buy a couple of pieces of equipment and to make machine guns in my garage. This was 1985 and back then there was a vast market and a great demand for machine guns.

The Feds changed the law on me just as I was about to invest all of the money I'd saved up to buy two or three pieces of equipment to make my guns. It was a good thing I hadn't already done it yet. It would've been terrible. Lord knows what I would've been doing then.

Instead, when the law changed, I had just enough money to essentially buy one machine gun-just one. But that was enough. I bought it and sold it and took the money and reinvested it, and here we are. I ended up buying this shop from the guy who was my gun guru. He had a worse att.i.tude than I do. He was a hard man to hang out with.

My inventory is primarily exotic guns, machine guns, and older guns. Quality guns. I have a core militia and anti-NRA customer base. That's my niche. I'm not gonna talk about the militias, but I will tell you straight out, I am not a supporter or a member of the NRA. The NRA is a lobbying organization, and as lobbyists, it's their job to compromise. And to compromise, you have to give something up. In 1968, we had a hundred percent of our Second Amendment rights and now, thanks to the NRA, we have maybe seventy percent. In school if you were to get a seventy percent you'd barely be pa.s.sing. How is it that this is acceptable to us with the Const.i.tution? Why can't they kick a little a.s.s and reannoint our rights as granted?

The people who come here wouldn't shop at McBride's, which is the big gun store in this town. You should go down there and check them out. They are my best advertising. It's amazing how many people don't care to get a quality product. They would rather buy a piece of cheap aluminum disposable junk over there so they don't have to deal with my att.i.tude. They just want somebody who will sell them whatever they think they want. And I won't. They ask me for something and if I think it's a piece of s.h.i.+t, I won't sell it to them. If you shop with me you're pretty d.a.m.ned dedicated.

When somebody comes in, I talk to them, find out how much experience they have with guns, what they want a gun for. Especially if it's somebody outside of my core group, I always ask them what they want the gun for. Most people say that they are looking for selfdefense. I get a lot of scared people in here. It goes in waves. But you know what? It used to be that the waves would get bigger when something happens-some murders or rapes or any kind of crime spree-you'd get something like that and you get this big rush of folks coming in to get armed and then things would die down for a while. There'd be no waves. But now it seems like there's always these smaller waves and then you have bigger waves that rise out of the smaller waves. As we grow, as America becomes more aware of bigger things to be fearful of-not just of the rapist or the local gang bangers-as people become aware of whatever the conspiracy theory is of the day, then you have to deal with that level of fear. Who do you fear? Do you fear the militia? Or do you fear the federal government? Or do you fear the UN? Or what do you fear?

People come in messed up all the time. Drunk and what have you. People who won't even look up at me come in saying, "I want a gun." It doesn't take long to figure that out. Most of them I just ignore and they go away. I don't have to wait on them. I am controlling the sale and I won't sell to them.

I'm not saying I never make a wrong judgment. We've had people come in and buy guns and go home and within fifteen minutes of buying the gun use it to kill someone. We used to keep the evening news on in here and one time we were watching and there was a guy who shot and killed his wife and they showed a close-up of the front seat of his car and sure enough sitting right on the seat was a receipt from our store. We pulled up the forms and waited for the cops to come.

We've also had instances where we found out within weeks that a gun we sold was used in a suicide. I hate to say this, but most of them are weepy women, and you can tell right off when they come into the store. You just do not sell them a gun, thank you very much.

I believe that part of the job of selling guns is to educate people about them and the responsibilities of owners.h.i.+p. n.o.body wants to be a part of the problem. They are inanimate objects-it's the behaviors of people that are dangerous. But sad to say, most people don't want an education. Most people want to stay stupid. I have a major problem with that. I hate to see somebody buy a gun with no idea of what it means to own one or how to even use one. I'm still learning myself. I'll never know all there is to know about guns.

So if you come in and you've never had a gun before, I'm gonna sell you something simple or nothing at all. "Keep It Simple Stupid," right? It's just the way to go. You can't afford to be oblivious or shy when a gun is involved because with a gun it is all over in an instant. So if you have no experience I'll probably hand you this gun here-a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. You've seen these before on TV or whatever and you look at it and it is very simple, you can tell if it's loaded or not just by looking at it and you can see the trigger and how it works.

It's like with kids, you start them off with a pencil, right? Then later once they've learned to write better you can move them on to a pen.

And with a gun like this Smith and Wesson-you'd buy this gun and a thousand rounds of ammo and I would send you off to one of the trainers at the firing ranges around here. You'd go to the range, once a week, and shoot maybe two hundred rounds at a time. You'd spend hours and hours doing this until you learn that gun. Until you do it so often that you could fire that gun properly in your sleep, or when you're drunk, or when you're at home and the bad guy is right there, too. Then I'll sell you a more sophisticated weapon.

It takes time, though, going to the range every week for years. To do it properly takes training. Too many people think that they know how to use a gun. They buy ammo and they think they're set. Those are the scary ones-the ones who lose hands and eyeb.a.l.l.s and worse.

Of course, everyone has a different idea of what gun competency is. But this is my opinion on how it should be done. And it's how I run my shop. And I think it should be the opinion of anyone else who sells firearms. But most customers don't want to do it. You talk to them about shooting thousands of rounds of ammo and their eyes just glaze over. Most people are only interested in the instant gratification, they don't want the education. Well, they can go elsewhere. I'm not that kind of guy. You could go over to McBride's and they'll sell you anything you want.

I think the way I do business is the only way to "regulate" guns. Meaning through the individual businessman using common sense. The "gun control" laws make no sense. They are not logical. People ask, "Why is this this way? What do these forms mean?" And you can't give them a reasonable, responsible answer. Nothing is realistic about the laws they pa.s.s-they say they're supposed to stop crime but they have nothing to do with crime. I mean, a crime is when you see the ATF and the FBI murder dozens of people in Waco, isn't it? That ticks me off so much, the lying, the hypocrisy of it all.

Everybody wants to blame the gun business. It's unfair. I mean somebody buys a knife and stabs their wife, does the neighborhood a.s.sociation send a bunch of old farts over to shut down the knife store?

The thing about the gun business that no one ever asks about or realizes is that it's work. It is a business. And that's all it is, and it's not even a very good business. I am the one who cleans the toilet here. That's being in this business. Coming down to the store everyday. You could take my temperature right now and it would be a hundred and one degrees. It's been that way for three days. I'm sick, but I can't not be here.

I would never advise someone to go into this to make money. In the time I've been here I've seen at least twenty-four gun shops come and go in Austin. They last a summer, maybe two, then disappear. You have to love it, you have to believe in it, believe what you're doing is right and ignore all the lies. I myself worked for years without really taking a paycheck. If my wife hadn't had a good salary and if we didn't eat the vegetables we grow and the deer we kill on our property, we wouldn't have made it. But we did make it. We didn't waste money and we didn't buy into the culture of a consumer system. And we're better off for it.

People will f.u.c.k you harder for drugs

than they'll f.u.c.k you for money.

DRUG DEALER.

Chris Muller.

I started selling mushrooms six years ago when I was a junior in high school. I was living in Brooklyn and it was a good gig because I had the connect. He was my friend. He lived right down the block from me. I'd known him since I was a kid, and he had the mushrooms. I don't know how he got them, but no one else had them. So what I did is I hung back and picked out these three kids, gave them some of these mushrooms and they just flipped. And I told them, "I'm your connect, you're the man, don't tell anyone I exist." And they were cool with that. They would roll up in their neighborhoods and be like, "Yeah, I got the connect, it's me."

They were promoting for me without saying who I was. They were making money, I was making money and my friend was making money and it was going really, really well. Basically I was a junior in high school and I was making like twenty-two hundred bucks a week profit. And I didn't have to do anything, you know, because I had a niche in the market. No one else had mushrooms, and everyone wanted them.

This went on for a year and a half. It ended because my connect, my friend, started branching out into his own thing, which was selling Ecstasy. And he was really blowing up. He would promote himself. My whole deal was that no one really knew what I did. But he started to be like, "I've got this! I've got that!" He would tell everyone and their mother, you know? It was like, uncontrollable. The numbers of people who knew were getting big. And when the numbers get big like that you have to start taking in other considerations.

I mean, I know a lot of people who've gotten f.u.c.ked up doing this. They get busted or worse. Like I know this kid-some people knocked on his door, he opened it, like a dumb-a.s.s, and they just ran up on him and took like ten grand worth of cash and they tied him up and pistol-whipped him. Like they f.u.c.ked him up. The funny thing was that I had a conversation with him three days before that happened, and I said, "Listen, something is going to happen to you. You're not respecting what you're doing." I'm not saying he wasn't a connoisseur and he didn't know his product, just that he wasn't respecting what he did. He took it for granted. No matter what level you're on, it's illegal. Period. And people will f.u.c.k you harder for drugs than they'll f.u.c.k you for money, you know? You have to remember that, and you have to respect it.

So what was happening with my mushrooms is that since my connect and I were so closely tied together, I knew if he went down, I went down, too. It wasn't smart anymore so basically what I did was I just deaded that. I bit the bullet and I just closed shop. You know, I took the twenty-two-hundred-dollar loss a week.

It was a very hard thing to do, but I was getting so nervous. I was walking around a lot thinking this is going to f.u.c.k up soon. You don't deal amongst your community, amongst your friends, where you can easily be spotted, where word catches like wildfire. I mean it could ultimately come back to me and my parents' house, you know? Where I lived.

And also because, you see, mushrooms, they're a volatile thing. People have different reactions to them. Some of these were going to kids who were like in ninth grade and they flip the f.u.c.k out, you know? And who knows what they're telling the police or the ambulance drivers when they're like, "Where did you get them from?" when they're in the back of an ambulance getting pumped, you know? That was another fact I didn't like.

But then again, it was really hard to walk away from those mushrooms. I had like crazy loot. I could basically just buy whatever I wanted. I didn't let it get to my head, I wasn't like a crazy flasher, but I always had nice things.

My parents had no idea because I always worked. I always held down jobs. Like I worked in a pet store and they knew I was a hardworking kid. I also cried poor a lot, too. You know, I'd be like, "Oh, s.h.i.+t, Ma, I don't have any money. What am I going to do?" While, really, at that time, I had all the loot I could spend. I bought like a couple of two-thousand-dollar bikes. And I hooked my room up. Also my hobby is setting up coral reef ecosystems. [Laughs] So I have this, like, four-thousand-dollar fish tank in my room. Since I worked in the pet store, I told my mom, "I got this at Carl's store. He gave it to me." You know?

It was a good life. I took mushrooms and I smoked weed, and I looked at my four-thousand-dollar fish tank. [Laughs] It was f.u.c.king dope, man. A coral reef. It has the corals, it has the starfish, it has a whole ecosystem. That's where my money went. And I loved that f.u.c.king life, man. [Laughs] You know?

But it had to end. Too bad, you know? But I bounced back. I moved to Manhattan and I started selling bud. Basically I wanted to do something that I can't get in any trouble for. With pot, anything under an ounce, it's pretty much a misdemeanor. I'm not a grower and I'm not a wholesaler. I'm straight-up retail. I buy from a couple of guys who are wholesalers and I sell it to my clientele, which is very select. I'm hardly ever holding more than a ounce. Basically, I'm a runner. It's low level. I don't want to do that high-profile s.h.i.+t. I don't even talk to any growers. Right now what I do is smooth and simple and nice. I don't cause any waves because people who cause waves don't live long.

I do business between six P.M. and eleven P.M. Monday through Sat.u.r.day. I take phone calls all day long as they come in, and then at six, I run out and make my deliveries and that's it. I'm done by eleven. I'm not making a killing, but this is a good deal I have. It's streamlined. It's efficient. Nothing really weird happens to me, ever. Because you know there's just a right way to do things and a wrong thing. And if you stick with the right way everything goes smoothly. You don't have that weird call from the weird address at a weird time where you're like, holy s.h.i.+t, what the f.u.c.k is going to happen?

People I deal with give my number to their friends sometimes, and they'll call me, and, depending on who's given the referral-you know, if certain people give referrals it's like I automatically a.s.sume that they're good because of the type of person they are and the type of person they're referring me to, and where they live-but then there's other times when someone will call me out of the blue and say, "Listen, I'm a friend of whoever," and I'll just be, like, okay, call that person and tell them to call me. That keeps it nice and simple.

The only thing that's weird is just like walking around with like a lot of money. Other than that, I stay away from everything. I don't talk to people. Like anyone who does what I do, I don't talk to them. I don't give them my phone number. I don't try to trade f.u.c.king war stories with them and, you know, tell them who my person is or who his person is or whatever. I really don't care. I'm not in this to be a superstar.

I don't like to mix my life up. My friends just know me as "Chris who's out." They think I'm freelancing things or whatever. Some of them a.s.sume maybe that I come from money-which I totally don't. But just the way I carry myself and the things that I have, they're like, okay, his parents paid for it, you know? That's fine with me. They can think what they want. My straight-up legitimate life is my straight-up legitimate life. Anyone that knows my name, my phone number, or my address, I just don't do business with, period.