SPOILED: Continued - - The Rule of Three.

I got off the street car on Market Street which was aswarm with sailors and soldiers who would soon be shipping out to Korea. Ignoring wolf-whistles, I made my way through crowds waiting for The Emporium and J. C. Penny's to open, and walked up Stockton Street towards Union Square where the posh shopped at City of Paris, I Magnin's, and The White House. At Post, I made a right and found myself in front of the four-story building where Ronson conducted business. I pulled open the beveled glass door, heard my heels clicking across the lobby's marble floor as I walked into the small, wrot-iron cage of an elevator. Its operator, an old man in a green cap and uniform with "George" embroidered on the pocket, was at the controls. “Good morning, Miss,” he said, reaching from the round, padded seat that folded out from the wall for the lever that closed the doors, “Floor, please?”

Ronson took up half of the third floor. It opened at nine; I was there at a quarter to and waited in the linoleum covered hallway. Peering through a glass pane imprinted with Ronson Lighter Company, Ken Tilles, Manager, in gold letters, I saw a few polished oak chairs standing against the wood-paneling of a small room; above them hung a gold-framed warehouse-sale painting. Soon, a couple of girls in skirts and sweaters and a woman who looked about twenty-five in a blue satin coat-dress with rhinestone buttons, joined me. My competition. We didn’t make eye contact. At nine, a lanky, gaunt blond man in a sport coat and slacks got off the elevator, unlocked the door, and let us in. Gesturing to the chairs, he disappeared through a door in a partition behind a display counter. He returned, in a grease-stained, limp, gray cotton smock, with ball-point pens and applications. After we filled them out, he collected them, and once again disappeared behind the partition. In the space on my application where it asks if you were a high-school graduate and the name of the school, without thinking twice, I checked the “Yes” box and wrote “Mission High.”

We waited - - I, in what I hoped was an acceptable pose: knees and ankles together, white gloved hands folded over my white straw purse perched on my lap. I would act perky, like Mom suggested, but not giggly, and pretend to be deeply interested in whatever my future boss said. The girls chatted. The woman in the coat-dress lit a cigarette. I was dying for one myself, but didn't want to appear un-"lady-like" (Mom, again) by smoking and risk my chances. Waiting my turn as the blond man called the others one at a time into the back, I studied the neat rows of gleaming gold and silver table model Ronsons, and boxes of shiny pocket lighters on the shelves in the display case. My rivals, as they passed on their way out, said, "Good Luck!' The door in the partition opened. The blond man came towards me. His washed out blue eyes looked haunted. He took a drag from his cigarette, exhaled and, through a cloud of smoke, said, “Mr. Tilles will see you now.” As I entered the glass-enclosed office, he rose from behind his desk and shook my gloved hand. The warmth I felt through the fabric lingered as he let go. Ken Tilles was a stocky, barrel-chested man. He wore a tie-less red and white checked cotton shirt, a light blue sport coat, and navy slacks. He had thick, black, wiry hair; black hair on the back of his hands, and in the “V” of his open collar. He had an olive complexion, gleaming white teeth, and eyes like polished Mexican river pebbles. He didn't smoke; he didn't offer me a cigarette; there was no ashtray on his desk.

Sitting across from him, I thought I’d start sweating, choke - - or feel my face turn red - - when I told him I had just graduated from high school and wanted to work to save money for college, but my words flowed smoothly. I felt calm and didn’t flap my hands around like usual when I talked. He went on and on about the job, saying that it entailed selling lighters and accessories. It sounded simple enough. “If this job pans out, and I really like it, I may have a future here,” I lied. Again. Mr. Tilles told me that besides heading up the San Francisco branch of Ronson he also played the drums and managed a jazz quartet. I liked him immediately. And ignored that teensy prick of guilt stabbing me in the gut. He asked me to come in an hour early on Monday so he could explain my duties and introduce me to the crew. "Oh, so I'm the new counter girl, then? Thank you." I tried not to gush.

George opened the elevator door on my first workday, saying, “Good Morning,” and called me by name. In my high-heels (I left my hat and gloves at home), I followed Mr. Tilles behind the display case to a cabinet where a stolid, black-and-gold engraved cast-iron cash register loomed. “When you get the lighter back from the repair crew, you ring up the charge,” he said, patting the monster, lovingly. I’d never worked one in my life. He pressed the keys; they responded with a satisfying metallic ring. Black numbers on white squares sprang up in the rectangular window on its top. He pressed another key and “Ka-ching!” the cash drawer flew open, hitting him in the paunch. “I always forget to jump back a little,” he said, laughing sheepishly, his face a bright pink. “Mr. Tilles,” I explained, “I worked last summer at Mier and Franks up in Portland with my Mom and we brought our sales slips to the cashiers and they rang up the sales.” Sounded plausible. I made it up on the spot. Lie number three.

"Spoiled" continues: I master the iron monster - - sort of - - and learn from the repair crew more than I want to know about Ronson lighters. I get used to the smell of lighter fluid; I'm caught loafing.

One

SPOILED

From the time I was ten, just out of the fifth grade, I worked in the fields every summer, picking beans on a farm fifteen or so miles outside of Eugene, Oregon, where we lived. My bio-father in San Francisco sent Mom little money for our support, so it was up to me, my older sister Di, twelve, and my brother Russ, who was eight, to find work to pay for school tuition and clothes. Oscar, our stepfather, a Chief Petty Officer at the end of WWII when he and Mom married, made it clear that his salary as an electronics teacher at a vocational school barely covered expenses for a family of five. So Di and I went bean-picking; Russ got a paper route.

Mom woke us at four, fixed us oatmeal and hot chocolate, and packed our lunch. As Di and I shivered and yawned in the back seat, granite-faced Oscar, with silent Mom at his side, drove us in his Chevy sedan across town to the deserted parking lot where the farmer’s stake-truck idled, its headlights casting beams into the darkness. We climbed on to the truck’s worn, wooden bed and waved as our parents drove off. Families, couples, a rabble of unaccompanied kids like us, gangly ‘teens, and worn-looking single people in their twenties and thirties clambered aboard - - all of us white and some just a notch above the poverty line. The farmer ground his truck into gear and slowly moved off; as it rumbled along, the sky lightened to a pearly gray. My sister grabbed my hand and jostled her way directly behind the cab to avoid the wind. While she chatted up friends, I pushed through the tightly packed workers to the back and hung on to a stake as the truck whipped around the curves of the narrow, two-lane road. The wind blasted my hair into my face, stinging it. The farmer turned off onto a rutted, dirt road; the truck bounced along for a couple of dusty miles then shuddered to a stop in front of some wooden outbuildings.

I had never been away from home before. I felt lost in this strange place. Older women comforted me with soothing words and cookies. One day, alone, crouched at the end of a lane, looking for beans, pushing aside raspy green leaves that left itchy red welts on my bare arms, I heard a woman's soft voice,

"Hello, honey. I'm the farmer's wife. What tribe do you belong to?"

Her question startled me mute. I couldn't look at her. She patted my head and moved away. Because of my tan and straight black hair, she had mistaken me for an Indian (Native American in today's PC culture). I smiled to myself and couldn't wait to tell Di. Soon, my competitive spirit kicked in and it became a race between us who could pick the most beans. In early August, at the end of the season which began in mid-June, the farmer doled out our checks. I felt the power of money for the first time, holding a piece of paper with my name on it that I could take to the bank and get back twenty-four dollars in cash - - just enough for tuition. Mom scrounged pennies from the allowance Oscar gave her which she spent in second hand stores on coats, skirts and dresses, making them over for us into trendy fashions. This went on for four years. Late one August after the bean season, she sent Di and me back to San Francisco to live with Dad, in time for me to start high school and my sister to finish her senior year.

I felt my heart sing as the bus crossed the Bay Bridge; we arrived in the City on a foggy, late summer day. I took deep breaths of the tangy air. My worries that Dad had become a stranger disappeared once I saw his eyes light up with a smile and I smelled his familiar shaving lotion. He had a hotel room waiting across from his work (we later moved to an apartment on Octavia). He was a bellman at the Olympic Club on Taylor, a private club for wealthy businessmen and politicians - - anti-Semitic at the time, I discovered, when Dad told me Danny Kaye had applied and was turned down. Di lasted a month; she left to live with a Christian family in Yakima. She'd become an Evangelical Christian in Eugene and feared the City would cause her to "back-slide." I felt hollow inside whenever I thought of her and Mom. We wrote often.

Though Dad opened accounts for me at the Emporium for clothes and gave me money for school, I hated asking him for a few dollars for movies or school events; he’d turn away, open his wallet, then turn around and hand me some singles. So, the summer between my junior and senior years at Mission High, I answered an ad for a counter-girl at Ronson Lighter Company. I followed my mother’s advice on How-to-Get-a-Job, though she had had only one - - as an usherette at the Orpheum Theatre when she and Dad split up. So, for my interview, I wore white gloves, a black and white tailored suit with a peplum, black high-heels, and a white pill-box hat with a black feather sticking out. The one piece of advice I didn’t follow? Tell the truth.