Chapter Three, Part 3: The End of Toy Story.

Harry and I at the 1953
Mission High prom.

During my stint at the toy store, Harry and I got engaged. He had red hair and freckles, a type of guy I tended to avoid, but he was charismatic and it didn’t hurt that he looked a little like Robert Redford. Still, I vowed I’d never have his kids. What if they had red hair and freckles - - and looked like me? He had graduated the year before and was going to City College. His plans were to transfer to Hastings Law. I had this noble idea to work and put him through school till I decided what I wanted to do; then when he became an attorney, it would be his turn. So, I'd keep the toy store job for a while.

One day, I had to take the freight elevator because Patty was puffing her way up the stairs. Dan had just loaded some boxes on it.
“Hi, kid,” he said, “Ya got a boyfriend?”
“Yes, we’re getting married.” We were between floors.
“Are you a virgin?
“None of your business.”
He pushed the red stop button. The elevator jerked to a halt, making a grinding, metallic noise; I fell against him. Before I regained my balance, he’d reached under my skirt. I jumped away,pressed the green button, quickly moved behind some boxes, and when the elevator stopped on the landing, I leaped out. He snickered as he drew shut the heavy iron gate. Josephine saw my face,
“What happened?”
"Dan. . . "
“Oh, that guy," she said, "Up to his old tricks again. Every new girl gets it.”
“I’m going to tell Norman.”
“Honey, men stick together,” Barbara chimed in, “It’s always our fault, you know.” She did a kind of Gypsy Rose Lee move, batting her eyes, “The way we look, the way we dress, the way we smell . . . .”
“Avoid him like the plague,” Jody said, lowering her Coke, “or he’ll try it again.” Nevermore, I swore, so I suffered Patty’s labored ascent up the stairs rather than get on the elevator with that old lech.

Over a weekend, Harry and I went to Reno and got married. Dad had moved to an apartment on Oak, so we stayed at the Grove Street walk-up. One Friday night, he took me to a City College dance. Former high school girl friends greeted me enthusiastically and asked me if I’d gone to Berkeley. I told them I was married had a sales job at a toy store; their eyes went blank; their faces froze, and when they moved away, it felt as though they walked right through me. I told Harry about it when we got home.
"That that’s the way it is in college, hon," he said, " - - very cliquey, and girls that get married are just out, period."
"My reasons for not wanting to go in the first place." He shrugged.

One day, I really had to pee; Patty was lumbering up the stairs. I couldn’t wait. I had to use the freight elevator. Dan let me on. I held a stack of cartons between us. He slid the door closed and glanced at my left hand. “Is your back sore?” he said. He must have guessed by my blank expression that I had no idea what he was talking about. A corner of his upper lip curled. “From all that--y’know.” He pushed his fist through the air rapidly and laughed as the elevator stopped on the mezzanine. I got off; bile rose in my throat. I ran to the bathroom and slammed the door. Not only did I haveto find work in a healthier environment but also a job that paid more so I could start saving money. Laura, a school friend, was a file clerk at Metropolitan Life. We'd sit over a pot of coffee and crack up over my toy store anecdotes, but when I mentioned the elevator incident, she insisted I quit and apply at Met Life.

I called the toy store the morning after payday and told Patty to tell Robert and Norman I quit, and hung up before she could transfer me to them. I rode a trolley bus down Market, got off, walked up Stockton, and climbed the stairs built into the Stockton Tunnel, which runs underneath Bush and California, up to Met Life. The building takes up an entire city block and is now the site of the ritzy, Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I found the Personnel Department, filled out an application, was interviewed by a pompadoured, wanna-be Rosalind Russell, who hired me on the spot.
“You won’t leave us and go to college will you?” she said, “Or get married and start having babies? We lose a lot of girls that way.”
“Well, I am married,” I said, pointing to the “x” I’d scribbled in the box next to “Married,” “but my husband’s going to college. One of us has to work.”
“Oh, so you’re putting him through school? Then when he’s through it’s your turn. So we’ll have you for at least four years, won’t we? Report to me tomorrow at eight, dear."

Months later, Harry and I moved into a three-room apartment on Castro and 14th Street. He had dropped out of City and was now an underwriter at Home Insurance, a property and casualty company. After dinner, while I did the dishes, he sat at the kitchen table and read aloud from a liability code manual, cracking himself up. Yes, I would work hard, save my money and go to college. The last place I wanted to end up was at an insurance company where employees thought the text in a manual was as hilarious as a Phyllis Diller rant - - but would life insurance be any different?

Next: Chapter 4, Part One, Met Life:
The Good: I meet another school friend, make new friends; cheap, excellent, subsidized lunches; boring work leads to play; the company store; Met Life integrates; coffee breaks; Eisenhower lowers taxes, my paycheck increases; Harry joins the Army. I meet another man and quit. The Bad: Another horny elevator operator; our heavily made up boss chats on the phone, applies more makeup, and chews us out; her perennially rumpled, frizzy-haired, nearsighted Mensa-material girl does it all; we can’t leave the building; the boeedom; some friends quit or are fired. The Ugly: Depressing, worse-than-school, work environment; rows of desks, aisles of file cabinets; the noise; the perennially rumpled, frizzy-haired, nearsighted Mensa-material girl; Harry has an affair.

Chapter Three, Part 2, TOY STORY

I made very little money at this job and often, close to payday, I didn’t have carfare, so I sometimes walked to work from Grove and Divisadero to New Montgomery and Market and back, at the end of the day, passing the elegant Palace Hotel on the corner, a jewel in the middle of trashy lower Market. Sometimes on a break, I’d meander through its lobby, use the marble bathroom with its individual louvered-door stalls; stop at the entrance to the dreamlike Garden Court restaurant and imagine myself having lunch there. One late afternoon, a couple of days before we got our checks, a woman came rushing in to the store. She and I were in the back while the others were busy with customers in the front. Robert and Norman were out. I wished she were a fairy godmother who’d say, “Oh, would you like to go to the Garden Court for lunch?” Dream on. She pulled a doll, still in its box, from the shelf, slapped a ten in my hand, “This ought to take care of it.” She turned and made for the back door. “Don’t bother with the change,” she said, over her shoulder, slipping away before I could stop her. What change? The doll was nine-ninety-five. The ten wouldn’t cover it; I’d have to make up the tax out of my own pocket. I crumpled the bill in my hand, hurried up the stairs to the bathroom, took off my shoe, and slipped the ten inside till I could sneak it into my purse on break. That night, I couldn’t sleep; I called in sick the next day. I felt so sure Norman or Robert would find out. I waited for the phone to ring or the police to show up. An opportunity like that never came up again, yet I questioned whether I would have taken it if it did.

At lunch break, we tried not to let Patty get ahead of us on the two flights of narrow, worn, wooden stairs that hugged the wall. There was no banister. One misstep and you could crash-land on the stocked shelves below, probably breaking lots of toys you’d have to pay for, not to mention a few bones, unless you were well-cushioned Patty. The time it took her to ascend cut into our forty-five minutes. Our break room was a windowless, fart-smelling rabbit hole that the men wouldn’t be caught dead in. It was painted a dirty apple green, a cheap and abundant war surplus paint that landlords slapped on the walls of their low-rent apartments or rooms, hence its name: Landlord Green. There was a refrigerator in the room that Patty was supposed to clean out weekly, which she did until Barbara found her box of Blum’s pastries missing. She railed at Patty, made her cry. Patty swore her innocence, saying that if she wasn’t trusted, she’d no longer clean it out; it went unused; no one dared open it. A lumpy, soiled, beige upholstered couch sat against the wall next to a sink; mismatched chairs stood in the middle at various angles around a chipped Formica table, strewn with crime, and movie magazines, and overflowing ashtrays. A tiny cubicle on the mezzanine landing, halfway up the stairs, festered the acrid-smelling “unisex” toilet. The first time I used it, I came out choking. “Next time, light up before you go in there,” Barbara suggested.

Balding, gnarled Ol’ (probably forty) Dan, the stock man’s horn-rimmed glasses perched on his hook-nose. Dan wore striped work shirts made of ticking fabric, and black Big Bens. He filled the wholesale orders and ran the freight elevator to haul down big items for customers from the floors above, where the stock was stored. Sometimes, if Patty was on the stairs and one of us had to use the bathroom, Dan would take us up. Otherwise, the elevator was off limits. We tried to convince him to let Patty ride. He said he’d have to clear it with Robert. I wasn’t there long enough to find out if he ever did.

Glenn, the outside/inside salesman, seemed an affable guy with wavy, grayish-brown hair; he looked like an accountant in his rimless glasses, white shirts, dark slacks, and striped ties. But Josephine told me that she had heard he’d served time for armed robbery and was a cousin of the bosses. In the lunch room, Patty let slip that Glenn was having an affair with Barbara.
“One morning, I saw them drive to work in the same car,” she said, picking egg salad from the corners of her mouth, “but they came in at different times. When I stay late, I see them leave together and soon’s they’re outside, I seen him put his arm around her waist.” Josephine refuted her, saying,
"No, it’s Norman. Glenn isn’t sexy. Barbara wouldn’t be turned on by Glenn.”
“But he has history,” Patty insisted, “Now, that’s sexy!”

Norman and Robert took care of business in an office on the mezzanine. We never went there unless asked; then you knew you were in trouble. I stayed out of Robert’s way and did my job. Sometimes, when business was slow on the floor, I watched Glenn write alphabetical code - - a certain combination of letters - - along with the numerical retail prices on the tags attached to items. The code was kept in a little black book. It was a mystery to me so one day I asked Norman what the letters meant. He explained that they represented wholesale prices. This system, he said, made it easier to enter wholesale orders that made up a large percentage of sales, into the books. Only Glenn and the bosses knew what it was. I thought I had figured it out. Early one morning,a new shipment came in, so - - enterprising me - - I stocked the shelves and wrote the wholesale code and the retail prices on tags. I felt pleased that I was helping Glenn and that Norman and Robert would be impressed and I’d get a raise. An hour into the day, Glenn huffed over to me,
“What the hell did you do?” he yelled, “Me, Norman, and Robert are the only ones who know the code. We change it all the time so naïve, smarty-pants little girls like you can’t figure it out!”
Later, Robert leaned over the mezzanine railing and hollered for me to come up to the office. This was it. I was going to get canned. He waited till I got inside the door then stood an inch away. He’d been drinking.
“Leave the fucking wholesale codes up to Glenn, goddammit!” he fumed, spitting in my face, “One more trick like that and you are out!” Norman calmed him down,
“Hey, Bob, the kid’s got a lot of gumption. She wants to learn the business. Leave her alone.” He opened the office door, smiled, ushered me out, closed it after me. I heard a muffled argument as I made my way down the stairs, heart pounding with every step. From then on, whenever I saw Robert coming, I’d high-tail it to the lunch room or hide in an aisle till I was sure he’d left the store. Jody, Josephine, and Barbara were amazed at what I’d done.
“I never had the guts to try figure out codes, let alone mark up stuff,” Jody said, “What made you do it?”
“No one told me not to, I didn’t know it was against the rules,” I told her, “I thought I was helping Glenn.” The only one who appreciated what I did was Norman.
“Look, doll,” he said, looking into my eyes with a fatherly gaze, “next time, you should clear it with me first before you take it upon yourself to do something you’re not sure of.” He smiled and clapped his hand on my shoulder a couple of times. “Now, go find someone to wait on.”

Chapter 3, TOY STORY, Part 3, continues:
I get married. Ol’ Dan, the stock man, makes a pass. I quit by phone and get a job at Met Life. So begins my so-called career in the insurance industry, about which I once shocked a co-worker: I told her I thought insurance was a business for men who couldn’t make it in organized crime.

Chapter Three TOY STORY

I had graduated from high school and was still living with Dad, in a third floor, share-the bath walk-up, on Grove off Divisadero. I not only wanted something better, I wanted to have my own place where Harry, my boyfriend, and I could be alone. I wanted independence. Work was the only means. Though I had majored in college prep, I hadn’t made up my mind about going. College meant I’d still have to live with Dad, or work part time and share an apartment; I never liked the idea of living with people not related to me. I didn’t want to rush or even join a sorority because of the practice of initiations, discrimination, and black-balling, nor did I want to live in a dorm.

When I was in school, Dad kept badgering me to take secretarial courses: shorthand, typing, dictaphone operation. “I flunked typing, Dad,” I whined, “I’m an artist, a creative person, I don’t want to be a secretary, beholden to a boss.”
“In other words,” he said, “a snob.”
“Do you want me to put up with bosses’ tantrums,” I countered, “shop for their wives or girlfriends, or both, on my lunch breaks; stay after work typing letters or forms, and tolerate my boss’s sexual come-ons, laughing them off, just to keep my damn job?”

Once out of school, I scanned the Help Wanted section of the Classifieds. I spotted an ad for a salesgirl in a toy store. What could be more fun! The next morning, in my hat and high-heels, I took a streetcar down Market to California Notion and Toy, a wholesale-retail outlet on Market between New Montgomery and Second Street. From Third Street east, which included Second and New Montgomery, Market Street was lined with one or two storey buildings catering mostly to soldiers and sailors on leave, or discharged now that the Korean war had allegedly ended (The Armistice lasted until November 1954). There were pawn shops, luggage outlets advertising cheap locker storage fees, hole-in-the wall stores selling cut-rate clothing, cigars and newspapers; dark, smelly bars from which bump-and-grind music pumped loudly from open doors, and greasy spoon restaurants stinking of overcooked hamburger and burned onions, upstairs were cheap hotels, and rooms, and pool halls (a description that fits Market Street west from 5th, today). Winos from the waterfront dives and other down-and-outers traipsed this area. Back then, few ventured below Third, unless you worked in the financial district, which was a couple blocks north of Market, bordered by Bush and California, Montgomery and Sansome. The toy store was tucked in the middle of the block on Market.

Norman S--, who co-owned the business with his brother, Robert, interviewed me. He was short, wiry, and as cool as a snake in hibernation. He wore expensive grey sharkskin or Italian silk suits, with ties of a modest pattern, white shirts. His hair was silver gray, receding, patterned like Ezio Pinza’s. I told Norman that I knew how to punch a cash register and that I’d worked at the Emporium part-time in high-school, so I had some sales experience. He asked me why I didn’t work full-time there. The Emporium wasn’t hiring, I explained, which was true. (I didn’t tell him about Ronson. If he called to check, I would feel bad if Ken Tilles found out I’d lied and wasn’t in college.) Norman said he would call me during the week. He called the next day and told me to start on Wednesday. Now, I could figure out what to do with my life while saving money. So, in a year’s time, I went from posh Stockton and Post, and modeling at the Emporium, to the sleaziest part of Market Street. But I wanted a job. I liked working in sales at the Emporium; engaging with customers except in the women’s half-size clothing department. I felt I'd enjoy this job.

My first day, Norman introduced me to Robert, who was boss when Norman was out of town getting new accounts - - two unlikely guys you would never think of as brothers. Robert reminded me of a Broderick Crawford character. He was big, bald with a bulbous nose; he wore owlish glasses with thick, black rims, and cheap, Robert Hall suits, or loud sports coats and slacks, and ties that made you want to scream. And his clothes were always wrinkled. He blustered around, shouting and complaining, thick lips twisting around words, saliva spraying from his mouth. You didn’t want to be near him when he was angry, which was most of the time. Norman spoke softly, never shouted, never got angry. He was kind. Smiled in a Cheshire Cat manner, like he knew his brother was a jerk. He encouraged me to learn the stock--both toys and notions. (I found out about notions at the Emporium. See previous chapter.) “During slow hours,” Norman said, “go up and down the aisles memorizing prices and where every item is shelved, so when a customer comes in, you can help him [sic: BPC era] efficiently and show him you know what you’re doing.”

As a salesgirl at a toy store, I didn’t have to lie to customers anymore; you helped people pick out items based on whom they were buying for. The place was filled with happy things: dolls, games, models, stuffed animals, baby rattles and toys for infants and toddlers, real sports equipment for kids, and toy musical instruments. The store was narrow and long. A back door opened on to an alley and parking lot, the First Street Transbay Terminal was a half-block away. Robert opened the doors at seven-thirty - - an odd time - - earlier than other stores. He wanted to take advantage of stockbrokers and insurance people who he felt would want to buy something on their way to work rather than when rushing to get home, unless they had secretaries who’d shop for them on their lunch hour. Robert was delusional. Neither Norman nor the others clued me in. These financial district folks used the store as a short cut from the Terminal and the parking lot, to the financial district. Ninety-nine percent. were men - - tall grim-faced men, wearing shiny, black shoes, white, button down shirts, dark three-piece suits, and Fedoras. They’d hustle in through the back door, push their way down the aisle - - padded shoulders and briefcases bashing against the stock, knocking things from shelves - - and fly out the front door. My first week, I would stop each one, smile and say, “May I help you?” They looked down their long noses and all but elbowed me aside. Yet, I had this dream: a rich CEO would see me on his way through the store and fall in love with me. We’d marry and live in a mansion in Sea Cliff or Saint Francis Woods. (Decades later, I learned that the feet of rich corporate heads never touch the street; to them, the idea of using a store as a short cut to get to work is beyond their imagination.) The other salesgirls called them “Back Door Men,” laughing as they clued me in on that term’s other meaning. After a while, I ignored these blustering, short-sighted drones, shuddering at the thought of what my life would really be like if I were to marry one. For the hour or so that the BDM blasted through the back door and rushed down the aisle like the bulls in Pamplona, I busied myself in another aisle.

One morning, I felt a hand grip my shoulder as I was rearranging some Effenbee dolls one aisle away from the bull-run corridor. I turned. It was Robert. “Please, help this gentleman!” he spat through clenched teeth. He apologized to the man, explaining that I was “still wet behind the ears.” This Back Door Man was in a hurry to buy something for his eight-year old daughter. Anxious to get out of there, he bought the first thing I showed him: a baby doll, a new-born, complete with bottle and layette. He grabbed it off the counter as soon as it was wrapped, and barged out the door. One afternoon, a tall, distinguished looking dark haired man, in a charcoal gray suit, asked my help in buying something for his son, a boy of twelve. He picked out a model tank. I pulled it off the shelf for him to look at. He took it in one hand and only then did I notice his other hand, hanging limply by his side. It was smooth and shiny, a sickly pale grayish-yellow; a prosthetic, made - - but failing - - to resemble, a normal hand. It was the first time I’d ever seen one. I tried not to betray my shock, yet I couldn't help stepping back and drawing in my breath.

Again, I lucked out with not having to deal with a cash register. We had a cashier, Patty, a hugely obese woman who sat at the register, behind the front counter all day, like the caterpillar sitting on a leaf, puffing a hookah, in Alice in Wonderland, or Jabba the Hutt, in Star Wars. There were three of us besides Patty: Jody, a petite short-haired, hard-nosed blonde, who, several weeks after I had quit, was arrested for check fraud (she once met me for lunch, out on bail, and wanted to borrow money. I had none. Dad had moved out, so I was living on peanut butter and crackers and walking home from work. Still, I wouldn't have given her any). Josephine was an older Italian woman, heavily made up with hair dyed coal black. She was married to a man she whined constantly about, complaining that he listened to opera on headphones all the time, ignoring her. She bought Chanel No. 5 at lunchtime one day, and later, in the break room, she whispered to me that she wanted to show me a secret. She stood up, hiked her skirt above the tops of her stockings, fastened with garters, revealing fat, milk-white thighs. I muttered something, then blurted that I had to be back on the floor before Robert started yelling.
“Oh, honey, I just wanted to demonstrate where is the best place to wear perfume,” she dabbed some on her inner thighs with fingers tipped with red-lacquered nails, “It’s here, darling,” she said, dropping her skirt and flouncing off. The next day, she was in a better mood. There was Barbara, a blowzy bleached blonde, who wore purple and red low-cut cocktail dresses to work, like she had come in from nights out, without bothering to go home first, lots of perfume, cheap jewelry, and heavy makeup. She, too, was married. She sneered sarcastically about sex, how boring it was, doing it with the same guy all the time. I wondered if when Harry and I got married, would I come to feel the same.


Toy Story: Part 2 (Continued.) Gossip - - who’s cheating on whom? Our rank workplace environment. The break room. I'm the victim of Robert's wrath trying to crack the wholesale code and almost get the ax.