Tales of the Southwest: Can't Dance for Sh*t

  

  I did some checking before I started this story.

  I checked to see if an Albuquerque nightclub I went to 30 years ago was still around.

  Nope.

  Midnight Rodeo was torn down recently. 

  I don’t believe I’m wrong in saying Midnight Rodeo was a chain of country-themed nightclubs around The Golden West.  If not there were a bunch of nightclubs across The Great American Southwest with the same name in Tulsa, Amarillo, Lubbock, San Angelo, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and Albuquerque.

  I was new to the Duke City…I had a groovy pad…a studio apartment in an old motel on the city’s notorious Central Avenue.  It wasn’t half bad for $200 a month…it was right across the street from a Smith’s Supermarket and a movie theater cineplex.

  I had a job running heavy equipment at a construction project.

  Now it was time to find a girlfriend.

  So where else does a guy find a girlfriend than at nightclub and the club that seemed like just the place was Midnight Rodeo where Country music was the big thing.

  There was another popular club in town called Caravan East, about 30 blocks down the street from me on Central…but the guys on the construction job said it was basically a club for old farts.

  Yep, Midnight Rodeo was where I needed to go.

  So one October night I threw on my jeans, button-down collar shirt, grabbed a wad of cash, my Moose River camping hat modified with feather and decorative pins (like the one that was a tiny bottle of booze with the words “Liquor is Quicker” on it), my crepe soled chukka boots and headed for “da club,” country style.

My "Moose River" hat looked like this, except it was adorned with hat pins like these...

And I went out dancin' in a pair of these....

  I got to Midnight Rodeo and found the place packed.  I ordered up a beer from the bar and headed for the dance floor.  I thought I’d just hang out and watch for a bit.

  The most danceable country tunes of the day were blaring to a huge, crammed dance floor. 

  The thing that hit me was these people knew how to dance.  This was dancing like I’d never seen before…it beat the hell out of dancing at a hillbilly honky-tonk or bar dance back east in the mountains.

  I didn’t know what they called this dancing but it sure wasn’t like what I called “The Hillbilly Shuffle.”  The Hillbilly Shuffle was basically a guy and a girl leaning into each other and moving around the dance floor.  Nope, there was fancy footwork going on on this dance floor in Albuquerque.

  I finished my beer and made my move to do some dancing.

  “You wanna dance?” I asked a woman who looked about as old as me.

  “Sure,” said the blonde, and off we merged into the mass of humanity that was dancing round and round.

  Soon we were on the other side of the dance floor and my partner was setting me free.

  “You cain’t dance for shit,” she said smiling, and she was gone.

  “But…but,” I was talking to no one. 

  She was doing that fancy footwork dance and I was doing a mismatched Hillbilly Shuffle.

  I scanned the room again for another prospect.

  “I’ve been told I can’t dance for shit,” I said to my new prospect, a brunette.  “I was hoping you might give me some pointers.”

  The brunette looked me up and down.

  “I ain’t got time,” she said and with that she walked off.

  I found another prospect we walked out on the dance floor…she did her fancy footwork and me my Hillbilly Shuffle and she shuffled me right over to the other side of the room and let me go.

  “YOU CAN’T DANCE FOR SHIT,” came a voice, an older one that came with a cackling laugh.

  I looked around.

  There was an old woman with a beer and a cigarette.

  She was motioning me over to her table with her cigarette hand.

  “GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE, BOY,” she yelled.

  The old woman’s voice made me flash back to living with my grandmother 25 years earlier, her calling me in for supper.

  I made my way over to the woman’s table.  She leaned over, pulled out the chair next to her and patted the seat cushion with her hand holding the cigarette.  A little bit of ash fell off the tip on the seat vinyl.

    “SIT DOWN,” she yelled over the music.

  I dutifully sat down next to her.

  “I’ve been watching you, boy,” she said while chuckling.  She was probably a good 30 years older than me.  “Jesus Christ, where the hell are you from?”

  “Back east, back in the mountains,” I said with a measure of pride.

  “Damn,” she said, “I shoulda guessed.  I wasn’t far off.  I was going to say eastern Kentucky.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “That was about 100 miles west of me.”

  “You come in here with that damn hillbilly hat and those pussy shoes.”

  “Pussy shoes?”

  “Who the hell wears chukka boots anymore?  Damn.  Boy,” she said pointing at the dance floor with her fingers and her dwindling cigarette, “Look at what everyone’s wearing out there….”

  I looked out on the dance floor.

  “Cowboy boots,” I said.

  “No, not cowboy boots, BOOTS,” she looked me in the eyes.  “You go around calling a hat a ‘cowboy hat’ and your boots ‘cowboy boots’ folks around here gonna KNOW you’re from back east.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “Lose that damn hat next time you come here,” she said, “Save it for when you’re canoeing in Minnesota.  Go out and get you some ropers and a decent hat.”

  “Ropers?” I asked.

  “Boots good for dancin’,” she said.

  “What is that dancin’?” I asked pointing at the dance floor.

  “Two step,” she said, taking a drag on a newly lit cigarette.  “What the hell is that dancin’ you’re doin’?”

  “Hillbilly shuffle, I always called it,” I said.  I looked out on the dance floor and spotted this one woman who was light on her feet and doing a kind of dance/hopping around the floor.  I pointed, “What’s that dancing?”

  “Oh hell, I bet if you asked her it’d probably turn out she’s up here from Las Cruces.  They dance fancy down there.”

  The old woman took a drag off her cigarette.

  “Boy, if you’re gonna get a girl here you damn well better know how to two-step.  C’mon…” she said as she stood and stubbed out her smoke, “I’m gonna give you a dance lesson.”

  We held our hands like dance partners do.

  “NOW WATCH MY FEET,” she yelled over the music, “SEE?  DO THIS…STEP, TOUCH, STEP, TOUCH, WALK WALK AND REPEAT.”

  “STEP TOUCH, STEP TOUCH, WALK WALK,” I said loudly, “STEP TOUCH, STEP TOUCH, WALK WALK…”

  “LOOKIT THAT,” said the old woman, “LIKE A DUCK TO WATER.”

  She and I were making our way around the dance floor with me looking like I knew what I was doing.

  We made our way back to the table.

  “Well,” I said, “I sure appreciate your help.  What’s your name?”

  “I’m Sally,” she said, “I’m a retired hooker.”

  I my eyes opened wide.

  “Ha ha ha,” said Sally.  “You shoulda suspected something, not many women talk straight like me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I just thought you were a teacher or something.”

  “I thought I recognized a hillbilly when I saw one,” Sally said.  “I grew up in western North Carolina in the Smokies.  Came out west and made a lot of money ‘getting acquainted’ over the years with the boys at the air bases…Kirtland, Holloman.  I come here from time to time for the atmosphere.”

  I nodded.

  “Now tomorrow you get out and go get you some boots and don’t get no square-toed boots, dead giveaway you’re an easterner,” said Sally, “And get you a good hat.”

  Sally smiled and patted me on the back.

  I made my way through the crowd and headed for the door.

  I was done with my night on the town.

  Besides, I couldn’t dance for shit.

 

E P I L O G U E

  I didn’t go back to Midnight Rodeo.  It’s not that I didn’t like the place, it’s just that it was populated by people who just weren’t my “tribe.”  So much importance put on dancing just right wasn’t my cup of tea.

  Besides, when I tried dancing the two-step again I had trouble paying attention to my dance partner while I was watching my feet and saying, “step touch, step touch, walk walk…” in my head.

  I did find an enclave of my “tribe” in the mountains beyond the Sandia Mountains.  Back at the end of the ‘80’s the village of Madrid was home to a funky bar that had Bluegrass music on Saturdays.  I would make the drive to Madrid, kick back and listen to the tunes then mosey on back to Albuquerque.

  The construction job ended.  I got picked up for a part-time gig at a pop music radio station but my heart was hoping for a job that never came at the city’s big Country station.

  Then one night I picked up a radio station on the AM band blasting 50,000 watts of Country music joy out of Roswell…

  …and knew where I belonged.

-30-

Ain't no pins or feathers in my hat these days.....

Tales of the Southwest: A Workin' Man in Albuquerque

Albuquerque...looking east across downtown toward the Sandia Mountains

  

  I mentioned in a previous chapter that 2019 marks 30 years since I landed in New Mexico in the state’s largest city Albuquerque.

  While I came to town with a little nest egg of under $1000 it was dwindling fast…I had to put down a big chunk of change on a groovy li’l hippie pad in an old motel on Central Avenue…The Duke City’s notorious “main drag.”

  I went to the temp agencies in town and within a week I had a gig at minimum wage assembling giant-ass shelves at a janitorial supply warehouse.  When that assignment was done it was off to one of the city’s malls of the day to work with a bunch of other temp agency folks moving a J. C. Penney store from one mall to another.

  In the meantime I had my application in at the construction firm that seemed to be working on projects all over the city…“Dos Picachos Construction*.”

  As the days passed still no word from Dos Picachos.  I wanted a job with those guys because of the good money…$12 an hour versus the $4 an hour minimum wage temp jobs.  At the end of every week after I budgeted for rent I barely had enough for gas and groceries.

  There were more temp jobs:  Washing cars for a rental agency at the Albuquerque airport, scrubbing dried snot and spit off the walls of a nursing home and working a collections gig at the Duke City office of a credit card company.

  Finally the call came from Dos Picachos…I was in.  I’d be running what construction folks call a “pan.”  Most folks probably know it as an earthmover…the thing moves along the ground gathering dirt from one place and dumping it in another.

  I had to go do a drug test.  It would be my very first.

  Back then there had been stories about this food or that everyday drug making the results positive for marijuana or other illegal substances.  When the construction honchos sent me off to the medical center for the test they gave me a piece of paper with some guidelines.  It told about letting the lab people know if you’ve taken acetaminophen (read that as “Tylenol”) and some other medicines and foods. 

  Into the drug test office I went. 

  I quickly learned that the drug testing people took their drug testing business pretty seriously because when I joked that I’d been studying real hard for the test I was greeted with a cold blank stare.

  Of course if I’d given it some thought I might’ve realized the drug testing people heard that same lame quip bunches of times a day.

  The next day I reported to the work site.  Dos Picachos was doing a job for the railroad south of Albuquerque in Belen.

  I caused a little stir when I got there, what with having taken my first drug test and all I had questions…I’m also the kind of guy known for speaking before I think. 

  Before the shift, there was a meeting to go over what we were going to do on the project.  Then Jim, the foreman, asked if there were any more questions. 

  I raised my hand.

  “Did I pass my drug test?” I asked.

  All the other guys whipped their heads around to give me a stare.

  “Why,” said Ben, a co-worker, “do you take drugs?”  Ben was a young guy who had just moved to the Duke City from Silver City.  In a matter of days he and I would end up carpooling to and from the city to the jobsite during which I learned his beliefs that America was on a downhill slide and “the liberal media” was to blame.  Looking back on some of the things he talked about I suspect he was an early fan of Rush Limbaugh.  He also had an affinity for Metallica and Andrew Dice Clay.  But right then he was eyeing me with suspicion.

  “No,” I said, “it’s just that I’ve heard stories about drug tests getting fouled up.”

  “That’s just something made up by the liberal media,” Ben said.

  “If you tested positive,” Foreman Jim said, “we’d talk to you privately before the shift and send you home.”

  “Drug tests are always right,” proclaimed Ben.  “If they test positive, you use drugs, it’s just that simple.”

  And so the project began.  There were two shifts…the day shift ran from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and the night shift worked from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m.

  I was on the night shift…we worked under klieg lights and headlights.

  The crew was made up of a pretty good cross-section of the people of The Great American Southwest:  A handful of white guys or “Anglos,” the popular colloquialism for white folk in The Southwest.  There was a black guy who ran the bulldozer, a couple of Hispanic guys, a Native American woman blade operator from the Acoma Pueblo and Vicente, a Native American dude from the Laguna Pueblo.

  It was like the Chamber of Commerce propaganda said…Albuquerque was a place where diverse racial and ethnic groups work in harmony.

  Well…I wouldn’t call it harmony, but we all worked.

  I liked to listen to the Hispanic guys because of their language.  I found it fascinating how these two dudes would be talking in English and when they got excited about something they’d seamlessly switch into talking Spanish.  Spanish seemed a lot easier than the French I took in high school.

  One night the crew was sent home early.  It was Ben’s turn to drive us back to Albuquerque.  This night he got off the interstate on the city’s south side.

“Where’re we going?” I asked.

“This bookstore,” he said. “They have a peep show.”

  Ben went in.  I waited in the car…for a bit.  I always found adult bookstores a bit weird…I mean it’s not like there’s single women inside waiting for dates.  My curiosity overruled my…whatever…and soon I found myself in an itty-bitty room, strange stains on the wall,  a metal-covered window and a coin slot.  I put a quarter in the slot.

  Gears ground, the metal thingy rolled up to uncover a window that revealed a room with a lone dancer on pink shag carpet.

  Well, that dancer was missing an awful lot of her clothes.

  While hip-hop music throbbed in the room she danced over to my window and was gyrating this way, shimmying another way and twisting that way, thrusting her bare crotch and boobs at me.

  I started to laugh.  The whole thing was just flat-out funny to me.

  The woman stopped dancing.  She started laughing too…that made me laugh more.

  The laughing dancer backed up to sit on the lone chair in the room.  She missed and landed on the floor.  She laughed more.

  And then the metal thingy came down to cover the window.

I went outside and waited for Ben.

Minutes later he popped out the door.

We stood outside.

“YOU made the dancer laugh, didn’t you?” he asked. 

  “Yeah,” I said, chuckling.  “It was ridiculous. I’m in this creepy little room watching this dancer gyrate and shake on a pink shag carpet.  It was funny.  I reckon she thought something was funny too.”

  “You’re weird,” said Ben.

  “What the hell are we doing coming here anyway?” I said.  “You live with someone.”

  “Seeing this stuff makes me want her more,” Ben said.

  “And you call me weird,” I said as we got in the car and headed on in to town.

  I looked out the window.  I pondered the mostly naked chick in the peep show…she looked like she had a brain.  I wondered if she was working the peep show to pick up cash, working her way through college.

  In the days that followed we kept working on the project, dredging river dirt and building a new railroad bed with it.  The dirt was soft and mushy and I got stuck in it a lot.

  I had run heavy equipment in Florida and had no problem with getting out after getting stuck there.  This was not the case in the Rio Grande mud.  I’d get stuck and Foreman Jim would have to pull the dozer off its job and come over and push me out of the muck.

  One night I got stuck again.

  Next thing I knew a dirt clod exploded on the inside of my cab against the windshield.  Chunks of dirt flew all over me.

  I looked around to see where it came from.

  There was Foreman Jim, standing and glaring at me, his hands on his hips.

  I didn’t even think twice.

  I turned off my rig, got out and marched right up to Foreman Jim and stood there, towering over him.

  “What the hell was that about, boss?” I said loudly.

  “I’m God damned tired of you getting stuck,” he said loudly.

  “No need to throw shit at me, boss.”

  “I wanted to get your f*#king attention,” said Jim.  “You’re slowing down the project.”

  At mid-shift break I was eating and I heard the Anglo guy from the mountains talking about me.

  “I bet ol’ Stretch could’ve kicked ol’ Jim’s ass.”

  I turned to Mountain Man.

  “Talkin’ about me?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Stretch,” said Mountain Man, he called me “Stretch,” “Yeah, we thought you were going to kick Jim’s ass.  We were expecting a good fight.”

  “Ain’t no sense in that,” I said.  “I just wanted to know why he thought it was so damn important to throw shit at me.  Besides I’d probably get my glasses broke if I fought him.”

  Another night Vicente wanted to fight me…

  Just because he didn’t like me.

  “I don’t like you,” said Vicente during mid-shift break.  He was standing over me as I sat having my “lunch.”  “I’m going to kick your ass.”

  I stood up and towered over him.

  “So,” I said.  “Just because you don’t like me you’re going to kick my ass.  That doesn’t make any sense.

  I sat back down.

  “YOU DISSIN’ ME, ASSHOLE?” yelled Vicente.

  “No, Vicente,” I said.  “I don’t want to fight you.  I’ll probably get my glasses broken anyway.”

  I went back to eating.

  Vicente went away and left me alone.

  Three nights later Vicente walked up to me at mid-shift break.

  “You and I drive the same make car,” said Vicente.  “My tire’s flat…can I borrow your spare?”

  I laughed a bit.

  “Sure, buddy,” I said.  “We’ll get it when the shift’s over.”

  The project ended in January.

  There was no work for a few weeks.

  Ben called me one day, asked what I was doing.

  “Doing temp work, working at the credit card company, 5 bucks an hour,” I said.  “What’re you doing?”

  “Waiting for my unemployment,” he said.

  “I’ve never gotten unemployment,” I said.  “I didn’t know I could get it.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben.  “I won’t work for less than 8 bucks an hour.”

  I was just glad to get a job.

  That was the only work I ever did for Dos Picachos.

  Not long after talking with Ben I found out a bunch of the crew got called back for a project right in Albuquerque.

  I was not called back…didn’t know why...really didn’t care.

  I had gotten a job back in radio.

  Radio bosses don’t throw dirt clods at you.

  Not usually, anyway.

-30-

*All names changed.

Appalachian Tales: Whatever Happened to That Guy?

  I’ve only been truly challenged to a fistfight once in my life.
  I’ve worked at avoiding them mostly because I didn’t want to get my glasses broken.
  It was back when I was in the 8th grade, junior high school. What it was all about is lost in time to me. I do know I had gotten tired of the “jocks” hassling me and I stood up to a member of their clique, Reggie Howell.
  “Meet me after school, I’ll kick your ass,” Reggie said.
  “Where and when,” I said.
  He just stared at me.
  “Okay,” I said, “Four o’clock in the big field behind Berkowitz’s house.”
  Berkowitz was one of the school jocks, but he was more easygoing than the others. Berkowitz was standing there, so was Randy Thomas who liked to bounce basketballs off the top of my head when I wasn’t looking.
  When school was done for the day I rode my bicycle home, had a snack and went out to the big field behind Berkowitz’s house.
  There was Berkowitz, there was Thomas. 
  Reggie was nowhere to be seen.
  “You didn’t bring your pal?” I asked them.
  “This is all up to him,” said Thomas. “If he wants to wuss out, he wusses out on his own.”
  Berkowitz looked around and smiled. “I guess you win by default,” said Berkowitz.
  The two of them turned and walked away.
  “Maybe I won’t bounce balls off your head anymore, McGee,” Thomas said without turning around.
  And you know, he never did again. And Reggie never mouthed off to me again.
  Then one day here in the future I got to wondering whatever became of those guys. So with the help of the Internet, Great and Powerful, I looked them up.
  Berkowitz became a software information technology dude. Thomas runs one of those publication companies that make regional magazines.
  And Reggie Howell is dead.
  Reggie Howell has been dead for over 20 years.
  And he died in a fashion I wouldn’t wish on anyone: He was at the wrong end of a shotgun.
  The details were all there on the internet.
  Reggie at age 38 had become the boyfriend of a woman he worked with. She was married to an older guy approaching 50. That guy, Keith Wilson, had been in Vietnam, had worked for the railroad and become disabled.
  Keith’s wife Lorrie made it public that Keith was abusive and she’d had enough. Lorrie left Keith and took their two little girls with her.
  The old newspaper article posted in the local university’s archives was well written, it told the tale of Keith turning to whiskey after Lorrie left. “It was just to calm him down,” a brother told the reporter. “It’s not like he was a drunk.”
  Lorrie had been out of Keith’s house for about 6 weeks, she had filed for divorce and outlined the terms for child support. She was still letting him see his girls.
  It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in May when Lorrie went to a local bar to pick her girls up from visiting with their father. She took Reggie along with her because Keith made her scared.
  Two men inside the bar told the tale: They heard a “pop” outside. They went to the window and saw a man lying bloody in the parking lot. There was another man who had his over and under shotgun pointed at a woman…and he fired, she fell to the ground. While one of the patrons went to go call the cops the other watched as the man chased his screaming little girls, shooting one, then the other. The man then got in his car and drove away.
  Keith went home and as he sat in his car in his driveway blew his brains out with a pistol.
  Reggie Howell was dead, so was Lorrie.
  Keith and Lorrie’s daughters, ages 7 and 9, spent some time in the hospital but both recovered and went off to live with a wealthy uncle in Richmond.
  After reading all this I leaned back in my chair and pondered how life goes.
  I pondered Reggie’s fate.
  I pondered two children, now fully grown, and pondered the scars they must have.
  I pondered what would make a man decide that killing people, even trying to kill his own children, was an acceptable choice.
  And then I thought that I’m probably glad I don’t know.

-30-

*All names, except mine, have been changed.

Tales of the Southwest: Welcome to Albuquerque

  It’s 2019.
  This year marks 30 years since I arrived in New Mexico.
  I landed in Albuquerque with everything I owned crammed in a 1970’s station wagon and $900 in my pocket. I had decided to move to the Duke City after much thought and falling for public relations stuff that painted Albuquerque as a big city where everyone worked and lived in harmony.
  I read up on Albuquerque including crime statistics. New Mexico’s largest city had a crime rate similar to New Orleans. I thought that since people flocked to The Big Easy every year for Mardi Gras then the crime rate may not be as bad as the statistics showed. “So how bad can it be in Albuquerque?” I thought.
  In life I have learned when I utter the fateful words, “How bad can it be” I find out, whether it’s breakfast, lunch or a place to live. Its kind of like comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s joke, “What’s a redneck’s last words? ‘Hey, watch this.’”
  I quickly settled in to a cheap apartment off Central Avenue…an old motel where the rooms had been converted to studio apartments…then got right to work finding work. I went to a shop that offered a place to get my mail along with a voicemail service.
  Remember, this was 30 years ago, before cell phones were all over the place.
  Then it was time to get cleaned up for the job hunt. I went to a nearby barber shop to get cleaned up for a job interview. It was your average barber shop in an average strip mall somewhere in the vicinity of Louisiana and Montgomery in the Duke City’s Northeast Heights.
  So there I was sitting the barber chair with the barber apron on. I was looking through the shop’s plate glass window at the Sandia Mountains when I noticed a young man with his back to the glass. I watched as he raised his hands up above his head. He had a brown bag in one hand and a pistol in the other.
  I was trying to make some sense of what I was seeing when I looked out into the parking lot and saw several Albuquerque police cruisers with policemen standing in a familiar pose like on TV shows. You know, the one where they’re hunkered over and holding their pistols with both hands, each cop aiming at the suspect.
  But this was real, not TV, and the suspect was on the other side of that pane of glass right in front of me.
  “Guys,” I said with a raised voice, “I think something’s going on outside.”
  The barber and the customers looked up. It took them a few moments to take it all in too.
  Then came the megaphone voice.
  “PEOPLE IN THE BARBER SHOP, MOVE TO A BACK ROOM.”
  “I think we all better get in the back room,” said the barber. He lead the way and ushered us all into what was basically a large closet…me still wearing my haircut apron.
  A few minutes later a booming voice echoed in the barber shop. “Albuquerque police,” the voice echoed, “It’s okay, everyone can come out now.” We eased out of the closet to find a cop standing in the shop.
  “What happened?” asked the barber.
  Mr. Policeman told us how a customer walking into the bank across the parking lot saw this kid getting out of his car and reaching under the seat for a pistol. This was back in the late 80’s when the Duke City was seeing an average of two bank robberies a week. So the customer called the cops.
  But the kid wasn’t after the bank, nope, the kid had bigger fish to fry other than the bank: The pizza joint next door to the barber shop. When the kid popped out of the pizza joint, pistol and bag of cash in hand, the cops were out in the parking lot waiting for him.
  “Welcome to Albuquerque,” I thought to myself.

-30-

That High Dollar Job Moving Bodies

We wanted to move to Florida so back in the late summer of 2015 The Lady of the House and I said “adios” to eastern New Mexico and “hello” to Pensacola, Florida.

The Lady of the House grew up there. Well actually she grew up in Fort Walton Beach about 30 miles east of Pensacola. Jobs seemed more plentiful and real estate was cheaper in Pensacola. Looking back I wonder if we would’ve had a better Florida experience if we’d moved to Fort Walton Beach instead.

Me? I lived in many places growing up…New York City, Honolulu, Baltimore…I’d ripped myself up and landed in Albuquerque and Phoenix with no job prospects and was doing well within a few weeks. In other words I never had a problem in moving to a new city.

Until Pensacola.

I suppose if I’d done some research I might have discovered wages in the area were low and the city was dominated by a class of people who sought to monetize every human encounter they had.

I have never been so quantified, scrutinized and rejected in my life when it came to landing a job. Pensacola is a young person’s city. Oh, and you damn well better have your college degree if you want a decent job there.

A car dealership hired me. I sold six cars the first two weeks I was there. Then the next month when I didn’t do jack in the first two weeks I got fired. The Lady of the House and I went and bought a box of fried chicken, had a picnic on the beach and pondered my next move.

My career has been in media…radio, newspaper. It was my lifelong work yet that experience mattered little to the folks who ran those things in Pensacola.

So while I kept looking for a gig in media I kept looking for a job in other fields to pay the bills.

I gave a shot at being a call center automaton…that lasted three weeks.

I had a fun gig driving cars back and forth between car dealerships and the local auto auction but it only paid minimum wage and the schedule was just for 20 to 30 hours a week.

Then came the interview with a Pensacola funeral home…a job that paid the princely sum of $10 an hour.

This wasn’t the first time I’d ever kicked around working at a Pensacola funeral home.

There was that time I put on a suit and tie and went just a few blocks down from my west Pensacola house to the funeral home right on the boulevard.

I walked right in and noticed right away that I was the only Anglo guy in the place.

Everyone else was African-American.

“Hi,” I said to a fellow in a suit and tie at a desk handing him my resume’, “I’d like to apply for a job.”

The dude reared back in his chair and looked at me like I had just farted loudly or something.

“One moment please,” he said. He got up and disappeared down a hallway, my resume’ in hand.

Moments later the fellow reappeared.

“Sir, if you’d come right this way,” he said.

I followed the guy down the hall where he pointed to an open door.

Inside, standing with the help of a cane was an elderly woman.

I stuck out my hand and shook hers.

“Hello, my name is Grant McGee.”

“Yes Mr. McGee, I have your resume’ here,” she said, “My name is Mrs. Miller.”

I was talking with the owner, I reckoned. It was called “Miller Funeral Home.”

“Close the door, Mr. McGee,” she said.

I closed the door.

“Have a seat,” she said as she went around to sit behind her desk.

“We do have an opening for a night receptionist,” said Mrs. Miller. “Someone to greet the deceased’s family and friends when they come in.”

I nodded my head.

“Mr. McGee, I’m going to speak off the record here…”

“Yes ma’am?”

“You DO know this is regarded in town as Pensacola’s premier black funeral home.”

“No ma’am,” I said. “I’m looking for a job and I live a few blocks west of here. My wife and I moved here from New Mexico a few months ago.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Miller. “Well, you speak pretty good English for someone from Mexico.”

I thought about correcting her but then I thought about that old saying, “Discretion is the better part of valor.”

“Like I said, Mr. McGee, I’m going to speak frankly here,” said Mrs. Miller. “You don’t see anything wrong with a white man working in a black funeral home?”

“No ma’am,” I said. “Who we are in terms of race is just all about where our ancestors came from…Africa, Europe, Asia and such. Besides, I think one of the most overlooked news stories of 1997 was that the human genome shows no markers for race, per se. We are basically all human.”

Mrs. Miller looked me right in the eyes for a few moments.

“Well, Mr. McGee, your view is refreshing,” said Mrs. Miller, “But while you may not have a problem with being the only white man at an African-American funeral home my customers and their families and friends just might.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I can understand that.”

“But now this is just you and I talking. You having been in management understand that I’m not actually allowed to talk about this with you. But I wanted to be honest with you about this.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Mrs. Miller stood up as did I. She extended her hand. I shook it.

“It’s been very nice to meet you, Mr. McGee. I will give this some thought.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

I went on back home where I found The Lady of the House in the kitchen.

“What happened at the funeral home?” she asked.

“They want a night receptionist.”

“Night receptionist?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s like that time I worked the front desk of a hotel. Same clothes too…a nice sport coat, khakis, nice shirt, tie.”

“You’re not really serious, are you?”

“Sure, you know, people would walk in and I’d smile and say, ‘Good evening, welcome to the funeral home…yes he’s right down the hall’ and I’d escort the visitors down to the parlor. I’d answer phones and make sure the coffee is made and all that stuff.”

“You? Working in a funeral home?”

“Sure. You know, if someone says, ‘She looks like she’s asleep’ or ‘He looks like he could sit right up and talk to ya!’ Or I might say, ‘Yes, here at the funeral home we do mighty fine work.’”

Mrs. Miller never called me for a job. The Lady of the House predicted she wouldn’t call and she was right.

So I kept looking for work. People couldn’t understand why a man of my age didn’t have my own business. Others thought I was overqualified and yet others thought I was underqualified for their management positions.

I was doing this while I waited for the local newspaper to call me telling me they were bringing me on board in the advertising department. I interviewed with them in October, I interviewed with them in November and again in December. They kept telling me they were working on deciding when they want to hire me. By the way, I never got that job.

Anyway, back to the $10 an hour funeral home job…

It was an ad in the Pensacola paper: “Drivers wanted” it read. “Flexible hours” it read. I thought it would fit nicely with the part-time gig I had delivering cars.

I put on my sport coat, tie and all the other stuff that is “de rigueur” for a job interview and showed up at the funeral home on time.

“Do you have any problems lifting?” asked the funeral dude as the interview began.

“How much will I need to lift?” I asked, I was looking for a poundage figure.

“That depends,” he said. “Some people can be pretty big.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re talking about moving bodies.”

“Yes,” said The Funeral Dude, “That’s part of the driver’s position we’re hiring for.”

I flashed back to an incident when someone died where I worked. And yes, it was the funeral home dudes who showed up and had to take him away. I mean, SOMEBODY has to do it.

“Well how many people are sent out on the job?” I asked.

“Two people can usually handle the task,” he said.

“What about decomposition?” I asked.

He sat back for a moment. I don’t think he was expecting that question.

“I knew of this guy who was working for a funeral home in New Mexico,” I said. “Someone had died in the middle of summer in a mobile home and wasn’t discovered for days. When they went in to get the body they opened the door and the stench was incredible awful. Then they stepped through the door and the carpeting was squishy…that was from where the body’s fluids had oozed out and soaked the carpet.”

“We have body bags for that,” he said.

“And the drivers have to load the body bag?” I asked.

“It’s all part of your training,” he said.

“So when people die they express urine and feces, don’t they?” I asked.

He sat back for a moment. I don’t think he was expecting that question either.

“Well,” he said. “That happens but not that often. Our black body bags are for those who have decomposed or expressed shit because they have a deodorizing element built into them.”

It turns out it was an on-call job. When the funeral home got the call to come pick up a body the driver was expected to be at the funeral home in about 20 minutes. Attire for a body pickup was expected to be a sport coat and tie. Transporting a body to Orlando for those folks who donated their bodies to science was casual attire. And for those days when I’d be asked to drive a hearse or the flower van I was expected to dress in a suit….something I did not own.

I could be watching my favorite TV show and be called out to move a body. I could be enjoying a day at the beach and be called out to move a body. I could be grocery shopping with The Lady of the House and be called out to move a body. I could be enjoying a sound sleep and get the call. All for 10 bucks an hour.

The opportunity to take the job was on the table.

I told the funeral dude I’d get back with him.

And I did.

“Hey, thanks for your time,” I said over the phone. “But I need something with more structured hours. Thank you for your time.”

That was part of the reason I didn’t take it.

The other part was I didn’t feel like forking out over a hundred bucks for a suit for a 10-dollar-an-hour gig.

I eventually found a job in Pensacola in my career field for the princely sum of $11.84 an hour. My years of experience meant nothing, that pay rate was low… comparable to what I made when I started out in the broadcasting business. I put up with that for over a year until we had enough of the low wages and that unfriendly, money-hungry city in general.

We left Pensacola in September 2017 to return to eastern New Mexico.

I’m damn glad we did.



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