Tower

Yesterday, I had intended to take a picture of the building once occupied by Tower Records/Books/Video, but I ended up staying late at Kelly's baby shower, so by the time I left, the sky was already darkening and I decided to get home so Jeanine and I could go see The Witch (which was excellent, by the way).

As mentioned a few posts ago, I lived with Kelly and her mom at the apartment on Church Street. I hadn't paid much attention to the address where the baby shower was being held until yesterday, but when I did, it seemed familiar. As it turned out, it was at her grandma's house. It was nice to see her again. The shower was organized by one of Kelly's old friends, and she went all out to make it fun. There were games (including a baby food tasting & flavor identification one), a gender reveal cake (it's a girl, much to the excitement of Kelly's son), and lots of food. I don't usually do too well at events like this, but it was fun and relaxing.

My earliest memories of Kelly were from my time working at Tower. She was in elementary school then, and spent lots of time rampaging through the store. There was a woman named Ruby who worked there and also had a kid, but I barely remember them. Most of us were way too young and insolvent to have kids.

For most of my time at Tower, I was a shift manager, but despite my job title having the word "manager" in it, by the time I quit in the late nineties, I was only making around $7.50 an hour. This meager paycheck was somewhat mitigated by the employee discount, which meant being able to buy books and music at very reasonable prices, not to mention free video rentals. It was during this time that my musical tastes expanded in all directions, thanks in part to being able to read music magazines on the job, and thanks in part to being able to take chances on CDs due to the discounted prices.

I always joked that Tower was the last resort of scoundrels. If a person couldn't manage to get hired elsewhere (either due to personal appearance or otherwise), Tower would usually be the last option. My coworkers were often drunks, potheads, nerds, outcasts, twentysomethings looking for meaning, and just about every other kind of non-optimal employee imaginable. One guy would read books at the register, and wouldn't help customers until he came to a good stopping point. This same person was caught hiding in the loft and reading too. I imagine that he applied there for one of the same reasons I did. He liked books, not people. Another employee quit in shame when he took some porno magazines (we sold quite a selection) into the bathroom for some alone time, and then didn't lock the door, with predictable results. His friend, who was always stoned, lasted a bit longer. I remember that he spent an entire shift one day doing nothing besides working on his car in the parking lot. Sometime later, there was a day when he showed up to work without getting stoned first, and this led to the sudden revelation that his job sucked. He quit soon after.

There was a homeless guy named Kerry who used to hang out in the store, talking to whoever was running the register. I would sometimes let him sleep in the loft in our back room, especially if it was freezing outside. I would have to kick him out before closing time at midnight though. He was a strange one - an MIT graduate who wouldn't take any charity. Customers, seeing him with his overly-laden shopping cart, would sometimes hand him money, which he would hand right back. I once took him to the recycling center with the cans and bottles he'd gathered from dumpsters, and he got somewhere around $300.00 in return. He could read all of the codes on food items, so when employees at Long's drugs would throw expired items away, he'd be there waiting for them. We got lots of free candy that way. Sometimes we would engage in candy wars, throwing them at each other while "working". Once, while opening up a register to replace a spool of receipt paper, I found a peanut butter cup wedged inside.

More Tower memories to follow...