Chapter Three

I have never been as skilled as others when it comes to sleeping on airplanes. In fact, it’s an absolute marvel to me how anyone manages to pull it off. Lucky me to have been wedged between two exceptionally fat examples of these marvels on the six-hour flight all the way to the airport in Chicago. When I had learned that my travel would be without layovers, I had been relieved, but honestly, I would have preferred it when all was said and done. It would have at least given me a chance for a do-over.

Serving as a head pillow and drool catcher for two massively overweight businessmen did nothing to alleviate my anxiety over the upcoming job I had to look forward to. Going through the files Shelby had given me, I started to get a rough idea about what I was dealing with.

The primary target would most certainly be the flagship store where the decisions were made that affected all the other locations. Despite being the largest, most expensive and most pivotal location, the flagship store was the branch that most consistently stayed in the red each month. I developed a working theory that this accounted for the failure of the chain. They say a chain is as strong as its weakest link, but in this case, the weakest link was also the biggest link.

The general manager of this place was an individual by the name of Cassie Bobeck. Under her were managers of each of the five departments: front end, deli, produce, dry goods, and maintenance. Each one branched into their own chain of command.

This sense of bureaucracy can’t be helping, I thought to myself and made a note saying as much.

Like all my notes, I wrote this one in code. I did out of habit for two reasons: the shorthand saved time and space while keeping my notes relatively uncluttered and also due to my long standing but now validated paranoia. Even though Nicholas Green was going to be nowhere near me, I didn’t want to risk anything with anyone, especially in unfamiliar territory.

A little bit of jet lag hit, and I could have sworn we dropped twenty feet in the air. The men sleeping on me didn’t even flinch in their sleep. It was annoying having to ride coach, but I understood the need to save money. However, what I couldn’t understand was the need to put me on one of the worst airlines in the country. Was that really necessary? The company must have saved twenty dollars, tops.

Sugar! Was the pseudo curse I whispered in my brain as I gritted my teeth.  It was going to be exceptionally difficult to work on this flight… Oh yeah, also I was hoping not to die in a fiery blaze if it just so happened to drop out of the sky in the middle of Tennessee or something. At least I would get one nice night in a Chicago hotel before I drove the company car up north the next day. I allowed myself to shut my eyes for a moment and visualize that beautiful double bed uniform to all chain hotels across the country. For that night and that night alone, I would be able to shut the curtains and pretend that I was still on the West coast.

My eyes popped back open. It was time to get back to work. I certainly wouldn’t be able to enjoy that experience if I had more paperwork to go over while I was there.

It wasn’t until I got down to the nitty gritty of things that I began to see serious flaws in Fresh Face’s infrastructure. Their employee retention rate was abysmal at the entry rate. Most of my clients were independent shops and thus didn’t need very many low-level employees. However, the ones that did require a large amount of them didn’t have any turnover rates to brag about (typical California teens who were bound to drop the part time job in order to use that surf board they had purchased with the earnings from said part time job).

That said, the part timers at the Fresh Face Co-Op made those teens look like pensioners! The average retention rate for an entry level employee there was five weeks. That was barely more than a month. It wasn’t any wonder either. The Co-Op paid a starting hourly wage that was fifty cents more than the minimum wage for Wisconsin (aggressively low, even for a midwestern state) but after all the wage deductions, these employees made a dollar less than minimum wage before taxes.

Looking at the deductions, I was disgusted. They deducted for uniforms, nametags, and the replacement of either should they be lost or damaged and at extremely exorbitant prices that I knew did not equal the cost of the item. Then there was the matter of union dues.

The union can’t be all that effective if they can’t stop their members from getting their wages assaulted for a flipping piece of plastic! I thought angrily to myself.

To add to my shock, I realized that nearly all the people in the managerial position had six figure salaries, not to mention five weeks of paid vacation a year and countless paid sick days! This had to stop, and it had to stop as soon as I got there. My blood curdled at the thought of who was so desperate that they applied to work part time at such a place.

One of the men seated next to me fell into a deeper sleep and allowed his raw, roast-beef-looking head loll onto my chest. His drool dripped all the way down the front. I would have to burn the shirt when I got to my destination, which was too bad because it had been a really nice work shirt, tailored to my figure and everything, showing the world the nice V shape of my torso.

Even though I don’t like to think of myself as a particularly vain person, the day has a certain zeal to it when I feel good about myself that I wouldn’t experience otherwise. I’m aware of my limitations in the looks department. I’ve always envied the guys whose faces fill out and become manly men. My face has remained extremely boyish throughout the years and while most guys I know would be able to grow a rich, thick, full, beard if they went days without shaving, I can go weeks without shaving and maybe, just maybe, a single hair would poke awkwardly out of my face.

Under the lightening effects of the California sun, my hair stays an eye searing blonde and my baby blue eyes look a lot more earnest than I usually am. Needless to say, my height and my broad chest are the only things keeping me from looking like a complete and total Boy Scout. (And I use the term “Boy Scout” only because it’s more flattering than “Hitler Youth.”)

Even with my audacious use of short hand, the copious amounts of notes I had to take for the Fresh Face Co-Op cluttered the paperwork and by the time the flight had ended, I had resorted to writing more down on notebook paper and clipping it to the appropriate section of the file. It was a magnum opus of consultation notes. Even then I knew though, that this was only the beginning. I had to steel myself for the next few months.

Right as the plane landed, both of the gentlemen who slept on me popped their heads up like they had been possessed by something. This is no exaggeration. It didn’t even bother me that both seemed fresh as a daisy. I just wanted to get to my hotel room, peel off the drool-soaked shirt, hop into the shower and fall asleep to the gentle nothings of basic cable.

“Hey, buddy! The airplane’s landed!” said the beefy man located closer to the window. “Stand up!”

With a quick glance around, I established that, yes, the airplane had just landed but no, there was no reason to stand up. Whether this guy liked it or not, we weren’t getting out of there any time soon. The aisles were completely full of big, beefy, passengers who swayed to and fro waiting for the massive crowd of people in front of them to do anything resembling actual movement. That said, the fact that I had just been on a plane for six hours had rendered my brain into such a zombie-like state, possible that I groggily complied.

I was pleasantly surprised at how cool the temperature was when I stepped outside until I realized that the night would naturally be cool when one was this far up north. Then I remembered that I would be spending a good part of the winter there.

The thought chilled me to the bone. I had been in Iowa during February once. I could barely handle that and here I was, going even further North. If Iowa was that bad, Wisconsin was sure to be a frozen tundra. With all the suddenness of my trip out there, I had not grasped the reality of what staying out there would mean. I hadn’t even had the opportunity to inform my friends and family that I would be staying in Wisconsin for the better part of a year. It all hit me in a fraction of an instant and I became so incredibly overwhelmed that my head felt too heavy to lift.

From there, I just let the movement of the crowd push me along. Clutching to the files I had poured over for the past six hours without the true comprehension of what they really meant for me as a person: no more ocean, no decent sushi, winters that made deep space feel like the Mojave Desert, crushing, crippling, loneliness. The threat to my livelihood was the least of Nicholas Green’s sabotage. This was downright cruel.

Since my hotel wasn’t far from the airport, I opted to walk there.

At least the skyline was pretty; it glittered in the cool air like the rhinestones on a figure skater’s skintight leotard. A strange smell filled the air that was not altogether unpleasant. It reminded me of chocolate and only got stronger as I approached the river. Yes. It was definitely a chocolatey smell.

How strange. Perhaps it was a form of encouragement from some power higher than myself. Not that I believed in that sort of thing, but my clients certainly did, so I allowed myself the fanciful thought or two in the vein of something that they might say. It helped me gather my thoughts.

The rumblings of the airplanes taking off behind me, I made a game plan for the evening as I pulled my luggage behind me on its awkward, little, wheelies. First, I had to make phone calls to my parents and then, to my three closest friends: Jared, Shelby and Elijah…

Elijah was going to have so much to say and I did not relish the idea of relaying to him the reasoning behind my boss sending me out into the middle of the Midwest. This was the whole reason he had dropped out of the game in the first place.

Okay, I thought. Maybe I’m not ready to tell everyone in person at once. I’ll just call my parents and email the rest.

One thing was for certain, I was not going to get a very restful sleep that night. Contrary to my previous belief that I would simply be able to draw the curtains in my fabulously standard hotel room and pretend the Midwest didn’t exist for a while, it was all too clear where I was. It was cold, and everybody was smiling at me as I passed as if they were forced to do so by societal conventions.

I stopped dead in my tracks for a moment and allowed myself to breathe the air that smelled of a combination of chocolate, diesel fuel and fast food.

This is all going to be okay, I assured myself. Just get through tonight before you can get through tomorrow. After you get through tomorrow, you can get to work on all the days after that.

I headed into the urban jungle.