No Longer the Liquor Girl

Three and a half years to the day, the longest job I’ve ever had (so far). So here’s a commemoration of my time working at the liquor store, rendered in the five senses.

The liquor store where I worked is Hazel’s Beverage World, themed for the Women Air force Service Pilots (WASPs). Hazel was a relatively common name at the time, but I choose to believe the the store is named in honor of Hazel Ling Yee, a Portland native and the first Chinese-American woman enrolled in the WASPs. The portrait at right is on view at the Portland Airport across from my regular gate, in Concourse E.

[Sight]

Studying, day after day, the archival photographs printed on the walls, the images of women who learned to pilot planes for the war effort. Eyes flicking up, habitually, to remind myself the location of the security cameras. Wandering through the warehouse in the back, scrutinizing the three levels of shelving, looking for where pallets of product got moved since the last time I worked. Craning my neck while I stock the shooter carousels, watching the front doors to see my favorite regulars come in. The hours and hours that I spent as a cashier watching customers peruse the aisles, watching my fellow store employees circle their sections, go into the back and pull cases, carry them out and stock them: methodical, tedious, sisyphean. 

The posters in the break room—The Who, vintage advertisements for aromatised wine, and a poster commemorating the Gundlach-Bundschu “Sonoma Valley Sobriety Tests”--and all the words that I read and wrote within view of them. I wrote my graduate thesis while I worked there. I read Denis Johnson’s short story collection, Jesus’ Son, in that break room, and I read Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had while working the cash register. 

All the maps: wine region maps pasted onto styrofoam that sat on top of the wine shelves, and the map of the Scotch regions posted in my boss’s office. Learning to identify the look in a customer’s eyes when they’re lost, practicing my tango cabaceo and raising my eyebrows to offer my navigational services. 

[Sound]

Terrible music over the store Sirius XM radio, replaced with metal or screamo or anodyne pop-rock when I walked off the floor into the warehouse. All the mornings I attempted to decipher exactly which Star Trek episode the warehouse manager was watching at his desk while the liquor team and I shuffled cases around. The hideous crackle in my earpiece of the store radio, the screech and static of employees talking over each other, the distinctive intonations and vocal patterns of each different person. The skritch of my non-slip shoes on the concrete floor, the slurp of the rubber seal around the beer cooler doors, opening and slapping closed all day long. 

[Smell]

The acrid rubber scent of my work gloves, lingering on my hands for hours after my shift. The chemical lavender smell of my coworker’s lotion that he slathered on at the beginning of every day. Must and vinegar hovering in the air near the mop sink, especially if whoever last cleaned something “forgot” to dump the mop bucket. My own stale work shirts, Nike polos that I kept wadded up in the bottom of my break-room locker. But then: learning to identify all the different aromas swirling around in the bowl of a wine glass, the way the spirit shows more of itself as it warms, cupping our hands to heat it up. “It’s got a lovely nose,” we’d say, and we’d take turns naming the botanicals.

[Taste]

Pizza on Fridays when the whole team was in, and the Italian sandwich from Snarf’s in the same plaza, and the cheap ready-to-eat salads from Trader Joe’s across the street. More booze than I ever imagined getting to taste. Single barrel picks when we’d sample five or six different high-proof whiskeys, each the same mash bill and aging process, just different barrels, different locations in the rick house, and we’d note how different each spirit could become. Nature or nurture, like twins subjected to different experiences, terroir and distinct expression. “That’s what it means for a whiskey to have soul,” Al Laws told us, the man behind one of my favorite Colorado distilleries, made with all Colorado grains. 

Blind tastings, learning to distinguish between the flavors of different cask agings, highland and lowland tequilas, rhum agricole and cognac and pisco and more. Distinguishing between carraway-forward and dill-forward aquavits. Learning about the neon red coloring agents for aperitivos: red dye, beet, or cochineal (bugs!). Trying to stay functional after staff trainings when we taste through a dozen spirits at a time, straining to maintain my composure with the sales reps who would pour us an ounce at a time and watch me loosen. 

[Touch]

The feeling of keeping my hand steady while I scribbled notes in my tiny tasting notebooks. My hands so dry, all year long, skin spiderwebbed and ashy, fingertips stained charcoal from the dust on the bottom of cases and on the metal shelves. Scrapes on my forearms and the insides of my biceps, cardboard cuts on my palms and fingertips, scratches from carrying boxes and squeezing them to keep from slipping. My work gloves unraveling around my wrist even while I wore them, the plastic-elastic thread catching on things. The heft of a handle of Titos, which we stocked fifteen times a day, compared to the delicate way we carried precious bottles out of the back when customers requested them from top shelf. Certain bottles we never took out of their brown paper bags, knowing even the sight of such rare treasures might excite customers we couldn’t sell them to.

Collapsing into the gray recliners in the break room during my ten-minute breaks. The goosebumps that would prickle on my skin when I went into the beer cooler. The stale heat rushing down from the vent over the Irish Cream aisle. The cool handles of the three-story warehouse ladder, which I learned to drag around and reposition countless times a day like it was nothing, along with the daily lifting and hefting and stacking and dolly-wheeling that gradually translated to me getting stronger, more agile, more capable. 

I loved working at the liquor store. I loved the rhythms that it allowed in my life–walking to work, begging rides home from coworkers after late-night winter shifts. Back when I was cashiering, I wrote thousands of words (reading commentaries for graduate school, drafts for my thesis and manuscript, blog posts and personal reminders) on receipt paper. 

I loved the preposterous requests customers made of me. The young woman who came in and asked for my most expensive mezcal, which she was exclusively buying to piss off her boyfriend. 
The octogenarian man, in suspenders and a newsboy cap, who asked me to help him find a box of pickle shots. “They’re what I buy every year for Christmas,” he told me, “for my wife’s boyfriend.” 

I loved working as a beverage professional and the questions that it sparked for me about experience, sensuality, referentialism (in conveying one’s experience of sensuality), as well as brand storytelling and sales presentation. And man, I loved drinking liquor for work. I loved staff trainings. I loved learning about obscure spirits and what distinguishes them. 

When Michael and I first moved back to Colorado, I really didn’t expect to get a part-time job at the local liquor store and then stay there for the next three years. But the rhythms were pleasant and, more importantly, working at Hazel’s allowed me to grow and develop my professional life in the directions that I needed. I could write and edit and review books on the side, and I did. And now that I’m leaving, I can devote even more time to editing for sneaker wave, freelance projects, literary criticism, and continuing to polish and query my manuscript. Oh, and launching a conference here in Boulder: the Thunderdome Conference, a small-scale writing conference for people who want to write really good books. The day that I put in my resignation at Hazel’s, I got confirmation from my first corporate sponsor. Leap and the net will appear. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about monetization and the economics of making art. I hope to do some grant-writing and fundraising for sneaker wave, our bold nonfiction magazine, and I’ve been soliciting corporations to support the Thunderdome, and I’ve been working with someone to seek corporate support for another project (that I can’t tell you about yet…). When I put in my two weeks, I told folks that I had to quit the day job that paid me money so I would have more time to ask people to give me money. Other than commercial, collectible art (the Jeff Koons sculptures of this world), our economic model for artists mainly revolves around artists asking people to give them money. I believe that art produces real value for society, but there’s nothing in our current economic structure that realizes that value. 

Several of the pieces that I’m working on in the upcoming months touch on this question of value, art-making, and economy. But in the meantime, if you believe the arts hold value, seek out ways to support your local artists. Please subscribe to sneaker wave! Commission artists to make you things. Celebrate beauty wherever you find it. 

And have a sip of your favorite beverage for me.