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Redux – Blueline

I realized that I had a great source of material I hadn’t quite drawn on. Stuff I already wrote! Is it too late to post a story that I originally wrote three or four or more years ago? In any case, this is one of my all time favorites. By recyling this post, I also reduce your carbon footprint. Be glad, and enjoy.

You know, when you’re fourteen, there are only so many jobs you can get. Being the oldest of four boys, I think my mom was really ready to kick my butt off to a job, so I was strongly encouraged to seek employment the summer before my freshman year of high school.

Well, we have this law where, essentially, you are required to work at a grocery store, namely, a Hy-Vee store. Since you aren’t sixteen, you can’t run the cash register, so you’re basically slave labor for the Shift Managers. Most of the managers were pretty decent, but there was this one guy named Eric who was, well, he wasn’t. To get a picture in your mind of what this guy looked like, picture the cowboy in the wanted posters from Bugs Bunny – big, mean, hunched over, and “mean guy” mustache. Something like this:

He’d assign those he really disliked (read: me) to do the most menial of jobs, like facing all the shelves so that they looked full, even though we only had 3 cans of pickled pig’s feet remaining. Or, even better, stand in the semi-protected shelter on the side of the building in the freezing cold loading groceries into people’s cars.

This grocery store had these little intercom phones with a green button and red button. These were used for in-store communications – so that instead of price-checking your #10 can of K-Y Jelly, we could do it quietly. You’d just get on the over-the-air intercom, and say “Ed Grimley, Red Line”. It all sounded very official, and you’d hear it all the time. There was a little-known fact, though, that if there was, say, a very drunk person, a violent shoplifter, or a terrorist in the store, they’d get on the intercom and say “Ed Grimley, Blue Line”

Any “Blue Line” call was secret code for “Bad mojo is happening, everyone get up to the front of the store and get ready to kick some ass!”. Didn’t happen much, but when it did, it was an adreneline moment.

Fast forward a couple years. I have LONG realized that even a part-time career in the grocery business is definitely NOT for me, and moved on to better (well, different) things. It’s about eleven o’clock on a Friday night, and as sixteen year-olds are want to do, we were out cruising around West Des Moines, being our usual bad selves in the burbs. For some reason, we find ourselves down at the grocery store where I used to work. Maybe we were picking up some toilet paper to hang in someone’s trees or something (a story for another post). As we’re leaving, I get this Idea.

We drive around the corner of the building to the grocery-loading area (in this part of the country, we get our groceries loaded into our vehicles, thank you very much). This is where the afore-metioned semi-protected shelter stood. Thing is, it had a internal intercom-phone with access to the over the air intercom. I get out, pick up the intercom phone, and say in my most calm intercom-voice;

“Eric, blue line. Eric, blue line. Thank you.”

Get in the car, slowly drive by the front of the building. There’s Nasty Canasta and six of his grocery-bagging henchmen, all standing around looking mean and ready to kick ass, but also with a sense of bewilderment as to who exactly made that call.