The Deli Diaries

Part 1: Fucking up & Dealing with It

I’m going to try something here, see what the response is like. The last two years have been really difficult for me professionally. I went from almost being retired on my savings to broke and in debt. Most of this blog has been about books and movies, but I’m giving this a try. I couldn’t talk about it for a long time. I kept thinking it was almost over, and things kept getting worse. But they bottomed out a few months ago, and I’m trying to bounce back now. —bucky

The art of fucking up

I fucked everything up. I trusted the wrong guy and lost everything I had saved for twenty years. It was like in the cartoons when a guy pulls on the sweater thread and the whole thing unravels. Two years ago, I had a half a million in equity and a hundred grand in my checking and brokerage accounts. Now I have nothing. I can’t support myself. I live in my girlfriend’s house, not helping out like I once did. Now, I’m working at a supermarket, in the deli, and I can’t see any quick way out of this.

I’m 55 years old, and I haven’t worked on my feet since I was 40. I’m not built for it anymore. There’s a toll it takes on my flat feet, pains I have to deal with in my fallen arches that led me into the office world years ago, a sharp poking that travels up the lower legs into the knees.  Some days, at the end of the shift, I bend over into the deli case to spoon out the basil pesto bowtie pasta salad and I hear my back whispering to me that one day, it’s going to leave me, let me splay out across the trays as my last physical act before I’m bedridden. It’s the small things that go out when you’re old.

No really, I fucked this all up.

I don’t want to talk about the money. But it’s like when a total square goes into a bad neighborhood and tries to buy drugs and ends up with a bag of anything else or just flat out gets robbed—they’re lucky to be alive—everyone could see they didn’t belong there and it made them a target. Well, the same thing happened to me but in the world of investment real estate. Those people are different types of criminals than the ones I was used to, and I made the mistake of not noticing. But these criminals are much worse than anyone I encountered on the street. On the street, if you burn someone, steal their stash or whatever, expect to be hunted down and sold out to the guy you burned. Expect to die. In the world of real estate, the gangsters know how to screw you without recourse. Even if I did start killing people, it wouldn’t help me one goddamn bit. So even though everyone wants to know about the money, I can’t bear to recount it. Let’s just say that everyone got a piece of my money that I don’t have anymore: lawyers, the city government, a contractor, an architect, and a former property manager, who is still parts unknown.

And I’ve been unemployed since November 2022

The white-collar American workplace has gone to shit. I have a degree and experience, but it doesn’t matter. There are too many of us out of work who are all vying for the same remote jobs. Back when, if you had the right set of skills in the right city, it mattered—a company looking for candidates might not have more than a dozen resumes to choose from. Now, every out of work candidate in the country is gunning for the same job, and you have to fight against 1000 qualified people.  

Every day, when I applied for white collar remote jobs well within in my career scope, I also applied to every other job I could think of. I took the police clerk and dispatcher exams, passed them both, but couldn’t get past the interviews with the two cops. I tried to get in at Costco and Trader Joes but joining the mafia is easier. I got turned down by a movie theater chain. I took and passed the CBEST which supposedly allows me to substitute teach, but I heard nothing from the school district and six months later, my application still shows as “in process” on their site. I see the fast food “now hiring” signs, and I have to think about it.

The supermarket calls. Literally

The local supermarket called. They need someone for the meat department. I immediately picture myself in a butcher’s apron and a cleaver, covered in blood and standing ankle-deep in guts. But I knew it would be more of a boxcutter situation, opening pre-slaughtered meats and cutting them into smaller pieces for the customer displays.

When I was in high school, we went on a field trip to a slaughterhouse which was at once meant to give some of us a career path and to scare some of us with academic potential into hitting the books harder. It seemed like a beautiful job to me, in its simplicity, especially in hindsight of my last tech job in which the executives literally did not understand what our underlying product was. On the outside of the slaughterhouse, a mural depicting a farm of happy animals was painted, with the entrance to the killing floor being a smiling barn. They told the animals they were going to farmyard heaven before destroying their brains with a pneumatic slug. While I was on the phone, I realized this field trip had been an omen.

Raiders paraphernalia lined one wall of the hiring manager’s office. Raider fans are their own people. The Raiders were traditionally an Oakland team, then moved to LA for a time, and are now in Vegas. But for a certain generation of Angelenos, the Raiders are still their team. They don’t care that they moved back to Oakland, and approved the Vegas move, which is easier to get to from LA than the Bay Area. But there’s also a second chance culture on the team, one that gave many NFL players who became unwelcome on their old team a fresh start, which is what I needed in the workplace. I was in.

But when he called to offer me the job, he said that he wasn’t taking me for the meat department, but that he needed people in the deli. This is the last place I wanted to be. I had hoped to unload pallets from trucks and stock the shelves, preferably in the wee hours, like a grocery store vampire. And from there, I wanted to corral the carts in the parking lot. A job I could do with headphones on. Minimal contact with the general public. In other words, anything but the deli.