The Company Picnic
My dad worked for the company store. It was called Sears, officially Sears, Roebuck and Company, on paydays a few other choice names.
My father sold furnaces at Sears for commission. I don’t know about other folks’ families, but ours didn’t make any major purchases unless something major broke down, and, besides, people weren’t running many furnaces in the middle of summer, let alone buying them.
Sears did provide some benefits that made summers of eating beans and hash worth the while. In addition to its summer weight-reduction program, Sears held its annual company store picnic, always on Sundays, the only day of the week the store was closed. Back then, the only thing open on Sunday was the collection basket.
The Steubenville, Ohio Sears and Roebuck would rent an entire section of a local park, including the biggest shelter house, where all the big bosses wore aprons and chef hats and smiles so cheesy you would have thought your old man worked at Frito-Lay. Right out in front of the line management gauntlet stood department heads Dock and Dick, pumping hands while giving you the old I-heard-so-much-about-you line of shit and you-have-some-mighty-big-shoes-to-fill lie. They stood there pumping you with so much crap you’d think the outhouses had running water back then and your toilet had backed up clear up to your eyebrows. I would find out later their names were Art and Mike. I already figured out the store manager’s name was not Shit-For-Brains.
Besides the flies, the ants and all the seeds in the watermelon, what I remember plenty about those bucolic summer excursions were the fun-filled contests like the gunny sack races, the three-legged race, water balloon tossing and egg-spooning balance relays. The way my father and his-co-workers and all their spouses were rolling upon the ground, laughing at themselves, you would have thought they were young once, not born thirty-something, totally uncool, their clothes way out of style.
Your family had to stay to the end of the company picnic if you wanted to take home any of the door prizes, of course, only after the store general manager gave a speech telling how special each employee was, just like one big happy family. Then the employees would reciprocate their appreciation by laughing at all of the GM’s jokes. The way they were rolling upon the ground, howling, clutching their bellies, slapping themselves, you would have thought the mosquitoes had arrived or my mom’s chicken salad finally hit them.
After the laughter had subsided to a small roar, the GM said, “You kids should probably cover your ears for this one.” He went on to tell a joke that stunk so bad we should have covered our noses, unlike the playground version, which I wanted to tell from the top of a picnic table, but there was always the promise of an after-picnic treat of a Fels Naptha sandwich.
While watching his audience show their appreciation of his wit by groveling upon the ant-infested concrete, the Big Boss Man patted the sweat from his brow, by most accounts a rarity. If the employees weren’t so stiff and sore by pretending they were young, doing all that burlap sack shit, they probably would have scraped themselves off the ground and gave the Big Boss Man a standing ovation.
I was fidgeting in the back, watching all this shit, fighting my boredom pea-shooting watermelon seeds. Those days, watermelons had about as many seeds as they did pulp. You spent as much time spitting out seeds as you did eating the fruit. The seed had this slippery texture as though coated with cooking oil but also was as sticky as a paper wad flicked during fifth grade catechism class. I would just pinch them between my thumb and booger picker and the way they would shoot out you’d have thought my fingers were named Smith and Wesson.
I stood clear in the back of the shelter house, behind a couple spooning—and not with eggs. The way they kept squirming and shifting upon their wooden bench you’d have thought they had a colony of termites up their asses. They did provide cover for me, and if I timed my shots just right, they produced about the same effect of a machine gun synchronizing bullets with airplane propellers.
These watermelon seeds couldn’t have been any more slippery had you plucked them from your nose. Some of them were bigger than a thumbnail and I suppose on a quick glance could well be mistaken for some creepy insect, like a flesh-eating beetle.
With the Assistant G.M.’s appearance, the time everyone had been waiting for arrived. This was the first occasion I had ever seen the newly hired AGM. I was disappointed his complexation didn’t match the brown nose my father said he had. It was red like the rest of them up there in the front rows from laughing at the Big Boss’s lame jokes. The Assistant was holding upside down a black felt men’s dress hat, no doubt a Sear’s brand, straight off some showcase dummy.
Back in the turbulent 1960s, so much change was going on it could make your outhouse-pumped head swim. Sears was already a forerunner of progressiveness, and locally this liberalism could not have been put on better display with its equal opportunity policies for women and minorities. And no one else would fill this dual role than Miss Toothman, who was both a modern-day woman and a bleach-blonde, because no one else stood out quite like her. She had worked her way up from behind the peanut and candy counter all the way to head of the Human Resources Department. My mom said that Miss Toothman got her high standing position from spending a lot of time on her knees and not from scrubbing the floor.
Miss Toothman appeared to have stepped right out of the pages of the Sears catalog lingerie section. Come to think of it, she did resemble a model in a few Sears catalogues I kept beneath the mattress section of my bedroom.
She now stood up in the front to read off the names old Brown Nose was pulling from the hat. The prizes were all Sears’s shit you could buy with the employee ten-percent discount, usually of automotive and exercise nature. One picnic, my dad won a free tune-up; another an alignment—at the chiropractor’s. Already some employee had taken home a door prize of a hood ornament repair kit.
Still red in the face, old Brown Nose was up there pulling names, each time having the look of a magician with his first successful attempt of pulling the boss’s foot out of his ass. He would hand Miss Toothman the ticket and she read the name of the winner. She had a kind of breathy, throaty voice I’m guessing from smoking or her top was too tight. That Sears brand pink blouse, I am certain, was the second thing open on this Sunday.
Anyhow, Miss Toothman was throating out some working stiff to come on up to collect his Sears thigh toner when my seed hit her right between the double Ds. Everybody in the shelter house saw the seed hit target. She kind of squirmed as if to face slap someone with her big boobies, causing the seed to slide down the valley of cleavage, and then down into what I guessed was a Sears brand brassier but turned out a Playtex, which I could plainly see had plenty of play to it.
Everybody was now stretching their necks to get a better look at this special entertainment. The head of Human Resources was doing some serious shaking of her human resources.
About this time, I zeroed in on the Big Boss Man and planted a watermelon seed smack, dab in the middle of his forehead, a seed as big and shiny as a rare black diamond. Now, everyone was laughing at his expense, except this time nothing’s coming out of his pockets. This time, it’s a new kind of laughter, heartfelt, everyone pointing at Shit-for-brains, covering their mouths, spazzing themselves simple. It was an all-out, full-blown, slap-happy category five laugh storm. Shit-for-brain’s turned as red as my melon-plucking hands, his jaw dropping as though he just caught his appliance manager buying a television at Big Lots. His wife wasn’t laughing, either. You could pretty much tell she spent most of her marriage covering her ears and probably her eyes. The Big Boss Man could have snapped a Sears brand cue stick in half over his knee with the gesture he made and then stomped off into the reserved-for-managers section of the parking lot. Toothsome Miss Toothman somehow collected her composure and followed behind, walking as though she had invented and patented the swivel chair.
During the car ride home, my father kept repeating, “You just can’t buy that kind of entertainment anywhere, even if you could afford it.”
Dad somehow survived the massive layoffs at the end of summer and was even promoted to the air conditioning department. We ate a lot of beans that winter, the seedless varity.
Horror Sleaze Trash 