My Least Favorite Year

Every year, when my birthday begins to draw down on me, (it’s next Friday) I find myself flirting with an old affliction of mine – nostalgia.

I’m one of the most unabashed nostalgia buffs I know. My late younger sister shared this trait with me. We could talk about the old days endlessly, the “old days” being of course the days of our shared childhood. Now that she’s gone, I don’t really know anyone who shares this vice, not to the extent I do, anyway. There must be a community of nostalgia buffs out there somewhere, though; otherwise how would you explain the proliferation of classic TV websites on the Internet, or the existence of magazines like Reminisce, which by the way was a favorite of my sister’s?

Each year, when the autumn leaves begin to blow around, (and the older I get, the worse it gets) I, born on the 12th of October, start getting a little misty. (And actually, I have to monitor this tendency carefully, because I am prone to bouts of clinical depression, and have found over the years that a sudden, crippling surge of nostalgia, brought on, say, by a weekend marathon of Laverne and Shirley on TV Land, is often a bellwether of depression’s approach.)

But I’ve found that a dependable, if not exactly surefire, remedy for getting too sniffly about the good old days is, not surprisingly, remembering the bad old days. If I catch myself looking back with a bit too much wistful melancholy about the grand days of my youth, when I had a full head of hair, a 35-inch waistline and a lifetime that was still mostly ahead of me rather than behind, all I have to do to get the rose-colored glasses off my nose is to remember a time when things weren’t so good. Hence, just this morning, while sitting in the bathtub pondering the big Five-Two, which comes up this week, I tried to think of what year would qualify as the worst year of my life.

2002 comes to mind. How many years can you point to in your life when you were laid off, and then fired, in the same year? Both happened to me in 2002. I was laid off by one company in April, quickly found another (miserable) job, and was fired by that second company in September. As that year ended, I was 47, unemployed and living alone in Wheaton, MD. Not a good year, 2002. But it doesn’t quite qualify as worst, because the first three months of it weren’t so bad. I had a good job and a nice apartment until that layoff came along.

No, 2002 comes in second place. If there is one year in my entire life for which I cannot, try as I might, summon so much as a whiff of wistful, not one single, solitary glance back “smiling through tears,” that year is 1978.

Ooh. I still get depressed just thinking about 1978. To think of all the things that were rotten about that year, all you have to do is think of all of the things that were rotten about the ‘70s generally. Disco was king. Jimmy Carter was President. The Yankees won the World Series. Bob Dylan released Street-Legal, one of his worst albums. Sylvester Stallone released Paradise Alley, probably his worst movie. Women were dressing like Annie Hall. Cars were in gas lines. The Sex Pistols were in People magazine. Battlestar Galactica premiered on ABC. People still had CB radios in their cars and were saying dumb things like “breaker-breaker, good buddy.” The streets were full of Ford Pintos. (My father had one.) Donny and Marie Osmond had a TV variety show. Slack-jawed middle-aged males were drooling over Charlie’s Angels. I could go on.

When 1978 began, I was going nowhere. When it ended, I was still going nowhere.

You know how everyone’s complaining these days about the twentysomethings who go on and on living with their parents? I was a pioneer of that, though God knows it wasn’t something I wanted. I did try to leave home in 1978, but my attempt backfired, like just about everything else I did that year. I was like America itself, stuck in neutral and unsure of how to get out.

People who remember the seventies will probably remember that it was a period in which you heard the expression “lowered expectations” a lot. We suffered a military defeat in Vietnam. We were collectively disillusioned and made cynical by Watergate, and we responded by sticking an impotent, goober-picking moron in the White House. The above-mentioned Sylvester Stallone won an Oscar in 1977 for Rocky, a movie about a man who settles for second-best. Bad taste and blandness reigned everywhere: radios were filled with Fleetwood Mac when they weren’t blaring forth The Village People and the endless thump-thump-thump-thump of Studio 54. The world seemed to be striving for the second-rate and the dull. For it wasn’t just America. Our cold war dance-partner, the Soviet Union, was in a similar state of malaise that year. Leonid Brezhnev was alive and sclerotic, as was his government. Years later the Russians themselves would refer to this period as “the era of stagnation.”

It was for me, too.

When 1978 opened, I was five months out of college, and a walking cautionary tale from those hardnosed pragmatists, of which the seventies had plenty, (in contrast to the wooly-headed, idealistic sixties) who would insist that going for a liberal-arts major was a colossal waste of time and money. If you were smart in the seventies, you majored in business administration, which might conceivably lead to a lucrative job. If you were dumb, you majored in English and wound up flipping hamburgers. That was the logic of the era. And when I was a student at San Diego State University between 1975 and 1977, I had plenty of classmates who were going for business administration majors, usually with a certain amount of reluctance. They would rather be studying something they enjoyed, but few wanted to face the prospect of taking a Bachelor of Arts degree and then moving on to a career at Wendy’s.

I tried to hedge my bets. I double-majored. History was the subject I loved, so I majored in that. But I had also heard plenty of “Gee, what can you do with that?” from various people when I owned up to pursuing a B.A. in history, so I also majored in journalism. If anyone were to ask, I was studying history because that was what I loved, and journalism because that’s what I hoped to do for a living.

But with all of the shortsightedness that youth is so good at, (plus an inherent laziness that’s always been one of my biggest shortcomings) I didn’t bother doing a student internship in journalism during my senior year at State. Hence, when I graduated, I had no hands-on experience in journalism and therefore no prospects. I interviewed at a couple of newspapers, but when they found out I had no experience I was shown the door. After an abortive attempt to leave home that lasted about six weeks in the late summer of 1977, my money ran out and I was back at my parents’ place. I turned 22 that fall, and took the only job I could find: working the graveyard shift at a 7-Eleven store in El Cajon, CA.

And that’s where I was at the beginning of 1978. Dragging myself off to El Cajon at 11 p.m. each night, then dragging myself, bleary-eyed, back home to Chula Vista in the harsh morning light. Even at 22 I could see that this was no way to live. For this I had spent four years in college? Clearly, I had to do something else. But what? I had no work experience at anything except, now, punching a cash register and pushing a mop. I thought about it, and decided that if I wasn’t setting the world on fire professionally, the least I could do was go back to school. I re-enrolled at San Diego State as a continuing student, figuring that if I had to work at 7-Eleven, pursuing a graduate degree — even in good old, useless history — might at least give me some purpose. (I didn’t even consider going for an M.A. in journalism; to me that sounded too much like wanting to become a PhD in welding.)

It didn’t work. What tripped me up was the very thing about night work that was turning me into a physical wreck that winter. I’m just not a night person. I couldn’t make the adjustment to working all night and then trying to go to school in the daytime. I can’t sleep in the daytime, so I was constantly exhausted. In a perfect world, the thing to do would have been to quit the 7-Eleven job and just go to school. But my parents, if they would not exactly have forbidden that, would at best have expressed disapproval by way of sighs and eyeball-rolling. They were lower-middle class people whose attitude was that education was all well and good, but once you had that sheepskin in hand, you were supposed to go out and start bringing home paychecks, end of discussion. “Graduate school” sounded to them like some thinly-disguised euphemism for loafing. I dropped the history seminars and stayed on at the 7-Eleven.

In March of that year things improved by about as small a degree as they could. I took a job at another 7-Eleven store, but with two significant differences. One, the store was in Chula Vista, just a few blocks from home as opposed to the 22 miles I was driving to get to El Cajon every night, and two, I would be off the graveyard shift. The work was strictly 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Back to sleeping nights. Aaaah.

Well, that gig lasted exactly two weeks. On a very busy Saturday night, when I had a line of customers at the checkout counter, two creeps from the California State Alcoholic Beverage Control Board who hadn’t yet racked up their monthly quota of busted convenience-store clerks, sent in a 19 year-old shill with instructions to try and buy some beer. I was extremely busy trying to move people out the door, (the ABC creeps waited for such a moment of course) and I took one look at this guy and figured he had to be at least 24 or 25, so I sold him his sixpack of Loewenbrau, and the next thing I knew, through the door came these two state slimeballs, flashing their little badges at me. Only an idiot would have believed it wasn’t a setup, but the Southland Corporation, which owned 7-Eleven, had a company policy that anyone caught selling beer to a minor, set up or not, was automatically fired. The next day I was out of work, and the following month I had to go to court and pay a $55 fine.

Now, your average glass-is-half-full person might have taken a sanguine view of this development as being nature’s way of telling me it was time to move on from working at 7-Eleven stores. But my father was a passionate partisan of the glass-is-half-empty school. My father, who had come through the Depression with only a high-school diploma, was a firm believer in the idea that every silver lining has a cloud. His thinking was hopelessly mired in 1933, and to him, getting fired from any job, even a job pushing a mop at 7-Eleven, was a life-threatening catastrophe. After all, this is 1933 and 30 million people are out of work, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Like most not very open-minded people, my father was convinced that the way he did things was the way everyone should do them. And he personally had escaped from the ravages of the Great Depression by joining the Coast Guard in 1935. If the military had been his solution to the problem of unemployment, it naturally stood to reason that it should be mine, too. My father started putting pressure on me to go down and join up. Well, naturally I didn’t want to. What seventies kid did? The Vietnam war had been over for three years by then, the draft had been abolished in 1973, the year I turned 18, and in general the military’s stock was pretty low in 1978. The runner-up for Best Picture at that year’s Oscars was a snotty Jane Fonda anti-war film called Coming Home. Even the movie that won Best Picture, The Deer Hunter, was hardly an advertisement for joining the people who’d joined the Army.

But my father was insistent. One might even say exasperated. He just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t embrace such a common-sense idea as joining the military to escape unemployment. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of the military?” he demanded. I had to remind myself that he was still living in 1933, and thinking that way too.

With parents like mine, coming up with compromises was a regular feature of life, so I came up with one. The San Diego area, where I grew up, is hugely Navy. There’s a big naval base there. Many of the kids I went to school with, including my best friend in high school, were the sons and daughters of sailors and naval officers. The indirect result of all this was that the only branch of the service I was even willing to consider entering was the Navy. The Army was out. Marines? Forget it, I’m no masochist. Air Force? Nah. I don’t like to fly, and anyway in those blue uniforms they all look like mailmen. The Navy, on the other hand, was somewhat familiar, and at age 22 the idea of living and working on a ship rather appealed to the romantic in me, with its overtones of Conrad, Melville and Eugene O’Neill.

But, and it was a big “but,” there was no way in hell I was going into the Navy as a bell-bottom-wearing swabbo. I had gone to the trouble of getting a four-year college degree, and therefore had the option of going into the Navy as an officer. If you had a college degree, it didn’t matter in what subject, you could apply directly for Officer Candidate School. I told my father that this was the only way I would consider going. Since I had a college degree, I would apply to the Navy, but only as an officer. I would go in as an officer or not at all.

To my surprise, my father thought this reasonable. And I went down to the Naval Recruiting Center in San Diego and talked to a recruiter. I learned that there were four career “cones” available to would-be naval officers: aviation, supply, surface warfare and nuclear submarines. Of the four, only the nuclear submarine service was closed to me, because to qualify for that one you had to have majored in science or math. But any of the other three were possibilities. I didn’t hesitate; I chose surface warfare, what the Navy calls “ship-driving.” After all, the Navy is about ships and if I were going into the Navy, a ship was where I wanted to be.

I flunked the aptitude test for OCS. It was in two parts: verbal and mechanical. I spiked the verbal part with ease; it was on the mechanical part that I went down in flames. I’ve never been comfortable with gadgets of any kind. I even have problems with vacuum cleaners and can openers. I did fine straightening out the grammar in test sentences and matching up the right word with the right clause, but when it came to looking at Diagram A and telling which way Cogwheel F will turn if Cogwheel B is turning counterclockwise, I was out of my depth.

The recruiter told me I could come back and try again in six months, but I never went back.

So it was back to looking for a job, and my resume was still that of a 22 year-old. It would fill maybe half a page. Education, followed by six months of cash-register punching in convenience stores. Since that sort of work was the only thing at which I had any experience at all, it was natural that I should gravitate back to it. So it was that in June of that year, while poring over the newspaper classifieds, when I spotted an advertisement announcing that some guy right over the hill in Bonita was looking for a “store manager,” I sat down and typed out a letter to him on my Smith-Corona portable typewriter, still the accustomed way of sending business correspondence in those days. I learned later that my having typed the letter instead of writing it out in longhand was one of the reasons I got the job. So much has the world changed in 30 years.

If ever there was a doomed enterprise, it was The Bonita Wine Cellar. My new boss, a pus-gutted slob whom I’ll call “Bill” because he might still be lurking out there somewhere, fancied himself a very savvy businessman but didn’t know the first thing about running a store. He was an insurance salesman who had once played jazz guitar in a band. He was now “diversifying” by opening a store, and clearly thought he was on his way to riches. He wore polo shirts and sandals all the time, drank too much and when his store failed to make money, blamed me. The truth was that he started out with two strikes against him and from there things just got worse. He rented an empty store in a tiny, poorly-lit strip mall down the street from a golf course. It had been a liquor store previously, but liquor licenses are expensive and Bill didn’t have one, nor was he inclined to try and come up with the $50,000 that a new one would have cost. No, he had some notion that all he had to do was fill that store with beer, wine, soft drinks, milk, bread and a few sundries, toss a flunky in there to handle the cash register, and watch the money pour in. Anyone could see that this business was neither fish nor fowl: it wasn’t a liquor store because he had no license to sell hard liquor, and it wasn’t quite a convenience store either, because he didn’t carry enough grocery items to make it one.

Then, to make matters worse, a brand-new Albertson’s supermarket opened that same summer about half a mile around the corner and down the street. Naturally they could undersell us on just about everything. Then, to make matters even worse yet, the State of California gave the go-ahead that year for supermarkets like Albertson’s to sell hard liquor in addition to beer and wine. So, even if we had had a hard liquor license, there still would have been a supermarket around the corner underselling us on everything. Bill’s little store consistently lost money, and he just couldn’t understand why. He came to the startling conclusion that it had to be because I was being surly to the customers. It couldn’t have been anything he was doing!

Well, come to think of it, there was one group of customers to whom I was being very surly, and if Bill wanted these customers, he was even dumber than I thought he was. I’m talking about little pointy-headed teenage pukes who would hang around after dark and then come in and try to buy beer. Because the strip mall was poorly lit, I guess they figured they could get away with it. Or maybe it was because the liquor store that had been there previously had let them get away with it. All I knew was, I had already been busted once, that same year, for selling beer to a minor, and if it happened again I was going to be in some serious trouble. So I wasn’t pleasant to the little teenage pukes. When they would try to buy beer, I would run them off. And they didn’t like that. Not a bit. And since the strip mall was so poorly-lit, they were emboldened to take little acts of revenge. I came out one night after closing up and found that the passenger-side window on my car had been smashed. Then one afternoon I came to work and found a crew replacing the glass front door. Someone had pulled up when the place was closed and pumped a few .22 slugs through the window.

It was obvious who had done it and why. Adults don’t shoot up closed stores; they walk through the front door and demand the cash in the register, then start shooting. No, clearly my zit-faced friends who couldn’t get Coors on my watch were behind this. But Bill didn’t want to hear that. His store was failing and it had to be my fault, therefore the person who had shot up the front window had to be an adult customer angered by the surliness that Bill believed I was ruining his business with.

By Halloween I had had enough. He was working me 52 hours a week (eight hours a day Monday through Friday and 12 hours on Sunday) for $600 a month, and now he was accusing me of ruining a half-assed business enterprise that any idiot could have told him was doomed from the start. Meanwhile, I had decided to give independence and education one more try. I turned 23 on October 12, and a few days later I rented a one-room studio in a house in east San Diego from which I intended to go back and forth (again) to San Diego State, making one more attempt to pursue that graduate degree. The fall of 1978 was a busy time for me. I was attending history seminars in the morning and early afternoon, then punching in to work at the Bonita Wine Cellar, returning at night to my little bug-infested garret a few blocks from the SDSU campus after closing up the store.

But the bullets-through-the-window incident, and Bill’s insistence on blaming me instead of the armed pimple-faced pukes whom I knew to be behind it, had torn it as far as I was concerned. I still had no work experience outside of retail, but down the road a short distance from Bill’s not-quite-a-convenience-store was the Brookside Winery.

Brookside has long since gone out of business, and it’s too bad in a way, because it had a very unusual, should-have-succeeded business model. This company, headquartered in Old Guasti, California, sold wine, but the wine it sold was the wine it made. Since Brookside had a “grower’s license,” it was allowed to operate “tasting rooms” in its stores, each store being designed to look like an old Spanish mission. Customers could come in and sample the wines before buying. Brookside always had a huge surge in business during the holidays, and they were looking for someone to fetch, carry, move crates, sweep floors and even help run the tasting room. The job paid minimum wage, but that was just about what I was making at Bill’s store anyway, so I abruptly quit him one afternoon and went to work at the Brookside Winery the next day. Bill got angry of course, at my not giving him any notice, but I really didn’t think I owed him anything. By the following spring Bill and his big gut were gone and the Bonita Wine Cellar was just an empty store again. The property is still there, by the way, but for the past 25 years or so it's been a dry cleaning establishment. Somebody had better sense than "Bill."

The Brookside Winery was managed by a middle-aged couple who are probably dead and gone now, but just to be on the safe side I’ll call them “Richard and Lorraine Curtis.” They had ten children, Richard and Lorraine, and the reason they held the Brookside franchise was because one of their elder sons was a middle manager with the company. They did a good-cop, bad-cop routine with their employees. Richard made a show of being affable and easygoing while Lorraine made no bones about being a bitch. In fact her own kids didn’t like her. I heard one of her sons actually refer to her as a bitch once. If your own kids are calling you a bitch, well, that’s some testimonial is all I can say. Lorraine had red hair, which is apropos of nothing except I knew from my studies of history that in the Middle Ages, redheads were considered trouble. Her youngest son, “Tommy,” had his mother’s red hair and also his mother’s personality. Rotten kid. The same son who called Lorraine a bitch also once referred to Tommy as “a little asshole.” Yes, the Curtises were quite a family. The day I was hired, Lorraine pulled no punches. “The job is seasonal, and it pays minimum wage. There’s no question of incremental raises or anything like that.” But I’d had enough of Beer Barrel Bill, so I accepted the Curtises’ offer and spent the next few weeks being cajoled by Richard and yelled at by Lorraine. I once dropped a case of half-gallon jugs of claret about an inch too far from the cement floor and they smashed. Wine went all over the place. I heard about that of course. I spent much time sweeping and moving crates around with a hand truck. But the job had a good side too; sometimes late in the day when business slowed down a bit, I’d be allowed to slip behind the tasting bar and play bartender for a while. And sometimes at closing, a few of us would pour ourselves a glass of wine and relax a bit before going home.

While I was doing this, the Shah of Iran was deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini took over as ruler of that country. See what I mean about 1978? It was just one good thing after another. In San Diego, too. That September, on a hot, dry morning which I remember well because I was driving to school, had the radio on and then saw the smoke, a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 collided in mid-air with a single-engine private plane practicing instrument landings at Lindbergh Field. The PSA 727 went down in the residential neighborhood of North Park, killing 132 people on the plane and 12 on the ground.

By the time that stinky year came to an end, I was pretty much ... right where I’d been when it started. I was still doing menial work in low-level retail, still pursuing the dim prospect of a graduate degree, a class here and a class there, (I never got it, by the way) and, having made my second attempt since college graduation at living away from home, was trying to hold things together and pay my little garret-rent on a minimum-wage job sweeping floors, pushing crates and getting yelled at by Lorraine “PMS-is-my-Game” Curtis. At 23 I was obsessed with ideas of self-improvement. Hence, incredibly if you consider all of these other things that were going on, when I heard an advertisement on the radio for The International Guitar Shop, saying that they offered guitar lessons, I decided that my self-improvement should have another cultural facet to it besides studying the history of 16th-century Europe, and I signed up for guitar lessons. Somehow I even managed to scrape together 80 dollars and buy a classical guitar from a pawn shop. So there I was, as 1978 wound down to its close, practicing “Malagueña” in my one-room digs when I wasn’t sweeping out the Brookside Winery, attending history lectures or writing notes in my wire-bound journal about how I was going to be flat broke in a few weeks.

I was, too, because the moment the holiday rush ended, I lost my job at the winery. My money and means were gone, and as 1979 got to an auspicious start in San Diego, with 16 year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opening fire on a group of children playing in a school playground, injuring eight of them, killing two adults and then offering “I don’t like Mondays” as her explanation, (later to be a song by the Boomtown Rats) I pulled out of my garret and was back once again in my old room at my parents’ house.

Fortune was about to effect a slow-turning change, however. In February, 1979 I managed to get on with a tiny independent news service in San Diego, and by the end of that year I’d racked up enough experience and made enough connections to land my first newspaper job. I wouldn’t live at home again for almost 25 years, until I returned in 2003 partly to help take care of my father, who was pushing 90 by then. But 1978 was a year in my life that might as well not have happened. The surest cure for nostalgia I can think of is to imagine living through that year again. The only good thing I can think of that happened in 1978 was the debut of the Garfield comic strip, which ceased being funny about 20 years ago. Looking at the larger picture, I think 1978's having just been canceled in advance would have been as good for the world at large as it would have been for me. I’m always hearing people say that the world is such a rotten place that we shouldn’t bring children into it. But looking back at that one year, I can safely say that the world is no worse now than it was then. In some ways it’s better (Brezhnev’s gone, and so are the Boomtown Rats.) Drink up. Have children. How bad can it be? At least we don’t have to live through 1978 again. For me, bring on the Big Five-Two. The rest of you over-50's, go get those disco albums out of the attic…and smash them.