By Jared Skoro
A Search for Normalcy
It was a year ago when I was last in New York. The memories I had of the City at the start of the pandemic were not ones too unfamiliar to all of us: I was squished in a Trader Joe’s. Why was I there? I never shop at a Trader Joe’s. I wasn’t there to shop or stock up, so there was no good reason for being there. Perhaps in the chaos of newly masked shoppers zipping through the aisles, the screaming and hissing of the shopping cart wheels as they darted from one empty shelf to another, directed like car traffic by tired, worn employees; I was there in search of normalcy. I would be returning to Texas soon, and all the hum and buzz of what was the City, with its colorful characters and architecture, would retreat into memory and perhaps never be seen again. This could be the last taste of what was New York. I remember writing about this moment a month later to try to understand this feeling I had, but all that came up was one word, Souviens, a very gustatory swallowing sort of word in French. Souviens. Remember.
When I returned to Texas, classes for the spring semester ended and the chaos in supermarkets still reigned. I decided to work at one until I could return to New York. I didn’t do it for some sentimental recollection wherein by being in a supermarket, I could harken back to that time where I stood in one in New York, desperately clinging to a normalcy that could never be had. That would be stupid. I only did it because it was one of the few places where I could work overnight and not talk to anyone, not get sick while on the job, and not deal with any customers. So, an overnight job at the supermarket was perfect, just listen to music on my earbuds, go into some aisle, and stock empty shelves until daylight. I applied at one nearby and easily got the job. When I went for an interview, the pay they offered was good despite still being Texas wages, and the work seemed manageable, so with everything lined up, I began working within the week.
The Supermarket
To get to the supermarket would be like getting to my grandparents’ house. Literally. Go up their road, except a little further north, and there would be the supermarket. It belonged to a chain of one of those upscale supermarkets, however it was among the plainer looking ones. It was the crown jewel of a strip mall with a towering rough-hewn bricked façade flanked on either side by a coffee shop and a pet store. The floors inside were of tan hardwood and the walls were light beige drywall. Immediately up front was the floral section, placed there in an improvisational fashion, further up and to the left were little subsections offering Asian food, a bakery, and a deli. On the other side of them was a bar with seating and tables, though with Covid, it remained empty all day and was commonly used as a breakroom. The majority of the rest of the area was dedicated to the meat and potatoes of any supermarket: the aisles. At the back of the aisles was the dairy section and a small outpost for a butcher. At the front of the aisles were the registers, run by cashiers, bagged by teenage kids, all wearing the company uniform of khakis or jeans and a black shirt with the orange logo of the company. All wore it except the night crew.
The night shift started at 9pm, overlapping with the store hours until 10, letting us work uninterrupted until either 5:30 or 6 am. My first shift began with training, but I was not alone. Two other people were hired with me. There was Pablo, a 40s something Hispanic guy who always wore gym shorts and a hat to work. He had a bulky but toned physique, gray hair, and a very chill laid-back personality. I would later learn that he was in the Army during the Gulf War, but he said that all he did was shit in holes. The other was Sharon, reddish-pink dyed hair, short and squat, a woman only a year older than me, but within that time had come clean from meth and had a child. She was bubbly and social with a tomboy attitude that came from any burp or sex joke she made. We were all trained by Ricky, the night shift lead, a 30s something Hispanic dude with darker skin than Pablo’s and longer black hair that formed a kind of bowl cut on his head. He wore glasses and was very slender. When he walked, he looked depressed by the way his legs stepped close to each other and his slouched back and lowered shoulders. When Pablo and Ricky first met, they immediately recognized each other. A year ago, they had worked together at a wire making factory, spending 12 to 15 hours there per day with no air conditioning and no time for breaks, lunch time, or safety. From hell, they had come to heaven, and they were glad to see that they both came out alright.
Learning The Routine
Ricky told us what to do. There were two types of nights. The first was a truck night. A truck would come to the supermarket, bringing pallets of goods that would be stocked on the shelves. We’d unload the trucks, take the pallets out to the aisles, break down the pallets, and stock the goods onto the shelves. If there were goods that couldn’t be stocked, we would place them on a single pallet, wrap them in plastic wrap, and store it in the backroom. After that we would face the aisles, organizing the goods on them to be presentable for the morning. The other was an off-night. There’d be no truck, so we would take the leftover goods from the backroom and stock them. We would face again, and also scan any items on the shelves that were empty so that by the next truck night, they could be filled. At 5, a manager would arrive, and dependent on the amount of work on either night, the manager would walk the aisles to check on our work, then give us the go-ahead to leave. We would leave often by 5:30 on off-nights, 6 on truck nights.
Our first night was a truck night. Pablo and I knew how to use a pallet jack from previous jobs and Sharon struggled for a little while but got it in the end. Getting the pallets out was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out where anything went. It was probably a very long night for Ricky as Pablo, Sharon, and I would pester him, asking where did this item go, or what aisle is the rice aisle, or I looked everywhere for where this item goes but there’s no spot for it followed by Ricky pointing out the spot that was hidden right in front of our faces. We all had “lunch” together at one and we chatted and got to know each other until an hour had passed and we had to get up and go back to work, working until 6.
It was strange working that first day. When I arrived, it was 9 pm and sunset, and when I left it was 6 am and sunrise. There were no windows in the supermarket, so it seemed as if time didn’t exist inside and when I went outside there was only a perpetual twilight. Sleeping at 7 was another mystery too. My father had built a shed around my bedroom window, so the sunlight didn’t bother me, only filtering very gently into my room. I slept easily that first day because I was tired from staying up all night which was a blessing because I never sleep easily.
The next few days proceeded as above, though getting easier and easier for Ricky. We slowly learned the store and became more independent in our work and met the other co-workers in the night shift. Protocol for Covid was strict. All of us had to wear masks and get checked for temperature by a manager before we were cleared for work. Customers had to wear masks too, hand sanitizer stations were placed at the front and at various strategic positions throughout the store. Of course, when you’re working alone in an aisle at 2 in the morning, you could let down the mask a little.
Constants
The novelty of the job wore off by the second week. As the routine became routine and the discovery of what went where ended, all the nights working there proceeded in a blur except for key moments that I will address in later entries. Throughout these moments, though, were things that never changed. In the windowless supermarket, the only measurement of time besides a clock or phone was the lights. They were all on until exactly 11:30 when half of them would turn off. This would make the store bright, but dim enough to not blind our eyes. They would all turn back on at 5:30 exactly. The sounds didn’t change. Occasional footsteps, a laugh from something said or sung in one’s earbud, the skidding of a shopping cart that we’d use like scooters, the hum of the refrigerators, we even had a guy that would sing gospel music as he worked. The store played music if we forgot to bring our earbuds, mostly palatable rock and pop songs, the same songs I would hear when I quit the job in November. One song was all about New York City which always gave me a smile as I stocked cans or spices or olive oil. Some nights at the witching hour, the music would suddenly transform into shamanistic flute music that made you either want to open your third eye or pass out right on the floor.
There was always an empty shelf somewhere in the store, the position of which depended from month to month. One aisle would be consistently empty for a month, then overflowing in the next. In late summer, it was paper plates and cups; in the fall, it was beans. When I first started in June, the toilet paper craze was nearing its end, so the shelves holding toilet paper as well as disinfectants and cleaning materials were always empty. It didn’t matter if we got a shipment of three or four pallets full of them, stacked so high as to almost scrape the doors leading out the backroom, it didn’t matter. It would only take a few hours in the morning for all that to be gone and ready to be restocked the next truck night. Ricky, Sharon, Pablo, and I drifted off into different workdays, but when we were together, we would still eat at 1 while the others would eat at different times. One of us may have wanted to go out to grab food from a Mcdonald’s or Taco Bell nearby, making it the responsibility of whoever left behind to unlock the front door and lock it once we’ve left and when we returned. This would carry through to workers on the early-morning shift, arriving at 3 or 4 to do the baking or janitorial work, until the manager arrived at 5.
And that was the first month, I was stocking shelves overnight at a supermarket in Texas, trying to stay away from Covid, making money in the hopes of using it for when I would return to New York. But as my little world settled into routine and appeared fixed under the automated store lights and the perpetual twilight, forces were in motion to upset this delicate balance in typical 2020 fashion.
This is the first installment in a series of Dispatches on COVID-19 by Jared Skoro.
Jared is a Gallatin sophomore from Dallas, Texas with a concentration built around English, Political Science, and Psychology. His work has previously been published in the Gallatin Review.
