I sat at a desk filled with junk, trade magazines a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee from the food court. The coffee was the only thing that belonged to me; I hadn’t a place to put all my useless crap yet. I looked up at the clock while sipping on my coffee, 2:15. I had been there an hour and fifteen minutes and already I was ready to blow my brains out. It didn’t help that I killed a twelve pack the previous night.

It had been four long months working for Mu’s Piano’s and Organs at the Arnot Mall. When I first heard about the job I was almost awe struck. It had always
been a dream of mine to work in a music store, being an avid piano player. And given the past seven years of working my way through college as an Assistant Manger for a fast-food joint, this job seemed to be a turn for the better. Unfortunately things didn’t stack up the way I had planned.

“Kevin? Kevin? Kevin!” The voice of Caroline Mu, ex-wife of the owner John Mu called from the backroom.

I let out a sigh and shuffled my way to her desk. She never needed anything important. It was always, “these special orders need to be called,” or “these books need to be put away.” All she did was sit there, talking about losing golf games and plans for the weekend. Out of all the people in the store she had it made. She didn’t come in until 10:00AM, took a two hour break walking around the mall to get exercise, took another hour break to eat, called in the book orders, talked on the phone, then left at 4:00PM. All the while, she still held the “co-owner” title and took home a big chunk of the profit.

“Kevin I need you to put these books away,” she said pointing over to a stack of piano books next to a filing cabinet. The funny thing is all of those books belonged in the filing cabinet. Caroline only had to take them to the front register to put them into inventory then bring them back here. She couldn’t take the extra half-step to put them away. One time my car broke down and when I was supposed to be in at 1:00. Instead, I didn’t make it in until 6:00pm. Sure enough, Caroline had left and waiting for me were a stack of fifty books scattered all over the place. I guess during my five hour absence no one knew how to put the books away but me.

I looked at Caroline and sighed. “Okay,” I replied and began putting the books away. It was always a huge pain in the ass to get the damn things to fit. The filing cabinets were already full enough with the lesson books. On a few occasions I ripped the sides trying to make them fit. Regardless, I shoved them in there, in one piece or not.

After completing that task, Caroline handed me another pile of books with white pieces of paper hanging out them. These were the special orders I had to call in. As I walked back to the desk the owner of it had returned, Peter. Peter was the store manager. He was a short tiny man with a beard and beady little eyes that poked through the rounded glasses pressed into his head. If he wasn’t trying to sell a piano, he was making phone calls or playing expired word puzzles. By expired, he would pencil in the same ones, erase the words and do it again.

“What’s up buddy?” He said in his soft, whispery voice.

“Not much,” I replied.

He smiled and looked away. He picked up the phone and starting making phone calls. Time to try another desk. I walked next store to the Guitar Department. Over there was a small office with a desk and some guitar repair tools. This was known as Rod’s Area. Sure enough, Rod was in there. He had a long red goatee that drifted down to his chest. He always wore a tan hat that read: Mu’s Pianos and Organs. I never saw the guy without a hat. He was playing something on an electric guitar, only it wasn’t plugged in. He kept flipping the toggle switch and adjusting the tone knobs.

“You know you are not plugged in, right?” I asked him.

“It’s a habit,” he said with a smile. “So what’s up man? What’s new?”

“Ah, nothing dude,” I responded.

“Oh yeah?” He said and went back to playing.

They kept the cordless phone in there, and being absent a desk, I figured I could go off into the corner and call the special orders. I picked the phone and looked at it. Both Line 1 and Line 2 were flashing, meaning that both Peter and Caroline were on the phone. I let out a sigh and put the special orders down on Rod’s desk.

“Mind if I keep them here?”

“Sure man,” Rod said flicking the toggle switch again.

I looked up at the clock. 2:30. Great. I let out a sigh. My mouth was dry, my stomach began to rumble, and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. Instead, I sat down at a piano up front and tried to play something. I couldn’t. I wasn’t feeling it. It felt pointless.

“Kevin!” The deep booming voice of John Mu said. I stood and turned around. There he was with that blank, emotionless look on his face. He was wearing a polo drenched in sweat, jeans and a Mu’s Pianos and Organs hat. His gut hung over his belt and looked as though it was about to reach his knees. His bald head shined over the spot lamps ahead. He looked to me, his black eyes through square-thick lenses and said:

“What did you sell today?”

“Nothing,” I responded.

“Why not?”

“There were no customers.”

“Why not?”

“Uh,” I stumbled, trying to think of an answer. “No one wanted to come in?”

“Why not?”

“I guess no one wants to buy a piano.”

“I hate it when you say that!” He snapped.

He must have just gotten back from a delivery. The guy seemed to get off on them. “I’ve been delivering Piano’s for twenty years…” he would say to potential customers with a big smile and a hard-on. Who gives a shit?

“Kevin? Kevin? Kevin!” Caroline’s voice rang out through the store again. Shit. What did she want now?

“Yes?” I replied.
“Can you come back here?”

I walked back to her desk. Caroline was sitting while John and Peter were standing. All of their eyes focused on me as I came back. My hands began to shake a bit and I could feel my heart-rate jump up a few beats. Was I nervous or just hungry? I couldn’t tell.

“Mrs. Lee, who is that?” John said to me.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Like I said, I don’t know.”

“Well,” Peter chimed in, “you had her in the computer with a note that said she
was interested in buying an M425 model.”

“Okay? And?” I said, waiting for the rest.

“She came in Saturday and bought an U1 off Peter,” John said.

“Great,” I said. Yeah, I was hungry. A roast beef sandwich and fries sounded good.

“The point is Kevin, you had that woman in the computer for an M425 and she ended up buying a U1. Now, do you remember our sales training I gave the first day?” John nearly shouted.

How could I forget? He came with a ham and cheese sub, soda and sat down at Peter’s desk. I pulled up a chair. He began devouring his sub. I watched as lettuce and mayonnaise rolled down his chin.

“There are four key points to a sale!” He said spitting out chewed up food. “Introduction, qualification,” he stopped to take a sip from his soda, “presentation and close.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” I said.

“You need to qualify!” He shouted. “That woman would have bought that $3,000 piano when she really didn’t want it. Peter talked her up to the $6,000.”

“You know,” Peter added with his whispery voice, “you don’t always need to show them the lower model. If we don’t show them the higher one, well, then they will never buy it.”

“Yeah,” Caroline spurted out adding her two-cents. “Don’t be afraid to show them those upper models!”

“You need show more initiative,” John concluded.

“Yeah. You need show more initiative,” Caroline said.

I forced a smile, agreed with them and walked away. The same thing happened a few months back when a guy talked to me on the phone for three hours about a Artcore 54 guitar, then came in and bought a 66. “You need to qualify!” Another woman came in and said she had been reading a lot about electric pianos and really wanted one. “You can do so much with these features,” she said. She came in a few weeks later and bought and acoustic piano. “You need to qualify!”

People changing their minds was all a part of life. It reminded me of lunch at the food court. I would go up there craving a piece of pizza, think about the pizza for hours, but when I got up there and saw all of my different choices, I would end up with Chinese.

I went back to Rod’s area. He was still there. This time he was reading Metal Magazine, only it was an issue from 2002. A few years back Rod was in the metal band. They were well on their way, making records, touring with various groups as opening acts, until one day it all came crashing down. “I was this close to a record deal,” Rod told me one day. “Only the band was going to kill each other, plus I had a kid. I needed to be there at home for him, you know?” So now he spent his days working for The Mu, reading about himself, listening to his own music, probably wondering why the hell he was here and not snorting coke off some big breasted blonde in a parking lot. It was kind of sad to watch. The guy was still getting offers from various up and coming acts to be the lead guitar man, but he always had to decline.

The phone was free and I started to make my calls. Ring, ring, ring…

“Hello?” An older woman answered.

“Hello,” I said like a tacky game show host. It’s how I got my jollies. “This is

"Kevin from Mu’s Piano and Organs-”

“Who is this? Who is calling?” The woman spouted back.

“MU’S PIANO AND ORGANS!!!” I enunciated while screaming.

“Oh, hello. What can I do for you?”

“I’m calling to let you know that your piano book, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in.”

“What?”

“YOUR BOOK IS IN!”

“Okay.”

I hung up and called another.

“Who is this?” A man said on the other line.

“MU’S PIANO AND ORGANS!!!”

“You don’t need to yell,” he said.

After ten minutes of calls I was done. I put the stack of special orders on Caroline’s desk. She was on her cell phone, rambling on about golf and how she had an extra piece of chicken on her salad from upstairs. I looked down to her chest. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“Kevin!” Rod shouted from the entrance to the guitar room. He hardly ever came over to the Piano side. “You got to hear this drummer man!” Over there was a nice PA system with various speaker setups. Rod put in the CD and within seconds the place was shaking with hot guitar licks, enormous bass lines, insane drum patterns and screaming. Rod gave me the metal sign with is index finger and pinkie and began head banging. I always found it appropriate to do the same when he did that, and I joined in.

After a minute of head-banging I looked up to the doorway. There was John Mu, standing there, looking at me. I hated it when he looked at me; his vacant black eyes, his blank look of nothingness.

“Kevin when you don’t have anything to do, let me know,” he belted out and walked away.

“Don’t let him get to you, man,” Rod said giving me a pat on the back. “He can come off as a real asshole, but he just has to get used to you.”

“Honestly Rod, I don’t see it,” I replied. “I’ve been here what, four months? And he still treats me like shit.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, just give it some time.”

Rod went back to head banging and I went back to the piano side. John was standing behind the register, still looking at me. I could feel his eyes following me as I walked in. He simply pointed to the humidifier that was on the floor.

“The humidifier needs to be filled first thing. Understand?”

Yes, I did understand. When we first set the humidifiers up he made a big deal of how over night it gets so dry that they use up all of the water. “They should be filled first thing in the morning,” he said. The only problem with that was, I never came in during the morning, and alas, this day I did not come until 1:00pm. I guess Caroline couldn’t do it because of all of those phone calls, and Peter, well, he was too busy tackling those challenging crossword puzzles.
I took the jug out of the humidifier and went into the bathroom. There was a hose that attached to the facet and I began filling.

“Kevin? Kevin? Kevin!” Every time when I was doing something I was interrupted. I poked by head out of the bathroom.

“Yes?” I said through my teeth, trying to remain composed.

“Peter has some skews for you to put on some inventory.”

“I’m filling the humidifier tank right now.”

“When you’re done.”

“Okay.”

Skew were another word for barcodes. Every time we would get a shipment of the small stuff, like saxophone reads, guitar strings, valve oil, it was my job to “skew” everything. It made no sense to me. Peter was the guy that put all the stuff into inventory. When he did that, it was all laid out over the counter. As he printed the skews out, why couldn’t he just stick them on the items? Instead, he would put all the barcodes in the box, set it by his desk and ask me to do it.
“Oh shit!” I said out loud as I looked back into the bathroom. The tank was overflowing. I turned the water off and pulled the hose out.

“Fuck!” I mumbled under my breath. I capped the tank and set it aside. I looked up and John Mu was in the doorway.

“What happened here?”

“The tank flooded.”

“Pay better attention,” he said. "Show more initiative," and he walked away.

Well, maybe if Caroline didn’t interrupt me for the most pointless things. I grabbed a mop from the closet and began mopping. After I cleaned up the mess, I began the lovely process of skewing. By now it was 3:30PM. Time for lunch.

My lunch break was thirty minutes of freedom. It was what got me through the first few hours of work, just thinking about eating. I walked through the mall and made my way to the food court, got a burger, soda and fries, unlike my original craving for roast beef. I guess I can’t qualify myself.

I would sit there, planning out my night. Most of the time there was no planning needed; it was stop at the store, buy a twelve pack, get drunk, listen to some music and do it all over again the next day.

As I walked back into the store I noticed a middle aged woman looking at a keyboard. Before I clocked back in I looked at her and asked:

“Can I help you?”

“Yes. Can you tell me a little bit about this keyboard?”

I went on spouting out all of the information about the hundreds of different sounds, rhythms, the weighted keys, etc. She smiled, thanked me for being so informative and said she would talk it over with her husband. As I approached the computer to clock back in, John Mu was now across from me.

“What did that woman want?”

“She was interested in that keyboard,” I said.

“Did you ask her why she didn’t want to buy it today?”

“No?” I replied.

“Why not? That’s your job!”

He walked away. My fingers started to hurt. I looked down. My knuckles were white and my fists were clenched. I took a couple deep breaths to calm down.

“I have more books for you to put away,” Caroline said as she was walking out the door. She pointed to a piano where piles of books now rested.

“There are some items that need skews near my desk,” Peter said as he walked out the door. He was headed home as well.

“See you later fucker!” Rod said giving the metal sign.

“Goodbye dipshit!” I responded.

We both laughed and he left. For the next thirty minutes I skewed things and put away books. It was just me and The Mu. He sat at his back computer playing solitaire. He didn’t say a word to me.

Paul came in around 5:00. Despite getting along with Rod, Paul was the only employee that kept me mildly sane. Unfortunately, he only worked part-time twice a week. He was a man in his late forties whose main job was at insurance company. He was in two bands that played in local establishments every Friday and Saturday. When he worked, we would sit around making fun of John, or just stare out the window at all the eye candy. The one good thing about working in a mall was there were plenty of beautiful women to stare at.

“What’s up man?” He said.

“Same old, same old.”

“Everything still your fault?” He said with a grin.

“Damn right,” I said.

For the past four months I had been complaining to Paul on a habitual basis. Each time he would come in I would have a new story of what John said to me. “You’re no help, you need show more initiative, you need to work on your greetings.” The work on your greetings comment was the worst one of all. He ripped into to me for saying: How’s it going? “A SIMPLE HELLO WILL DO!” John busted out at me one day. Paul said that out of all the sales associates that have come through, I was definitely treated the worst, and he didn’t know why. I didn’t know why myself either.

When Paul walked in John came over to let us know he had to go, but would be back around 8:00PM. Before he left he handed me a list of names and numbers.

“This is a list of people that have rented band instruments off of us in the past year. I want you to call them to see if they are interested in piano lessons.”

In the back of the store were six studios. Different teachers of instruments paid John studio rent to teach in the back. Anyway, Caroline and John got together one day and decided they needed to tap the band kids to see if they wanted to learn the piano. If they did, we could get them to sign up in the store and sell them pianos. The idea wasn’t bad, but to cold call all of these people? That didn’t seem like a good idea, but what did I know?

“Okay,” I said.

“Remember, we want them to take lessons and buy pianos. They are thirty percent off right now. Drive that point home. I’ll see you both at 8:00. Goodbye.”

He left. Paul looked at me, gave me a serious look. “Drive that point home!” He said mocking John’s voice. We both had a laugh. He went into the guitar area and started wailing on a guitar. I went to Peter’s desk and began making phone calls.

“Hello, this is Kevin from Mu’s Pianos and-”

“Who is this?”

“KEVIN FROM MU’S PIANO AND ORGANS!!!”

“Oh! Hello.”

“I have on record that you rented a trumpet from us a few months ago.”

“Yeah?”

“How’s that going?”

“Good.”

“Great,” I said. Now the pushy part. “We were also wondering if your son or daughter would be interested in Piano Lessons. We currently have pianos for sale by thirty-”

“No thanks,” and the line was dead.

After an hour of calling I made it through the list with no success. Paul came out of the guitar room and looked over to me.

“Wow. It’s fucking dead tonight.”

“It’s been dead all day,” I said. “This is bullshit.”

“What?”

“This fucking list.”

“Well, you know John and Caroline.”

“I don’t think I can take too much more of this.”

“Try to make it through Christmas, man. There’s a lot of money to be made on commission.”

“Nope,” I said mocking John. “I don’t qualify people.”

“Who said that?”

“John.”

“What a dick.”

“Rod keeps telling me that he just has to get used to me.”

“Yeah, and that takes about three years.”

“Well fuck that.”

John came walking in shortly after, a half-hour earlier than we thought he would. He picked up a few papers on his desk, and came up to Paul and me.

“Well guys, I’m going home. I’m tired.”

“Okay John, see you later,” Paul said and walked away.

“How did you make out?” John looked at me with that hard line glare. “Any potential customers?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“No one is interested.”

“I gave you a specific protocol to follow, and you didn’t get one customer?”

“No.”

“You need to show more initiative! I want you to keep calling and leave me a note on how it went. Goodnight.”

He left again. As soon as he left I tore the list up and threw it in the waste paper basket. My fist came crashing down on the desk. I am not showing initiative? How is it my problem if these people don’t answer their phones, or don’t want piano lessons?

I stood up and began pacing, trying to cool off. By now, Paul had noticed and came back into the other room.

“What happened man?”

“John!”

“He just had to get one last dig in on you, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck man, you need to start looking for another job. Just try to make it through Christmas.”

“I don’t think I can man.”

I took a seat back at Peter’s desk. Paul went to looking out the window. Every so often he would point out a girl in a skirt, but I didn’t care. I was too heated. I sat there, thinking about my job as a fast-food manager. Even with all the angry fat people in the drive-thru, the pill-heads who cooked fries and the toothless managers who got knocked up in their teens, never have I been treated so poorly.

“I’m done,” I said.

“What? Dude, come on. Don’t let John get to you.”

“No,” I said. “I’m done.”

“Well, you’re not going to leave now are you? We still have twenty minutes?”

“No. I am going to fill the humidifiers.”

“Okay.”

I took the tank that I filled early today and brought into the bathroom. It was
now half-full. I unzipped my pants, aimed and let it go. I smiled as I watched the tank fill. I twisted the cap on, brought it out and put it back in. I couldn’t help but laugh.

“What did you do?” Paul said.

“You’ll find out tomorrow.”

We closed down the computer, closed the gate and stood outside the store. We headed toward the parking lot.

“So I will see you tomorrow?” Paul asked.

“No, you won’t.”

“Your quitting?”

“Yes.”

“Damn man. What are you going to do?”

“Drink beer, read some books, anything but waste another minute here.”

“Well, you’ll have to come back and visit.”

“I don’t think that will ever be allowed.”

We got into our respected cars and drove home. The next day I had a series of messages. Some were from Caroline, which sounded like she was in tears: “Kevin, I feel there is a place for you here. You should have least told us if you were having a problem.” The final message was from John Mu. “I don’t know what your worthless ass did to my humidifier, but you are not ever allowed in my store again!” I deleted the messages, had a beer and went back to bed.

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