Over drinks and books, a boss became a buddy
By Chuck Leddy, 1/8/06
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ANTHONY SCHULTZ ILLUSTRATION FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
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I worked in a Boston-area bookstore in the late 1990s, making an embarrassingly low salary and finding myself working for an eccentric boss who became a friend. He was a man with one of those dramatic Southern Gothic names — you know, something like Jefferson Beauregard Jackson.
I'll call him Jeff. He was 45 years old, thin as the proverbial rail, with gray hair, and he spoke with the slow Southern drawl of his native Savannah, Ga. Working with Jeff was like working with some doomed 19th-century poet — as if Percy Bysshe Shelley had lived into middle age and taken a bookstore job.
Jeff was an easy boss to have, mostly because he was hungover much of the time and would let you do pretty much what you wanted. If you didn't feel like shelving books or dealing with customers, Jeff would let you hang out in the backroom listening to the radio.
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After work is when I really got to appreciate Jeff. Once we'd locked the doors, those of us on duty would head to a local watering hole for drinks — Jeff always a few ahead of us. After a few shots of bourbon, he'd break into bizarre sayings such as "Whenever you do your banking, be sure to dress like a pimp."
Jeff was a gentle drunk, prone to outbursts of modernist poetry. At quiet moments, as we sat at the bar slowly getting soused, he would surprise us by quoting from his favorite poem, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." With a shot glass in his hand, he'd drawl, "Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table/ Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets." And then Jeff would drain his drink and we would finish ours, and we'd all stumble down the street to the subway station to catch the last train home.
Despite the woeful pay, I was happy to work in a place that would make room for someone like Jeff. I had always felt like an outsider myself, a misfit in love with words and stories, and Jeff appealed to this side of me.
Perhaps he wasn't a textbook example of managerial comportment; maybe he didn't set firm boundaries between manager and the managed, but he was always utterly himself. He accepted us and we accepted him, and our tiny staff formed a close-knit community.
One sensed in Jeff something extraordinary, a freewheeling energy that could be both unexpectedly inspiring and potentially self-destructive. New employees invariably thought Jeff needed psychiatric attention. More than once, I was taken aside and had to listen to whispered questions about "What's to be done about Jeff?" I always told them to give him some time, that he had a way of growing on you. And after a few weeks these same employees would be joining Jeff and the rest of us for drinks after work and laughing at his stories about his days in Savannah.
Jeff did his job extremely well. He possessed refined Southern manners that reminded me of Rhett Butler in "Gone With the Wind." To customers, Jeff spoke like an Elizabethan courtier — think Sir Walter Raleigh with a mild hangover.
"How may I endeavor to assist you this fine day, madam?" he would say, bowing his head and almost curtseying in the customer's direction. He'd listen to customer complaints with his hands clasped and with such rapt attention, as if pleasing that particular customer was the only thing that mattered to him. After a few minutes with Jeff, even the most irate customer would be apologizing to him for getting out of control. I watched and learned.
Some of the customers could be quite challenging. They'd walk up to the service desk and say, "I'm looking for a book." I'd wait a moment and then ask what they had in mind. They would say, "I don't remember its title, but it was a novel with a red cover that was reviewed in The Boston Globe a few months back. I think it was about a woman who did something she later regretted." So I'd pull out the bestseller list and suggest a few titles off the top of my head and then start checking the computer.
If all I heard back were nos, I'd call Jeff over. He would bow slightly, look concerned, say "how do you do this fine evening?" and then listen intently for a minute. "A red cover, ha? Well, that surely does sound familiar. Yes indeed. She did something she later regretted? Well, I can certainly identify with that plotline." Somehow, even if Jeff had persuaded them to purchase something else, the customer always left happy. Jeff was a master of dealing with the lost and confused people who walked into the store. Probably because he was one of them himself.
When it got slow after 8 p.m. Jeff would tell us about his days in Savannah and all the strange characters he'd befriended there. One was a retired British stage actress who owned numerous cats. She'd named each one after a character from Shakespeare. Jeff would rub his hands together and tell us how "that Iago surely would cause a lot of trouble scratching up the couch, but that Desdemona was the worst hellcat you could imagine. She'd jump up on the coffee table and knock over our cocktail glasses."
His time in Savannah sounded like one long bender. Jeff had even worked in a liquor store there, but left after a few months. I never asked him why. Of course, I worried about Jeff's drinking problem and often wondered what caused it. Maybe it was loneliness, some tragic inability to connect with others. I tried not to think these thoughts too much, and I never spoke of them to Jeff. He was ridiculously well-read and absurdly overqualified for his job, yet living alone in a single room. He made maybe $9 per hour. The least I could do was respect his silence about whatever unspoken pain he might be harboring. I visited him sometimes at his apartment and the place was strewn with empty beer cans. I drank with him a few times, but I'd always try to leave before he started talking about the banking habits of pimps or doing his T.S. Eliot impression in that world-weary voice of his.
I left the bookstore after three years, and took a job that paid twice my bookstore salary. I worked on the 14th floor in a gray cubicle and typed all day in front of a computer monitor. I sat beneath fluorescent lights and answered e-mails and typed memos. Nobody in my new office had befriended eccentric British actresses or would quote from T.S. Eliot. My boss generally communicated with me through e-mail, even though his office was nearby. We had long meetings every Tuesday morning in which I was encouraged to "think outside the box," "leverage core competencies," and "proactively seek opportunities for synergy." I never quite knew what any of it meant, so I'd doodle in my notebook and nod my head.
I went back to the bookstore a few times, but things weren't the same. Jeff had left for New York, where he worked in another bookstore. I visited him there a few weekends. He was again living in a single room. We'd walk around Greenwich Village and go from bar to bar, drinking two beers in each, while talking about the old days.
Jeff was as funny and vaguely melancholy as ever. And I've never had another boss even remotely like him since.
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