Protected by God June 13, 1985

 

You’re only as old as you feel, the old adage tells us, only some of us more look our age than others, and others almost always look older than yourself.

Jim from Dunkin has an amazing way of looking younger than he really is. He’s about my age, shorter, with the build of a girl.

When you look at him closely, he seems younger still, and hardly the material people might consider management. He has a thin moustache that wiggles when he talks, and he has a congested laugh, and if you look even closer, especially at his eyes, you can see hints of hurt inside.

Back in February 1981, I didn’t like him at all.

Not that I disliked him, then or now, he just made me uncomfortable. He had an air that I later realized came from his once being a priest.

Talking to him on the phone just now felt as if I was back in a confessional, and he expected me to tell him about my sins, and this brought back all the melancholy I felt when I first met him, a time when I was in the midst of breaking up with Suzanne.

He is a clean fanatic, insisting the bowls, floor, tables and hopper all be as close to sterile as God might make possible.

“Cleanliness is close to Godliness,” he liked to say, always followed by a stupid grin.

In the Paterson Dunkin where I first encountered him, the bloody battles in the front of the store did not deter him from enforcing this policy. More than once after a Saturday night gang war, he had us mopping up blood and sweeping up shards of broken glass.

He was never around when the fight broke out, only in the aftermath, popping out from some safe hiding place, still just a bit flustered, but not so much as to keep him from ordering us to clean it all up.

As store manager, he made a point not being around for any of the hijinks and for some reason never got the blame for when something went wrong, even if we ran out of supplies or product, even when the store got robbed three times a week.

Paterson was a corporate store, and they were too short of qualified managers to quibble, and though the company tried to franchise the store to some non-corporate owner, no one was stupid enough to buy into all the problems a 24/7 store in Paterson entailed.

What they didn’t like about Jim was his tendency to take in stray boys. He did this so regularly, the rest of the staff laid bets as to how long it would take him to hire a new boy, and how long before he propositioned the boy. He even propositioned me once, telling me innocently that I could say a lot of money if I moved in with him, an offer I gently declined. He never pressured me about it.

Besides, he always had the other boys to worry about, jealous over each new addition at the store, one of whom, living in his Hackettstown home, going off in a jealous tirade each time Jim hired a new boy. I met this boy lover later when Jim and I both wound up working at the Willowbrook store, the boy coming down to check on Jim there and to see what new boy Jim had hired. When he managed the Paterson store, he always had three or four of these boys hanging around – not so many at Willowbrook.

I hated his sense of humor, always loaded with sexual inuendo, which I tried to ignore, while some of his women workers could not and quit.

The corporation tolerated Jim, I think, because of his utter devotion to Dunkin Donuts. When he gave up the priesthood, Jim transferred all his passion into his job; he lived, breathed even dreamed Dunkin Donuts.

Every time I saw him, I thought of the TV commercial in which a baker jumps up out of a sound sleep when he ears the jingle on the radio, “Time to make the donuts.”

While I tolerate Jim, others in the store can’t stand him, not merely because of his collection of boy toys, but because he can’t be depended upon in times of trouble.

Grumpy customers scare the crap out of Jim, and when one of these customers acts up, Jim hides leaving the chore of dealing with the customer to the staff.

But he always reminded me of another adage: God protects drunks and idiots,” and is certainly looking out for Jim.



email to Al Sullivan

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