My first real job was at the Wherehouse. Most people today aren’t familiar with this store, but when I was growing up it was the main place where I bought my music. I remember going there on Tuesdays to get the newest albums as soon as they came out. When I needed a job in college, it was close to home and an obvious choice for me given my love for music and the amount of time I spent in the store anyway. I once locked myself out of my apartment, and I decided to wait – all afternoon – at the Wherehouse for my fiancé to get out of class. I must have been asked if I needed help fifteen times before I finally explained the situation and was left alone, albeit amidst some strange looks.
I did my undergraduate studies at UC Santa Barbara, which had at the time (and perhaps still does; I haven’t checked) the whitest and most affluent student body of all the UCs. It was also adjacent to Isla Vista (or “IV” as it was known by those same super hip kids), where the vast majority of students lived and parties were so insane that they literally closed off the city to outsiders on Halloween. Because shit had gotten so out of hand on these major holidays that they simply couldn’t handle any more madness.
The demographics of UCSB didn’t completely preclude my making friends there. I made one of my only real friends within the first few weeks there, and we have stayed (mostly) in touch over all the years since then. I mean, we don’t see each other all the time, but that’s because we live four hours apart. She still buys my kids birthday gifts and shit, so I think that counts for something.
Anyway, there were some diamonds in the rough there, but for the most part Santa Barbara just wasn’t my scene. Rich white kids can be fine I guess – god knows I SHOULD fit in with them – but I just never have. This is not some exceptional testament to my character, whether for good or bad – it just IS. Since elementary school, the majority of my friends have been non-white, non-wealthy, often from non-English speaking homes. I also grew up speaking Spanish due to baby-sitters from El Salvador and Mexico who did not speak English. So while I was generally in my element with them, I was quite often not as at home around those who were presumed to be my racial brethren.
Which was the majority of the students at UCSB. Aside from the socioeconomic makeup of the student body, it also had a justified reputation as a party school due to the aforementioned antics of IV, and at that time in my life I didn’t partake in such things. I don’t just mean I didn’t do drugs – I didn’t drink or smoke weed at all for the vast majority of my time there. I have described IV to people who didn’t live there as a place where, every single time I ventured there, I was offered marijuana by someone. I never saw the positive side of this until a Fresno friend remarked, “Sounds like a place full of very generous people,” to which I had no response. Touche.
Needless to say, my perspective on Santa Barbara and IV were not popular among my peers at UCSB. I didn’t meet a single person with anything negative to say about the place until I started working at the Wherehouse. I still remember the first time a coworker there, who eventually became a close friend during that time, said “I agree” when I told her I wasn’t a fan of Santa Barbara. It took me a second to even register what she had said because I was so used to being met with incredulity whenever I expressed this opinion.
I eventually met multiple other people at this job who generally agreed with me about the city and the school, and this actually made perfect sense – because the people working there were not among the upper crust of the (already quite) upper crust at UCSB. They were working because they needed to, whether to supplement their cash flow as students at UCSB or Santa Barbara City College, or simply as a regular job for non-students. Their perspective was thus quite different from what I tended to encounter in day to day interactions on campus.
Some of my best, and worst, memories of my time in Santa Barbara are from the year I worked there. The absolute height of that time was when Kanye West’s debut album, The College Dropout, came out in early 2004. At this point, I had been working there for about six months and had developed good relationships, and management support status, with most of the employees there. We were allowed to pick the music that was played in the store within certain parameters, the main one being that there was no objectionable content. Additionally, the music played in the store had to be from albums that weren’t brand new and thus shrink wrapped. This immediately eliminated the vast majority of rap albums due to explicit lyrics, much to my dismay. Quite fortuitously, though, some precious soul sold a used copy of The College Dropout that was fucking edited. I couldn’t believe my luck and immediately set it aside in our collection of promo copies and other albums to be played in the store.
We listened to the SHIT out of the album for months. To this day, I can still quote it front to back, skits and ad libs included (except for all the N-words, which I steadfastly keep out of my mouth for fear of being one of those kids I hated from UCSB). We discussed the album during our shifts, arguing over which songs were best, just how much chipmunk soul one could fit into a single album, and who had the best verse on “Get Em High,” which I still contend was overrated.
My lovefest with the album at work was brought to an abrupt end one sad day a couple of months after we came up on our used copy. One of my coworkers called me at my post up front from the back rental counter and asked me, “You know what I want to hear right now? I rode a plane! Rode a plane! Rode a plane!” This was a reference to the outro to a song called “The New Workout Plan,” which was so ridiculous in its sexism that it was essentially laughable. I gave him a thumbs-up from across the store and headed over to our CD collection to put it on. It wasn’t there. I rummaged around the front counter, searching all the likely places but unable to track it down. I was frustrated but eventually moved on and put something else on instead.
The next day, I mentioned to a coworker and fellow hip hop head named Alan that I hadn’t been able to find that particular disc, and he sort of looked down at his feet and blushed. I immediately pounced on him because I knew what that meant – he had sold my prized fucking possession. This was technically fine, and in fact the correct policy, because it was a regular used CD that was supposed to still be on sale at the store. But goddammit it was a violation of our friendship and bond as hip hop fans, and I was hurt by it. He insisted in his good intentions, and in the end I had to agree that he did the right thing, because a woman came in looking for a clean copy for her grandson and it was the only one in the store. He just couldn’t turn her away knowing we had exactly what she needed behind the counter and were hoarding it for ourselves.
I knew I couldn’t be mad at him for selling it, but I still felt robbed of the album and pouted about it for a week or so before I let it go. This was partially because I had just enough maturity to realize it wasn’t that big a deal and also partially because at this point I had bigger fish to fry. This fish was a manager at the store who had a reputation for being…let’s just say creepy. I had heard stories from female coworkers since my first weeks on the job, and while they seemed mostly innocuous, you could always sense their icky-ness and the discomfort they brought on. He had a habit of buying the girls small gifts and expecting some sort of reward in return, usually in the form of fawning over him or some small token of physical affection. He had made a couple of unwanted advances over his years there, and even the store managers would discuss how questionable some of his antics were. But he was a good worker and had been at the job for years, so he was needed at the store and near the top of the totem pole in terms of management.
I had mostly avoided any unwelcome attention from him for the first half of my year there, but I wasn’t able to remain so lucky. He was a sort of awkward dude, so any time a girl was especially nice to him, he took that as an opportunity to move in on them. We all tended to give him the benefit of the doubt and believed that he didn’t intend to be gross about it, but the effect was the same. We all avoided being alone with him to limit the chances of having to deal with him.
For whatever reason, he decided he had taken some sort of liking to me at some point, and I could tell the difference in him right away. He was a supervisor to me, and he started moving employees’ posts around so that he and I were always together. More troublingly, he would arrange for us to be together alone, letting my coworkers go home early so it would be just the two of us. Unwelcome hugs and other touches were next, and the final straw was when he sent two people home on a closing shift, when we left at midnight, leaving me there with him alone late at night.
Another supervisor had also dealt with this stuff from him, and, while she expressed sympathy for me, she seriously and consistently recommended against reporting it. The result, she said, would be worse for everyone if I called corporate to report it, because the dreaded Loss Prevention would descend upon the store and make life miserable. I didn’t want that, did I? It became a situation where I had to choose between my own, presumably petty, comfort and the working conditions of all my coworkers. It was a shitty scenario all around.
I eventually took my concern to the big boss man, the store manager, and warned him that if something didn’t change I was going to call that number anyway. He responded by telling the offending ick-master to use his paid time off while they tried to “sort things out.” This at least fixed the problem in the short term, and to the store manager’s credit, he never disclosed that I was the one who caused the change. A couple of male coworkers even talked to me about what was going on, commenting that they were surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. Which of course shows that they were well aware of the problem but had been either unable or unwilling to figure out what to do about it.
Eventually, however, dude’s PTO ran out, and the store manager approached me in the middle of the store to ask if I was cool with him coming back. He was my boss and I was in the middle of the sales floor, so I gave some sort of non-committal response which he took as a clear go-ahead, at which point I reminded him of my previous threat. He then backed off the rest of the way and, I assume, told creepy dude that he wouldn’t be coming back at all, but by that point I was pretty much done with the job. My best friends there had all left, and management clearly didn’t give enough of a shit to proactively protect its female employees, so I packed it in. My fiancé had gotten a job at that point, so I no longer needed to be spending 40 hours a week dealing with that crap.
The number of things this whole situation illustrated for me were many and fairly obvious in today’s cultural climate, but they are sadly still worth reiterating. Because, while what I had to endure was NOTHING compared to the bullshit my sistren have had to go through in front of no less than contrarian Congressional panels, I know first-hand how much going forward with this stuff wreaks havoc on you emotionally. Choosing to prioritize your truth somehow feels selfish, and you constantly question whether or not what you’re experiencing is actually as bad as you think. It’s not a scenario that imparts self-confidence or mental stability, that’s for damn sure.
I wish this was not a story that had to close on a dark note, but there’s no real way around it. When I think of that time in my life, more often than not I think about Kanye West and exchanging mix CDs with coworkers and finally feeling like I found my scene in Santa Barbara. But my thoughts inevitably circle back to the end of my time at the job, and these are not positive thoughts by any means. Were they high on the list of aggressions women endure in this society? No, not by any stretch, but the fact that they are so commonplace as to be considered blase in any context is disturbing and important to keep in mind as we watch women brave enough to come forward be shredded in the court of public opinion and made to endure death threats to themselves and their families for simply sharing their experiences. I certainly don’t wish that on even my worst enemies, so Ann Coulter and Tomi Lahren can sleep soundly at night knowing that, if and when I obtain the powers I have been praying for, I won’t be sending them to the same fate so many of us have endured. I was fortunate enough not to be a Kanye-style college dropout, but this was no thanks to the guys who made working and living in a college town more dangerous than it needed to be. Plenty of thanks are due, though, to the women who continue to stand up and share their truth to protect the rest of us. #IBelieveYou, girl. Never stop fighting.
