Forgetting the Garbage
A new season of The Indirect Market begins with a couple of farewells.
Hey folks. It’s been a bit.
There’s been a couple of things that have happened in the past three months that really gummed up my brain. I’ve been sitting on these for a while, trying to figure out the best way to communicate them and (hopefully) get things moving again. What follows are my best attempts.
In early April, I found out that the comic shop I originally worked for would be closing its doors forever. I had a lot of mixed feelings about that.
I had loved working at that place, and I learned a lot from working there. When my time was done, I left on good terms. I gave them two months notice, and put my heart into setting them up for the days to come. I went over my processes and sales tactics. I was going to go off and “become a writer”, using a long-term contract I had landed as a launching point. That money never came in.
I went into panic mode immediately. When I quit, I didn’t have much in the way of savings - just a promise that things were going to work out. They had not. I started thinking about what my next step would be. I briefly wondered if I could ask for my old job back. After talking with my partner Danica for a while, we dismissed that possibility entirely, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
That said, I knew I missed working in a comic shop. I needed to do something. Danica and I thought we could probably make a go of running a place of our own. We started looking at the logistics and put things in motion. Once it became clear that our shop could easily become a reality, I reached out to one of my old bosses.
On the day I gave my notice, that particular owner said that he wasn’t upset. He said he would have only been mad if I was going across the street to set up “Brandon’s Happy Comic Shop”. I told him right then that if my circumstances changed, and I found myself thinking about opening a store, he would be the first (outside of Danica) to know. So I told him.
After hearing my vague plans, he said two things to me. The first was him as a representative of his business.
“We’ll work together and re-open a third location, and you’ll run it as your own, an equal partner in the business.”
The second, he said as himself: “Don’t listen to me, and open a business yourself without any partners. Partners are a nightmare.”
It was then that I found out about a time I was nearly laid off with the rest of the store’s staff. At one point, the company had three partners, and one had been a drain on the company both financially, and mentally. Things deteriorated to the point where that person was to be bought out - but the price meant that they’d have to get rid of pretty much everyone who worked for them to make the money work out.
Luckily, at the same time, one of their other employees had come into some money after a relative had passed, and inquired about purchasing their third location. This set things back to level. I continued to have the job I never knew I had lost.
“Having partners just makes things harder,” he told me.
In a perfect world, I would have been happy becoming a partner in my old job. But too much had happened. By the end, I would come in to work with a dead feeling in my gut, just worried that one of the owners was in a bad mood. Years ago, I arrived to work one morning to find a box cutting knife stabbed into the week’s shipments with a note that said “do not open until (owner) gets in”. The night before, I had forgotten to take out the garbage like I was asked. It was a busy day, and it slipped my mind, but it was the only thing I had been asked to do. It was taken as disrespect, and the response was the presentation I walked into. I was not to open the boxes, to get things ready for Wednesday, and out of fear, I complied.
When the owner finally arrived, he was vibrating. I did not respect him, he said. I did not do the things he told me to do, how he told me to do them.
At this point in time, I had been the store manager for a while, and in that time, I took a store that had started falling in sales along with the industry, and had pushed it to the point where it could viably pull in a million dollars in sales on its own. But that wasn’t good enough. I had forgotten the garbage that day.
This was… a recurring theme in my last years there. When we made new hires, I made sure to tell them, when (owner) asks you to do a task, even if something else is more important to the functioning of the store, complete that task first. He will show up randomly - sometimes after making a point of telling you he would not make it in that day - and check that one thing. Everything else wouldn’t matter. I made sure to protect them.
It wasn’t all bad, though. I wouldn’t have stayed if it was. The people who came in were awesome, and the owner was… the owner was usually nice. He had problems. My partner noted, after I was done there, that it was an abusive relationship. There would be these wild, angry moments, and then, not an apology ever, but kindness. Compassion. He’d help when things in my personal life would go sideways, tell me that they wanted to give me part of the business… and then I’d forget to properly arm the security system at the store once when I left, or I would put the wrong comic in the wrong file, and I suddenly “didn’t deserve it - you need to care more”. All this, when the owner had been pulling back more and more every single year - outside of the surprise visits to the store to see if I had accomplished his tasks.
I loved that store. Those stores. In my last days, I went to their second location once a week to try and get them up to speed with a new system they hadn’t set up two years after they got it to keep them up to date with the industry. I could have said no. I could have quit weeks earlier. I gave them absolutely everything I could.
I’m… I’m still not sure how I feel about their closure. Or… well… wait, no. I know that I’m sad about their closure. The owner who I dealt with had started checking out long before he had hired me, and was almost completely detached by the time I left. I heard several times that he was in the process of being bought out of the business himself, although the information I received was always a bit garbled, coming through bad metaphorical telephone lines.
In the meantime, the other owner of the business passed away, leaving his chunk of things to his kids. Those kids… or… well, adults at this point - my brain still casts back at least 8 years when I think about them - didn’t ask for the life they were handed. Theirs is not my story to tell, but they had to deal with a lot of loss in their life. In the end, it seemed the store was in their hands, and no matter what my experience was with that place, it certainly was no fault of theirs.
As things wound down there, I had some chats with folks from different periods of that store’s life.
I ended up chatting with a long time friend who told me (I think for the first time?) that he had been the first person employed at that shop. Together we worked through some memories of the owner we both dealt with the most, and stumbled across something that crystallized a lot of our experiences there.
That store had started, in part, from money that the owner had inherited when his father passed away. The experience had left him… raw. We came to realize that so much of the history and culture of that shop emerged from grief, and it lived in the bones of that place through to the end. I won’t say that excuses how I, or any of the employees there were treated, but it put some things into perspective.
But yeah. That’s a lot of words to simply say “I’m conflicted”. It was a place that helped me become who I am. It was a place that taught me some of the harder lessons on running a comic shop. It was a place that taught me how I didn’t want to act. It was a home. It was a hardship. It was my life.
At the end of the day, I just hope that everyone is okay. That things are as good as they can be when there’s so much living in the bones of that kind of situation. Not that any of that will matter coming from me, but… there it is. For what it is worth.
In other news, the same day I found out my old store was closing, we discovered that the absolute clown-shoes of a store our shop was located beside was closed permanently. They were some Q-talking, convoy ding dongs who were cruel human beings with a well documented lack of empathy.
I have no conflicted feelings about that. Rest in garbage, you absolute piss-babies.
Finally (and I’m sorry, this is going to be a bit of tonal whiplash again), in late May, I discovered the fact that a good friend of mine had passed away.
They were a person who had gone through so much over the past three years, between health issues both physical and mental, and job and housing troubles. In their last days, they had really been putting things together again after a long stretch of bad times. They found a place to stay, and had some solid bits building back around them.
Then, they took a spill, and an undiagnosed aneurysm in their gut or stomach (around there) burst and they just… passed away, out of nowhere.
A few days after this, I had my own good-bye. When things were better, we had met up once or twice a month to talk about life over beers during afternoon happy hours.
I took this picture at one of our most frequent haunts - one last drink with my pal.
While she might not have always felt it, Danica has kept me together over these past months. I tend to put on a brave face and keep pushing through, because I was raised to just keep going. Don’t let those pesky appearances seem in any way shabby, you know? We talked about this a few times over the past few months, the different ways we lean on each other and keep going. Some days, it all feels so relentless, but at any given moment, one of us has enough to keep us both grounded. And we continue. And we breathe. And we get better, and fall apart, and get better again.
This is a very strained metaphor, but… one of the things I’ve learned most in the past few months, is learning to just… forget the garbage. To forgive yourself for the small things, and give yourself some grace. There’s bigger things to worry about, things that actually require your time and care and attention, and dwelling on the garbage isn’t going to get you anywhere healthy.
That’s the thing I’m taking with me, through all of this. That’s what I’m going to try to do going forward. There’s so much that I feel like I fail at, so much that keeps me from trying, that I can just leave and push past. Things aren’t always going to be perfect, but more often than not, they’re going to be good enough. And that’s something, right?
Anyway.
I hope you enjoyed this “good enough” post. There’s more to come, as I have an, uh… extensive list of topics I’ve let sit and stew over the past few weeks.
We’ll talk again soon.
-B.
Thank you for sharing, B.
So sorry for your loss.