Have you ever worked a seasonal job? I’m not talking about your year-round employment or everyday nine to five; I’m talking retail during the months of November and December, when people are at their most ghoulish and the loudspeaker is playing the same “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playlist over and over and over and over and over…
Seasonal employment is hellish but necessary when you must pay for gifts and decorations and baking supplies and ice-skating. The holidays are expensive! And I’ve always worked, but I need a little extra help come November, which is how I found myself in the setting for our next tale: Borders.
Sadly, this establishment no longer exists. We still have our beautiful Barnes & Nobles and indie bookstores, but back in the early 2000s, Borders bookstores were everywhere, including the suburban town of Solon, Ohio, where I grew up. The store opened during my teen years, and I was immediately obsessed. I’d beg my mom to take me or convince her she needed something at the Bed Bath & Beyond that was next door so I could go in and read mags and look at books. Because of You’ve Got Mail, I associated big-city living with booksellers and coffee, which is why having a Borders in my small town seemed like such a huge deal; it was the closest I could get to living my New York City dreams. Plus, they had gay stuff inside, so I could sneak the Advocate magazine and read about Danny from The Real World without anyone knowing.
I first applied to work there when I was in high school, but they weren’t quite ready to hire me. That all changed my freshman year because my school was on a quarter system, unlike most of the other colleges in Ohio, which were on a semester schedule. OU students had an extra-long winter break, making us the perfect candidates for retail jobs over the holidays. I was officially on my way to my Nora Ephron fantasy as a Borders cashier (one of five-ish people manning the registers at any given moment).
I loved it. Even though the customers were nightmares and I was mostly just selling them all Planet Earth DVDs, I was living my best Meg Ryan life. Technically, I was working for more of the Tom Hanks storefront, but in my head, I was Meg with the cute short haircut and teacher skirts. There was something soothing about going into work and getting a custom coffee and being surrounded by cozy decor. Sure, there were downsides. I was/am a terrible gift wrapper, so anytime a customer asked me to wrap anything, they would inevitably be disappointed. Did you ever see that episode of Saved by the Bell when A.C. Slater gets a job wrapping at the mall? It’s the same episode I mentioned earlier where Zack takes on the California homelessness crisis. Slater accidentally ties his finger to the bow he ties for Lisa. My wrapping was like that. (PS: Sorry for bringing up a 1991 Saturday-morning show starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar more than once in this book, but that’s who I am.) I eventually started warning people, “I know I have to wrap if you ask me to, but I’m not good.” Nicer customers would take their goods and tell me they would handle it themselves, some would wait for another employee to become available, and others would make me go through the motions of wrapping their junk and then swiftly unwrap before they got out of the store because I did such a bad job.
If there’s one thing I learned from the Facts of Life theme song, it’s that you take the good, you take the bad, and you take them both, and then you have the facts of life, so I never let the bad parts of the gig get me down, and I always knew the good outweighed those negatives. I remained positive, enjoyed living my dream, and sold a lot of books from November until January.
After the season ended, I was sad to go back to school. I missed my coworkers, the Lindor chocolate balls at the counter, and the free CDs they gave out in the employee break room. There was a whole bookcase filled with albums you could take home. They were returns, damages, and music that was played within the store, which is one of the few things I do not miss about the experience. When November hit, the store music became all Christmas, all the time. I love Céline Dion, she’s a Canadian queen, but even a gay man will grow tired of her singing “O Holy Night” for eight hours a day. The store played a lot of Céline’s These Are Special Times, an album that was released years earlier but still was played over and over and over and over—a balm for the Midwestern moms who frequented the establishment.
Sophomore year of college, I wrapped up my finals and headed home in early November, where I would once again work at Borders. When I arrived behind the cash register for year two, I heard Céline once again singing holiday hymns and, inexplicably, a ballad duet with R. Kelly (who appears on her holiday album).
By the eighth listen of the Titanic songstress’s “Feliz Navidad,” I snapped.
“Can we please listen to something else? Anything else?” I begged my manager.
“Customers buy a lot of copies of Céline,” Teri (my manager) told me.
Teri was nice and always busy. She was a fiftysomething woman, which is my ideal demographic, and she ran a tight ship, working through breaks and only sharing personal info while she was stocking or doing something productive with her hands. I loved hearing about her marital struggles and hyping her ass up anytime she was down like the gay best friend in a ’90s rom-com that I was born to be. Despite how much I love this demo, they cannot be relied on to choose music. No one other than young gay men should make public playlists. If you’re not a young gay man, by all means, go listen to what you want on your headphones. But if you’re in charge of store music or a workout class, you must hand the auxiliary cord over to a young gay man immediately.
“Can I put something else on? What if I make a new Christmas mix with other divas?” I asked.
As the words left my lips, I worried Teri would think I was gay.
“I don’t know. Are there other diva Christmas songs?” she asked.
“Mariah, of course, Whitney Houston, and Cher…”
“What Christmas songs does Cher have?”
I panicked. Cher never did release a full holiday album. Aside from her work on the Sonny and Cher show, the only holiday song I could think of was the bop she’d done as a duet with Rosie on the Rosie O’Donnell Christmas album. They sang “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” together, recorded during the “Believe” era. I WAS NOT OUT. I couldn’t mention Cher’s song with Rosie as an example of her holiday musical output, could I?
I’m not a good liar, never was. I get caught up in the lie, adding too many other lies on top of the original lie, and I’m completely unable to keep everything straight. Here I was, trying to convince my manager I wasn’t gay and that Cher had a holiday album. They were just two lies, but two too many for me.
“‘Just Like Jesse James’ by Cher is a Christmas song!” I lied.
For the unfamiliar, “Just Like Jesse James” is a Cher song, but it’s not for trimming the tree. In fact, it’s unlike almost any other song in her catalog, which is probably why I decided to use it for my cover-up. It’s country-esque (or the most country Cher has ever gotten on a track). It was the most masc hit of hers I could think of in the moment.
“I don’t even know that song. It’s Christmassy?” Teri asked.
“Yes, I’ll play it for you!” I said.
I mentioned earlier the back room had all sorts of CDs for the taking. They were open-box albums that they couldn’t retail. Some people would take a CD home, burn it onto their computer, and put it back on the shelf. I grabbed The Very Best of Cher album and played it on the employee disc changer.
Teri was completely distracted, trying to schedule an entire store’s worth of employees who didn’t want to work on Christmas Eve. As she looked at her lists, I grabbed a nearby bell from one of the decorations. On my thigh, I shook the bell as the opening Cher chords came on the speaker, trying my best to not allow Teri to see the bell.
“Okay, whatever, you can play a holiday diva mix if you make sure it’s all Christmas songs,” she said before our “Turn Back Time” queen even got to the chorus.
That night, I went home with one goal: to become a music producer. I was familiar with burning CDs; I have countless albums from high school (most of which contain “Can’t Fight the Moonlight” by LeAnn Rimes and at least twenty-seven that have Mandy Moore’s “Only Hope” on them), but I wasn’t just making a mixtape. I had to figure out a way to fashion a pop/country song into something that could appear alongside Brenda Lee. I needed a jingle bell.
Luckily, I was gifted a karaoke machine when I was younger, and my parents kept it in their basement since they never throw anything away. It came with a karaoke cassette with holiday music on it, so I downloaded Cher from Napster and somehow layered the song over the backing track of “Jingle Bells” from the karaoke tape. I know you’re all reading my book right now, but I probably should’ve gone into audio engineering as a profession instead of writing.
The next day, I went into work with my new CD ready to go. The homemade album started off with classic Mariah singing about what she wants for Christmas, then a little Whitney belting “Do You Hear What I Hear?”* and in the middle, I had Cher’s “Just Like Jesse James (Danny’s Jingle Bell Mix).”
Teri took me to the disc changer set up to play throughout the store, so I loaded in the album and got in my spot behind the cash register. The music never plays too loud in those stores, but it was loud enough to hear while people browsed. I watched stressed-out customers checking items off their lists as the mix played. With bated breath, I waited for the Cher song to come on, anxious to see how people would react. Would they hum along? Would they be confused? Would there be complaints that we were playing a song essentially about butt sex?
When Cher’s silky voice kicked in and she started singing about giving it and taking it and something about a loaded gun, the customers looked happier than ever. The lyrics of the song are troubling, to say the least, and many gay people take the song to be a euphemism for anal. Even so, the stunning vocal delivery seemed to make everyone happy, everyone except Teri, who was looking confused as she restocked the children’s shelves with copies of The Polar Express.
“What is this Cher song even about? What does Jesse James have to do with Christmas?” she asked.
“It’s a Catholic thing,” I said, knowing Teri was Jewish and admittedly not familiar with all the ins and outs of the Catholic holiday traditions. “Jesse James was originally one of the wise men. There were four, but he left the others and went into town. After Mary had Jesus, she went into town, and he tried to have sex with her. ’Cause she was a virgin.”
“I will never understand your religion,” she exclaimed, succumbing to the idea of Mary wanting to get fucked by Jesse James after the immaculate conception.
The song played four more times on my shift; each time filled me with glee as I watched the store patrons furrow their brows and wonder why this song was playing, why there was a jingle bell sound on the track, and how they’d missed the remix of such a classic Cher hit when it had been initially released. The song would end with a Santa voice saying, “Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas,” as it was part of the karaoke track I used, making it even more of a mindfuck.
Retail work is hard, especially during the holidays, so oftentimes sales associates have to make their own fun. Be nice to them while you do your shopping, and if you’re a seasonal worker fed up with a playlist, remember: you can add a jingle bell to any song to make it Christmas music.
* Whitney’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is important. Go listen to it immediately.