Just What I Needed

Working retail in the middle of a relentless winter can be quite the drudge. Today seemingly offered no relief. The district boss paid us a visit, obviously indifferent to the fact that it's very difficult to stay on one's toes when one has been slogging through slush in steel-toed boots for weeks. And everyone was complaining about the weather, strangers and friends alike. Two people told me, not so jokingly but pretty seriously, to do something about the weather (as if I'm A. J. Colby). Naturally, I passed the buck to the Outlandish Hat Lady. She comes in the store frequently, always sporting a different, completely ostentatious hat with some creature or cartoonish pop icon crowning her head. I was in no mood for the wintry, brownish large animal she had donned today: an elk or moose or bison or something. So I told her to help us all out and get some summery looking thing on her head. "Don't you have a surfer dude hat you could wear, anything to maybe change our luck around here?" She chuckled but didn't seem too optimistic; all her winter hats, she said, were rather wintry (thus my million dollar prod to creative haberdashers: there's a market out there for outlandish winter hats with summery themes; pay me later).

But then it all turned around in just a couple seconds, which is one reason why working retail, after all, can be quite fun. I must preface this true account by admitting up front my several (pretty harmless, I think) stereotypes and prejudices; I'm human, I contain unpleasantries. At the time, I was walking through the store, back to my lair in the warehouse, with about seventeen different things to do; I didn't need an eighteenth, namely, "to do" customer service. But there was a customer staring into the computer screen at the info desk, without another bookseller in sight. Being Catholic (i.e., guilt-ridden), I of course had to look over at the customer to see if he was in desperate need of help (whiplashing his eyes at anyone walking by, hungry for the crumb that is "can I help you?"). He didn't seem to notice me so I could have kept going with a (somewhat, as much as twelve years of Catholic schooling will allow) guilt-free conscience. But having already satisfied (and then some) the "fat" part of Fat Tuesday by happily consuming some of the treats various co-workers brought in today (nothing that would have made Jack LaLane proud), I gave into the hefty pull of Lent and asked the customer if he needed help (full-disclosure, before you start to measure me for a hairshirt and nominate me for martyrdom: I instantly sized up the customer [African-American male, fifty-five, maybe sixty] and "consumer profiled" him as relatively risk-free: in need of maybe a mystery, a diet book, a war history book, a CD to commemorate the late Teddy Pendergrass--nothing too onerous; believe me, if the customer had "profiled" as extremely high maintenance in my warped book [un-unh, no public peeks inside that gnarly tome], I would have Dionne Warwicked him: just walked on the hell by).

"Can I help you find something?"

"Um," sizing me up, trying to suss in a second whether I could help him in the search for his cultural holy grail of the moment. "I'm looking for a certain song by Foreigner."

"Um," going through my mind's playlists, trying to match the guy in front of me with the half dozen or so Foreigner songs I know, and trying to decide if I could get away with half-singing a few bars of each one without inciting the wrath of Mother Nature and calling down six more months of ceaseless winter on all our asses.

"I think it's called 'Just What I Needed.'"

"That ain't Foreigner," histrionically and playfully waving my arms, and already leading the guy back to the CD racks. "That's The Cars."

"The Cars!" Frustration, relief, eureka. "I've bought four Foreigner albums looking for that song." Doing my best not to say something like, "well, that's at least three-and-half more than anyone should ever have to own." "I was beginning to think it might be Journey or something."

"I can see that." And I can. "All those bands kind of lump together. You're just lucky you asked me, who was fifteen at the time 'Just What I Needed' came out." Yep, through no effort whatsoever, I'm doomed to live the rest of my life knowing acutely the differences between Foreigner, The Cars, and Journey, (not to mention REO, Styx, et al.) thanks to the sorry state of radio in the late 1970s. "Here you go," handing him The Cars Greatest Hits, track one, "Just What I Needed."

The guy beamed as he pulled out of his pocket an obscure Foreigner album (alas, not quite a redundancy for a child of my age), "This is the last one I bought, looking for this song," now happily patting the Cars CD. "Thank you so much." Genuine. As were the half dozen other thank you's and the firm handshake he gave me before purchasing the CD and heading off to a day of aural bliss. What a job, to be able to so thoroughly, and easily, make somebody's day like that (let alone cure the guy of obsessively buying every extant Foreigner CD in the county).

That's why I love so much the mystical, unprejudiced, horizon-less, healing beauty of music--to make possible such a great moment between two strangers, one of whom just happens to have the taut guitar blasts and woozy keyboard riffs of "Just What I Needed" embedded in his nurtured DNA. And kudos to The Cars, for concocting such an intoxicating pop confection more than thirty years ago; sue me, boys, for spreading some of the love from my humble nook in this electronic inter-web.

And, uh, winter--piss off. Ever since that wonderful moment this afternoon, it's been nothing but sipping rum in Maui, working happily on my sunburn, for me.

The Cars-Just What I Needed