“Have you ever worked in retail?”
Her question startled me.
I tried desperately to think…. Quick, what is retail?
“Like a Wal-Mart?” she helped. I sensed, for the first time in the interview, that Crystal might have decided to be on my side. This whole thing had started as a joke or a dare with her, but maybe, just maybe, she had come to see me as a person who really needed some help.
It suddenly struck me how much a life of entitlement had protected me from the reality everyone else knew so well. Maybe Crystal could help me get a grip, yet I could not even grab the saving rope she had tossed me in this job interview: I had never even been inside a Wal-Mart.
Crystal made a little mark on her paper and moved on. I felt very nervous. This was not going well.
“Have you ever dealt with customers in tough situations?” Crystal read the question from the form and then looked up at me. But her eyes were softer; now she seemed to be willing me to answer this question correctly.
Yet I was still at a loss. Was it tough to talk to the CEO of Ford? Yes, but that wasn’t what was going to get me this job. I remembered that I had done advertising for Burger King and had worked at a store one morning to get a feeling for the business.
“I worked at Burger King,” I said.
Crystal gave me a big smile.
“Good,” she said. “And how did you handle a customer when things went bad?”
“I listened very carefully to what they were saying, then I tried to correct what was wrong, and then I asked them if I could do anything more.” I spouted gibberish from some forgotten brochure I had written on how to handle bad situations.
Crystal smiled again and made a mark on the paper.
“Have you worked with lots of people under tough time pressures?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, keeping it vague. Working late on an advertising campaign for Christian Dior was different from serving lattes to hundreds of people on their way to work.
Crystal ticked down the list. “What do you know about Starbucks? Have you visited our stores?”
I was off and running. During my job seeking over weeks and months, I had been in many Starbucks around New York. I leapt at the opportunity to show my knowledge. “The Starbucks stores in Grand Central are always busy, and none have seats, so I can’t sit down, but the store on Fifth Avenue at Forty-fifth Street is really comfortable, and the one at the corner of Park Avenue has a great view, and—”
“Okay, Mike,” she said, cutting me off, “I get it.” She smiled. “Since you seem to be a fan, I think you’ll like this question: And what is your favorite drink?”
Once again, I was able to be honestly enthusiastic. I love coffee in many forms, and Starbucks was my favorite place to get it.
“What’s the difference between a latte and a cappuccino?” Crystal asked.
Here she had me. I liked both drinks, but did not know the difference. “I don’t know…. The cappuccino has less milk or something?”
“You’ll learn,” she said, marking my form again, but I thought that response was positive. Just her saying “You’ll learn” was a confidence builder for me. I had almost given up on the thought that I could learn or do anything new, or that anyone would invest the time in helping me learn a new job.
Crystal stood up. The interview was clearly over.
I stood up as well, almost knocking over my latte in my eagerness. We shook hands.
“Thanks, Crystal,” I said, being as thankful as I ever had been in my life. She must have sensed the true gratitude behind my everyday words.
She laughed. What was so funny about what I had said? She was obviously now just getting a kick out of the whole situation. And me. Maybe I had shown her that the “enemy” was someone she could easily handle. Or, even better, maybe she had discovered that I was not just an old white man, but also a real person whom she could help. Whatever the reason, she seemed much more relaxed with me.
But then she got serious again. “The job is not easy, Mike.”
“I know. But I will work hard for you. I promise you this.”
She smiled, and maybe there was a little bit of pride in it. Later, I would learn the reason. Eight years earlier, when she had been on the street, she could never have conceived that in the future, she would have a Waspy guy, the proverbial “Man” himself, all dressed up in a two-thousand-dollar suit, begging her for a job.
Crystal must have recognized the sincerity in my willingness to cross over the bar—from drinking lattes to serving them up. But I realize now that she must have also seen that I still had much to learn, and many preconceptions to shed.
Despite this, she was willing to take a risk, cross over class, race, and gender lines, and consider me for the job.
“I will call you in a few days, Mike,” she said, “and let you know.”
—a quote from Bill Brummel, documentary filmmaker, published on the side of a cup of Starbucks Decaf Grande Cappuccino
APRIL
Several agonizing weeks went by, and I heard nothing further from Crystal. Every moment I was consciously or unconsciously waiting anxiously for her to call. I continued going to the Starbucks store at Seventy-eighth and Lexington where we had met, hoping to catch sight of her, but she was never there.
I also kept calling potential clients for my marketing business, but my voice mail remained empty. More than ever I needed a job, any job. When I had first met Crystal, I was not terribly serious about the idea of working at Starbucks. But over these last weeks, waiting for her call, without any other options surfacing to give me hope, I had realized that Starbucks offered me a way—perhaps the only way—to handle the costs of my upcoming brain tumor operation and support my young son and my other children. To support myself. I was facing the reality, in my old age, of literally not being able to support myself. I had left my former wife with our large house, was down to the last of my savings, and now I was facing the prospect that I might not be able to meet next month’s rent. I was even more desperate than I had been just a couple of weeks ago. Whenever my phone rang, I found myself almost praying it was Crystal.
Had I done something wrong during the interview? I wondered. Said something wrong? Or was I just the wrong gender or race or age for Crystal to want to work with me?
As I sat willing the phone to ring, I thought back to casting sessions for the television commercials I had created over the last decades. I had not hesitated to eliminate people for any imperfection. If an actor’s smile was too bright, or not bright enough, if a young lady had the wrong accent, that person was dismissed. When hiring, I chose the people who were like me, with backgrounds like mine. Now, as the days went by and Crystal still did not call, I had a sinking feeling that maybe Crystal operated in the same way: Do the easy thing, stay clear of anybody different.
“Diversity”