Peggy

The last couple of years I was in high school I worked at the local Kroger store. It paid good as they had the Teamsters union and working twenty thirty hours a week put a fair piece of change in my pocket. I started my more profitable enterprise around that time and so the job would become more important as a cover story than income.

There were probably six to eight of us kids and we stocked shelves and baggeg groceries and carried them out and put them in the customers' cars. The store gave customers Top Value stamps which were still a fairly big thing then. Some other stores gave S&H 'green stamps' as most called them. I forget many stamps you got for spending how much, the average was a half dozen to a dozen. Somebody come in and load up a whole cart with a lot of meat got a big long string. Those were usually the ones using food stamps and sometimes they didn't want the stamps and would give them back to the cashier. They liked that, even though they made pretty good money it was like somebody giving you a few bucks.

I would take the groceries out - those women with the food stamps with all the meat -and put them in the cars. A lot of them were big new cars, Buicks and Oldsmobiles and an occasional Cadillac. You thought Johnny Cash made that up? People on welfare didn't have much to worry about and still don't.

The cashiers there - four or five - was pretty much the same crew the whole time I was there and for a long time after. Until the store closed - union jobs were good and when you had a good deal you tried to keep it. They were all women, one older in probably late thirties. I believe she was the boss. Decent looking for her age, couple of hot daughters in my age range. One became some kind of dance teacher like the gal that married Dickie Kingnan. One of the cashiers - checkers as we called them - was a decent-looking young woman but not what we call hot today. Another one wasn't hot but closer, seriously nice body, personality like the weather. Smart-ass, especially with us kids. The last one was seriously fine, nice too. Husband beat her up some and one day she came to work and explained that she walked into a door. Everybody knew, small town and a lot of people knew him. It was still a long time before she left him and eventually married the guy who was the county sheriff at the time. From what I knew of him he was one of one or two decent sheriffs they had there. Cancer killed him at 62, Maryann as far as I know is still living. She was real sweet, we liked her better than any of the others and the funny things we lusted after her more than the other hot little number.

The full time guys were the produce manager, a guy not much older than us. Nice fellow, we liked to get assigned to work for him when he needed some help. It was easy work too and you didn't have to bag and carryout. The meat department was its own little world and that's where Peggy worked but I'll get to that in a minute. We had the dairy department which included eggs and for some reason beer. In those days it wasn't every place in town having beer and the Kroger store had just a little corner down by the milk and eggs with some Bud and Schlitz and some other common brews. Forget his name but he was a crusty old guy that had been there about fourteen years and made something like fourteen dollars an hour (this was 1972) and had four or five weeks of vacation. His job was keeping the coolers stocked and probably a little paperwork.

Vernon was the frozen foods guy. Broccoli and peas and stuff in packages in a long open freezer. Pretty much the same as the dairy guy - put in his eight hours keeping that the freezers topped off on that aisle and anything more than that the part time help took care of. Same deal as the dairy guy, them having about the same seniority.

The guy that was our boss when was there was the union steward and therefore a alpha hotel. He wasn't very bright and had a younger brother my age. He was even less intelligent and could be belligerent but was a little squirt and nobody was afraid of him. He had a weird eye, maybe unilateral amblyopia but I'm no expert and I felt sorry for him more than anything. His big brother was one of three of four people as they say I wouldn't cross the road to piss on him if he was on fire. As to whether I would piss on him under other circumstances of course I would. He constantly bragged about fucking and with his looks and manners I wonder about the kind of women he fucked. If he wasn't lying most of the time.

OK, that's the dairy fellow and the frozen foods guy and the produce guy, I guess it's time for the meat department. As I said it was different - they may have had a different union. They made good money for chopping up dead animals. It wasn't like they were butchering animals - they sometimes would take a whole chicken and cut off the appendages and package them however, sliced hams, things like that. But it paid quite well. The manager would do his forty hours at twenty bucks an hour and them to eight hours and thirty. And about once a month he would work a Sunday and get double time. What's that - $1360 for a week. In 1972.

There were a couple of others, the only one I remember was a youngish woman. Mid-to-late twenties, fairly skinny, not bad looking but not that great. I describe some women I've known as pretty but not too pretty and I find that appealing. Peggy wasn't unattractive but not attractive. She was unmarried but had two kids about 3-5, fathers unknown to any of us and whether she knew or cared was also unknown to us. She liked to drink and smoke pot and we young guys hung out at her house drinking and smoking and hoping to fuck her. We were seventeen or so and wanted to fuck any girl or woman we could and if you weren't lucky enough to be in a relationship where you were getting it regular you were an opportunistic feeder.

Peggy (not go be confused with Peg - that was a while different story) liked to fuck but was particular about who she fucked. She liked to get a guy and do him pretty much monogamously for a while - usually several months. She said she liked to enjoy mens' bodies and there were bodies she wanted to enjoy she enjoyed them. We were just hanging out getting drunk and smoking dope and getting laid occasionally without wanting to be one of the bodies she enjoyed and it was pretty cool. Later she decided she wanted my body but that was about the time some other things happened and saved me from the awkwardness that might have been but that's another story for another time. So I didn't fuck her even once.

I did get drunk at her house a few times. She liked to have a bunch of us over on weekends and we put away some liquor and pot. That was the time of $15 lids and she made good money everybody in the meat department did and she kept a good stock. She picked a bad time to try to get me in the sack - I was banging a cute chick that was fun to be around naked or clothed and anyway as I said Peggy wasn't that good-looking.

She had a younger brother my age and he was pretty strange too but in those days it was hard to say what a person was like if you didn't know them before and after drugs. Later I learned that she married a biker-type guy and moved off somewhere. Seems it was after Kroger closed the store on account of the union and she either didn't want to move to another store or whatever. I know the frozen foods guy stopped working for Kroger at that time and later got himself elected to some county office and ended his career there. Her brother died fairly young, sixty or so.

The other Peg? Haven't got there yet. Cute little thing with the morals of the proverbial alley cat. There's another chick tied up in that story. Maybe later.