TUESDAY: How I Grew Up at Nordstrom

BY DUFFLYN LAMMERS

Copyright is held by the author.

I PUT myself through college working as a security detective at Nordstrom, although I started out as a salesgirl. What I liked most about the store was that, unlike Macy’s, there was no maze of crackpot walls between departments. Instead, you could see clear across the floor and easily find your way out when you were done shopping. Also, it turned out to be useful when you were following someone who had, say, stuffed a few silk nightgowns into a girdle under their dress, or put on fifteen pair of underwear, one after the other, in the dressing room, before putting their Levis back on.

I started out at the San Jose location working in Brass Plum, the junior department for girls where they blasted music videos by The Bangles and Bananarama on repeat (this was 1989). I had a perm and wore a perfume called Poison. My coworkers and I would celebrate if we got the “princess” shift and didn’t have to get up early to open the store or stay late to fold piles of sweaters on tables. I was 18 and studying at the local junior college in Los Altos three days a week, which must have been built around the same time as my high school because it had the same wood shingle roofing and vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture.

I was almost fired early in my tenure at Nordstrom, after I failed to show up to work. The Assistant manager had left me a voicemail, “I hope you have a good explanation.” I did. Sort of. Horribly hungover, I’d crashed my Mustang into a pole at six in the morning. The doctors put me into a drug induced coma to save my life. I got a card from my piano-playing English professor who’d had everyone in class sign it, and a bouquet of flowers from Nordstrom. I rationalized that because I hadn’t been charged with drunk driving this had nothing to do with alcohol.

After I recovered I went to work at the Stanford Shopping Center location in Palo Alto, flanked by Eucalyptus and Redwoods and overpriced real estate. I got on well with my new manager, Laura Stein. She wore Doc Martins every day, which went with everything she owned because she only wore black and, although it seemed counter-intuitive to me, “surfer boys” were her type. Laura and I would go out drinking in San Francisco so she knew I liked my vodka martinis. I was one of her top salespeople. She said I was on track to be a buyer someday.

I had started dating the new manager of the Security department, Gavin, an Elvis-obsessed East Coast transplant who drove a blue MG roadster. The first time we hooked up was at a Giants Baseball game where we got drunk on cheap beer and secrets. I didn’t’t care that he was separated from his wife or that he’d also been dating Barbara in Lingerie, who was supposedly my friend.

The Security department was super tight — like a military unit. Two of them — Will and Steve — had actually been Marines. They pushed weights for hours daily at the gym and ate an alarming quantity of hard boiled eggs. They were also Gavin’s roommates. Steve was dating Ondine, one of the only female “shoe dogs.” Meanwhile, Will dated Jennifer, who was also in Lingerie.

You can see how — like some kind of high school gossip train bound for disaster — it was inevitable that Barbara would find out about me and Gavin. It would have been one thing if I’d told her I was also seeing him. But I didn’t. And he didn’t. Instead I let her whisper to me about their latest night out and how much she liked him. All of which was a very good reason to go out and get plastered, even if I did have to work the next day.

Gavin got promoted shortly thereafter and moved to New Jersey. Laura reluctantly fired me before I caused any more trouble. Somehow swilling vodka still didn’t register as a contributing factor.

In San Diego a couple months later, I wound up at another junior college, and another Nordstrom — this time in Security. Here there were Avocado trees and Cactus outside and the college had red tile roofing but the store was the same. I had listened to Gavin and Will and Steve talk about security, plus Brass Plum was ground zero for petty theft — I had seen enough people stealing. Even so, I was surprised that they hired me after the way things ended in Palo Alto. But I knew Laura had also transferred to another store and it would be a pain in the ass for them to find her. Besides, I had been a good salesperson. Just not a good person.

Now, I was determined to start over. I still had a perm but I changed my hair colour to auburn and started wearing Obsession by Calvin Klein. I began working out on the Stairmaster and getting good grades and I went on a juice fast that did not include Martinis. This would not last.

While in training for security, I shadowed another detective who showed me how to look under the walls of the dressing room stall without anyone seeing me, how to watch their hands instead of their eyes and what to say when I stopped someone. You had to wait for them to go outside, otherwise they could say they meant to pay for the sunglasses that were hidden in their bra. And you had to really project authority because in truth it was just a citizen’s arrest. We had badges and handcuffs but we were not in any way officers of the law, although we liked to use their lingo. We talked about “perps” and “WFA’s” (white female adults) as we microwaved hot pockets in the security office. It was only a week into training that I got my first arrest — an entire cheerleading squad who had mandated that new members had to steal something as initiation. I was a natural.

We moved around to the various stores in the region to keep things fresh. I met Rebecca at the Horton Plaza store when I went there to work for a few days. A slender girl with a pixie cut and freckles, she was their top detective. One day, she followed two thugs into the elevator. They had copped a couple of leather jackets and were wearing them out. She decided to make the arrest in the elevator, and they beat her up pretty badly.

Once I almost got clocked myself. I was trying to apprehend a guy, grabbed his wrist and elbow— a Hop Kido move I’d learned from an off-duty cop — and he spun around to punch me, but thanks to the grip I had, I was able to steer him away so his punch didn’t connect. When he took off sprinting I let him go. I was good at this job partly because I knew where it ended.

I also fit in. I mean I looked precisely like someone who would shop at Nordstrom. And now that I had an employee discount, I did. The women I surveilled could have been my friends. Or at least looked like they could have been my friends. I wondered sometimes why these people stole — did they have a family member in the hospital? Maybe they needed money for weed — back then Nordstrom didn’t even ask for ID for a return. And they gave you cash. Maybe people just stole because they could? I started trying to ask but they would answer my questions with, “do I have to answer that?” or “why do you think?” Their hostility made sense, given I had just busted them.

Once, a girl with a perky ponytail pulled the tags off a bunch of tops in Brass Plum and folded them neatly in a shopping bag and then snatched several matching earrings. After arresting her and taking her to the security office, I called the actual police, which was standard.

That day it was officer Schalderach who responded. The girl had surrendered the bags where she had hidden the ready to wear. I hadn’t searched her, but I knew there was more. So, once the officer arrived I did a pat down which revealed the jewelry concealed in her pockets. But we thought she was still holding something back. We noticed a bulge in her crotch. Schalderach asked her what was in her pants. To which she replied, “That’s my cock.”

Then one morning I was working in “the cage,” the secure area where we kept employee belongings. I’d started my shift at four in the morning — the first person at the store. When the manager Eda showed up, she gave me a funny look. Later my boss said Eda had smelled alcohol on my breath. Fair enough. I’d been at the Red Robin until they closed and had come straight to work. I got a warning. Didn’t tell anyone about it, of course. By then I was accustomed to hiding my drinking.

Before things could get worse, I quit that job and transferred to a college in New York. I let my perm grow out and my new scent was an essential oil call Night Queen that I’d bought on the street in Greenwich Village.

Without the structure of a job, I was free to drink nearly every day of the week. And I did.

Toward the end of my junior year, I missed the last train back to campus and slept on a bench at Grand Central Station. I remember putting all my quarters in the pay phone to talk to my boyfriend, who understood only that I was drunk and stranded and not much else given the way I was slurring my words.

He broke up with me not long after and I asked him if it was about the drinking. “Partly,” he said. If I could have read between the lines I would have seen it was not only the drinking but the behavior that went with it.

I had a friend at school whose mother was the actress Margot Kidder. One day Margot called looking for her. The daughter wasn’t there, and I answered. I told her how horribly hung over I was. She said that she had quit drinking. She was writing a book about it. I hadn’t realized it was possible to quit drinking.

That winter I went home for the holidays and on New Year’s Eve 1994 I set down my glass of Champagne at midnight and declared that was my last drink. I haven’t picked up alcohol since.

One day a couple years later, I shared my story at a huge recovery meeting. I talked about my job at Nordstrom and how I had been running from myself but catching everyone else. A girl who heard me speak came up to me afterwards. I had arrested her. She actually thanked me. “That was my bottom,” she explained. She had been high at the time of the arrest and it had prompted her to get help.

Not long ago my partner took me to a fancy hotel in Aix en Provence for my birthday. By now my hair was back to its natural colour and I was wearing a French floral scent called Divin Mensonge. I pilfered an ashtray and a towel from the hotel. As I unpacked them at home I realized why I had been so good at that job. I could catch thieves because I was like them. I knew how to disappear, how to smile while your heart was breaking, how to keep a secret—even from myself. We were all just trying to feel something, anything other than shame.

I put the ashtray and the towel in an envelope with no return address and sent them back to the hotel.

Dufflyn Lammers, “The American Love Coach in Paris,”  is represented by the Gusay Agency in Los Angeles who are currently shopping her memoir You Had Me At Bonjour to publishers. Lammers co-edited the spoken word anthology Chorus with Saul Williams, 2014 (Simon & Schuster). She is anthologized in Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, edited by Gary Glazner, 2000 (Manic D Press, Inc). Lammers has been published in Business Insider,  the Los Angeles Times, Santa Fe Writers Project, Adelaide, Iowa Woman and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2018 Silver Medal Solas Award for Travel Writing in the Love category by Traveler’s Tales. Her one-woman show Discovered debuted on the West End in London, May 2017 and was nominated for the Duende award at the Hollywood Fringe that same year. She has appeared on Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam (HBO), Criminal Minds (CBS), Entourage (HBO), and in BELLY from Artisan Films. In 2011 she wrote, produced, and starred in the short film Raven. She has the best Frida Kahlo costume you’ve ever seen, a self-described “hyena laugh,” and can often be found wandering the streets of Paris looking for Hellman’s Mayonnaise.