A couple of turkeys

When I worked for the art supply store Dick Blick, they used to give all their employees a free turkey for Thanksgiving. Even back in the mid-nineties, this struck me as being charmingly old-fashioned. The first Thanksgiving I worked there I took my turkey home and cooked it for myself during one particularly lonely holiday. I wasn't a good chef and had never tackled anything like a whole bird before, but it turned out okay. The following year I got another one, but my refrigerator suddenly died. It was an enormous model with vertical doors, seventies brown. I had gotten it from a friend, and my stepbrothers had helped me drag it up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. I loved that thing. Since the bird was thoroughly frozen, I thought it might keep for a day or two until I could manage to cook it. I was wrong. The smell was horrific.

In the meantime, I borrowed one of those little dorm room fridges, with a freezer just big enough for a single tray of ice cubes. Eventually a guy from work offered me a more reasonably-sized one. He and a couple of friends carried it up the three flights of stairs for me. He ended up wrenching his back really badly.  I felt terrible and of course couldn't ask him to haul the old one away, so the behemoth sat there for a long while. At some point I moved it into the dining room and turned it on its side and used it as a work table.

In the meantime I had left Dick Blick to work for Borders, a company which seemed to be irritated by its employees and in any case certainly wasn't about to give them any free poultry. While I was working there, my knee got fucked up and Jasmine moved in to help with my recovery. She was constantly scolding me for being such a poor housekeeper (she wasn't wrong) and eventually shamed me into calling someone to come lug the old fridge away. 

 

I found a junk man in the phone book who would do it for thirty bucks. He was just a scrawny guy and his equally scrawny wife with a pickup truck that seemed a lot smaller than one would expect for someone who made his living out of hauling away large appliances. They got the thing out the door and a few minutes later I heard a lot of banging and cursing. The fridge was wedged at a sharp incline in the very narrow stairwell, and the woman was perched on top of it. "I have to get to work," I said. They just stared at me, so I locked the apartment door behind me and scrambled over the appliance to get downstairs. I fully expected them to still be there when I got home, but they were gone.

 Some years later I went back to work at the art supply store again, and they too had stopped giving out free turkeys. They had also rebranded, dropping the Dick from their name. Times were changing. Everything was becoming more corporate, less personal. It would be years before I celebrated Thanksgiving again. Most years I just work. I never cared much for turkey anyways.