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First Edition Design Publishing - Ray Shasho

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128 pages

English

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Check the Gs tells a story for everyone who is proud of their family and heritage but not afraid to laugh at its many eccentricities, and for anyone who has ever worked in retail and experienced its humorous situations and misadventures. Journey with me through twenty five years of my life and learn how a bizarre family business influenced and changed my world forever.

Informations

Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	15 juillet 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781937520007
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Check The Gs
The True Story of an Eclectic American Family and Their Wacky Family Business

Ray Shasho

Copyright 2011 Ray Shasho
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN 978-1-937520-00-7
Published by First Edition Design eBook Publishing July 2011
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher.

Visit Ray at http://rayshasho.com
Dedication

To my beautiful wife, Sharon, who always believed in me, especially during those tough and challenging moments in our lives together. I learned to fall in love and stay in love because of you.
My daughter, Michelle, and my son, Ray Ray, I’m very proud of each of your own personal conquests and continued perseverance in this difficult and complicated world. Thank you for being incredible kids.
Thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me the most wonderful childhood a son could have.
For Uncle Moey, Cousin David, and Cousin Teri, who left us much too early, thanks for the wonderful memories; we’ll meet again in the next life.
But most of all, thanks for the love we all continue to share together.
I think Carly Simon’s lyrics say it best:
And tomorrow we might not be together
I’m no prophet and I don’t know nature’s ways
So I’ll try and see into your eyes right now
And stay right here ‘cause these are the good old days
Chapter One - Chin Lung Art Gallery

It was 1962 when Dad and his twin brother, Joey, opened their retail store on the corner of Thirteenth and F Street in Washington DC. The three-story building had the best show windows in town. Only three blocks away was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and its very famous house. Inside the house was a man named Kennedy, who was busy dealing with an incident called the Cuban missile crisis.
Three years later on a Saturday in April, my father insisted that I go downtown with him and work at the store. I was six years old. The only time I had visited Washington DC was when I straddled my dad’s shoulder’s and witnessed beautiful white horses pulling President Kennedy’s coffin draped with an American flag down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a sad day; so many people cried. Mom dressed me up in a white long sleeve shirt with a red bow tie and a red vest that had some kind of emblem printed on the left side. My pants were perfectly ironed, and my shoes were shined. My head didn’t have a hair out of place thanks to Dad’s Vitalis.
Yesterday, Mom had taken me to the barbershop on Edmondson Avenue. That place was neat; they had real monkeys in their windows. My older brother Howard had always shared his experiences of working at the store and how it felt to break the ice, to make your first sale. I guessed it was going to be my time to share now. After I got dressed, I started thinking about the day to come and got really antsy. It was the first time that I’d get to see dad’s store in the city. I was excited. I sat down at the kitchen table with Dad while Abuela, my grandmother, served the both of us bagels with cream cheese. Abuela was intelligent, sweet, and soft. Her hair had always been gray since I could remember. She wore 1950s prescription glasses attached to a chain that dangled down. Even with the chain attached around her neck, she’d still sometimes wonder where her glasses were.
My cousin Tony arrived at our home at 7:45. He should have been here at 7:30, but he was late after he decided to cook a big Saturday morning breakfast for his kids. Tony stood at six foot two, but I always imagined him to be much taller. Tony was one of the camera experts at my dad’s store on F Street. He and his wife, Gigi, were definitely my oldest cousins and were old enough to be my aunt and uncle. He had the heaviest Cuban accent I had ever heard; it took me years to finally understand what the heck he was talking about. He was the type of person who would do anything in the world for you, without hesitation. He was a good soul and funny as shit, or as Tony would say, “chit.” He had a great sense of humor, and when he told a funny joke or story, it was even funnier because of his accent.
I finished my breakfast and then sat quietly watching Dad as he got in his last cup of coffee. Dad made more of a slurping sound than a sip, and after every slurp he’d swallow and let out a euphoric “Ah.” While holding his coffee mug by his mouth, he glanced at the wall clock and then said in his best Sergeant Joe Friday impersonation, “Let’s go!” I immediately sat up from my chair and ran into Mom’s bedroom to kiss her good-bye. She was resting in bed with Terry, our black and white terrier. She wished me good luck as she hugged and kissed me.
I ran back into the kitchen to say good-bye to Abuela. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, so she fumbled around her upper chest area looking for them. When she couldn’t find them easily, she cried out in her nervous Cuban accent, “ Donde estan mis espeuelos? ” (Where are my glasses?) I laughingly explain to her, “Abuela, they’re around your neck.” She’d look down and see them dangling below her chest and then burst into a quiet laughter. Our charming skit would be performed frequently over the years to come. My brother Howard was still sleeping; he had plans and wasn’t coming downtown with us today.
We marched out the front door to a beautiful summer day, walking down cement stairs and to the driveway where Dad’s navy blue Oldsmobile 98 parked. I gazed over to the middle of our front yard where Howard and I had planted sunflowers. We had a contest to see who could grow the biggest sunflower. Howard’s flower looked to be around six inches taller than mine. He always beat me at everything, but then he was seven years older than me. Tony climbed into the driver’s seat, Dad sat up front with him, and I sat in the back seat. I was one of the men now. We pulled out of our driveway onto Johnnycake Road. Ten minutes later, Tony pulled into a Shell gasoline station. He asked for ten dollars of gas, but the attendant pumped in only eight dollars. Poor Tony always had a hard time asking for gas at the service station; attendants always pumped in the wrong amount of gas because they never understood him.
We finally got on the interstate and headed south for Washington DC. We passed by the Carling Brewery as we left Baltimore. After about an hour or so, we were getting closer to the downtown Washington area. We were moving slowly in a lot of traffic, and it seemed like we were always stopping at a traffic light. Then I saw these really old, rundown buildings and groups of black men hanging out on a street corner laughing. I looked ahead through the windshield window and spotted the Washington Monument. I hoped that we were almost there.
After fidgeting in the backseat of my dad’s Oldsmobile for an hour and inhaling massive amounts of cigar smoke from both Dad and Tony during the trip, we finally turned into the Twelfth Street parking garage. My clothes reeked of cigar smoke, and I desperately needed to get out of the car. When the car came to a complete stop inside the parking garage, I was the first one to jump out. I felt kind of puny from the smoke and the long car ride. I needed fresh air. The windows were completely shut during the entire trip because the air-conditioning was on. I could see thick black soot lying on top of the dashboard from all the cigar-smoked trips that Dad and Tony had made into downtown; all the ashtrays contained a pyramid of ashes. I didn’t want to complain about the smoke and seem wimpy, so I kept quiet and watched the scenery out my window. I wanted to be a tough guy like my dad and Tony. A black man handed dad a parking stub and quickly drove his car away. We walked on the city sidewalk toward the end of the block. We couldn’t cross the street because a blinking sign at the end of the block told us not to walk. I walked behind Dad and Tony the whole time since coming out of the parking garage, but when we stopped to wait for the light to change, all of us stood close together. It actually gave me a break because their cigar smoke kept drifting back toward my face.
I took a minute to take my first good look at downtown. The first thing I noticed was a man throwing food scraps at a group of pigeons. I never got a chance to watch pigeons. They don’t seem like very smart birds and always hung out in the city for some reason. They looked kind of fat and clumsy and seemed to want to walk rather than fly. I got bored watching the pigeons eating, so I focused my attention on all the different kinds of people wearing serious faces as they marched up and down the street. It was a bright and sunny day when I left Johnnycake Road, but now everything kind of looked old and gray; I guessed the sun was hiding behind one of those big buildings. The cars and busses looked like they weren’t sure what lane they wanted to stay in, and I heard engines revving and horns beeping. With every step I took, I smelled bus fumes. We crossed the street when the sign finally said walk. The next light also said walk, so we kept crossing streets. Then we headed up a really steep sidewalk. I felt like I was leaning over like one of those ski jumpers in the Olympics. We passed by a hamburger place called Little Tavern Shops. I smelled the burgers as we walked by, and it was a refreshing odor; it gave me a nice break from inhaling all those crappy bus fumes. The scenery quickly turned into old and dirty brick walls with huge metal doors. Sitting on stoops outside the metal doors were scary-looking bums staring back at us. Some of the tramps focused their attention to what was inside their crinkly brown paper bags. One of them stared right at me, and I sped up and walked in between Dad and Tony. I tried to concentrate on looking straight ahead so that I wouldn’t see anymore bums, but