Ryan Cooper

[ Continued from part II .] Working with James had its advantages. He had been there for years and knew the history of the store, which was far more interesting than I would have suspected. In the stockroom there was a massive metal grate leaning against the wall. I had never seen it used for anything, and asked him one day what it was for. “This place used to be owned by a guy who was in with the mob over in Jersey. He didn’t pay them some money he owed and just disappeared one day. The store landed in his wife’s hands, and she didn’t know how to run the business. She ended up owing the city a lot in back taxes, and one day the city marshal just came by, forced everyone out, chained the doors shut, and cut the electricity. Well, this was the middle of summer and no one could get inside for about two weeks. Inside was about $200,000 in inventory. When the city finally finished with the store and we got back inside the smell was so bad the first guys had to wear gas masks. ...

[ Continued from part I. ] After a couple days I mastered the cashier business. I felt anxious to prove myself—as a white college graduate, I feared confirming the stereotype of the pointy-headed, useless intellectual. I got very good with the register and the produce codes—though not as good as Sam, one of the sub-managers, who was blindingly fast when he had to take over a till. Virtuosity wasn’t my goal in any case; rather I went for a low error rate, as any cashier more than $20 under for the day’s count was automatically fired. I was never under by more than $5—and that only once—but I was over by more than $20 on several occasions. I never figured out why. I was, however, the most popular cashier. Practically every minor transaction like groceries is carried out with no more than a grunt in New York. I was obstinately polite and cheerful. (Well, most of the time. Some people were just out to ruin my day, because I was a helpless cashier. I bitched them out in the ...

[ Happy New Year!  To celebrate, here's a story I wrote about my time in New York City.  Since I'm on vacation, I'll be posting it in installments Dickens-style .] On 29 September 2008, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 778 points, then a one-day record point drop (though not in terms of percentage). This marked the beginning of what economists call the “Great Recession,” the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. On 8 November, I boarded a plane to New York City, no job prospects or plans in mind. I wasn’t totally helpless. My friend J. was teaching first grade in the Bronx with Teach For America and she was a bit lonely and hating the New York social scene. She said I could come and stay with her and her roommate. I was killing time, waiting for the departure of my South Africa Peace Corps group in July. “I don’t have a job over there,” I said. “It sounds like no one has a job over there.” I had recently graduated with a degree in chemis...

One of the cabins was at the bottom of a hill, and for some reason the remodelers had sealed the crawlspace. Heat wicks moisture out of the ground, so the crawlspace filled with several inches of water. When Dad opened the door there the first time and played his flashlight around, he saw a fungal bloom on the scale of a biblical plague. Every surface was covered with several inches of moist and springy growths; the light revealed iridescent fruiting bodies, green and red and white and black, as though the whole colony had been preparing for this very moment. It was a horrifying discovery, I’m sure, yet it meant another day’s pay fixing this mistake. Dunton is like that—during one particular project several dangerous and critical mistakes are inevitably uncovered, which lead to more projects in their turn. One wonders if it is theoretically possible for a single skilled laborer to make progress there, or if he would be buried under new projects emerging faster than he could finis...

[ Front matter: Here's another piece from my Dad. Stories like this make me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. ] Sitting in a courtroom on a hard chair is not my idea of how to spend a pleasant day in March. Particularly when it's the first day in what seems like months that it hasn't snowed or rained. Particularly when the courthouse is located only a few hundred yards from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Out there, with snow dusting the walls of the canyon and the air as clear as nothing—well, it looked pretty nice. This morning in the newly-remodeled interior of the courthouse a federal magistrate is arraigning two haggard-looking young men from Flagstaff, Arizona, charged with violation of Federal Regulatory Code 7.4H(3). It's 10:00 a.m. The two men have already hiked up from the bottom of the mile-deep gorge in the slush this morning. They are dirty and worn out. They face a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a 500-dollar fine. Conside...

[Front matter: this is a story my dad wrote after a science trip down Grand Canyon back in 2008. I've got his most of his collected works here, and I'll be posting them now and then. My dad's a bit funnier, a lot cooler, and much less pretentious than me; y'all should like this one.] It’s already the most massive boat I’ve ever driven and they keep bringing stuff on board. Here comes a laser geodometer, in a custom case the size of an oil drum. “Keep it out of the crunch zone,” the fellow says, “it cost 60 grand.” We’ve taken the spare motor out of its box and filled the space with a laser sediment particle meter, an acoustic Doppler current profiler, a couple of generators. The P-61 sampler is a fish-shaped solid-brass instrument that takes two people to lift off the beach. I’ve got all three spare outboard engines and the whole fleet’s gas; the kitchen and all the food, a veneer of personal duffel in carnival colors, lashed over everything like a hairnet. I like ...