When I was twenty-two, I got a part-time job at Guitar Center—a retail chain that specialized in selling the dream and the makings of rock-and-roll. I was a late-to-college freshman in desperate need of a job and, in 2002, Guitar Center was by all measures considered a “cool” place to work. I was hired to sit at the front desk three days a week, greeting customers and making sure no one walked off with stolen merchandise. My official job title was “Inventory Control Specialist,” but everyone in the entire company referred to this job as “Door Girl.”
Being a Door Girl was, for the most part, painfully boring. I stood at a kiosk for five or seven or ten hours, depending on the day, and waited for people to enter or exit the building. My primary responsibility was to check customers’ receipts and verify that what they had in hand matched what they’d actually paid for, from two-dollar packs of guitar picks to fifteen thousand dollar recording consoles. Looking back, it seems foolish for Guitar Center to have employed mostly young women in this role and not large, intimidating male bodyguard-types, but of course we were also there to answer phones and make conversation with lonely men. Sort of like a rock-and-roll receptionist.
I had been instructed to spend my downtime watching the sales floor for suspicious activity, but I spent most of this time highlighting passages in art history textbooks. Even when I did scan the space, all I could see from my desk was a tangle of guitars and amps and promotional posters that evoked the chaos of a Where’s Waldo spread. I remember most clearly the 36-some-odd square feet I lived inside for close to four years: the faux-granite standing desk, the wobbly swivel chair, the “green screen” computer that resembled a Commodore 64. The kiosk itself was a raised platform with waist-high walls wrapped in the same coarse gray carpeting that covered the floor. I still remember the precise location of a partially dislodged carpet staple that frequently poked into my right forearm.
None of my coworkers talked to me for what felt like months, which made my day-to-day challenging, since I wasn’t permitted to leave my post unless another employee held my spot. This task was universally looked upon as an inconvenience of great consequence. Most of the staff were commission-based salespeople who spent their days pacing the floor like starved wolves, waiting for some phantom Golden Customer (a clueless mother shopping for her kid, a fool who’d just won a scratch-off ticket) to waltz into their lives and swell their monthly commission into quadruple digits. They were also—and perhaps this goes without saying—mostly men, and the Door had historically been a female-space. They treated my kiosk like a forcefield of emasculation, a prison in which their virility—measured entirely by sales profit—wilted and soured like a teenage boy whose mother has just walked in on him masturbating.
I was not accustomed to working with so many men. My previous job had been at a bakery (all women), the job before that at a trendy clothing store (also all women), and the job before that at JoAnn Fabrics (all moms and two enviably crafty gay men). The number of women on Guitar Center’s staff fluctuated but during my tenure never exceeded three or four: me, the Door Girl who worked the opposite shifts, and the occasional young woman working the sales floor (resulting in a ratio of about one woman for every ten men). This did not bother me at first. I’d grown up with older brothers and lots of male friends and had always considered myself Just One of the Guys, which in the 90s meant I dropped F-bombs often and with ease, listened to a lot of Soundgarden, and didn’t flinch at things like the Howard Stern Show. It did not occur to me that I’d historically surrounded myself with relatively feminist men in whose company I luxuriously did not feel impeded by my gender—or really feel the shape of my gender at all. At twenty-two, I did not believe that being a woman had slowed or encumbered me in any way. I considered sexism a problem of my mother’s generation, one that had more or less been solved.
The breed of masculinity I found at Guitar Center was so obvious and seemingly self-contained that it first appeared too cliché to do any harm. The whole institution seemed to exist by and for men, particularly male musicians, and more particularly male musicians who’d fully bought into the fantasy of rock and roll, which essentially resembles the kind of up-all-night debauchery romanticized in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous. Guitar Center capitalized on that fantasy with the shrewdness of a witch in a gingerbread house. Inside its diamond-plate-metal-trimmed walls was the promise that this amp or this drum kit or even this pack of guitar strings would bring its owner closer to their personal rock-and-roll Atlantis, whether that was the dream of imminent fame or the languishing memory of glory days that had left them deflated, playing Cheap Trick covers at 45th birthday parties. Guitar Center provided a space where it was all still possible, where they were allowed—and encouraged—to wank for as long as they wanted on equipment most of them could not reasonably afford. And they did, unabashedly, sometimes for hours, as though they were alone in their basements or on stage in front of ten thousand screaming fans. The cumulative result was a cacophony of unrealized aspirations, a sound only an eager salesperson could love. A sound that, to me, became inseparable from the sadness of men doomed to live in the service of their own imagined greatness.
Many of these men and boys seemed irked to find a woman standing guard at the precipice of their retail man-cave, as though my presence imposed an unwanted layer of self-consciousness. As they passed in and out of the turnstiles, some barely mumbled hellos, others fumbled to make friendly conversation. I was asked often: “Do you play an instrument?” as though I were a kindergartener at my older brother’s piano recital. “I play bass, actually,” I’d say, a piece of news that registered in their expressions as either quaint or irresistibly sexy. Men occasionally propositioned me, though the ones audacious enough to do so to my face were all old enough to be my father: an Italian-American drummer who repeatedly offered to take me out but only if I manicured my nails, a fifty-two year-old reference librarian who spent an hour every Thursday trying to get me to marry him, a divorced dad who passed me a note that said, “Dinner, movies, motorcycle ride” along with his phone number.
Those guys were no more than an annoyance. The worst were those determined to put me in my place, to remind me of the inconvenience I’d caused by weaseling my way into the boys’ club. I stopped a man once who tried to cruise past me without logging in his guitar. He scoffed and heaved the case up onto my counter. “What do you need, honey,” he said. “The make and the serial,” I told him. He clicked open the case and as I reached for the neck to retrieve the number, he swatted my arm away. “Wait, wait, wait,” he said, laughing, and lifted the instrument up himself. “Sweetie, there is no way I’m letting you touch this guitar.”
As far as I could tell, a woman’s intended role in this fantasy was as an extra. The mother chauffeuring her son, the girl watching her boyfriend’s attempts to master the opening riff of Blink 182’s “Dammit,” or the Door Girl who looked through your bag with what you assumed was the seriousness of a bachelor party stripper dressed as a cop. We were expected to be part of the scenery, not unlike the larger-than-life obligatory Janis Joplin wall decal that watched over me from across the entryway. The few women who shopped there for themselves did so pragmatically. They slipped in and out virtually unnoticed, unless the sales guys thought they were attractive, in which case one of them would page “Line 10” over the intercom. Joke’s on her—the phone system had no Line 10; it was code for hot-chick-in-the-store, and when that call came the staff dropped what they were doing to track the woman down, flocking to her presumed location like pigeons to an abandoned hamburger bun.
I took all of this at a kind of boys-will-be-boys face value and spent my days observing that cringe-worthy song and dance from the superiority of my gray carpeted perch. After a few months of being mostly ignored, I earned a base level of respect by essentially doing my job: catching transactional discrepancies, offering to stay late or come in early, helping to prep the sales floor for holiday weekend specials. I still hadn’t made friends, but I’d made myself useful, kind of like a donkey.
I got the sense most of my male coworkers didn’t know what to make of me: a college student who lived in the city and drove into the suburbs to work a mindless job that paid less than a work-study gig (naturally, we were paid minimum wage which, in 2002, was $6.75/hour). They were used to girls like my predecessor, a petite blond with a nose ring and several pairs of ultra-low-rise Dickies whose position I’d filled when she’d been promoted to the sales staff. “Don’t let these guys give you any shit,” she told me on my first day. Her advice seemed playful, in an us-women-gotta-stick-together way, but I learned quickly that this was an every-woman-for-herself scenario. In no time, Dickies left me for the wolves. She resented having to cover my breaks and treated the task with the same terse disdain expressed by her male counterparts. I couldn’t blame her. For as tedious as my job was, hers was nearly insurmountable. The staff treated her like the cute runt of the bunch, and the only customers willing to do business with her were clueless dads or teenage boys who thought she was hot. Her tenure may have been doomed from the start because she’d broken the cardinal rule women are warned not to break at work: she’d fucked the boss. At least, that’s what everyone thought, and what people think often has as much if not more credence than the truth. The truth is: I don’t know if they fucked. I know that sometimes he chased her around, grabbing at the bare flesh above her studded belt while she squealed and tried facetiously to get away from him, a chase that often ended in the vending machine annex by my desk. When they disappeared around that corner, I could only hear the quiet, giggly mumblings of people who think no one is listening.
Fucking a staff member was an easy way for a woman to make herself seen at Guitar Center. It afforded some temporary privileges, like being invited out for beers with the guys after work and being considered “cool” for one’s lack of prudishness. Every woman who worked there during my tenure did it at some point. Dickies alone was cumulatively rumored to have screwed no less than six of our coworkers; the day-shift Door Girl had a long-time affair with a married salesguy who had four kids; and I fell for a lanky, emo singer who wore a corduroy blazer to work every day (perhaps the world’s most unlikely Guitar Center employee) and ended up dating him for two years. Guitar Center provided a particularly fertile breeding ground for workplace romance. The sales staff was expected to work 10-hour shifts, six days a week; most of them complained of having no life outside of their jobs and eventually resorted to lusting after the women who were part of their unfulfilling cyclical existence. Maybe we yielded because we too had been fooled by some aspect of the rock-and-roll fantasy, like Penny Lane from Almost Famous, who we are tricked into admiring, even though she is ultimately traded for a case of beer.
While dating a staff member offered a greater degree of inclusivity, I remained convinced that the superior and more sustainable way to survive in that ecosystem was to be what I thought I already was: Just One of the Guys, a status in which I’d placed a sort of unbreakable faith. This distinction could only be achieved by playing the long game, quietly doing my job, proving over and over that I did not fit into some predetermined female stereotype. I never cried at my kiosk or complained when they used the women’s bathroom to poop or tried to get myself promoted to sales, an upward mobility that made many of them uncomfortable. I barely spoke to my singer boyfriend at work and never tugged him away from the salesfloor for personal drama. I played their game and even subverted their rules sometimes, paging Line 10 when a hot guy came into the store, which they thought was charming. Most importantly, I didn’t play the “woman card”; in the case I objected to something, I made sure to do so from a civic or business standpoint. I earned a reputation for being unflappable, the kind of girl the guys could be themselves around, the best kind of invisible. On slow Sundays they took turns lingering at my desk, tossing around a mini foam basketball and confessing their aspirations and transgressions as though I were an oracle.
This, perhaps, had become my fantasy: to exist outside the boundaries of what they believed a woman could be. From this hallowed ground, I thought I could passively enact change by standing in as Guitar Center’s moral compass, a creature whose presence inspired my male coworkers to reevaluate their behavior. The mirage of my influence prevented me from recognizing that I had graduated from Just One of the Guys to Girl Who is Suddenly Attractive Because She’s Funny and a Good Listener. I found myself one day listening to a coworker tell me that he masturbated thinking about me, and worse, I took it in stride. In fact, I found it sexy, not because I wanted to sleep with him, but because we both knew I never would: another kind of power I had never known.
My daydream of female exceptionalism did not end with some crushing display of sexual harassment. The true disillusionment revealed itself gradually, in small, everyday indignities: each time a man handed me a receipt and then tugged it away before I could reach it; or the time I had just finished washing the windows and a customer pressed his dirty hands all over them and said, smiling, “Just keeping you busy, honey”; or all the times I could hear my coworkers joking around in the nearby sales office just before they shut the door, knowing they didn’t want me to hear whatever came next because it might be the thing that crossed my line, the unlucky comment that got them into trouble. It didn’t matter how much they had accepted me; I would never get past that office door.
The times I did overhear things—those worse than they’d intended for me to overhear—I privately disapproved but publicly abstained. My small acts of resistance came in the form of exercising the power of my position; I was, after all, the store’s gatekeeper and had over time established myself as a stringent line of defense. Toward the end of my time there, I ratted on one of the guys for a conducting a shady deal. I don’t remember the details, only that he was a top salesperson, lauded for making the store a lot of money, so I prepared myself for some pushback. I later overheard him say, “I’d fuck that little cunt’s college brain right out of her head.” The comment didn’t bother me at first. It was startling but also uninspired and predictable. What gradually bothered me was that I had foolishly let myself believe in my own miraculous exemption; that I’d worked for years with these guys, many of whom I considered my friends, but the second I upset the hierarchy I was nothing more than a little cunt; and that I could no longer unsee the possibility that this was how they all actually thought of me, all the time.
I know none of this compares to the destructive kind of powerlessness inflicted on a woman when a man pins down her wrists or destroys her career or robs her of a childhood. Guitar Center left me with a subtler kind of powerlessness, one based on the principle that if I want a man’s respect, I am responsible for determining precisely how to earn it, and even when I do, that they can still choose whether to give it to me.
In the end, something unremarkable inspired me to leave. During my last month at the Door, the company ran two simultaneous ad campaigns: one championed an image of Rosie the Riveter, the other featured a nude woman behind ad copy that barely obscured her nipples and genitalia. From my kiosk, I stared at these two images side-by-side, plastered all over the store on glossy posters. I thought about how no one had anticipated the absurdity of this juxtaposition, which meant they also had neglected to realize that the women who worked and shopped there had to do so amidst that absurdity. The longer I stared at the two images, the more their contrast seemed to reflect the impossibility of being a woman in that space. I guess you could say my college brain got the best of me. By the time those posters came down off the walls, I was already gone.
Candace Jane Opper's writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, and Vestoj, among others. Her manuscript, “Certain and Impossible Events,” was chosen by Cheryl Strayed as the winner of the second annual Kore Press Memoir Contest (forthcoming, 2019). She holds an MFA from Portland State University and is the former producer and co-host of Late Night Love Affair, a podcast about books written by women. She writes and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son.