Out with the old....

I used to hate New Year's Eve, perhaps more than any other day of the calendar.
On December 31, 1991, I went in to work the midnight shift at 7-Eleven without any sense of foreboding, lacking any premonition at all. I emerged very much scathed ten hours later, my opinion of humanity battered, my soul seriously hardened.
I had started at 7-Eleven scarcely two months prior, and was not yet entirely comfortable in the job. But because of my rookie status, I wasn't entitled to stat holiday pay for New Year's Day--only to time and a half--and so it was deemed profitable to throw Ken to the wolves. Alone.
The night was cold, and it was snowing heavily. The first hour of the night dragged by with very few customers, and the streets were all but deserted as midnight approached, struck, and passed.
Half an hour into 1992, it hit.
Seemingly from nowhere, a flood of drunken revellers cascaded into the store. The torrent quickly intensified until there seemed to be no room for anyone else to enter; yet still they came. There was no space for something as civilized as a line to form: instead, people gathered around the till, yelling, screaming, and shoving each other. Through the crowd I glimpsed flashes of semi-human animals stuffing things into their coats, throwing chips and canned soup around, and spraying pop all over each other. An unmistakable sound momentarily overpowered the din and a jet of vomit coated a goodly part of the potato chip aisle. At that, I tried to leave the till, to confront the barfer, but a solid wall of people prevented my passage. He was long gone by the time I got through with a bucket and cloth and made a few perfunctory wipes of the chip racks. While my back was turned, at least five people walked out with handfuls of merchandise and I hurried back to the register.
The floor was already black from the snow being tracked in and around, and it wasn't even one in the morning yet. The bars wouldn't even let out for another seventy minutes.
Somebody demanded I call a cab. Unthinking, I complied. The first two cab companies wouldn't answer their phones; the third yielded a fast busy signal. After several tries, I managed to get through to a dispatcher, who informed me the wait for a cab was at least an hour and a half and would likely lengthen as the night went on.
I can't say the assembled multitudes were very happy to hear this news. A number of them settled in for the duration, the more honest of them actually rejoining the line every twenty minutes or so to purchase something or other, a (probably larger) number not bothering to pay for anything at all. Meanwhile, more and more people crowded in, at least one in every ten demanding I call a cab. I began to hear rather ominous musings. "Hey", said somebody with a drunken slur. "If we can get the cops here, they'll take us home!"
This didn't exactly reassure me. In fact, I called the police, for the first time in my life, and asked them to come and disperse this. I told the dispatcher that the situation here was volatile and had the makings of a riot. She promised a cruiser would be by. I went back to my register. The next two and a half hours passed in a senseless blur. I became an automaton, hammering away at the register, bagging chips, trying to ignore everything going on behind the first rank of people. I declined to call any more cabs, directing people to the pay phones outside. One gentleman was unhappy with this and showed his displeasure by whipping a container of nachos smothered in hot cheese at my head. I managed to dodge that, which was probably lucky for me--the cheese had just been dispensed at a temperature of well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
I threw a glance outside at one point and saw a couple of cruisers with their lights flashing.
Finally, I thought. The officers were busily breaking up a fight out in the parking lot. The combatants were ushered into separate backseats, and--could it really be true?--an officer came in to check on me.
By now, the flood was receding, although I still couldn't leave my till. I tried to tell the give the constable some idea of what I had been going through. He asked me to describe the person who had thrown the nachos. I told him that was impossible; there'd been a sea of people in here tonight...was "drunk male university student" enough to go on? I confess I was getting a bit testy. The constable left soon after, shaking his head in the same way I was shaking mine.

At four o'clock on the dot it stopped. The last customer left the store and disappeared.
I surveyed my surroundings. Never before or since have I seen such a mess. The floor was completely and totally black, with slush melting into sick-looking pools. The chip aisle was almost completely stripped; most of the few bags remaining had been ripped open, their contents spilling out all over the place. A vomitous smell lingered. From the pop cooler, a half-eaten sandwich winked at me. I walked around in a daze, not knowing where to start.

At exactly four-oh-three a.m. my boss's blue car pulled in. She'd hardly opened the door to the store before the yelling began. What had I been doing all night? Why had I allowed the store to become such a God-damn mess? I was useless. I was worse than useless. I was a disgrace. I should be fired.
A man with any balls would have dared her to fire me. A man with any sense of justice would have railed at her for putting me on alone for this. A man with any self-confidence at all would have simply walked out and never returned.
I was none of those men, at that point in my life. At nineteen I still considered bosses to be something like parents. Parents were to be obeyed without question, right?
I did try to defend myself. I asked Jo to take a look at the till tapes, which would show I served over five hundred customers in less than four hours. I started right in on the puke, the threats, the nachos. Jo heard none of this. Her sole concern was getting the sales floor restored to some semblance of normality.
It took me six hours. Jo even helped, for about twenty minutes of that, before she slammed into her back room office to review the security tapes. Soon after. she stormed back out and asked me if I was aware that there had been shoplifters in the store.
Gee, do you think?
I can date my passage into adulthood precisely to that moment when I lost my temper, thoroughly and completely, in front of my boss.
Did she have the slightest idea what had transpired in here over the last four hours? Why in the fuck would she put a still-green employee on alone on a night which broke all store records (and would have shattered them had all the merchandise that was consumed been paid for)? What exactly was I supposed to do, leap over the counter and subdue the thieves? That contradicted everything in the training videos, I said, and added that the training videos didn't, couldn't, prepare anyone for the kind of night I'd just had.
I thought about walking out. Couldn't bring myself to do it. Jo was one of those people who would intimidate the hell out of you until you stood up to her, at which point she'd immediately back off. I'd never met anyone like this before and I had no idea how to act and react. Her abrupt withdrawal confused me. I couldn't have won that confrontation, could I have?

I never worked another New Year's Eve alone. I did work them, however, being foolish enough to forget to book that night off three months in advance like nearly everyone else did. It was an important night, obviously: it was required to go out and get blotto because tomorrow you'd wake up in a whole different year. Co-workers of mine were quite upset when I finally got a New Year's Eve off in 1995, reasoning that if I wasn't going to a bar, there was no point in having the night off. I cheerfully told them to get bent: I'd fucking earned a reprieve.

The bitterness has faded now, five years since my last 7-Eleven New Year's Eve graveyard shift. It recurs like chronic heartburn if I allow myself to remember watching one inebriate take a dump on the floor in full view of thirty or more onlookers, or the New Year's Eve when a few cars outside had their windshields kicked in, but these things are much easier to block out now than they once were. I think I've written out the last of the bile just now. It's gone. That feels good.

I'll be spending tonight at home with my lovely wife, relaxing in peace and tranquility. And tomorrow it'll be a brand new slate.

Happy New Year, everyone.