Truck Night

When I was a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, I had a part time job as a night stocker at a Safeway Grocery store. The hours were from 10:00pm to 7:00am and I worked three nights a week. This series of photographs is from a selection of work created during that time (1981 to 1983).

Growing up, my father was a manager of a grocery store in the Midwest. The food, the space of the store, the sounds, smells, colors, and the shoppers were all a part of my childhood experiences. As a teenager I held a job at Safeway, a new super-store in the suburbs of Kansas City. I worked as a bagger and cashier for seven years before moving to Austin. By that time, I had developed an interest in the variety of things going on within the store. The space was brightly lit with fluorescent lamps, with background Muzak continuously playing. The array of colors and type on all the products and the abundance of everything on the shelves was a cultural spectacle of which I became very aware.

When I started working at a Safeway in Austin in 1980, it was familiar and suburban, except that I was working at night. The store was closed and locked. I was part of the night crew, doing warehouse labor. It was culturally more diverse than where I was from. The Muzak sound system was hijacked each night to emit rock music over the dozens of ceiling installed speakers, broadcast at high volume throughout the entire store while we worked. Twice a week, the immense truck full of goods would have to be unloaded, boxes opened, prices marked and the shelves stocked, all in one night.

The store was transformed into an adolescent space for the crew to act out. It now functioned as a private space, where we had a job to do, restocking all the shelves and making the store look perfect by the morning, when the doors were opened to the public again.

I was studying photography at UT at the time, and was attracted to the black and white process. My camera was with me frequently at the store and I would shoot during the course of the night, and then present the work during class. I was the outsider at the store, the one attending college. I felt like the misfit just passing through. The others were looking to be managers, perhaps lifetime employees at Safeway. Sometimes during breaks or at lunch, we would pile into Mike’s Camaro and go driving around the suburbs. Other times, the crew would play video games, signing their names in sexual slang. I would usually be taking pictures, or sitting on a check stand reading.

Prior to Austin, when I was still in Kansas City, I began to have a recurring dream that involved working at Safeway. After putting in a long shift in the check stand, calling out prices to the customers, I began to do this in my sleep. The dream was something like this:

I would be in the check stand about ready to go home after a long day. Another employee would come by and close off my check stand with the chain. I would turn to leave, when I would hear the chain being unhooked, and a customer would start unloading a huge basket of groceries.

In other dreams, I would be in the back room, at the time clock, or the break room area. Looking back, it now seems like an early John Carpenter horror film, banal but weirdly terrifying. The dreams continued while I was in Austin and employed at Safeway, and I would usually remember them.

I left Austin and moved to New York in 1983, though I continued to have the “grocery store dreams”. This was amusing to me, but it wasn’t until I entered psychoanalysis, that I began talking about them and trying to understand when I had them, and why. Many things were revealed to me during this time. My relationship with my father, to labor, to art, to class, many things became apparent.

This selection of photographs represents the course of one night of work. It illustrates my dreams, anxieties, and my horror; these are stills from an ongoing never-ending movie of my past.