It's 9AM

Downtown baby, don't you think it's crazy?

Chris Lowry

May 12, 2023

Mr. Cohen was eighty four.

Mr. Hastings was seventy six.

One owned the department store I worked at when I was sixteen.

And the other took care of the older man, his boss for fifty years.

I couldn’t imagine working at the same place for that long.

Couldn’t imagine working retail in a downtown department store on Main Street Pine Bluff for that long.

Cohen’s was next to Burt’s and a few blocks from Marx’s.

Both men’s stores that we competed against.

All three pillars of the Main Street retail scene.

Hastings talked all the time about the decline of Main Street.

He would know.

He had lived it.

I listened, a little.

But I was more interested in the brand new Pines Mall going up on the south side of town.

More interested in where I was going to meet my friends when I got off at six.

Because Cohen’s was open from nine am to six pm.

Mr. Cohen himself cut quite a figure.

He was ancient and stooped and had one job now.

Sit on the stool behind the eight foot women’s jewelry counter and just watch.

He wore a suit to work every day, had snow white hair that was as thin as gossamer, and coke bottle thick glasses that made his eyes look as large as an owl’s.

He had dementia, or maybe Alzheimer’s with bouts of crystal clarity and a lot of actions rooted in habit.

After owning the store for sixty plus years, he would.

He disappeared every so often, and Mr. Hastings would shuffle from his perch behind the main desk and go on a search for him.

Hastings picked the old man up from the old folks home every morning and dropped him off after work.

He took him to synagogue on Friday’s and out to eat on Sunday’s.

He walked him up to the second floor break room at ten, twelve and two for breaks.

Set out his lunch, gave him a six ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper for the first break and only water after that, despite the protests.

Cohen wasn’t vocal about much, didn’t share any of his memories, though there must have been a few.

He was mostly quiet, and ancient and on the verge of decrepit.

The only time he showed much life was when he disappeared, and when young black boys came into the store.

He would hop off the stool and follow them around like a silent stooped bird of prey, watching their movements, waiting.

He did not trust young black men, though he would tolerate women on the women’s side of the store.

I worked on the Men’s side, with Billie who looked like a plumper version of Flo from the TV show Alice, right down to the bouffant hair and mouth full of gum and sass.

I worked with Bill, who was very much in the closet and spent a lot of time talking about his girlfriend that we never met. His favorite activity was designing the two huge window displays every month, and the in store displays on top of the wardrobes.

The wardrobes ran the length of the store, packed with three hundred suits or more at any given time.

His second favorite activity was helping measure and dress the police force because Cohen’s was the exclusive provider for uniforms.

Every cop on the force got a credit they could spend at the store for their uniform, so every officer in Pine Bluff was in at least once a year.

Bill and Billie would hustle and tussle over who would get to serve the men in blue.

She liked to flirt and he liked to pretend not to, and sixteen year old men just took note and tried not to laugh.

The best part of my job was the third floor.

An attic warehouse the size of the bottom floor, with a box room in the middle for unpacking and tagging and hanging the clothes that came in.

It was an air conditioned oasis in the hot summer and a heated igloo in the cold winter and I got to spend a lot of time with my sixteen year old female counterpart, Stephanie as she did the women’s clothes while I did the men’s.

We would escape up there as much as we could together.

Mr. Cohen never made it to the third floor when he went missing.

The attic was not his domain.

When he went walkabout, it was out on a Main Street he no longer recognized, so it was easy for him to get lost on the straight shot four blocks.

All of the business landmarks he knew had disappeared over the past twenty years, leaving him with only memories and ghosts.

A spotty memory at that.

Or he went to the bathroom on the second floor.

The attic was dim and dark and lit by yellow light bulbs I got to change on the regular.

The first floor was white light bright, bathed in long fluorescents installed in the seventies, that I got to change at the top of an eighteen foot ladder.

While Cohen supervised and held the ladder for me, which was another one of his jobs.

The second floor was like an afterthought, built between the first and third and only about twelve feet wide. It had the billing office where Scott the Assistant Manager liked to hang out.

It had the break room which was all dark wood, and dark trim and one old solid wood antique table that I would kill to have today.

And the bathroom.

It could be called a water closet, because it was literally a toilet and small bowl sink built under the stairs in a room hardly large enough to turn around in.

It was the first place Hastings checked when Cohen went missing.

It was also where he was three times out of ten.

Sitting.

He would forget what he was doing or how he was supposed to do it in the middle of the act.

Or maybe he was waiting for Hastings to help, because who really knows how the mind works, when someone stops communicating?

It might be petty revenge for being told no, a lot.

For being old, and once in charge, but now babied and coddled by the man you were the boss of for decades.

Won’t give me a Dr. Pepper for the two o’clock when I ask? Here, wipe my ass.

Or maybe he was old, and tired and forgetful.

Easy enough to be that.

9AM

It's 9AM

Downtown baby, don't you think it's crazy?

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