Read Shirley, I Jest!: A Storied Life for Free Online

managed to buy an old car for ninety dollars. It probably only had eight or nine rides left in it! When it did conk out, I had to leave IHOP because it was too difficult to take the bus. Eventually everyone moved out of the group house on Los Feliz.
    I started sharing a basement apartment on Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park with Edna, a good friend from college. Money, of course, was still an issue, mainly because neither Edna nor I had any! Edna got a job in Hollywood (tearing taped dimes off sweepstakes entries). I reregistered with the same employment agency that had placed me with the law firm.
    Within a week, I landed a job at a bank in downtown L.A. Initially I was to be trained as a teller, but first they had another little task for me. I was put in a big room with massive fluorescent lighting. They brought in several boxes. These boxes were filled with two thousand 2 × 4 index cards. On each card was the name and information of one of the bank’s customers. Each of these customers had applied for a newfangled thing called a “charge card.” My mission was to alphabetize the cards and then run credit checks. Depending on their score I was then to issue them the appropriate credit amount. It felt like a lot of responsibility for me to extend credit to these customers. I learned two things about myself at the bank. One, I am a great alphabetizer and, two, refer to number one. I organized the names, in order, in three days, no problem. But calling to check out a person’s financial statistics and then to determine if they were a good credit risk would, even under incandescent lighting, be vile ! I felt like I was searching through their underwear drawers looking for a gun that had been used in a crime!
    Who in their right mind would put me in charge of such a task? I’ll tell you who—thevery nice, and very handsome bank manager who hired me. The employment agency must have done some fancy footwork. Maybe they told him about the job I’d had at the law firm and that convinced him I was bank teller material. He had no way of knowing about the “dead files” in the bottom drawer! And here’s the kicker. I was solely in charge of this task and “the people in the boxes.” I alone had to determine the limit on the card according to the calculated score. I was in charge of the applications and could check off whatever limit I deemed appropriate, up to one thousand dollars.
    I spent my precious breaks sampling the vending machine fare while mulling this over, absentmindedly eating candy, chips, cookies and more candy and drinking coffee. I started empathizing with these people and began toying around with the idea of issuing most of them the thousand dollar limit even if they didn’t meet the criteria. I thought of the elderly people in those boxes in the same way I thought of my grandmother: honest, hardworking, always paying her debts, and perhaps needing a break more than others. But then, what if they defaulted? All of them? Oh, and were sent to prison! And somehow I was linked to it, then arrested, tried, convicted, and put in the same prison where my elderly people had now formed a gang and tormented me on a daily basis? I was consuming way too much candy!
    One day while sitting in my “office” in another caffeine-sugar daze, the door swung open. The handsome bank manager asked me to come with him for a moment. I was hoping at this point that he was going to fire me. But no such luck. He led me to the bank vault. A guard and a female teller were waiting.
    “We want to train you to assist with the safety deposit boxes. Don’t worry, you’ll go back to credit, but we want you to learn this first.”
    I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. He was smiling at me with an expression that seemed to exude his total confidence, as if to say, I believe in you, Cindy . They were all so nice as they ran me through the drill and handed me a key that was tethered to an official-looking chain. I would be responsible