This Must Be The Place and Other Stories

This Must Be The Place

Larry Jenkins started working at the Newbury Linoleum factory in the summer of '61. He was eighteen and the drummer in a rock-n-roll band that was going to be big one day. In the meantime, though, he needed a day job and linoleum was it, daddy-o.

Mr. Kincaid, the senior floor manager, a middle-aged man with thick-framed glasses and a pot belly that strained the buttons on his shirt, showed him around the grounds.

The loud factory floor where giant machines mixed the flax and oil solutions -- compressing and dyeing until it rolled out the other end as flat sheets wrapped around long spindles -- couldn't have interested Larry less.

The glassed-in offices that overlooked the final production hall were nominally more interesting, but still pretty yawningly square. The identical desks and primly-smiling secretaries all reminded him uncomfortably of his mother.

The canteen was roomy, but had an odd smell to it. "Cabbage?" Larry asked. 

"Cabbage," Mr. Kincaid confirmed, with a knowing tilt of the head.

Larry nodded and followed the manager through the back loading docks and out into the front showroom.

This would be where Larry was going to spend his days.

The large, plate-glass window revealed an expansive view of the customer parking lot, a highway exit on a grassy slope rising behind it. "So you can see the customers coming," Mr. Kincaid explained.

Two crystal chandeliers hung from a low ceiling, lighting the thick, burgundy carpet and yellowish floor tiles. Display stands and racks of samples dotted the room that customers could flip through like thick, glossy magazines. A spiral staircase twisted up to a gallery where the new-fangled vinyl samples could be found. Should anybody be interested.

Vinyl.

The mere mention of the word made Larry's eyes glaze over in a way that Mr. Kincaid took for interest, and he lumbered up the stairs to show Larry the new patterns and explain the chemical compounds at length. Larry smiled and nodded the whole time, little 45s of his band's songs dancing in his head.

Coming back down the stairs, Larry noticed a neon sign bolted into the wall on the far end. This Must Be The Place it said in illuminated, mint-green letters that didn't match anything in the room – and yet somehow did.

"Oh, that." The manager waved a dismissive hand. "That's been here since the 40s. It's to make people think "this must be the place where you can get pretty flooring" or something like that."

Larry readjusted the unaccustomed tie around his neck and nodded.

At the end of the first month when he was offered a permanent job based on Mr. Kincaid's recommendation, Larry whispered to the faintly buzzing neon sign as he left to go home: "This must be the place where I'm gonna work until I get famous. Just you wait and see."

1963 found Larry standing at the front of the empty showroom staring out the windows at the cars passing by on the highway, but not really seeing them. His band had just broken up after three years of trying and failing to get more than local gigs.

"Sorry, man," Eddie, the bassist had said as he clapped a hand on Larry's shoulder. "Helen wants me to quit. We need to save for a house of our own which means I have to get serious about a steady job. You're coming to the wedding, aren't you?"

Sure he was, and he had. But bitterness had risen in his throat and soured his expression so badly during the ceremony, he knew the other guests assumed he was secretly in love with Helen.

After that, the rest of the guys had jumped ship one by one, abandoning their dreams for a one-way ticket to Squaresville. They called it "growing up," but it lacked a backbeat and that electrifying feeling of being a part of something big. And now? Would he have to give it up, too?