The statement stung in my ears and made the bile rise up in my stomach. Yeah, I thought. Grateful. I should be grateful to be working in a 150 degree warehouse for minimum wage with a boss who does most of his sweating because he’s sitting in an office chair getting fatter.
I guess I found the job at just the right time. Being between jobs, I had spent most of my time downtown – strolling around and people watching, making the work-a-day suckers in expensive suits and uncomfortable looking shoes nervous, and ducking into dive bars for cheap beer and shade. I preferred the life of leisure, but you can only do that for so long before the cash reserves run too low. Everyday my mother would call me; she had that worried tone in her voice.
“Are you looking for work?” she’d ask. “You should talk to your uncle. Maybe he can get you on down at the plant.”
“I don’t need help from him,” I said. “I’m fine. Really.”
“You can come by this weekend and do laundry if you want.”
“Thanks.”
The conversation was getting beyond old, but that wasn’t reason I needed a job. I needed a job because I was broke, and broke trumps parental guilt every time. I had put it off as long as I could. So when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I happened to find a copy of the want ads laying on the counter of the bar where I spent my last couple of bucks. Even though the beer was warm, I made sure to savor it as I flipped through the pages of different sized boxes. Ads from temp agencies. Ads asking me if I wanted to earn a living from home. Ads for truck drivers, dishwashers, accountants. I skipped to the back where the Miscellaneous and Unskilled Labor jobs were listed.
The ad was short, which seemed like a good sign. The bigger the company, the bigger the ad, the greater chance they would be fuckers. The smaller the company, the less money they had to spend on ad space. My odds (I thought) at small companies were better. You’re less replaceable when there aren’t 1000 other people just like you.
Warehouse work. Day shift. Monday-Friday.
It listed a number to call. I left the bar and called the number. The woman’s voice on the other end of the phone told me show up the next day for an interview. The woman’s voice sounded nice. That meant she was probably somebody’s grandmother who had been with the company since Rosie the Riveter. I went back to the room I was renting to prepare for the fact that I had to get up and go to work the next day. I tried consoling myself with the fact that I could pay rent and not have to end up on someone’s couch. That might be nice, I thought. Also, I would have something to tell mom when she called. I might actually manage to be the good son for once, I thought. A steady paycheck also meant that I could look forward to more warm beer and cheap wine. I might even be able to move away from the Ramen diet I’d been on for a while. Work was sounding better and better. I looked through the kitchen. I had enough Ramen to get through another week, if I stretched it out. Enough time to maybe get a paycheck. “Ok,” I told myself. “You can do this. It’s only work. Most people do it every single day. If THEY can do, so can you.”
The warehouse was in an industrial park on the west side of town. As I was walking in, I looked around. Small warehouse. Two bay doors. There was a truck backed up to one of them. I couldn’t tell exactly what was in the trailer. A couple of guys were in the back, and I couldn’t tell if they were loading or unloading. The office wasn’t hard to find. it was near the back, and walled off, most likely for the air conditioning. I walked in. The secretary, an shriveled up woman with purple tinted gray hair, looked up and smiled like Death. “Can I help you?”
I told her why I was there. She gave an application form on a clip board to fill out. The pen was attached to the clipboard with one of those chains like they used to use on pens in banks… back when people walked into the bank to make deposits and had to fill out a deposit slip. Guess they didn’t want the pen to disappear. You can never be too careful. I sat down in a really uncomfortable folding chair that rocked on one of the back legs and filled out the application; it wasn’t very long. When I was finished, I handed it back to the secretary. She smiled again and my neck hairs stood on end. “Mr. Carruthers will talk to you in a few moments.” Death nodded her head towards the rickety chair I had just sat in, then she stood up and carried my application – clipboard, pen, and all – into the back office. For a second, I thought maybe she had a fake leg.
The interview was short. Carruthers was a balding guy in his mid to late 40’s. He looked like he’d spent a long time sitting in an office, practicing his comb over. He didn’t stand up when I walked in, but he stuck out s chubby paw for me to shake. I did.
“Sit down,” he said.
I did. He looked at over a pair of reading glasses and glanced down at the application.
“You ever do warehouse work?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve done factory work.”
“You have your own car? We’ve had trouble with guys not having cars.”
“I have a car.”
He nodded. “Have Evelyn give you new employee packet. Take it with you and bring it back. You start tomorrow.”
“Uh, what time, sir?” I asked.
Carruthers grunted. “7:30-4, Monday through Friday.”
“Ok. See you in the morning.”
He grunted again and squinted. “Don’t let me down, kid.” Like he was doing me a favor.
I returned the following morning with my new employee packet filled out. When I walked into the office to give it to Evelyn, she smiled and my skin crawled. Then Carruthers bounded out of the back office, gave me my time card, and showed me where the time clock was. Then he handed me off to another guy with slightly worse communication skills named Stevens. Stevens didn’t have a first name. He was a big black guy with a righteous afro straight out of a Pam Greer flick. He did smile, showing off a couple of gold teeth. His smile didn’t make my skin crawl, at least. He led me over to the truck parked in front of the bay door; it may have even been the same truck from the day before.
“Ok,” he said. “Ya take these rolls,” he pointed to the rolls stacked four high in trailer,” and move 'em back there,” he pointed to the back of the warehouse. “Ya gotta be careful not to get ‘em too dirty, or tear ‘em up.”
“Ok,” I said. “Then what?”
He looked at me like I was stupid.
“What do I do when I finish?”
He shook his head and started to walk away. I looked at the rolls. They were maybe 3 feet tall and 5 feet around. “HEY!” I called after him. Stevens stopped. “What are these made of?”
“Fabric,” he said, and kept on walking. I wasn’t sure where else there was to go, but I had a feeling that I’d never find him again.
Ok, I thought. It’s just fabric. How fucking heavy can fabric be? I looked around, trying to figure out how to get the rolls off the top. Leaning up against the wall to my right, there was an old broom handle. I grabbed it and used it to pry one of the rolls out. I barely got out of the way before it fell right where I was standing.
“Be careful with those rolls!” I heard a voice behind me. It sounded like Stevens, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Carrying the rolls was harder than I thought. Fabric, apparently, can be heavy. I tried rolling them, but Carruthers came bounding out of his office and yelled at me. I tried asking him if there was a dolly or hand-truck I could use – but he went back into his office before I could get the words out. The warehouse was comfortable for the first hour or so; but as the day wore on it got hotter and hotter. There were other people working in the warehouse, but they moved at a snail’s pace, and none of them were lifting anything heavier than a broom. As I expected, Stevens was nowhere. Carruthers would bound out of the air-conditioned office once in a while, but he retreated as soon as he started to sweat. I moved a couple of rolls that morning. I wasn’t sure why they just didn’t have somebody on a forklift unload the trailer. It would probably get done a lot faster . Or, at the very least, have more than one person doing the work.
After what seemed like the entire day had passed, I heard a voice. “TAKE A BREAK!” Shit. Not even lunch time. The voice hadn’t belonged to Stevens or Carruthers. Guess somebody decided to tell the new guy when it was time to smoke. I walked outside. There were two old picnic tables to the left of the bay doors. All of the employees (except for Stevens) were sitting at one, talking amongst themselves. I started to walk over there, but one of them – a mannish looking woman with a front tooth missing—shot me a dirty look. So I walked over to the empty table, sat down, and lit a cigarette.
I was on my second cigarette when Evelyn the Death head secretary say down. She was smoking a Virginia Sim. Rolled up notebook paper is cheaper, thought, and it probably tastes better.
“Are you liking your first day?”
“Sure.” I was focusing on my cigarette.
“You don’t seem very happy.”
Are you serious? I wanted to say. Why don’t you get your fat old ass out that air conditioned office and see how happy you’d be.
“It’s hard to find work, these days,” she continued. She blew a bluish cloud of smoke in my direction. “A lot of people can’t find jobs. “A lot of people would be grateful just to have a job.”
I didn’t answer. I just nodded my head. By the time I finished my cigarette, it was time to go back to work. She stamped her cigarette out on the top of the table, shook her head. “Tsk, tsk.”
The trailer didn’t look any emptier; as a matter of fact, if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve sworn that somebody had gone behind me and put more rolls in. But that would mean they’d actually have to DO something.
I worked until lunch, but I didn’t work that hard. I think I moved one roll in two hours. I knew it was lunch when I saw everybody wandering back towards the time clock. Smoke breaks were paid. Lunch wasn’t. I still had the broom stick in my hand when I walked back and clocked out. I walked into the office. It was empty. I looked into the back office. It was empty too. I had a mind full of things to say to Carruthers, and they were all going to end with me telling him where he could stick his goddamn broom stick. I considered waiting on him, or at least waiting on Evelyn to tell her. I stood in the middle of the office for a few moments. That’s when I noticed the cash box sitting on top of her desk. The lock was unhinged.
Opening the box, I considered emptying the thing and walking out. But I wasn’t a thief. Besides, they had my home address. Instead, I took forty dollars… probably what I’d earned up to that point… and left a short note. I closed the lid of the cash box and walked out of the office. On my way out of the warehouse, I ran into Stevens.
He smiled his gold-toothed shit-eating smile. “Whatcha gointa do with that, boy?” He motioned towards the broom handle.
“Here,” I said. “Take it and shove it up your ass.”
He stared at me for a second, but he took the broom stick. He was still thinking of an answer when I walked away, got in my car, and drove away.