The rows of uncomfortable looking folding chairs sat off to the right. They were four or five rows deep and most of them were occupied by somebody who looked scruffier and more desperate than me. At least I hoped they looked more desperate than me. It’s probably not a good idea to split hairs when you’re talking about a day labor agency; if you can handle the back breaking work and shitty pay, it’s the best route for the perpetually unemployed, the drunk, and the lay about. It’s a simple process. You register for work, and when you feel like it, you get up and get there early in the morning before the van leaves to go to the job site. At the end of the day, you get paid, and then it’s just a matter of finding a check cashing place. Easy.
And that was pretty much what I was looking for. I’d gone the day labor route in other places, just to get by. I’d been avoiding it since I took up residence at the Lost Dutchman simply because I didn’t want to get put on a road crew in the summer. That’s the kind of work it usually is. You stand out in the middle of the highway, wear a bright orange vest, and wave a flag. Standing on fresh blacktop during the summer in Cincinnati or even New Orleans was one thing. Standing on fresh blacktop during the summer in Phoenix was a whole other thing. But I had to do something. At least for a couple of days. And one thing about day labor – they don’t care what you look like as long as you’re wearing clothes and as long as it looks like you can pick up a shovel.
When I walked in, I noticed the sign with big block letters taped to the door:
NO APPLICATIONS TAKEN AFTER 10AM.
ANY ONE ARRIVING AFTER 10 WILL BE TURNED AWAY.
OPEN @ 5 AM.
I checked my watch to make sure it wasn’t after 10. It was almost nine. I walked up to the front desk to ask for an application. A large black woman was sitting behind the desk. When she saw me there, she looked up.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “I’d like an application.”
Without saying another word, she gave me a once over and pointed a table to her right that was covered with clip boards. I walked over, picked one up, and managed to find an empty chair in the middle of the back row. No one else had a clipboard. They were just sitting and waiting. Maybe they were taking advantage of the air conditioning. The blue ink pen was taped with masking tape to a piece of string that was tied to the clip board.
When I started to fill out the first page of the application, the pen wouldn’t write. I looked around; it was unlikely that anybody would have there would have a pen I could use. I looked up at the woman behind the front desk; she was flipping through a magazine, using long, razor looking fingernails on one hand to grab the corner of the pages, and using the other hand to grab potato chips out of a bag sitting on the desk. I thought about going back up and telling her the pen was dead. I shook it instead. Still no ink. Then I took out my lighter and heated the tip of the pen. That did the trick, though the ink came out in little globs at first.
The type was barely readable. It looked like it had been copied too many times and that the first copy was off a leaky mimeograph machine – one of those purple printing monsters that, if you got the pages fresh enough, you could take a big whiff and get a little high. The first page was the application itself:
NAME____________________
ADDRESS (required) ___________________________
PHONE or CONTACT # __________________________
EDUCATION __________________________________
COMPUTER SKILLS ________________________________
SPECIAL SKILLS ____________________________________
What the hell do they mean by Special Skills? I thought. Jump rope? Hoola Hoop? Being able to say the alphabet backwards? The space for computer skills didn’t make much sense to me, either. Most of the people sitting in the waiting area didn’t look like the kind of people who couldn’t live without their laptops and iphones. I went ahead and filled it out, along with the I-9, a form stating I was willing to submit to random drug testing, and another form that said I understood, as identified by my signature, that neither the employment agency nor the client company were responsible for any medical bills that may happen as a result of injury on the work place. I wondered if the potato muncher behind the desk had to sign a form like that. Probably not. I tried to imagine her standing by the side of the road wearing a bright orange vest and waving a flag. No way.
After I filled out the forms, I wormed my way out of the last row and carried back up to the main desk. The woman behind the desk looked up from her copy of US WEEKLY and took the clipboard from me. Then she wiped her fingers on her blouse; it was a dark blue and the grease from the chips left small streaks. She looked over the forms, and without looking up asked, “Do you have a driver’s license or state identification card?”
I dug it out of my wallet and handed it to her. She pushed back the small swivel chair she was balanced on, groaned a little, stood up, and walked – with a great deal of effort – to a copy machine about ten paces behind her, against the back wall. After she made a copy of my id card, she waddled back, her bright red lips pursed like she was exerting extreme effort. Then she handed it back to me and fell back into the chair. For a second, I expected it to collapse under the weight and tension.
“Now what?” I asked, looking over at the waiting area.
“Come back tomorrow,” she said, not looking up from her magazine.
“But what about them?” I pointed to the people in the chairs. “Are they waiting for work? I don’t mind to work second shift or…”
She snapped her head up and looked at me. “Come back tomorrow.”
I was going to push my luck, but I didn’t want her accidentally lose my application. I turned around and left, but only after giving one last look to the people filling chairs. I thought for a moment about just sitting down and waiting to see what happened. After all, it wasn’t like she paid any attention to what I look like. I decided against that, though, and walked out into the stale late morning air.
I showed up the next morning at a quarter to five. There was already a line of people waiting to work; There were three vans in the parking lot in front of the storefront – those long mini-bus kind of vans that seated maybe 12 people. 15 or 16, if you squeezed them in and didn’t worry about seatbelts. The chip eater was inside, sitting at the desk, sipping a coffee drink with lots of whipped cream on top. The door was locked.
At exactly five o’clock, three guys came out and opened the van doors. The people who had been waiting started getting in the vans. When the van filled the driver closed the door, and if you didn’t get in, that was your problem. I managed to get in the last van, squeezed in on the second to last bench with four other guys. I was on the end; but that didn’t count for much. The arm of the seat was cutting into my side and the guy next to me smelled like he hadn’t showered since Reagan was in office. Plus, he snored.
Luckily, the trip was a short one. We ended up at a warehouse in one of the industrial parks near the 1-10. The van stopped and the driver didn’t even get out. “I’ll be back here at 3:30,” he said. Somebody opened the van and we piled out. There was a another guy standing there to greet us. He carried a clipboard and wore a pink polo shirt with the collar turned up like he was an extra in a John Hughes movie. I didn’t bother to look and see if his jeans were pegged.
“Ok,” he said. “We’ve got some work inside the warehouse and some onsite work. I need…” he looked at his clip board. “…ten of you onsite. The rest will stay here. Any volunteers?”
Ten guys immediately volunteered; I made the mistake of breathing and missed my shot at working outside… though I wasn’t sure that would be any better than working in the warehouse. It was supposed to be a warm day – above average, even – and I was a little relieved that I wasn’t going to be out in it. Then Duckie asked each of us our names and wrote it down on the clipboard. “I have to call the agency and tell them which of you is here so you get paid.” How magnanimous, I thought. You’re a goddamn humanitarian. After he took down our names – I noticed that nobody bothered to make sure he’d written his name down correctly – the ten who volunteered to go onsite were herded over to another truck and sent off. He shuffled the rest of us into the warehouse.
I was set to work in a back corner, moving and organizing boxes. “All you gotta do,” Duckie said to me, “was unpack the boxes on this side,” he pointed to the right, “and organize the contents over here. It’s pretty self-explanatory. If you have any questions, Karla here will help.” He waved over a short blonde in wearing an olive colored tank top and ass hugging khaki shorts. She nodded at me without smiling. I nodded back.
“It’s real easy,” she said, taking over from Duckie, who had walked away to assign someone else an important task. “We got things organized here. All you do is unpack shit and put it in the proper place. Got it?”
“Sure thing,” I said, thinking about how proud my first grade teacher Mrs. Mills would be if she could see me now. Grouping was always my best skill; I used to win every time I plaid that matching game. You know; that one where you flip over the cards and try to find the ones that match, and whoever has the most matches wins. I might forget birthdays and important phone numbers; but my short term memory was unbeatable.
Karla gave me a box knife – not without a bit of nervousness – and left me to my work. I guess I couldn’t blame her. There wasn’t a question on the application about criminal background. And though I didn’t have one – not really – Karla the Khaki Queen had no way of knowing that. I started opening boxes and putting the contents in the appropriately marked place on the other side. Duckie and Karla were right. It wasn’t a hard job. It was just boring as hell. And as time passed excruciatingly slow, and the temperature in the warehouse started to rise, I started regretting that I wasn’t one of the ten who went to where the onsite job was. Every once in a while Karla would look around the corner to see how I was doing. Sometimes it was Duckie. Neither one of them talked to me. I didn’t bother to rush, since I figured that my task was easier than anything else they might give me if I finished. All I needed to do was get through the day. That was all. It’s not even a real job, I told myself. You’re not coming back here tomorrow. I promised myself a few cold beers once I got paid and kept going.
At some point, Duckie came over and told me it was break time. I wandered followed him into the break room. It was air-conditioned – sort of –.but there wasn’t anybody there. So I wandered outside. The regulars were grouped together on two picnic tables smoking and talking. The other five temps were sitting at another table. I looked over at Karla. She had since decided to tie her tank top up like Daisy Duke. She was the only girl in the group, and all the guys – including Duckie – were fawning over her like she was a Queen. She must have noticed me looking at her, because she looked up at me and arched an eyebrow. I walked over to the temp table and sat down.
“Christ,” I said, “it’s hotter than hell in there.”
“It’s gonna get worse,” one of them said. I immediately recognized him as the guy I was sardined next to in the bus. “It’ll get up to a hundert an’ forty ‘fore the day’s over.”
I lit a cigarette. “Have you worked here before?”
He nodded. “Yup. All of us have.”
They all nodded. “So why did everyone volunteer to go onsite? It’s not going to be any cooler under this sun all day.”
“Nope,” he answered. “But sometimes they feed you real good. Sometimes there’s leftover food and they let us have it. Sometimes.”
“So why didn’t you volunteer?” I asked.
He grunted. “I nodded off.”
After the break we all went back to our designated tasked. Karla’s designated task, apparently, was to rub up on the guys who worked full-time and get them to do her job for her. She was really good at it, because I didn’t see her do anything the entire day. I heard her plenty; laughing, giggling, talking. Cackling like a witch. She came back to check on my progress once or twice – I was pacing myself so that I’d be done by the end of the day, and not a moment sooner – and then she’d go off to some guy. At lunch I saw her go off with Duckie. When she came back 20 minutes later, she stepped out of the car – it was a nice car – tying her shirt back up. For a second, I hated Duckie. I wanted to wrap that pink polo shirt around his neck. Karla worked on him over lunch so she didn’t have to work the rest of the day. And Duckie couldn’t do anything about it. Then I found out why because during second break, a woman who turned out to be his wife showed up and brought him a bottle of water. Poor, poor Duckie. The dumb bastard.
I finished up right before quitting time. Karla came back to check on me. “You all done?” She smiled. It was easy to why Duckie was such a dumbass.
“Yeah,” I said, breaking down the last box and putting it on the pallet. “All finished.”
“This is your first time here, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look like the other ones,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She smiled. “I don’t know. I mean… they’re all smelly stinky drunks. Most of them can barely push a broom.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Give it time.”
“You know,” she smiled. “I could put in a good word for you with Craig.”
“Who?”
“Craig,” she answered. “The boss. The guy in the pink shirt.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, starting pay isn’t great,” she said, “but it’s full-time. And I know I could convince him. He listens to me.”
I just be he does. I imagined my future working at the warehouse. One more swinging dick fawning after Karla. Fantasizing about killing Duckie with his Member’s Only jacket. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m just waiting for something else to open up.”
“Oh.” She seemed surprised at my lack of graciousness. “Well, ok. It’s just hard to find good guys.” She walked away. I watched her as she walked and wondered how she could walk at all in shorts that tight.
At the end of shift, the van was waiting for us out front. The same guy who had dropped us off that morning was driving. I was tired, sweaty, and I wanted a beer. When we got back to the office, the chip chomper waddled out and gave us our checks. That was when I noticed the check cashing place right next door. I cashed my check – forty bucks – and started walking towards the MTP for a cold beer.
