The Easiest $11/hour I Ever Made

I used to work in a bindery where every Coke was a Jack and Coke after a trip to my locker. I always kept at least half a bottle of bourbon under my car seat as a backup. In my mind, it was like never letting my gas tank get below the halfway marker.

The bathroom walls were thin. So thin that I, in a caffeinated drunk, heard two pressmen in the bathroom on the other side of the wall whisper about plans to leave their wives and finally be together. I never brought it up to them on our lunch breaks or otherwise.

My second week on the job, I drove a forklift through a wall and couldn’t stop laughing. It felt like an action movie. I was the hero barraging the mansion where the seven-meals-a-day, Wall Street elitist claimed exemption from the lower class he tortured. I was Robin Hood.

On deliveries, I would hock lugies and have to hold them in my mouth like dog-slobbered tennis balls because the windows in the van wouldn’t always roll down. When they would, I chain-smoked and made sure to stop for gum before I got back to the shop.

A buzzer would go off to signal our breaks. Every smoke break required two cigarettes: the first used to light the second. At the end of the breaks, we collected our butts like X’s, tattooed down our arms for every kid we accidentally killed in NAM but only sometimes regretted.

In the office, customers only knew us over the phone by our voices. They didn’t know Brian had Satan tattooed on his right forearm. They didn’t know he had scabs on his face, or that the scabs were from when Meth locked Brian in a motel room for three weeks. They didn’t know Gary was red-headed, balding, and just about the last guy you would feel comfortable with in a suddenly broken elevator. Dave sounded nice, but his skin looked like it was conspiring with gravity to slowly leave his body. His favorite phrase was, Life’s a bitch and then you die. It was never his favorite phrase over the phones, of course. Best of all, the customers had no idea that I was the only employee without a prison record.

Steve showed me how to sneak away for an extra break when the foreman was shit-heeling with the owner about his vacation hours, how he deserved more respect, etc. It’s funny how pieces of the plates broken at home stay in a person’s skin and bleed all over their workspace.

There was a corkboard on the breakroom wall where 4x6 photographs were thumb-tacked in to say, Look, we have fun here. Remember the Christmas party and how happy everyone was with the spouses they wanted to smother with pillows. Remember, this is your life. Remember, this is all you’ll ever be, so enjoy it.

Brian’s wife left him with the kids and he invited me over for dinner every day for three weeks. I could never make it, could always find an excuse, and he eventually left his car running in the garage after he got home from the bar. The funeral was like a work outing because we were his only friends.

One pressman came up to me, the boxer who would have fought Oscar de la Hoya if he didn’t get busted for black tar and crack the week before the match up. He said, in an English that had its kneecaps broken from diminishing return, Go to college, kid. Life’s tough. I still haven’t graduated from anything.