POWER STEERING IS A BEAUTIFUL THING —that a blue 1965 Ford
Fairlane was not equipped with. Driving to work required a commitment to turning that was best supported by not stopping the car. If I miscalculated and had to stop because I didn’t catch the light or had to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, I would lose momentum and come to a stop. This made turning a challenge, requiring both hands pulling with strength and commitment to turn as I navigated the late-night roads of Omaha to my brother’s and my first—and thankfully last—industrial job. When you work in the manufacturing end of a business, you go in through the back door, the parking lot lit by a single floodlight dimly touching everything like one of the poor neighborhood basketball courts. We actually thought the whole building looked like this until we followed the third-shift employees for a beer, took a turn around the building, and found a beautiful business façade. Side note: you go with a third-shift crew at 7:00 am for a beer at a local bar that is open at that hour, and you are sixteen, you are not seated and you are not carded. The bartender just grunts, pours, and goes back to smoking on a stool and watching the news. The best way to describe a bar like this is “darkly lit, sticky floors and bus terminal service.” Side note over. I’m ahead of myself because the knighting of Tim and me to the morning beer breakfast didn’t come until much later in our tenure. We were driving this car (vinyl-seated, non-air-conditioned, no radio, no operating dashboard) to our summer job. We were working at an
industrial printing press plant helping a pressman on the third shift. This was against his will. We were the boss’ kids, so, we were presumed to be entitled, lazy, and unable to do the jobs. We had not gone to technical school. Rather, we had gone to private schools that taught nothing of value for the real world and would make his life harder. The first night was going to be his chance to lay down the rules and make certain we knew our place. The conversation went something like this: Tom and Tim: Hi, we’re here to work with <Boss>. Are you <Boss>? <Boss>: Do you fuckin’ see anybody else that looks like a <Boss> here? Tom and Tim: What do you need us to do? <Boss>: Let me guess: you don’t have a goddamn idea why you’re here. Tom and Tim: We were told you were in charge, and to do what you say. <Boss>: That’s fuckin’ right, rich boys. Do what I fuckin’ tell you! Now this is a fuckin’ printin’ press. Do ya got, that rich boys? (The training continued like this for the better part of ten minutes and was condensed with terms about the press we couldn’t remember and swear words we could). <Boss>: Here’s your job. Don’t get anything cut off or broken because I’ll get in trouble and then I won’t have any help. That blade there, that fuckin’ steel barrel there, and that arm over there. All those are the ones that will get you hurt, and that will piss me off. This red button here stops the press so you don’t fuckin’ get hurt. Don’t hit that fuckin’ button or I’ll kill you, so don’t screw up the machine and don’t get hurt. <Boss>: You (pointing at me) take the label stacks off the machine after they come off of the machine when the blade cuts them. You (pointing at Tim) load the shafts of separated cores back into the machine on the turning barrel without getting your arm caught in it. Got it? Let’s get going. [<Boss> turns up the machine as fast as he can so that everything messes up; the ink flies, the paper backs up, the blade cuts at a rate I can’t catch the labels and Tim can’t get the shafts in. <Boss> is happy as a clam, but doesn’t say it.] <Boss>: Goddam retards they sent me! I’m already fucked! You can’t do a
Sh ovel i n g M an u r e at t h e C i r cu s
goddam thing right! I’ve spent half my night teaching you the simplest job in the whole damn building, and you’ve already screwed it up! Now we have to get everything fixed! [<Boss> then teaches us how to fix the machine so that it will run correctly and get it fixed when things broke down—which it did, since it was already thirty-five years old. Every night at least a third of the time was spent fixing the machine.] <Boss>: Let’s see if you morons can do it right this time! [He turned it on at ⅓ the speed, and we almost kept up for a half hour] Thankfully, lunch time break was called and we got to the breakroom, adrenaline running hard. One of the night-time crew walked by us and said, “Ignore him. He can’t do anything to you. He’s just trying to be a hard ass.” Our <Boss> was a guy named Doug. He was probably 25-27, good shape, but he had a right incisor already starting to turn black, a mullet haircut, and weasel’s mustache. He was our boss because he’d had a couple of years of trade school and the State prisons were full. Our job was to do all of the work for Doug while he either “checked for trash,” which was code for smoking a couple bowls in the back where the supplies were stored, or was doing an “inventory check,” which was code for taking a nap on the pallets of paper rolls that were used on the printing press. The real danger of the shift on the printing press was that it would stop working for any reason. Danger one was finding Doug, which involved “not finding him” while you found him. This happened by walking through the three-steel tiered storage area, saying loudly, “I know that Doug was looking for trash around here somewhere.” You had to move slowly enough, because Doug may have to not only wake up, but put paraphernalia away, and on more than one occasion he would have invited a guest to work and he didn’t want her to meet anyone else on the crew. That was the purpose of slow movement and loud clamoring. Danger two was being the bearer of bad news, that the press equipment was not running. Expletives, accusations, more expletives and then the S h o v e l i n g M an u r e at t he Ci rc u s
most damning of all statements: “Well, why didn’t somebody come get me?” [sigh] Danger three was that as the pressmen’s assistants, we were supposed to help with fixing the machine. This was a widow-maker of ancient machinery whose dangerous design we had already seen in the on-dollar horror movies that we had snuck into at the movie theater even though we weren’t supposed to see them until we were seventeen. Something isn’t spinning? Take a wrench, push on it really hard to see if you can make it spin! Of course, that means that all of the rest of the machine immediately starts spinning, spitting, and cutting—finger, limb or eyeball be damned. When all other attempts had failed to fix the printer, Doug called in “Chief.” Chief could be called at any time and would be at the facility within fifteen minutes. Chief looked like Bowzer from Sha-Na-Na, if Bowzer was four inches shorter and had a beer belly. Slicked-back black hair, gum-chomping when he wasn’t smoking, black t-shirts with blue jeans. His name was “Chief.” Doug’s name was “Chief.” Your name was “Chief” when you were working with him. The mechanic from the prior shift was “Chief.” “Chief” was a universal name. It felt a little bit like listening to Bob Dole speak about himself in the third person. Calling in the black-shirted Chief was an admission of failure by Doug that had a penalty. The penalty was the smug look on Chief’s face that Doug had to endure when Chief walked in, followed up by Chief’s tirade. “What shit does Chief gotta get you out of tonight, Chief? Listen, Chief, Chief’s got your back. Whatever you fucked up, Chief, Chief will get it fixed. So, Chief, let’s start at the beginning. Chief, did you even load the paper right here or did Chief there (motioning with his head in my direction) load the paper? Doesn’t matter, Chief, Chief can tell it isn’t the paper. Chief, you probably have an ink distributor valve problem. Chief can handle that, though Chief, I’d think you’d have fixed that before you called Chief here in.” Listening to him replace all names and pronouns with “Chief” was dizzying. I felt like an ice-skater trying to keep my eyes on the horizon to maintain balance and not fall over. In this case, the horizon for me was Doug’s seething face and gritting teeth. On third shift, Doug was
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used to being God. Label-boxers, pick-pack-ship teams, and the assistant pressmen technically all reported to Doug. Doug was not considered by the coven to be a vampire. He was to them a sub-vampire known as a night-shift asshole. Watching Chief work him over like a bully getting his due on the schoolyard was entertainment for the whole vampire family. All Doug’s mistakes had a roll-down penalty. When everything was working and Chief had left, we knew we were in for a verbal beatdown. “Damn rich kids don’t even know how to load a spool of paper!” “Damn idiots are letting the glue bins go empty.” “I guess you think it’s funny that Chief had to fix a problem you screwed up and was too big for me to fix on my own. Now I gotta save your jobs for the overtime because you’re so stupid!” When you are sixteen, and just a few steps over the tracks to the better side, you figure in your first job, this is how all bosses talk. I found out over the course of life that the language changes, but there are bosses like this at all levels on the ladder. Not all bosses, but a decent number. I just got less willing to take it. Doug did wind up in jail because of a fight at one of the bars in town. By that time, we had moved on, and we knew Doug was never going to move on. As for Chief, I have no idea. He is probably doing mechanical miracles in the middle of the night and making conversation that had other participants’ brains spinning. TAKE-AWAY #1 YOU CAN SHOVEL MANURE. We knew that we
could handle this for ten weeks. We needed the money and we knew it would end. This wasn’t a career and jobs for sixteen-year olds at that rate were hard to find. You can shovel manure for a while if you know when the while ends. TAKE-AWAY #2 TUITION ISN’T CHEAP . I’ve been in charge of other
people since I was eighteen, in one position or another. It was great working for Doug, because I saw a long list of things not to do when you are over other people. Keep mental notes and make promises to yourself of what kind of leader you will be while you are working for one you won’t. S h o v e l i n g M an u r e at t he Ci rc u s