Paid by the Hour

David DeMilo spent the summer of 1977 working in a warehouse in the Boston area. This short story describes the unexpected events of that summer.

Guy pensively scrubbed his fat cheeks, coated with an eternal day's growth of beard, and looked up at me half-angrily, simultaneously releasing a fart which echoed across the huge warehouse.

"Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-HA! HEE-HEE-HEE!" As he held his bulge in hilarity, his spaced-out set of teeth stood out like stones under his silly gondola mustache. The day had officially begun.

The bright horn of the lunch truck cut the morning haze like an air-raid siren, marking the day with the 10:15 break. The store personnel gradually wound down their activities and wandered outside to the aluminum shelves full of packaged milk and pre-sandwiches.

But the construction workers on the site dropped everything immediately. It didn't matter. All kinds of shit hit the floor--pieces of iron they had half-welded into place, plaster board, hammers, showers of nails, hunks of pipe, rolls of insulation. As soon as that siren sounds, it's not in their contract.

I got into line to buy my chocolate milk behind this hardhat in a dirty white t-shirt. He had faded tatoos on both arms, a thin, mean-looking moustache, and a thin, mean-looking face. He didn't say much, just picked his poison from the truck and paid his dues--a pack of Luckies, a meatball sub and a donut--all washed down by the Bud in his thermos.

All the employees in the place (and the owners as well) were forced out onto this same summer asphalt to eat--execs and hardhats alike--to eat with the same hunger that serves for sustenance.

Eyes burn on the smooth, neat secretaries from upstairs. They were mostly married and pert, taking diet Tab, yogurt and Benson and Hedges from the truck with proud, married smiles and long legs.

"The Big Gunner"--the union spray painter from Revere--had sparkling eyes on such occasions. He brought his 18-year-old son to work with him as sort of an apprentice to his messy but profitable work. The union painter made $13 an hour, eight hours a day, plus time and a half on Saturdays and double time on Sundays.

"Huh, he'll make enough to pay for his funeral," Guy mumbled to me, spitting pastroml sandwich all over me as he talked and chewed. The painter talked Red Sox with his boy; they were leaning up against the food truck drinking Bud, eating subs and smoking Camels. Camels. They were already covered head-to-toe with white paint from the awkward hissing machine they worked, their lips and the hairs that just brushed out from the nose were tinged with white paint. They smiled behind the white masks ghost faces of miners who look hungrily out of the darkness--inhuman mutants of the mechanical tool jungle, the wonder of a smile that shines through latex.

Rene stood on the loading dock and waved his arms frantically at me; it was time to get back to work. Rene never took a break. I never saw him take lunch. I never even saw him leave work.

He was always there, walking briskly everywhere in endless emergency, heavy Sparrish eyebrows pushing down his square face into nothing but total seriousness. Every once in a while, a vague grin would drift momentarily onto his face, like he was recalling an old joke that made him silly, but the smile would quickly dissipate as he whistled and pointed and bristled down the aisle.

Rene had me back on the forklift until lunch, when Buzzy stumbled into work. He had a dentist's appointment that morning, and he looked high from a dose of sodium pentathol. Buzzy was an appetite suppressant freak, you see. These forklifts were Buzzy's machines--he charged them and took care of them and drove them with a facility no one else could approach--and he was very proud of that fact.

Buzzy whizzed a few palates into place and took his lunch at 12:30 and urged me to do the same. So Buzzy, Jeff from the item warehouse and I grabbed our lunches and ran over to Buzzy's car, a banged-in '68 Mustang. Once inside, we stashed our lunches into the glove compartment and waited for Buzzy to drive us down the street, near the junction at 128. We swung into an empty parking lot and stopped. Here, we pulled out some joints and lit them up, trying to get as much toke to the minute as possible. We hadn't much time.

Buzzy lit up his hash pipe and roared out of the parking lot--he swung onto the street off the whiptail of a 40-mph 360-degree-turn, just for momentum. Now we were ready to eat lunch.

The truth about Buzzy is that he was a hot rod freak. He owned a '74 Duster with enough supe to suck the teenage punks with their hot shit Camaros right off the highway...and pipes, yes, PIPES everywhere, curling out of every sheen in the auto's body.

That's Buzzy: whipping his forklift around the warehouse at $5 an hour and working on his hot rods in his spare time. That's all he knew, that's all he cared about. Short, skinny, bone-faced, red, moustache Buzzy, living down the same dullness I lived with the energy of a benny addict.

After lunch, Buzzy did his Buzzy thing while I helped unload a van full of stretcher strips with Dave from Boston College. The driver got out for a cigarette break and a Coke. He sat back on a heap of two-by-four's and argued with one of the construction workers about politics.

This guy--I found out later his name was Jimmy--said that Ronald Reagan was this country's only hope and that Nixon was the best president we ever had. He sipped his beer and leaned his taut but 30ish body back on a nail sticking out of a two-by-four, letting out a "yeeEEEEEEP!" and a shaken, amused smile as an afterthought.

Though I disagreed vehemently with everything he was saying, I didn't want to argue with him; me, the little college faggot against this square-boned Irish marine boxer from South Boston who ate beer cans.

"And that fuckin Mo Udall!" His voice was getting louder now, his assumptions more daring and outrageous, He was on his second beer.

"There's another fucking Harvard faggot who's trying to ruin this country. Him and fuckin' Timity Leary there...them fuckin' up in their ivory towers trying to tell us how bad off we are, how to live, who the fuck is he..."

Dave from BC looked at me in the middle of this chaotic tirade and flashed an evil grin.

"Fuckin' Tim Leary ruined the minds of thousands of young boys with LSD...you can't fuck with the mind," he said, pointing his index finger stiffly to the side of his crew-cut head.

I realized that I was overestimating the situation. I should try to reason with Jimmy...tell him that I go to Harvard, that's right ME. Sweating, stretcher-strip carrying, blue collar ME! And that I'm for abortion and drugs and all those things and I take LSD and smoke pot at lunch and it really means nothing because it's all a matter of living your life for yourself. Drop acid until your teeth fall out and God won't say a word. He'd never be so presumptuous again.

Probably not. His hollow face would turn redder than his sunburn, he'd suck in the beginning of a beer belly that started right above his dickies, and he'd wail the piss out of me.

Then I realized I was completely fucked. Dave from BC looked at Jimmy after he said "Harvard faggot" in the middle of his third beer and said, "Hey--he goes to Harvard!"

Jimmy stopped babbling about decency and looked at me with the bewilderment of a four-year-old boy who has just learned that Santa Claus is a big fat bimbo they pick up off the streets to sit in department stores and console whining babies and said, "But what're you doing here?"

Of all the questions Jimmy could have asked, he picked an intelligent one. He picked the one that was so far above my head that I froze chock full of dread at the thought of it. I explained to Jimmy that I am not Sartre and that all Harvard students are not rich, twitty, Aspen-in-the-winter-Acupulco-in-the-summer types. He seemed to understand this. But he continued about ivory towers and hypocrisy and repression, and I couldn't argue with him. My logical, objective arguments were irrelevent and useless when pitted against the turgid wall of bitterness and sarcasm and beer that Jimmy had thrown up around himself.

He smoked some more and mopped the sweat off his brow and hunkered back to his cab, amicably talking to me.

"I mean shit, I didn't even go to college and I'm doing better than my fuckin' brother who went to Suffolk Law. He's opening a bookstore somewhere and right now, just from driving the rig and collecting for numbers in the fall, I got myself a pool, a new van--with a nice paint job and shag cahpeting...

"Alright, when I was in school I had my problems. I used to fuck around in class and hang out but now I've gotten my shit together and I'm doin' awright." He was talking to a judge, trying to reverse a bad judgement on his character. No decision. We shook hands and he said goodbye and tole me to "be good."

I didn't know, with the monotonous, time-framed routine of work and school and everything else in America how long I was going to be able to "be good." After all, why make rules and regulations if you know they won't get broken anyway? This life needed a twist to make it fun.

Once I had come down from my "lunch," Buzzy and I decided to have a forklift war. Typical shit. We chased each other around the aisles while Rene was up in Bryce's office getting tomorrow's orders.

Bryce was one of the $70,000-a-year geeks I was talking about. He was one of the company owners, and he looked like a short, fat troll. Everybody hated him because he was always walking around looking like the Pope, turning off radios in the warehouse and flashing nasty frowns and making life a little tougher for everyone. You can't trust a guy who doesn't like music, even if it is top-40.

But at the moment, he was upstairs in his air-conditioned reality, and Buzzy and I were engaging in mechanical terrorism. He was chasing me most of the time, staying just an inch behind me, extending his forks to nudge me in the ass. So I decided to take him down a long aisle.

I floored the accelerator and let it run. As I put my fork down to avoid hitting an overhead girder I saw Blair walking up the perpendicular aisle, and I turned around to warn Buzzy. But it was already too late. Bryce had spotted us.

"HEEEEY!" He shouted in some deep echoe that rumbled from inside his capitalist soul. Buzzy looked around and lost sight of the girder and ploughed right into it at top speed, felling a top tier shelf that let loose several wooden crates onto Buzzy's head, mashing it against the cast-iron supports on his lift.

He slumped against the side of the lift and slid down, falling limply out of the cab and onto the hard concrete floor, half of his head caved in, bereft.

For that moment there was nothing but dripping silence--impending and forever, thoughtless and suspended.

Rene and I and Dave from BC and Bryce were gathered around like gulls, staring. Bryce watched rapt: knowing this could only lead to complications, he nevertheless absorbed the tension-rush that zipped through him the way an incinerator consumes wood.

Then we all looked up, hating each other and ourselves, and looked back at the wreck and my boss heaved a sigh. Hot rivets of hate flew through the warehouse like plumetting birds; the air was thicker than cigarette smoke, and my boss sucked it all in and walked away without saying a word.

Rene cleared us away silently and for the time being, we just joined the work noises of the construction workers who never noticed the accident through the king-cuck-a-plink mechanical tool jungle. We took up brooms, dumped trash, looked at the clock, carried boxes, made work. What, after all, was there to do but continue?