November 1977
I’m not the only one that has a problem with Stanley’s
treatment of Gary. I’m just the only person willing to say something to Stanley
about it, when other workers at the warehouse are too scared of losing their
jobs if they do.
I always thought of him as a calm and decent person. Yet
here, he savaged Gary, relentlessly accusing the warehouse’s newest driver for
no reason.
While Gary had a lot to be desired as being the perfect
employee – constantly late, slow, taking too many water, cigarette or bathroom
breaks – he was not the ogre Stanley made him out to be, constantly watching
Gary’s every move through the large picture window of his office at the top of
the warehouse, yelling unnecessary commands over the PA at him. Everybody in
the place could hear Stanley abusing Gary.
“I don’t see what this is all about,” said Kevin, the Dead
Head Stanley had hired to help for the Christmas season, a broad-shouldered boy
of about 23, who might have been a high school linebacker if not for his long
hair and his laidback anti-jock attitude. “All Gary did was drop a box and the
stuff in it wasn’t even breakable.”
I told him it didn’t matter, busted or not, and that with
Stanley, Gary needed to be extra careful, even though all of us have dropped
stuff from time to time, sometimes breakable stuff, too.
“I need a break,” Kevin snarled, lighting up one of his Pall
Malls, sucking in the smoke that would eventually kill him, or at least
contribute to that awful unhealing wound in his chest doctors would later call
“cancer” as he stared out the back door windows, the afternoon sunlight
cascading through the trees that bordered the church yard and the historic
graves.
Kevin was a throwback to the late 1960s, like those die-hard
deadheads I knew in the East Village, less concerned about getting ahead than
in having an untroubled life.
Stanley had hired him for the holiday season, needing the
extra set of hands to deal with the heavy orders we always had from late August
until a few weeks before Christmas.
But Kevin hated the hassle Stanley brought to the warehouse
each day, as if Stan outlined his attack on Gary at home and deliberately
orchestrated events with which to put Gary in a bad light, and Kevin – no fan
of Gary at all – just didn’t like the scene.
“I’m thinking about quitting,” Kevin said, expelling the
smoke with a sigh. “I can’t take this shit anymore.”
Although barely into his early 20s, Kevin had not aged well,
his face full of wrinkles his pot use could not cure, growing old at a faster
rate than the rest of us, perhaps the first inroads of the cancer that would later
kill him.
He ran his thick fingers through his red main of hair which glistened
from recently loading an APA truck with outgoing deliveries.
“I’ve been thinking about quitting for a while,” he said.
“Me, too,” I told him, although we both knew I might never
leave, trapped humping boxes of cosmetics for the rest of my life, rolling a
stone up a high hill only to have it roll down the other side.
I had already become a prisoner in my own life, my existence
locked into two cells, the need for the Friday paycheck, and the more
significant prison of my own life. I would not step out of this place without
knowing there was some place else I could reach easily, and I saw nothing like
it any time soon.
Not long later, Kevin was gone, before the end of the holiday
season, leaving us shorthanded, though it was Gary who later informed me Kevin
had signed on at William Paterson College, still looking for a path that was
not the path the rest of us were taking.
