Ray, Part I

I hate work. That’s not to say that I don’t understand the value inherent in doing something well; I just feel like I have a greater appreciation for free time than most people. Having spent four years at a private Catholic high school with a schedule so precisely regimented it could have been drawn up by a Special Forces strike team, I cherished my summers. I knew every moment of that time frame intimately, from the heady exuberance of mid-June to the suicidally depressing last week of August. So then after my sophomore year, when I was ordered by my dad to find a summer job, to say I was crushed would be an understatement.

Of course, I had no motivation to shop around for employment, so my dad suggested that I work in a shipping supply warehouse run by one of his rec-league softball teammates. Most of my friends considered the mere notion of summer employment on par with indentured servitude, so working in a warehouse, to them, was akin to slavery. They couldn’t understand why I would want to do manual labor, particularly when my PLAN test sophomore year had so clearly indicated that my future profession was “business administration.” It was clear that phrases like “billable hours” were somewhere in my future, and this was most definitely not the way to go about reaching that goal.

Still, I liked being outside, and working at the warehouse would keep my afternoons free to spend at the beach and in my friends’ swimming pools. I was scheduled to show up at six in the morning every weekday and load trucks for five hours before spending the early afternoon moving pallets of cardboard boxes and enormous bags of packing peanuts around with a forklift. That was another perk: the chance to operate heavy machinery.

The best part about working at A-One Packing Supply, though, was that it allowed me to build an understanding of myself as a man apart from the materialistic bullshit of my high school. This was, of course, a personal ethic I arrived at while driving from my parents’ $300K house to work in their car. Believe me, I would have loved to claw my way up from the depths of poverty into success to give myself some kind of dignity. I would have loved to say that I cut my teeth doing manual labor and that it gave me a taste for the value of a dollar and for the undeniable feeling that comes from a day of hard work. Things didn’t quite turn out that way, though.

“You listen to enough of that shaggy nigger music, and you’ll turn into a fucking criminal,” Ray said from his chair on the loading dock.

I reached up to the radio and eased the dial through the Dr. Dre song and back to the classic rock station, where “My Sharona” was beginning its fourth rotation of the afternoon. Ray leaned back, rubbing the back of his head pensively with one hand and pointing his cigarette at me with the other. A pitiful breeze drifted in from the parking lot, barely strong enough to move the scraps of cardboard strewn across the warehouse floor. “That’s all they play on the radio these days.”

I nodded dumbly in assent. It was from him that I had learned many similar maxims, among them that the whores in Midland were far superior to those in Amarillo and that wearing a baseball cap backward was the first step toward homosexuality. Ray, satisfied, began digging in his pocket for a refill of Skoal.

I couldn’t help but stare at him sometimes. It wasn’t just the utter absence of any other sensory stimulation during the day – it was the way he looked. I can’t drag my eyes away from other people’s physical quirks, even when it’s extremely impolite. There was nothing obviously wrong with Ray’s appearance, but the structure of his body was just a little off-kilter, in the way that you notice an artificial leg even if its owner is wearing pants. After a lifetime of observing other human beings, your body of evidence becomes such that even the slightest tweaking of what is “natural” makes you uneasy for reasons you don’t understand.

He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Certainly, he was no Elephant Man, but his facial features looked like they had been cut from a block of granite. The cheekbones and nose were just broad, flat surfaces with harsh edges, accented by a constant five o’clock shadow and a sheen of grease and sweat. He had the gangly legs of a cross-country runner – all kneecaps and ropy muscle – but they seemed to extend up past his waist, until it was like his shoulders were resting directly on his hip bones. His eyes, too, deep-set and wide open all the time, had an arresting quality to them. It was the sort of vaguely crazy desperation you saw in movie terrorists’ faces just before they said something like “Of course it’s necessary to kill the children too.”

I was condemned to spend four hours a day alone in the A-One Packing Supply warehouse with Ray. Even though it was the easiest portion of my workday in terms of physical exertion, the psychological strain of not knowing what he would do next weighed on me, much in the same way that a mouse tenses up when it’s dropped into a cage with a snake. There wasn’t necessarily any good reason for me to believe that Ray would eventually snap, but I knew something was coming. The best course of action was to buy him an occasional Mountain Dew, hoping that when he burst through the back door spraying hollow-points in every direction he’d remember my kindness.

In what was probably the least responsible workplace decision since the advent of child labor laws, Ray had been promoted to warehouse manager by his brother, who owned the company. Given any other environment, Ray would have been out of a job on the basis of his volcanic temper, virulent racism, negligence toward even the most basic safety regulations, and barely-functional alcoholism. He didn’t quite fit the hostile loner archetype, but you could still pick up a sense that he saw every personal interaction as a potential threat. Occasionally Lance, the operations manager, would catch him drunkenly sleeping in his chair in the sun and let him continue undisturbed for fear that he would wake up and start waving around his switchblade, as he had done once before. It was during these naps that I was instructed to direct any customers to the front desk and to be as quiet as possible.

After about thirty seconds of silence, Ray rotated himself toward me and spoke. “What’s a kid like you still doing working here, anyway?” The cigarette dangled limply from his lower lip, pointing almost straight down.

“Builds character, I guess,” I said.

“Sure as shit it does.” He grinned. I could tell this was the answer he wanted to hear. “Kids these days wouldn’t know a real job if it came up and bit them in the ass.” I laughed weakly, but he wasn’t finished.

“I saw a kid coming out of the Santa Margarita High parking lot in a Z3 this morning,” he continued. “Kid couldn’t have been more than seventeen. How the fuck do you like that? I didn’t get a car until I was 22, and that was because I stole it.” He laughed, a short, raspy cough. My high school was a favorite target of Ray’s class-conscious outrage. I had been careful to avoid letting him know I went there. I doubt he would have let up even if he’d known.

He took a long drag from the cigarette and continued. “Man, I tell you what, you give a kid anything he wants like that, he’ll never succeed. You want to raise a kid right, you gotta make him work for it.” Parenting. Another of Ray’s areas of expertise, along with race relations and women. He leaned back again, this time forcing the chair almost parallel to the ground with his body weight.

Ray, childless, had been blessed with me – a captive audience to whom he could impart the boundless wisdom of his thirty-six years. Most of this information took the form of lavishly detailed anecdotes ending in some kind of dismemberment. Ray had spent two years on a salmon-fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska and three as an oilfield worker in West Texas, and he loved launching into stories about the dangers of his previous jobs. Most of them were punctuated with details like “Poor guy didn’t even see the girder coming. Split him open like a Hefty bag full of vegetable soup, brother.” He also concluded every sentence with “brother,” sometimes adding an accusatory stab in the chest with his forefinger. It was like Hulk Hogan was narrating the story of his life, if Hulk had been a manual laborer with an IQ of 85. The only acceptable response, too, was “Fucking awesome.” I and the other workers who made up Ray’s audiences had to say “Fucking badass” or something of that nature to pacify him, in the same way I said “Fucking awesome” at parties when some tool finished telling me about his new Land Rover.

On the plus side, Ray was the only person who knew exactly where everything in the warehouse was at all times, as if he was some sort of low-level savant. He also knew the fire marshal well, and was consistently able to talk him out of citing A-One Packing Supply for free-stacking unstable pallets seven and eight high directly in front of a desk where four illegal Guatemalan women worked, oblivious to the fact that a well-timed car backfire would bring down fifty thousand pounds of paper pulp on top of them. The warehouse was teeming with health and safety code violations that would make any respectable OSHA inspector curl up in a corner and start shaking, but that wasn’t going to stop Ray from making an honest living and, in the process, preserving one for the rest of us.

Ray did, however, possess the simplicity that most people lack. I shouldn’t have liked him. There was something compelling, though, about seeing all the alternatives that weren’t part of the career path my test scores had indicated for me. I could see myself at Ray’s age, slowly strangling myself in a series of Brioni power ties, one for each day of the week. The lies that surround the corporate world were conspicuously absent in Ray. In the office we tell ourselves that our jobs mean something, that we are part of Something Larger Than Ourselves. Pushing around cardboard boxes for a living hammers home the point that a job is just a means to the end of the rest of your life, and that looking for personal revelation in what you do with your weekday mornings is a fool’s errand.

Some people live for the weekend, and others, God bless them, can get some kind of obscure gratification out of the actual workday. Ray just lived, though – up at four in the morning, home by four in the afternoon, spend the evening with a Costco steak and a beer, and then early to bed. He transcended his job in that where some people complain that their jobs suffocate their private lives, he didn’t have a private life. There was nothing else there to choke out. Ray’s weekends weren’t an opportunity to produce some kind of meaning that his job failed to provide; they were just a 48-hour lunch break. He could occasionally be found asleep on the job, but he’d never complain. I think it came from knowing what a real shitty job was. Granted, you might deal with a couple of crazies at A-One, but the chances of getting your leg torn off or being swept overboard by a 50-foot wave were minimal. While working in a corporate office eats your soul in more ways than one, there is more than a little dignity in being a drone of the labor variety. There is something concrete that comes from producing a tangible service, rather than profiting from other people’s greed or litigiousness. Ray and his kind, unpalatable though they might be, were the bedrock upon which the fattened superstructure of society rested – the cockroaches that would survive a nuclear holocaust. I liked that kind of resilience, and so I kept showing up long after I should have left. Really, I kept coming just to see if I could – to see if I could make it through one more day without bailing and going to the beach.

Ray finally hoisted himself from his chair and spoke. “Time to get back to work. I don’t want your lazy ass getting all the credit around here.”

That afternoon’s job was fairly simple. We had been instructed to count and catalogue two thousand enormous foam pads, each seven feet square and two inches thick. The pads had been wrapped in bundles of twenty and stacked haphazardly on the top rack at the back of the warehouse, thirty feet from the concrete floor. It was impossible to estimate how long they had occupied that space – it could have been years. A large portion of the inventory in the warehouse was made up of leftovers from long-forgotten orders that did nothing other than collect dust. I trudged to the pads’ location, and Ray brought the forklift around to the base of the racks. “Hop on.”

I balanced myself on the steel forks and began to rise steadily toward the ceiling, then stepped onto the racks as Ray eased backward on the levers below me. I had to drag each bundle, twice as tall as I was and almost as heavy, from the rack to the forks, all while maintaining my balance on two four-inch-wide steel rails. “Hurry the fuck up,” Ray shouted from the floor. “It’s almost lunchtime.”

I worked in silence on top of the racks, picking up each bundle with a supreme effort and holding it aloft just long enough to slide it onto the forks. All the hot air in the warehouse had risen to the top of the building over the course of the afternoon, and it sat there undisturbed like a dusty blanket, choking the air out of my lungs and making my underarms pour out sweat like I was wearing a rubber suit. The fans installed in the ceiling had broken months ago, becoming shelters for a wide variety of spiders. It took me almost an hour to finish removing the pads, and by the time I completed the last stack I looked down to realize that Ray had gone to lunch, leaving me stranded on top of the rack. My body temperature inched upward, and I began the delicate process of climbing down. Still angry at Ray for hanging me out to dry, I walked back to the truckers’ office at the back of the building, adjacent to the loading dock.

I slumped into the desk chair and turned the warehouse’s only working fan to its maximum speed, staring directly into it. Ray would not be back for at least another half-hour, giving me time to turn off my brain until his return.

TO BE CONTINUED