Ray, Part II

The word “office” might have been a little presumptuous to describe the room, as it contained only a single Formica desk and conference table. On the desk sat an ancient computer, purchased at some point during the Reagan administration, through which the company still ran its shipping system. The table had been decorated with years of epithets from the A-One Packing Supply truck drivers, most notably the phrase “TOM IS GAY,” lovingly carved in half-inch-deep letters into the desk’s surface with a razor blade.

Asbestos leaked out of an enormous gouge in the office wall, where Ray had had a minor forklift accident months ago, most likely while drunk. I had to give Ray credit, though. Coming to work drunk had been something we’d all done, but he pulled it off with style. When I had first given in and tried it, the rest of the day had been a blur of paranoia. I had desperately tried to disguise my breath and speak coherently to Lance, focusing tremendous energy on walking in a perfectly straight line. While the rest of us were struggling mightily to understand what customers were saying to us through the resultant haze from three Coors Light tallboys, Ray was racing the forklift around the warehouse’s perimeter, trying to beat his personal best time.

I wondered how much asbestos a person had to inhale to get cancer. The dozens of carcinogens undoubtedly present in the warehouse weren’t particularly worrisome to most of the employees, each of whom sucked down at least a pack and a half of Marlboro Lights per day. The rest of the warehouse workers, who ran the night shift from 10 P.M. until the drivers left around 6 A.M., had provided me with my first glimpse of the working world. On my first day at A-One, as a sixteen-year-old kid, I had arrived at seven in the morning to discover an ambulance pulling into the loading dock. It was there to pick up one of the truck drivers, who had neglected to inform the company that he was diabetic and had collapsed and fallen into a coma back by the vending machines. He had remained undiscovered for almost two hours, until one of the cleaning women tripped over him while rounding a corner too fast and broke down into hysterics. Constant excitement. Just the kind of job I’m looking for.

Eventually I had come to the realization that Ray was on a first-name basis with one of the EMTs not because they knew each other from somewhere, but because they saw each other so regularly. Injuries at A-One were a predictable outgrowth of the marriage of heavy machinery and convicted felons. This is not to say that the warehouse guys were bad at handling the forklift; it’s just that occasionally there were “accidents” that resulted in someone’s arm being pinned to the wall with a steel fork or someone’s finger getting hot-sealed into a plastic bag at 500 degrees.

A-One Packing Supply was staffed by a crew of men who had either gambled against the law and lost or fried the self-preservation lobe out of their brains with one speedball too many. At best, each guy had an eighty percent chance of showing up to work on Monday morning. I never got to know anyone too well, because I never knew whether they’d be back for more than a week. It was almost an occasion for celebration when someone made it in without laying down his motorcycle on the toll road at four in the morning or spending the previous night in prison. The warehouse was a waystation to nowhere. There was no possibility for advancement, no valuable resume experience – just a Zapruder-like frame of indeterminate time before a guy flicked back into prison or dealing drugs or bartending at Chuckles. Only Ray was there through all of them.

A-One had also been the first place I came into contact with speed. It took me a month to realize that something was a little off with one of the other warehouse guys. He would blink frantically in the middle of his sentences, locking onto my gaze and maintaining constant eye contact long after it became uncomfortable. Sometimes he’d speak so quickly that he’d meld words together: Goddamnshit! and Cockeatinbitch! One morning I found him passed out on the truckers’ office floor, with Ray working nonchalantly at the computer three feet from his body.

“Jesus,” I’d said. “What… What happened?”

“End of a speed run,” Ray had said, as if this happened on a weekly basis (which, I would later discover, it did). “He’d been awake for something like fifty hours straight.”

“Fifty hours?”

“Yeah. Sometimes you can get upwards of sixty, seventy even. Depends on how good the stuff is.” I couldn’t tell if he was blowing smoke up my ass or not. Ray had a propensity both to lie about his experiences and to ingest copious quantities of illegal drugs, so it was a toss-up. “I can hook you up with some if you want.”

“No, I…” I had paused, mid-sentence. This was not an environment where Kelly Kapowski’s struggles with addiction on Saved by the Bell were relevant. I could get a lot of shit done in fifty hours. The realization that I had been wasting eight entire hours per day while asleep had never really dawned on me before. It was like a whole new world was opening up before me, where I would have the ability to do superhuman things like wash my car at four in the morning. Luckily, my mind flashed back to the end of another one of Ray’s oilfield stories at that exact moment. “Guy was on meth 24/7. Finally just keeled over and his heart popped like a zit, brother.”

It was momentarily tempting, but I had decided to stick with alcohol. By my third summer, at least one day a week I would come in with at least a slight buzz on, having long ago overcome the paranoia of having Lance realize that I was drunk on the job. I figured that, even in a worst-case scenario, I could plead that my co-workers were doing things that were way more illegal. I had my excuse all planned out. Come on, Lance. Wetzel stabbed someone! Ultimately, it became a game, where I would see how numb I could get and still pass under the radar.

Still, in order to preserve at least some semblance of care, I stuck to vodka, for its ability to be disguised as water and its lack of a telltale scent. Specifically, I chose Popov vodka. Popov is the Novocaine of alcohol. Where bourbon transforms you into the Incredible Hulk and beer makes every voice around you sound like the teacher from Charlie Brown Christmas specials, vodka makes you suave and sophisticated, so that you can act for a few hours like more than a man who makes eight dollars an hour throwing around bubble wrap. Vodka drowns out the off-putting consciousness that you are a cog in a machine that produces garbage – and not a very important one at that. Your skill set expands from operating a rudimentary shipping program, driving a forklift and lifting heavy things to a vast array of subjects, including discussing politics, seducing women, and generally overpowering others with your crushing intellect and razor-sharp wit. Fuck confidence – Popov courses through your veins like liquid professionalism. No wonder James Bond had all those women.

Vodka also makes it easy to lie – not only to others, but to yourself. With beer you wake up on the floor somewhere with vomit running down your cheek, and usually you can retrace your steps from the hours before by following the swath of stomach acid and broken bottles. Vodka is more subtle, though. The morning (or afternoon) after is usually a mess of blank memories without an identifiable trail, making it simple for you to convince yourself that nothing bad happened and that you probably don’t have a problem.

Ray wandered back into the office, eating Stagg chili directly out of the can. I decided to roll the dice.

“Hey, you left me up on the racks about half an hour ago. Did you think I was just going to fly down?”

Ray eyed me, pausing to swallow a mouthful of beans. “No, but I figured you’d find your own way to the floor.” It was impossible to argue with his logic. Ray ambled across the room and planted himself in the folding chair behind the conference table. The fan droned on.

“How long have you been working here, Ray?”

“Seven years in December.”

“And you never got sick of it?”

“Sick of it? You think I work here because I have a choice?” He stared at me incredulously before slouching back into his chair and continuing. “Nah, it’s not bad though. At least you’re getting some fresh air in you, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Besides, you’re the one who can afford to be sick of it. You’ve got what, another month here?”

“Yeah. Two and a half weeks, actually.”

“What do you think you’re gonna do?”

“College,” I said tersely.

“Oh yeah? Where?” This was the most interest Ray had ever shown in my future, and I wasn’t about to let him know that revealing the prestige of my destination would make the last three summers of work sound like a vacation, like I was that millionaire in New Jersey who spends his free time as a train conductor.

“Bay Area.” I hoped he wouldn’t follow the same line of questioning. He didn’t.

“Cool, man. That’s cool. Get away from the slobs like us.” He slapped me on the shoulder, a little harder than would have been necessary to make his point, before getting up and ambling out of the room.

I realized that for three years I had been testing myself to see if I could survive in the wrong arena. In October I would be leaving for school, where I would again be surrounded by the upwardly mobile crowd whose interest in pinot grigio and “Sex and the City” would force me to harness every ounce of energy to keep myself from punching them in the face. I was desperate to get away from that image, to the point where I had considered attending a state school rather than my first choice, again just because I could. I once read somewhere that the hyper-ambitious man strives for recognition, but the average guy is just trying to escape. A-One Packing Supply was my escape – the fortress of solitude where I could insulate myself from the knowledge that my future involved a career shuffling papers and accruing just enough hours to earn a hefty bonus that I would never have the time to spend.

About two months after I left for Stanford I got a phone call from Lance, who told me that Ray had suffered a serious injury. Having committed a string of seven or eight DUIs in the past, Ray had had his license taken away from him and was reduced to riding his bicycle to work. He made this commute every day at four in the morning, usually immediately after a long night of drinking. Apparently, Lance informed me, Ray had been racing down Santa Margarita Parkway and had flashed across an intersection against the light, getting clipped by a truck and flying thirty feet before landing on his head. This didn’t stop Ray, however. He took a 2-hour nap on the concrete, then woke up, retrieved his mangled bicycle, and carried it the remaining two miles to the warehouse. Everything was running smoothly until Carlos, one of the drivers, showed up and vomited when he saw the two-inch-square patch of skull that was visible just over Ray’s right eyebrow. Fearing for his brother’s safety, the company owner had decided it wise to relocate Ray to a mental hospital in South Carolina, where his needs would be better met.

In December I flew back home and decided to resume my job at A-One for a week before they shut down for the holidays, in a frantic effort to pick up some extra cash for Christmas presents. The new warehouse manager was a young guy, about 25, who insisted on exaggerating his Southern drawl to Foghorn Leghorn proportions. He spoke only sporadically, but he used his words to lash his underlings into line with the terse authority of the warden from Cool Hand Luke, so that instead of spending four hours in the middle of the day looking after Ray’s comatose form, I was hand-lifting hundred-pound pallets and shuttling them onto trucks at a dead run. By the time my shifts were over, I could barely muster the energy to press the accelerator down on the drive home. I had thought it impossible to miss Ray, but at least his absence served as a reminder of why avoiding such a job via a college education was probably a good idea. I began to eye the clock longingly as the afternoon dragged on, willing it forward with whatever mental focus I had left by three o’clock. Working at A-One had finally become, well, work.

People ask me why I stayed at A-One all through high school. Usually they ask with the same incredulous tone with which they inquire about the six-foot-tall pyramid of beer bottles on my balcony or the time I ate fifty marshmallow peeps in one sitting. Like George Mallory climbing Everest, I had to eat them because they were there, and I had to work at A-One because, well, what else was I going to do? Usually my response is something along the lines of “Gotta make money somehow,” or “I wanted a real job.” There really isn’t a polite way to say it. “Well, I loved it, because it was the last time for the next decade that I wouldn’t be surrounded by collar-popping assholes like yourself. More wine?” Going to college is the trade-off that we all make: being forced to grow out of the luxury of being who we are in exchange for an education and a paycheck, or, if you’re an English major, at least the potential thereof. There is no happy medium between Ray and the corporate world. Making a living by doing what you love is by and large the bastion only of professional athletes and rock stars. Unless you comprise part of the small minority of douchebags who can be happy selling your soul as a trial lawyer or investment banker, you’ll just have to suit up and like it.

Now that I’m graduating from college without definable job training, it makes it even more ludicrous that I traded my summers for what amounts to a pitiful blurb on my resume: licensed forklift operator. At least it was something that, for a short time, made me believe that growing up surrounded by wealth was a situation I could isolate myself from, as if riding places in friends’ Jaguars and spending weekends at their beach houses kept me hardcore, as long as I was back behind the forklift on Monday morning. Even as a middle-class kid in a luxury world, working at A-One was worth the knowledge that I could put off being a part of that abhorrent upper crust, at least for a little while longer. And now I know that if I manage to fool the working world into believing that I’m actually worth a salary, I can be just as happy with a gallon of Popov and a bag of skinless chicken breasts as with a sixty thousand dollar car. We’re all drowning it out with something, but at least my fix is cheap.