A Working Stiff's Manifesto (8 page)

“I like your style,” he says. “You're ambitious.”

He's actually considering my request, mistaking my desire to end the conversation quickly for business savvy. He nods. “That isn't out of the question,” he tells me.

It isn't? Damn. Now I'm going to have to make a decision. Turn my life upside down for a restaurant I haven't yet decided I like, or continue to live in poverty. Poverty has been going on too long.

“We'll get back to you,” he says.

So two days later, I'm wearing a tie and wandering around doing nothing. Jeff, the area director, goes over the module book with me in great detail, explaining each step, what I am supposed to learn on each day. Then he leaves and the module book is thrown out by the other managers. They are desperately understaffed and they just want a warm body to pick up slack, so I am assigned a myriad of menial chores.

On day one, my manager training consists of cleaning the toilets and replacing air fresheners, then driving across town to pick up liquor. After that, I go back into the kitchen to make onion rings for seven hours because one of the prep cooks failed to show. On day two, the opening waitresses both fail to show, so I do all their opening side work, then make onion rings for seven hours. The kitchen manager, who is desperate to unload some responsibility, tries to get me to do the food order without explaining to me how to do it, and rather than see the restaurant run out of everything, I wind up having an argument with the guy. Then Marci, the closing night manager who only two weeks before was threatening to fire me, decides she doesn't feel safe closing alone because she has received a prank phone call during the day, and suspects robbers or rapists might come in after the restaurant has closed. My instinct is to tell her to take her chances, but I'm supposed to be professional now. I sit at the bar for three more hours, not drinking, but waiting, watching sports highlights over and over while Marci does paperwork. By the time I leave, I've been there thirteen hours.

I spend the better part of the next month mopping floors and making onion rings, working over seventy hours a week. I am now working thirty more hours a week and averaging, after taxes, ninety more dollars per paycheck. Furthermore, I have become a lightning rod for blame. The night cooks forget to change the fry oil one night, and we open with burned grease. Nobody has ordered fresh fry oil, so we have to spend the lunch shift serving blackened french fries. Jeff comes in and sees this.

“Did you see this fry oil?” he screams at me. The days of handshaking and smiles are over.

“Yes.”

“What have you done about it?”

“We're getting a truck tomorrow.”

“Goddamnit, we need fresh grease today. What are you going to do about it?”

I am fresh out of ideas. I'm supposed to be a trainee. People are supposed to be showing me what to do.

“We're not paying you this kind of money to just wander around,” he tells me. “Call another restaurant and get them to lend us some grease.”

This makes sense, and while I am doing it, he comes in and screams about the lettuce.

“We've got lettuce rotting in the back of the freezer! Why aren't you rotating it?”

“I've been making onion rings,” I tell him.

“You're not supposed to be making onion rings. You're supposed to be managing. Get someone else to make the onion rings! I want you watching the lettuce and fry oil quality!” He storms off.

He's living in a dreamworld. We're fresh out of employees. He thinks we have prep cooks lined up dying to work. In reality, if we've got three prep shifts a week covered, I'm happy. I go back to making onion rings because we're almost out of them.

Jeff comes back into the kitchen a few hours later, sees me working at the stainless steel table. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Is it about onion rings?”

“Let's just talk.” I know how the conversation is going to go. I take off my apron.

“I'll be in to pick up my paycheck,” I say.

I walk home.

So that's how it goes. I should have just stuck with a nice nine-dollar-an-hour job, minding my own business. As soon as you start to move up, you're asking for trouble. There's nothing up there but ambitious, driven people trying to get you to do more of their work for less of their money.

For the rest of us, the dream has nothing to do with it. It's avoiding the nightmare that counts. I'm walking along a busy street peopled with the homeless and the nearly homeless, the walking, talking reminders of what happens when the bottom falls out. I have about ninety dollars left until my next payday, and after that, nothing. What divides me from them? Ninety dollars.

A guy comes up and asks me for some spare change. I wonder if he is doing better than me, financially. In Philadelphia, I remember working a Friday night at a restaurant where a homeless man would stand outside begging for change from our customers. At the end of the night, I had made sixty-five dollars, and he'd made seventy. How much money is there in begging? I've never tried it, maybe I should give it a whirl. You can pick your own hours and be your own boss. Isn't that the American dream? Maybe I should become an independent finance acquisition specialist.

This guy reeks of alcohol, and his skin is as leathery as a saddlebag. He is having trouble standing as he tries to focus. Maybe he isn't doing better than me, for now anyway. I give him two dollars and send him on his way.

I have a friend, Jim, from a restaurant job a long time ago, who was recently hired by a national moving company, and he has a job driving a tractor trailer across all fifty states. There is a message from him on my answering machine when I get home, telling me he needs help. How timely.

Jim wants to pay me $500 a week to drive and help load the truck. He's been having a problem lately because every time he pulls into a new city, the company he works for is supposed to provide laborers to help him move people's furniture onto the truck. Most of them are stoned, drunk, and useless, and they keep breaking the furniture, which he has to pay for.

First, I have to get a truck driver's learner's permit, which is easy enough. I go down to the DMV and take a short test. Now I can drive as long as he's in the cab. Then I arrange to have all my stuff put in storage. I say good-bye to my roommate, and catch a cheap early morning flight to Nashville, Tennessee, where I meet Jim at the airport.

“Damned good to see you,” Jim says, shaking my hand. “It's nice to finally have someone you can trust out here.” It's been about a year since I've seen him, but he looks a good deal older. He has bags under his eyes and has developed a nervous tic. The freewheeling drinker I knew from the restaurant has disappeared.

We go to dinner in downtown Nashville, and Jim describes his life since he was hired by the moving company seven weeks ago. He's been all over the country: Chicago, Las Vegas, Texas, Florida, and up the East Coast. He hasn't had either the time or the money to appreciate any of this, however, because he's spent the whole time either in a truck or in people's houses loading their furniture onto the truck. Every customer has a particular pick-up and drop-off date, which the company provides, and often the schedules are nearly impossible to meet. So someone might have a pick-up in Nashville tomorrow, but since there is a drop-off in Memphis the next day, nothing from the Nashville load can be put in front of the Memphis load, or it will all have to be unloaded again, taking hours. The truck has to be packed accordingly. He's learning this by experience. He tells me stories of one logistical disaster after another.

“I was in Las Vegas,” he says, “and the company says the guy has nine thousand pounds. There was twelve thousand there easy. The company agents bid on jobs just to get them. They don't care about the truckers, they get paid according to how many jobs they get. So the agents always quote the customers a lower price than you'd expect. The thing is, I don't have room in my truck for the extra three thousand pounds.”

“What'd you do?”

“I refused the shipment. You can refuse two a year. So I drive all the way to Las Vegas from Chicago for nothing. I'm an independent contractor, I have to pay for the gas.”

“And the customer doesn't get moved?”

John shrugs. “Not by me. That's the agent's problem. He should learn to make quotes.” I imagine a guy who was all prepared to move, everything wrapped, in boxes, waiting for his truck, and when it shows, the driver sees how much stuff he has and drives off.

“You gotta stick up for yourself,” Jim tells me. “Otherwise they'll eat you alive.”

They'll eat you alive anyway.

The first day we have a pick-up in Nashville, a small one. A young woman getting married is moving from an apartment in Nashville to a house in Spokane, Washington. Then we hightail down to Huntsville, Alabama, where a young woman getting divorced is moving all her stuff into storage. Circle of life.

Between each move, we have to find a weigh station to weigh the truck, so we can find out how much each load is and charge the customer accordingly. The nearest weigh station in this case is nearly a hundred miles from the woman's storage space, so driving back and forth to the station in the pouring rain takes up most of the day. We get done at one in the morning. We sleep in a motel, which costs forty dollars.

At six we are up and cruising empty to Topeka, Kansas, which Jim hopes to reach by nightfall. The mileage directory says this is 758 miles away, and truckers are only allowed to drive ten hours a day. This means we'll either have to average 75.8 miles per hour, which is illegal, or drive more than ten hours, which is also illegal. Jim puts down in the logbook that we started at nine thirty, which creates problems of its own.

Now, if we get pulled over between six and nine thirty, Jim loses his license because he's driving without being logged. Furthermore, if we get pulled over at ten o'clock, and we're 250 miles out of Huntsville, we have to explain to a state trooper how we drove 250 miles in a half hour. So my job is to keep a fake logbook full of horseshit information that makes everything look okay.

I can't even begin to get the hang of it. I'm supposed to keep records of the truck mileage when we cross state lines, which is easy enough, but in the fake logbook the mileages have to be different. Then if we get pulled over and the trooper looks at the current mileage on the actual odometer and sees my written mileage, which we're not going to hit until some time tomorrow, we're screwed. There's no way to pass a thorough inspection.

“There's no way to do this and make it work,” I tell Jim.

“Just try.”

“Why don't we just pull into Topeka tomorrow afternoon?”

“The company promised we'd be there tomorrow morning.”

The public likes a professional moving company. They also like having their stores stocked with everything they need.

Then they like the idea that trucks driving on the road are regulated by some kind of governing body, making sure the vehicles are safe and the drivers aren't all falling asleep at the wheel. It's just not possible.

Everybody wants fresh vegetables, fresh fish, fresh coffee, fresh cut flowers. Warehouses are going out of style. Everything must be brought in that day. Consumer tastes are pushing the trucking industry to hurry up, while more and more cops are flooding the roads to make them slow down. Thousands of federal and state employees have created laws and devised a system, with logbook directives and weigh stations and checkpoints, and thousands of truckers are trying to outsmart it to make a living. The trucker who doesn't need to outsmart it either has a luxurious job or no bills to pay.

As darkness starts to fall, Jim tells me what I hope is an apocryphal story of the trucker who drove five minutes over ten hours, then got broadsided by a drunk driver in a car. The car driver's passenger died. The accident was deemed entirely the trucker's fault, because he was over his ten hour limit.

“So get the books right,” Jim tells me.

My attempt at log-keeping wouldn't fool even the dumbest state trooper, but it turns out not to matter because we blow a trailer tire heading into Kansas. This slows us down enough to make everything legal, which is to say, backed up. I sit in the cab and madly erase everything I have written so far, then scribble in the real numbers. By the time I am done, the logbook looks like a mad scientist's chalkboard.

“We're going to have to spend the night here,” says Jim, dejected. He has failed in his mission. He has not kept the schedule. I point out that the schedule is unrealistic and he stares at me as if I just don't understand. I don't. We drive the truck into a motel parking lot and Jim waits for the wrecker while I get us a room.

Another forty dollars. We decided that, as there are two of us, we'll sleep in the cramped sleeper only when there is no option. We are splitting the room cost, which is twenty dollars per person per night, $140 per week out of my five hundred. Then there is food. We have to eat every meal at a diner, so I'm looking at twenty dollars a day minimum for food, which sucks up another $140. By the time I get my money, it's chump change, $220 for a seventy-hour week. With overtime, this averages out to about $3.80 an hour.

Jim comes into the hotel room, devastated. He is carrying logbooks and maps, and he sits at the little desk, feverishly going over details. I am trying to watch
Law and Order
.

“Could you keep that down?” he asks, irritated. So I watch
Law and Order
with the sound off, which takes away a lot of the effect, as the show is mainly dialogue. Then, after about five minutes he looks up and says, “We have to leave at five in the morning.”

“What for?” Now I'm pissed.

“So we can make our schedule.”

“The people who made up the schedule are sitting in an office in Beaumont, Texas. It was just an idea they came up with. Why don't you just call them tomorrow and tell them we're running late because we lost a tire.”