Ghosts of Tom Joad (13 page)

Since the businesses we worked for could get away with not paying us enough to live on, other businesses popped up to loan us money at rates we could never afford to pay back because of course the businesses we worked for could get away with not
paying us enough to live on. Then the government started subsidizing the businesses to not pay us enough to live on with food stamps, aid to babies, that sorta thing—with our own tax money that they took from our wages at those same businesses. Cream in coffee, just swirls around and down. Companies stopped sharing the profits of labor with the workers who increased the productivity and instead just shoveled the money upstairs so we can't afford to buy what we make. Now if we're not workers and we're not consumers, what are we?

S
O HERE'S MY
life. You gotta watch the alcohol and the drugs if you're living rough. First of course is that they are expensive—there's no Dollar Menu at the liquor store—and once you start down that road it slides under you too fast. You drink a little to stay warm, you drink a little to pass the hours. You accept a passed joint to be friendly, and pretty soon life starts to feel better disconnected. Mornings were there to sleep through, afternoons that had no purpose. You start to wonder who made the rule about no drinking until 5 p.m., or 3 p.m., until there is no reason not to drink whenever now is. Shame ain't no problem, as it'll go away at least until morning after the third drink. Then she starts to take your money, then you start eating even less and pretty soon you're that guy on the bench with a paper bag wrapped around a jolt of malt liquor from the gas station. I tried to stay clear of the drugs; beer was always our drug then in Reeve anyway, and from time to time I do admit I took comfort in the songs at the bottom of those bottles.

You acquire a different sense of time. You get tired jobless in a way that sleep don't fix. You wait a lot, waiting not for a movie to start but just waiting, waiting for something to change or just for another day to end. Near the bottom, before you disappear under the alcohol, there's the problem of what to do with all that time. When I had a life it was always about not having enough time. Homeless, too dirty for places that sell things, you got time. Libraries are good but you can't overdo it and in a small town with only one, closed half the fucking time anyway 'cause of budget cuts, it's not a full-time job. Sitting or sleeping only covers so much territory, so you end up walking around. At first you just start doing it, unsure how long you can stay on your feet, 'til you end up staggering like a drunk. That's funny, yeah? Sometimes I used to ride the public buses around town—now, that's also funny—as they were dry and warm. Some drivers would let you on for free, some didn't even want to touch the crumpled up dollar from your pants pocket, some would make you pay a little and let you stay on until the end of their shift. Some assholes would see you stand in the fucking snow just 'cause you couldn't pay the full fare. They're afraid of losing their own jobs for helping someone. Just like that fucker truck driver who wouldn't gimme a ride when I walked away from Angie.

I was flat-out drunk one night when she crept back into my head. I don't know what the hell made this night any different than the others. It was probably my new girlfriend Ms. Budweiser because I was drunker than shit, but I dug some coins outta my jeans and went to a pay phone. In those days when dinosaurs roamed the land around Reeve, we had pay phones,
they cost a dime and you could talk to a person at “information” to find a number.

“As our valued customer, your call is important to us, please hold.”

“Hello? Hello, I wanna, um, want to, yeah, talk to Angie.”

“Name and city, sir?”

“Her fuckin' name is Angie like I just said. She lives maybe near that Greenwich Village. Gimme that number.”

“Which city in Ohio, sir?”

“It's New York, New York the city, I just wanna talk to her dammit.”

“Yes sir, New York City. Transferring to long distance information now—”

“As our valued customer, your call is important to us, please hold.”

“New York information, may I help you, last name please?”

“Angie goddammit. Angela, Angel. Soft shoulders, you know, the one from the parking lot …”

“Last name or address please, sir?”

“She sent me a fucking postcard sayin' she fucking lives looking out the window at a park, so gimme that address. Goddammit, help me.”

The operator hung up. I slept it off. Things always look better in the morning.

R
EEVE LOST OUT
on the big Bullseye retail store, when Gibbsville offered better tax breaks to the company plus a couple years' free lease on the old high school land after they
closed the second high school due to fewer students and people moving away. The company built there what is called a big box store.

The idea was our tax money was used to lure that company in, and they was smart enough to play Reeve off against Gibbsville like we did in football, when all along they knew they were gonna locate somewhere around here anyway. It was our tax money being used to create jobs for us. They held a job fair, with tables set up in the other high school's gym, decorated with magic marker-written signs and a few tired balloons, which was all that stood for the fair part. A lot of people were already lined up when I got there, and the Bullseye people were wearing their bright blue vests walking around, looking us over like livestock. We covered a lot of ground, from last year's model of homecoming queen to retired guys who couldn't afford to retire. “Interested in loading dock?” they said to me, “C'mon over and talk about cosmetics here,” they'd say to the pretty high school girls. We were good little pieces of meat.

One guy said that because Bullseye drove his small store outta business he had to take a minimum wage job at Bullseye, which only pays him enough so that he sorta has to buy at Bullseye. They made him a greeter at the front door and told him to be enthusiastic. He was. Like that, all them jobs wasn't much. You got one and you were happy at first, but you soon felt like you made it onto one of the life boats from the Titanic but were just waiting for the next big wave to dump.

My job at Bullseye was to take big boxes of things off the truck, and do the break down. It was called officially by Bullseye in the associate handbook, “Inbound Event Processing.” What
happened is that a computer at the Bullseye headquarters called a computer at a warehouse, which notified a computer in New Jersey to send off a buy order ultimately to a factory computer in Thailand to make some more headache pills to replace the ones we had ordered for our store. They came in a big carton of say 144 smaller boxes. I tore a pick sheet off the printer, which told me to count out thirty-six of them boxes into a plastic tub labeled P
HARMACY,
then count out say twenty-four more and put them into a tub labeled G
ROCERY,
and so forth. Somebody else would come into the back room from each of those departments and take their tub. Because of me and my counting, the Bullseye store could order a big cheap box of 144 and I'd divide them up right. A computer could not do that and so almost reluctantly I had a job.

The day I lifted that first box off the truck, I felt something. My eyes saw the pick sheet, and I found the carton. My arms lifted it up and while it wasn't heavy, it had some weight, enough that I could feel the muscles work. My strength was challenged a bit, not just lifting food into my mouth, but lifting weight because a man was paying me to do that. Hadn't seen you in a while, old friend, hello.

The job was real easy to learn. There was no apprentice system needed here, no paid jobs for boiler operators' assistants, no plumber's helpers. I walked in and Steve, the Team Leader, said “Take the pick sheet there, go to the truck, hit them with that barcode scanner gun, count them out right, initial the pick sheet and put it in that folder. Fifteen minute break's at noon. No talking, but you can wear head phones as long as you're in the back room. Come in to work through the rear entrance,
never use the front door or park in a guest space. Late from break twice and you're fired. Bullseye welcomes you as a valuable addition to our team, um, Earl.” He'd looked up just at the end of my welcoming speech and seen my name tag. Steve the Team Leader was hard to get to know. He stayed in his office most of the time, and when we had these mandatory team-building meetings, he'd say stuff to us that sounded like he was reading lines from a play written by Bullseye, like “So how's the [insert popular local sports team name] doing, [insert teammate's name]?” It was almost like Bullseye didn't want him to think much. Maybe us neither.

On my first day, I met with Teri, from Human Resources. She told me I had to decide how Bullseye would pay me. See, Bullseye wanted everyone to use electronic direct deposit, which was the cheapest, well, Teri said best, thing for Bullseye and thus for its valued team members. Problem is that to use direct deposit you had to have a place to deposit into directly, a bank account. That used to be simple, and as a kid I remember being walked into the bank one Saturday morning with a bag of quarters and some paper birthday money to open my first passbook savings account. The old guy banker even let me keep the pen I used to sign things. Now, banks want chunky minimum amounts to open an account, and want to charge you for checks and stuff. If you don't maintain some heavy balance, they charge fees, so for a guy like me banks were too expensive. You also needed a mailing address and ID to prove you were just homeless and not a homeless terrorist. “No problem,” said Teri from Human Resources, “Bullseye understands and for a $7.95 biweekly courtesy fee will gladly issue you a paper check.”
I would then have to take the check to a storefront check cashing place (again, no bank account), which charges a courtesy fee of four percent largely because they could care less if you're a homeless terrorist as long as they get their share. “No problem,” said Teri from Human Resources, “Bullseye understands and will pay you in the form of a debit card. It looks just like a regular credit card, and every two weeks your salary gets loaded on it electronically, automatically.” I could even manage it online, if I had an on-line. Cool, so I did that. Only I found out that to get actual cash I had to stick the thing into an ATM for a fee, and if the balance fell below a minimum, fee, and there was a monthly maintenance charge fee, so basically if I didn't spend it quick enough in the right way my money evaporated. The only place I didn't pay a fee to spend my own money was if I used the card at Bullseye. Even just getting my hands on my money I'd earned was like trying to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Teri also guided me through my drug test. Most places that don't pay much seem really concerned that their workers are drug-free. I'm not sure why this is, 'cause I learned that you can be a banker or lawyer and get through the day higher than Jesus on a cloud. Regardless, for the first time since Muley and me peed off the Black River Bridge drunk together on my birthday, I urinated in front of another person, handing him the warm cup. He gave me one of those universal signs of the underemployed I now recognized, a “we're all in it, what're ya gonna do” look, just a little upward flick of his eyes. Even though I was hung over as hell, I did pass thanks to alcohol not being part of the test.

Then I had to buy some blue, collared shirts and what my mom would've called khaki slacks, which were the uniform for Bullseye. I got to keep and wash the uniform, which was okay I guess, but even with the employee discount it meant that I worked my first two days just to buy the clothes they wanted me to have. As a kid I used to get all my clothes at Christmas mostly, except for jeans and T's, but you had to be pretty rich to wear jeans and a T to work. Bullseye was pretty strict on the uniform, except for Courtney the Cosmetics Girl, who was allowed to wear a scoop neck, I guess because the assistant manager liked her, and she had big boobs and the customers liked that. She approached her job with all the enthusiasm of a kid's toy whose batteries were about to die, but she had big boobs and that was enough.

Teri from Human Resources last help to me was a video on theft. Bullseye was deeply concerned for the welfare and well-being of its valued associates and thus maintained a drug-free environment, but it seemed equally concerned for its own welfare and well-being, as the video warned me about stealing anything. The interesting thing is that, in addition to warning us about stealing candy and pop for breaks, we were not to steal time from Bullseye. Bullseye paid us for our time and so even if we snuck out for a smoke or flipped through a magazine chatting up a checkout girl, we were stealing their time. Would we have liked someone from Bullseye to come to our home (or, I guess, motel room, car back seat, shelter bunk or cardboard box under a bridge) and have to do whatever the hell Bullseye would want from us there? Bullseye's rules reminded me of church, where pretty much whatever we wanted to do turned
around to be a sin. How the preacher could read young men's minds was unclear, but Bullseye seemed to have the same knack. The good news was, oriented, I was ready to go to work. But one more thing—it turned out that this orientation was unpaid, done before we were technically hired, and so it was considered an investment in ourselves and our future, Teri said.

It was hard to get to know the other workers, the associates, as we were told not to talk and because it turned out that Steve the Team Leader had another computer. His computer wasn't hooked up to the headache pill factory but instead was watching those pick sheets. As I came to learn, the bar code scanner was kind of watching over me. The people who came and picked up my filled tubs had one too, and those scanners told Steve how fast I was picking and filling. On days when I apparently wasn't doing those things fast enough, Steve would come out and tell me I was not performing to my full potential as a valued teammate and that meant I had to work faster. I did. I did not have his computer, so I wasn't sure how fast was right, or fast enough, and so I tried to just do it all as fast as I was able. But no mistakes—Steve was angry, sure, if I was slow, but if I put too many or too few into a bin and the bar code scanner told him, that made him especially angry. It was my job to pick and sort stuff, but it was Steve's job to make sure Bullseye made money, he said. That was what I came to know as management. Steve was actually about my own age, but he had come from Louisville with the Bullseye corporate family, and I always kinda thought of him as a lot older than me. I was pretty sure his last name was Manning or Marvin, but he was also always insisting that as a teammate I was to only call him Steve or I'd be in
trouble for that too. Still, it was better than when I worked off-the-books for a while in the craft store at Christmas, coming home like a stripper with a pocket full of ones and fives covered in glitter.