Ghosts of Tom Joad (14 page)

I tried chatting up this older woman named Patty, but all she did was complain. Bullseye had a computer watching her work, too.

“I started at the end of October as just a cashier. So alright, they got this speed time shit that measures how long you take ringing guests up. They want you to be in green as much as possible because that means you are fast. Red means you are slow. The problem with their system is that it is not always your fault. At first I heard about how you can cheat by suspendin' the transaction if the guest is taking too long, but you're only supposed to do that when you're waiting on like a price check. You can't do it too much, or the computer'll tell on you for that. Sometimes a guest will slide their card, but they will take a freakin' eternity to answer the credit card questions, which ruins my speed score. I kid you not when I say some guests take literally a full minute to finish it and it's like one damn question—credit or debit. So apparently that is my fault now too.”

The next Tuesday, as Patty was getting fired, she found out that the cash registers also counted out ring time for items per minute, tender time for the space between finishing the ringing up and putting money in the drawer, her idle non-sale time plus customers per hour, items per hour and sales per hour. Whatever numbers were good for all that she didn't have. So no one really saw her do nothing wrong, but she got fired by the
computer. They posted each cashier's scores in order next to the break room so you sorta could guess who'd be fired next.

Patty also always told us she was actually an artist. Her terrible paintings of seascapes taken from pictures in some book decorated the walls at Lewis' Pizza, where customers could buy them, assuming they showed up for pizza with two hundred extra dollars shopping for an oil painting. No effort had been spared to make those pictures awful, and I grew up five hundred miles inland. I guess Patty was still good looking in that older bat shit crazy chick kinda way, but in truth, that relationship wasn't going nowhere. Damaged, restock pile.

Now the Cart Guy at Bullseye was pretty funny. His job was to rodeo the carts outside the store. That's it, but it still seemed to confuse him some days. Reminded me of Muley, who had joined the Army and left Reeve. Cart Guy must've put in five miles a day in the parking lot, summer and winter, rain and snow, and his feet was all calloused from the running. He used to stub out cigarettes against his bare heel in the break room to make us laugh. Great stories about long nights out, painting the floor with IHOP pancakes and vodka. He'd always do imitations of the guests, sayin', “Excuse me, EXCUSE ME Sir, freaking excuse me, SIR.” He said one time, not fully joking, “Did you know ‘No Shirt, No Service' applies to employees too?” Cart Guy's cigarette trick got old and so that wasn't going anywhere either, because the kid was like nineteen and even I could see he was already pretty much dead without knowing it. More damaged goods, return to vendor.

This girl named Leigh missed one day. She told Kevin the Store Manager she misread the schedule. Kevin said if she didn't
have no doctor's note then one more time and she was gonna get excused, get back to work, have a good day. Excused was the word Bullseye used instead of fired, like us being valued associates instead of just workers. Words sort of meant something different inside Bullseye, like they never really wanted to make it clear what they meant. Kevin the Store Manager said one time he had worked twelve years for Bullseye, so he knew the special meaning words, and the rules and the tricks, and got to be the boss. Kevin the Store Manager loved rules. He was probably the only person who really didn't stick Q-Tips in his ears just because the box said not to. Rules made him feel comfortable by making his choices smaller. At the same time, he'd flirt clumsily with the high school worker girls, and they'd flirt back without enthusiasm thinking it might be good for their jobs in some still-developing pubescent version of being nice to the boss. Everybody learned fast. Kevin had as his big responsibilities making sure the pricing guns were racked at the end of each shift, and doing bag searches for the cashiers on the way out the door so they wouldn't steal. You could guess that this wasn't Kevin's dream job. It was nobody's dream job. It was just somewhere you ended up and, if you were tired or unlucky, got stuck.

Out in the parking lot, this young guy with a clipboard came up.

“Hey, you got a minute? I'm from the union, wanna talk with you about a meeting we're having soon.”

“Get away. We heard about you at the last team-building exercise. They said to stay away or we'd get fired. Said you can't even be in this parking lot, it's private property of Bullseye.”

“Just give me a minute. C'mon, they're paying you, what, $4.25 an hour? Hell, that's what a fast food lunch you gotta eat in your 15 minutes of break costs. Is that really what an hour of your labor, man, your life, is worth?”

“Mister, back off. We ain't got much but these jobs. We're scared. Some of us got kids and all of us got bills. We can't afford to go to your meeting. Now leave us be with this.” Jeez, that union guy was out there all the time, even when it was raining. I couldn't for the life of me understand why someone would be standing there in the rain then. Must have been somethin' in it for him.

We all got little pins yesterday, as our store sold over one million dollars in stuff. Anyway, Bullseye got a million dollars, and I got a little pin to stick on my name tag, which I must wear. New thing: Everyone has to memorize the five rules of superior customer service and recite them on demand from Kevin the Store Manager. He actually walks around the store and stops us, saying, “Earl, tell me Rule Number Three.” Rule Three is, “Ask the guest if she has found everything she desires.” The hard part is about half the warehouse staff speak Spanish, and memorizing the rules is really hard for them. Thank you for listening to this and please come again (adapted by me from Rule Five).

New break policy: zero to five and a half hour shift, no break. New schedule policy: all shifts reduced to five and a half hours or less. Somebody said it was illegal not to give us breaks, but what can you do, call the cops like it was a real crime? Well, turns out the joke's on me. I asked that union guy out in the parking lot about it, and he explained to me that we were in a “Right to Work” state. By law, employers are not required to
grant breaks to anyone over age 16; Bullseye gives us some kinda break, but in other places minimum wage workers like us do eight and nine hour shifts without a meal or a chance to get off their feet for a few minutes. No one gets sick leave, holidays, or vacation time, of course.

I actually asked Kevin the Store Manager about this. He was always encouraging us to talk to him about anything. “My door is always open,” he said, before going into his office and closing the door. One time I knocked, and standing in the doorway I asked him about having a break more often, just a few minutes to sit down and take a load off, and Kevin the Store Manager said:

“You're lucky to have this job. Lotta people out there who'd take your place.”

“I know Kevin, and I'm grateful. I'd just like a chance to sit down and eat a regular lunch on them long shifts.”

“Well, we all gotta do what is best for Bullseye. Careful you don't bite the hand that feeds you.”

I got it. Even if I'm never fed.

People not caring like that let the bullies get in charge. Seemed familiar. When I was a kid I really believed the border between me and the world leaked both ways, so that I could maybe affect things instead of just being affected by them, but it's different now when you work for a big company like Bullseye. At that point you realize that not everything is possible, and that changes everything.

I
DID START
talking once in a while with a woman named Jodie. She wasn't very pretty, but she had that desperate available look in her eyes, the one women don't see 'cause it ain't there around women. Since we only had fifteen minutes for break every six hours, Jodie and me used to joke that we were speed-dating. “I got two kids,” Jodie told me. She was always tired, saying the one kid won't sleep alone and insisted on crawling into her bed at night. “I told all the kids, Mama doesn't have any more sugar, go to bed, but they keep coming around.” The older one watched the younger one all day while Jodie was at work, and at night he wanted time with Mom. Price on families is hard to measure but easy to see.

“After Chris, who used to be my boyfriend, lost his part time job and took up drinking full time, things went bad for us at home,” Jodie told me. “He'd come back later and later, and then started coming back so late it was early the next day. I knew what he was doing and, while it hurt me, it was more a problem that he was spending too much of what we had than the tomcatting. Too many times our money ran out 'fore the month did. Food bank at the Salvation Army looked like the Monroe Mall used to look, same people in line nowadays. It was first come, first served, and people with cars could get there before us that had to wait for the first bus at 4:22 a.m., so it wasn't fair. The Salvo people tried though, letting us put our bags down to hold a place and giving us a seat inside on rainy days. Some food banks wouldn't do that, and you'd be standing in the weather with the kids for three or four hours for boxes of macaroni and cheese.”

“Hey Jodie,” interrupted Ephraim, her Team Leader. “Can you quit break a few minutes early and clear off the end caps on aisles four and six? We got a load of those new iTablets coming in and corporate wants to give them a lot of shelf frontage before the holidays.”

“Sure Ephraim, I'll get right to it. What do you want me to do with all the boxes of macaroni and cheese that're out there now?”

“Just throw them away, Jodie. They're half-stale, ready to expire. Nobody wants them. And get those tablets on the shelves right. Sales affect my bonus, corporate watches that stuff.”

I still had seven minutes left on break.

We caught up the next day, and Jodie continued remembering to me about her old man Chris.

“There was a while when things got a little better, because even though Chris was stayin' out more, every once in a while he'd come home with a fair amount of cash. He'd smell funny, not alcohol-funny, but like he was working around paint or something. His eyes would be red and his hands sometimes too, but he'd have $200 in crumpled twenties on the kitchen table and just say, ‘buy the boys something.'”

Jodie knew. We did have one growth industry in our semi-rural area. We favored of course alcohol, and the men over forty practically had no idea there was any other kinda drugs. The younger guys weren't interested in hagning around the bars. They hadn't grown up with the social side of drinking, the beer after work kind of thing. Guys my age, we had smoked a little weed in high school, but you couldn't really grow it in Ohio, and
God only knows how it made its way from wherever it was grown to Reeve. I doubt they had a computer that ordered dope from a factory in Thailand like Bullseye, but it must've been something like that. Weed never took, though, not like beer and whiskey. It was expensive, it made you want to eat, which cost more money, it made you kind of sleepy later, and it wore off too fast after that. Not a Midwest kind of drug. The state of Ohio had the booze monopoly, retailing everything but beer and wine itself in the State stores. Taxed it to hell, too, what was called a sin tax. What they counted on was that tolerance to alcohol developed pretty fast. You drank to get drunk most times around here, but it kept taking more and more to get to the same place. That was a good business model for the sellers, but had its downside for the buyers.

So there was meth. Meth was cheap, really cheap, and you could make it in Ohio, a new industry. Anybody could do it, just use a recipe and add in stuff from decongestants from the drug store and solvents and salts. Making meth with this shit can result in explosions and toxic gas, a business risk. But, be careful, and follow the instructions people who paid attention in high school chemistry class wrote, and all of a sudden you're an entrepreneur. Meth wasn't a social drug, and so you didn't need to hang around with old juicers in a dark bar. Meth came to you. Your friends were using it, if not selling it or cooking it, and the angry, speedo high it gave fit the young guys better. Meth wasn't only for boys, either. Girls liked it too, and 'cause you never thought about eating on a meth cruise, they called it the Jenny Crank diet.

Butane lighter and a glass tube, or just smoke it off a hot light bulb, “will get you homeward bound ridin' the pipe,” they'd say while they could still talk straight. We even had a bit of tradition from way, way back of making moonshine in the woods, so that fit too.

Meth and what happened to Ohio were just waiting for each other. I tried it a couple of times—everybody did—like a new restaurant in town most folks would eat there at least once, so they could talk about it with their friends. For a world stuck in shit, meth was the answer. This was a drug designed for unemployed people with crappy self-images and no confidence. And that was it. Meth wasn't about having drugs, it was about not having no jobs. It don't seep into your brain like weed, it comes in like an iron man fist. Imagine the feeling you get from the one thing that interests you the most, especially at that first hit of the session, zero-to-sixty. Imagine what it feels like to be the smartest, or the strongest, or the sexiest person in the world. Remember the most excited and energetic you've ever felt. Man, you feel like you accomplished stuff before you even got started, your brain running in crazy fast nervous wicked noisy circles. You wanna do everything at once, flying on the buzziness of the confusion. You are horny as hell, and it is so fucking good you bite a hole in your lip, and when you get off, it feels like only minutes speeded by. Get some clean stuff and handle it right, you could keep altitude for hours. Now, take all of these things and multiply them by a thousand or a million and there you have the feeling of meth. Until it fades. Then you blink away the dust and you're back on the couch without a job or a hope in hell and not having slept or ate, and feeling inside like everyone you ever
cared about just died. Then you just gotta do it again, only it takes just that much more. You of course started with just a taste or two and then you find yourself buying more weight, from a guy you don't know with a gun in his belt, and you realize you're now inside the reality that used to stay behind the curtain. See the problem? See the profit?