Road To Nowhere (9 page)

“But the university wrote him back a stern letter of rejection. He next applied to U.C. Santa Cruz – again, another school not far from Berkeley. He got the same kind of rejection letter. It made him wonder. He did some investigative work and learned that not only had all the universities in California been contacted by Mr. Sims, but all the state colleges as well. John couldn’t believe it. All that was left were a bunch of junior colleges.

“His plans were in ruins. I said he often spent his free time at work goofing off, but he also spent a lot of the time studying the subjects he needed to become an engineer – maths, physics, chemistry. He figured he could catch up in no time at all. Now all that was out of the question – at least for the time being. That’s the way he thought. Sure, you could say he was overreacting. He could have gone to a junior college and worried about getting into a four-year school when the time came. But he didn’t want to do that because he didn’t want to have to call Candy at big important Berkeley and tell her that he was taking a few night classes at Cerritos Junior College. I mean, he had his pride and there’s nothing wrong with a guy having pride.

“More overtime was offered at work and because John had nothing else to do, he took it. Rather than going in at eleven, he started at six in the evening. He didn’t know that Tyler, the head of the bakery and a staunch company man, usually worked to seven or eight. This was the first time the two began to have regular contact. Tyler liked John initially. During the extra hours, he put John on another one of the plushier jobs. John was given a list of what the supermarkets wanted and he’d go round to collect the stuff – forty boxes of doughnuts, fifty boxes of rolls, a hundred loaves of bread, and so on. Then at eleven, with Tyler gone, John would clean his machines and take the rest of the night off. The overtime paid double – he couldn’t complain.

“John often took his first break when Tyler was about to leave. Tyler had been a marine, which should have set off warning bells in John’s mind right away. John had never done well with people who were into authority and discipline. But John could be respectful, when it suited him, and Tyler saw in John a kid who’d had a few lousy breaks but who was bouncing back. The two spent a lot of time talking about sports – boxing in particular. John really enjoyed a good fight and boxing was a second religion to Tyler. Tyler, in fact, had boxed in the marines. He was built like a tree stump. John laughingly thought to himself that there was no way he was ever going to take a punch at this guy.

“John didn't get his plush overtime every day. Now and then, the conveyor bells that carried the bread pans away from the oven would break down. When this happened, Tyler would grab whoever was handy and have them manually unload the pans on to racks so that they wouldn’t all start piling up. Working right beside the oven was intense – the temperature had to be over a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and thirty. The pans themselves were also very hot. When you were put on the hell detail – that's what it was called – you had to wear damp gloves with sleeves attached that reached all the way up to the top of your arms. If you so much as bumped your arm with a pan after taking it off the conveyor belt, it sizzled a nice little black hole in your skin. But the long gloves were a pain. The arm covers were loose and slid down all the time, leaving your arms exposed. The pans didn't even need to touch your skin to cause third degree burns – they radiated so much heat.

“John hated the hell detail with a passion. But Tyler began to use him on it more frequently because the oven belt was breaking down more often and also because John was quick. John could unload the bread pans faster than anybody. At breaks, though, he would have to drink a gallon of water just to keep from getting dehydrated. He began to wonder if the overtime was worth it.

“John was not only quick, he was clever. After working the hell detail a number of times he began to see just how inefficient it was. Men should not be doing what machines could do better, he thought. He examined the conveyor belts and saw that they kept breaking down for a very simple reason. Too much dough was slopping off the sides of the pans as they travelled through the oven. John reasoned that if that slop could be cut down, the conveyor belts would break down only occasionally. He figured a couple of metal scrapers, situated at the receiving end of the oven, would solve the problem. He worked on making them in his free time, late at night, using spare parts. He tried his invention out when no one was around. Invention was too big a word. They were just metal bars, that cleaned and steered the pans as they went by, but as far as John could see, they worked great. He installed them without permission and looked forward to the next day, when he could take credit for his handiwork.

“But John decided, during the night, that he would wait and let his bars do the job before taking credit for them. This they did over the next month – the conveyor belt didn’t break down once and there was no need for Tyler to yank people off their usual jobs and put them on the hell detail. The odd thing was, during all this time, nobody asked who installed the new bars. Not even Tyler. John wondered at that, until one evening, when he was having a break, and Tyler was just about to leave for the day. It was then John got another lesson in human nature.

“John was sitting alone in the corner of the break room eating a bagfull of fruit. Sandwiches used to be his staple, but since he had begun to smell like the Pillsbury Doughboy he couldn’t eat bread or anything with flour in it. John was just about to open his mouth, when Tyler told the workers that
he’d
had the bars installed to scrape the bread pans so the conveyor belts wouldn’t jam so often. Tyler puffed up his chest as he spoke. He said he decided to fix the problem himself and be done with it. The men around him nodded appreciatively. A couple even suggested that Tyler should get a patent on the bars, to which Tyler laughed as if that wouldn’t be a bad idea.

“It was then John opened his mouth. He said, ‘Hey, I was the one who installed those bars. I was the one who figured out what the problem was. What are you talking about?’

“The room fell silent. John had just made Tyler out to be a liar and a braggart at the same time. Some of the men had worked for Tyler for several years and knew how tough he was, and how he didn’t like to be embarrassed – ever. They knew John would be fired.

“But John saw none of this. It was just like the time Mr. Sims came striding towards him in chemistry class. John thought he could open his mouth and explain the situation and everything would be all right. But John
made
situations when he opened his mouth, and he had just made a big one. Yet Tyler didn’t say anything to John. He just stared through him and left the lunchroom. The rest of the room went back to eating and John finished his apples and didn’t give any of it much thought.

“A couple of weeks later John lost his job cleaning the wrapping machines and filling the orders for the individual stores. He was moved on to the hot dog machine. The hot dog machine didn't actually make hot dogs, of course. It was a complicated arrangement of metal fingers and slamming bars that worked to keep the preformed dough in the proper grooves in the steel pans so that they could grow into nice bundles of eight connected fluffy hot dog buns. The job was worse in some ways than working beside the oven. It was noisy, and it was dangerous. The operators of the hot dog machine – there were usually two of them at a time – were responsible for keeping the maximum number of buns in the metal grooves. In other words, the people were there to straighten up anything the machine had missed, which was plenty.

“The danger came when you tried to mix metal fingers with human fingers. But that was exactly what the hot dog machine operator had to do his entire shift. He was always darting in and around a pan filled with white dough and steel prongs. It was a good place to lose a finger. John hated the job. He was no fool and knew why he’d been reassigned. Or maybe he was a special kind of fool. He wanted to show up Tyler again – for all the good the first demonstration had done him. He was not working with the hot dog machine a week when he figured out a way to make it more efficient.

“The buns were sticky before they went in the oven, which was natural – they were made of flour and water. It this stickiness that kept them from resting in the roper grooves. John figured if the buns could be dried just a little before they went into the oven, they would rest happier.

“Next to the hot dog oven was the doughnut oven, which had a row of fans along one side to take off the excess heat. The doughnut oven was always overheating, which was not good – even for an oven. What John did was redirect the conveyor belt that brought in the uncooked hot dog rolls so that they went by the hot air. Then by the time they got to the hot dog machine, they were semi-cooked and much easier for the machine to handle. John did all this work late at night without getting permission from Tyler. He wanted to show the bastard up, make it clear who the inventive genius was. Once again John was able to cannibalize parts. It wasn't much more difficult than setting up a train set.

“Naturally, Tyler immediately knew about the change. John had half expected the jerk to have it torn down right away. But Tyler left the conveyor belt’s new turn up long enough to prove its usefulness. John began to think maybe he wasn’t such a bad sort, after all. Tyler called John into his office. He started by asking if John was responsible for the reworking of the hot dog roll line, and John said, ‘Yeah.’ Tyler asked why he had done it, and John quickly explained the logic behind it. In fact, John blabbed on about how it was working great, that it was no longer necessary to have two people work it. Tyler appeared interested. He asked John to accompany him on to the floor and demonstrate how much less attention the machine needed. John thought it was a curious request. It was easy to demonstrate how you had to do something; hard to show how you didn’t have to do it. But John decided to play along. What could it hurt, he thought? The worst Tyler could do was fire him.

“So John lined up at his usual place beside the metal fingers of the hot dog machine, alone, while Tyler and a bunch of others looked on. Soon the pans of blown dry sausages of dough started rolling, and for the first few minutes John didn’t have to do anything because all the ‘wannabe’ buns were sitting easy. But even with John’s improvement, there was an occasional bun that sat cock-eyed – a bun that the prongs of the machine would miss so that it got burned in the oven. Such a bun came by and John reached out to scoot it into its proper place.

“Now the only thing that made it possible for the operators of the hot dog machine to work so closely with the grabbing metal fingers was that the prongs never touched the pans. They would scrape within two inches of the pan – never closer. An experienced operator could nudge a bun back into place even as a prong was swinging in to get it because the operator knew he had those two inches to work with. Never, never, would he let his fingers stray more than that distance above the pan.

“John was experienced. He had the reflexes of a cat. He knew his exact margin of error. He knew it in his sleep. He knew it blindfolded. He reached out to flick the bun into place just as he looked up and winked at Tyler and his pals. The machine had been on a full ten minutes and this was the first time he had to do anything. He had proved his point. He had the brains, it was obvious. The bakery job was just a stepping-stone for him. He was headed for bigger and better things, while a guy like Tyler was going to be in the bakery twenty years from now, still smelling like the Pillsbury Doughboy and still boasting to a bunch of people with cinnamon rolls for brains how he had improved the efficiency of the plant thirty per cent.

“But John picked a bad time to look up. His margin of error – those precious two inches – weren’t there that day. The metal fingers swept down, and although they didn’t scrape the pan, they came mighty close. You might ask, why didn’t John notice the prongs were cutting it unnaturally tight? The answer is he should have noticed, but he was too busy gloating about how silly he was making Tyler look. To give him some credit, though, the metal fingers moved like a blur. It was possible he wouldn't have noticed they had been lowered unless the machine had been turned off and each arm was manually swung through its range of motion. John was never to know for sure.

“The metal prong grabbed him. It got hold of his index and middle fingers. At first John felt the catastrophe as nothing more than a hard yank on his right hand. He felt little immediate pain – physically that is. But when he looked down, and saw that two of his fingers had been torn off, he almost fainted.

“He went into shock and it was a pity. Because had he been able to keep his wits he probably would have been able to collect his fingers. Then a skilled surgeon could have sewn them back on, and who knows? They might have worked. He might have been able to play guitar with them – piano. Medical science can work wonders. But John was never given that chance. The prongs had grabbed his fingers and stuffed them in with the hot dog buns. They disappeared into the tunnel of the long fiery oven as John’s blood gushed on to the floor. John just watched them disappear. The sight of half his hand missing was too much for him.

“The others ran to his aid. Tyler was the first at his side. The man grabbed a small white towel – he seemed to have one ready in his pocket – and wrapped up John’s right hand. The towel turned red in an instant. John was bleeding bad. He had lost not only two fingers, but a portion of his actual hand. A big vein was open and squirting. Tyler hurried him to his office, practically carrying him, and an ambulance was called. While waiting for the paramedics, Tyler applied a tourniquet to John’s wrist. The bleeding began to slow down. If Tyler hadn't been there, John might have died. In a sense Tyler saved his life. What a swell guy.

“The doctors operated on John for over four hours. He didn’t wake up until the next day. His hand was in a cast. It felt as if it was on fire, as if the two fingers that had gone into the oven were still attached, cooking his flesh to cinders. Later he learned that his fingers emerged from the far side of the oven, each wrapped in a fresh hot dog bun. Two women on duty saw them and one of them fainted. Of course, after the fingers were cooked, they weren’t worth sewing on.