Ain’t No Lovin’ Lie

3rd Place in the Fiction Writing Contest

Issue 19

            The warehouse where Steve worked a summer job was located slightly east of the street that divided Detroit into west and east – two portions of the same city that may as well have been two different countries. The warehouse served a chain of department stores located in Detroit and its suburbs. It was 1968, and one year after the riots. Recruiting stations were continuing to locate near high schools throughout the city and an ever increasing amount of boys not in college were being sent to fight in Vietnam. Some enlisted on their own. One of them was Don who worked at the warehouse, destined for the Marine Corps and Vietnam and who had come close to dislocating Steve’s jaw.
            Steve was one of a number of college boys who were referred to the warehouse by the state employment assistance office and interviewed by Mr. Spears, the personnel department manager, a black man in his early thirties who had a habit of smiling after saying something. He reminded Steve of guards in prison movies.
            “My name is Mr. Spears; I’m in charge of hiring and firing.” He scratched under his chin as if he had missed a spot shaving that morning. “Have a seat.” Steve sat in the chair in front of his desk.
            “So you just completed your first year at University of Michigan?”
            “Yes.”
            “Going back in the fall?”
            ​“Yes.”
            “They do a lot of drugs there, I hear.”
            “I guess.”
            “You guess?” He waited for a response but Steve didn’t answer.
            Mr. Spears continued: What was Steve studying, (raising his eyebrows when Steve told him “math”), any health problems, ever worked in a warehouse and did he have a deferment from the draft. He then tilted his chair back and appeared to be in deep thought, as if these topics were key qualifiers of warehouse work. After about thirty seconds of appearing doubtful, he made his pronouncement.
            “I think you’ll work out. Can you start today?”
            “Yes.”
            “Yes? As in you accept? Just making sure. I don’t want you quitting on me.”
            “Yes, sounds good.”
             “Good. Let me go through some rules with you. They’re fairly simple. The workday starts at eight AM and ends at five PM; there’s a half hour lunch break and you get two fifteen-minute breaks per day. Keep your hair short, your nose clean and your mouth shut and you’ll do just fine. Any questions?”
            “No,” Steve said.
            “Good. One last piece of advice.” Mr. Spears leaned forward. “Whether you’re on the floor of this warehouse or on the campus of University of Michigan, or in the jungles of Vietnam, just remember one thing.” He raised his index finger and paused before delivering the last word: “Survival!” He then shook hands with Steve and wished him good luck.
                                                                        ***
            The summer crop of college boys was widely despised by the non-college boys who worked there. Steve managed to navigate the work environment, mostly by following Mr. Spears’ advice of keeping his mouth shut. He reported to Ellis, a tall black man with a slight paunch, in his early forties who had worked there for twenty years. Like Mr. Spears, Ellis wore the same knowing prison guard look.
            “I need you to do something,” Ellis said during Steve’s first week. Ellis sat on a large box, cleaning his nails with a small jack-knife. “See those boxes over there?” He nodded his head in that direction. “I want you to move those boxes to this pallet right here.” The pallet was next to where Steve was standing. “And when you’re done, I want you to count them.”
            Ellis kept up a steady patter as Steve moved the boxes. “Now that you’re out of school for the summer, if I were you, Steve, I’d watch my step. I don’t want to get no call from the police about you.” Ellis plunged the jack-knife into the box he was sitting on.
            Steve continued to haul boxes.
            “You know what I mean, don’t you?” Steve didn’t answer, wondering how long Ellis would keep it up.
            “I mean, I don’t want to hear that you ain’t coming in to work because they found something that you shouldn’t have. You do know what I mean, right?” He was about to stick the knife in the box once more when he spotted Jack, a non-college boy about Steve’s age, talking with his co-workers.
            “Jack, it ain’t break time,” Ellis shouted. “Get your dumb ass over here, and help Steve move these boxes.”
            Jack took his time walking over. He stood near both of them and shook his head to get a blond shock of hair out of his eyes. “I know you want to help out, don’t you Jack? You think you can help Steve here move these boxes? Steve here is new.”  Ellis turned to Steve. “Jack just graduated high school; he was part time here, but we made him permanent. So now he thinks he can just do anything and goof off whenever he wants. But I know you know better than that, right, Jack?”
             ​Jack began moving boxes, giving Steve a slight shove to get out of his way. If Ellis saw the shove, he said nothing. Ellis lit a cigarette, and stared out into the expanse of the warehouse as the two of them worked.
            After a few minutes, Jack started to call out taunts. “Hey college boy, you think you can move faster?”
            Steve ignored him. The taunting continued.
            Jack couldn’t have been too bright if he was carrying on like that in front of Ellis, Steve thought. After a few more minutes of “Hey college boy” Jack became more emboldened. “Where’d you learn to fuck off like that? They teach you that at your damn school?” was his last. Ellis leaped up, his six feet two frame towering over Jack. “Leave him the hell alone and do your damn work!” 
            Jack quieted down; the two boys worked in silence and after finishing the job Jack walked away. “Where you going, Jack?” Ellis shouted.
            “Tommy said he had some work for me,” he shouted back; Tommy being Ellis’ boss.
            “Yeah, that’s good. I’ll come by to see how you’re doing with that work.”  He turned to Steve. “Now count the boxes.”
            “Forty-five.”
            “How you count that fast? You bullshitting me?”
            “Three rows of five each, three boxes high. Nine times five.”
            Ellis stared at Steve as if seeing him for the first time.
            “Yeah!” he said. “You all right!”
                                                            ***
            The college workers hung together most of the time, working together when they had the chance, hanging out during breaks and eating lunch together. They were mostly friendly with each other, Among the college buddies at Steve’s table was a psychology major who didn’t say much and projected a superior attitude with Steve and others not totally unlike the prison guard persona. Steve could sometimes hear him softly singing the refrain from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” while they were working. Another was a young black student at a seminary, studying to be a priest, who laughed at the dirty jokes sometimes told. “I thought you told me you couldn’t tell such jokes,” Steve once said. “That doesn’t stop me from laughing at them,” he responded. There were others but those two would stick in his memory over the years.  
            As Ellis got to know the college workers, he dropped the prison guard persona, and he took a noticeable liking to Steve. When Fridays came around, he enjoyed a particular ritual in which he would ask Steve “Got a hot date for the weekend?”
            Steve’s answer was always “No.”  Ellis would shake his head and offered various reactions. “You shitting me? Handsome guy like you?” One time, when Steve answered his usual “No”, Ellis said “Come here. I want you to see something. Look up there. At the windows at the top.” Steve looked up at the ceiling of the warehouse. “No, not the ceiling. Right below. You see what I’m pointing at?”
            “You mean those plates?”
            “Yeah. Those ‘plates’ you call them. You wouldn’t know those were windows would you?”
            “Those are windows?”
            “Yeah. Believe it or not. You know when the last time those windows were washed? It was fourteen years ago.” Ellis shook his head. “Fourteen years. And that ain’t no lovin’ lie. Time goes by fast. Before you know it, you ain’t got any windows no more. So you got to get on the ball. Don’t let time pass you up. Life is short! You hear what I’m sayin’? ”
            Fourteen years ago would be 1954, when Steve was starting kindergarten. What seemed like another lifetime to Steve was all part of the continuum of work for Ellis and God knows what else that came before his work at the warehouse. He knew little about Ellis or any of the other supervisors at the warehouse for that matter. They came from another time and place.
                                                ***
            Towards the end of Steve’s time at the warehouse, his lunchtime table was visited by a short muscular boy named Don who usually sat at a table of his peers, one of whom was Jack who Steve had met when he started. Don started working at the warehouse after dropping out of high school at sixteen. At eighteen he enlisted in the Marines. It was now his last week before leaving for his basic training at Parris Island, during which he visited various tables including Steve’s.
            He was saying goodbye, Steve thought as Don joined them one day and talked a blue streak about things that ranged from baseball to football, to conspiracy theories about Robert Kennedy’s assassination earlier that summer, and a rumor that Ellis’ son was in Vietnam.
             The seminary student looked up at this. “You know that for a fact?”
             Don sat up straight, his head turning around, looking reminding Steve of an Italian father he had seen once at a dinner table, in command, sitting erect, head turning taking in what was going on, ready to step in as needed.
            “I heard it from someone,” Don said, taking a side-eyed sip from a can of Coke.
            “That’s how you know?”
            “Yeah. That’s how I know.” The seminary student looked away and no more was said on the subject. Don turned his head toward Steve as if noticing him for the first time.
            “So you go back to college soon,” Don said.
            “Yeah. Next week is my last week here.”
            “Mine’s this week. Joining the Marines. Same as my dad.”
             Don rubbed at a scar on his arm and looked at Steve. “Got this scar in a knife fight, in case you were wondering.” Steve didn’t respond.
            “You ever been in any fights?” Don asked.
            “Nothing like that.”
            “But you’ve been in some?”
            ​“I guess. When I was little.”
            “You win any of them?
            “Maybe one. I don’t remember.”
            “Yeah. You don’t look like the fighting type.” Don looked at Steve and in a way that he probably thought sounded friendly asked “What’s your nationality?” This came as if a natural follow-up to a conversation about knife fights or otherwise.
            “Same as you.”
            “No, I meant your nationality.” 
            “You mean my religion? If I asked a Catholic what their nationality was I doubt they’d say ‘Catholic’”
            “I meant your religion, yeah.” He took a gulp from his can of Coke without taking his eyes off Steve.
            “Jewish.”
            Don acted as if pleased with this answer and responded with what Steve imagined Don believed Jews felt comfortable hearing. “Pretty good job you’re doing in Jerusalem.”
            This made absolutely no sense to Steve and it unlikely made much sense to anyone else at the table. But Don kept going, asking where Steve’s parents and grandparents were from and then finally asked the question that had been weighing on his mind: “Why’d you kill Him?”
            “Why’d I kill who?”
            “Jesus Christ, you idiot!”
            Steve’s sense of history and heritage was weak, so he put forth the only argument he knew on the topic. “The Jews didn’t kill Christ. The Romans did.”
            The seminary student shook his head slightly, and an overwhelming silence now prevailed at the table, punctuated by Don’s weigh-in on the matter: “Bullshit!”
            Having so spoken, Don left the table.
            Conversation continued with no mention of what happened, mostly focused on whether the Detroit Tigers would be playing in the World Series this year. Steve felt comfortable with this group though he knew he could hardly call them friends; same with school when you came down to it. It was a matter of finding comfort and fitting in where you could, he thought.
            For the remainder of the day, Don was working on the upper levels of the warehouse stacking boxes. He took advantage of his various sniper’s perches by throwing an empty box at Steve whenever Don happened to see him walking by.
            On Friday of that week, Steve stood in line with others by the time clock, a daily ritual that involved a game of chicken: seeing if they could punch out with less than one minute remaining until closing time, which meant not being docked any pay. Both Ellis and Don were standing in line. Don worked the line with differing renditions of “Tomorrow at this time I’ll be on a train heading for Parris Island to be in the Marine Corps for basic training, and then off to Vietnam.”
            After a few of these woe-is-me variations on a theme, Steve turned to Don and said “I doubt anyone was holding a gun to your head to enlist.” Don pushed Steve and drew his arm back; Ellis, standing behind Don grabbed him, and shouted at Steve. “Clock out and get the hell out of here, now!” 
                                                            ***
            Among his friends nothing was said about the incident the next week which was Steve’s last. Still, he was picking up indications that they weren’t as friendly. It was hard for him to know whether he was imagining things. Among the permanent employees he distinctly felt shunned. Ellis didn’t talk to him very much other than to tell him what he wanted done and generally looked the other way whenever he saw Steve.
            Ellis did speak with him at the end of his last day; saying only what needed to be said. “Go to Spears’ office. You have to sign a paper. Then come back to punch out.”
            “Anything else?” Steve asked.
            “Then leave,” Ellis said.
            Mr. Spears was standing behind his desk when Steve walked in. “So today’s your last day,” he said, handing Steve a form. “You need to sign this. It says you are voluntarily leaving. In other words, we didn’t fire you.” He watched as Steve signed it.
             “It’s probably good that you’re leaving now.”
            “Why is that?”
            “Word gets around. You’re lucky you didn’t get hurt.” He shook Steve’s hand. “Good luck.” Steve thought Mr. Spears was going to say something else; when he didn’t, Steve left the office.
            It was a few minutes past five; the warehouse was emptying. Steve heard the refrain of “Homeward Bound” coming from somewhere. When he reached the punch out clock no one was there; no line, and no game of trying to punch out. He punched out, and saw Ellis, standing behind him, arms folded.
            “I was going to let you leave here without a goodbye but that don’t seem right.”
             Steve nodded.
            “I was pissed at you. I suspect you knew that. I guess I’m not anymore. Not good to stay pissed at people. Sometimes anyway. You’re pretty smart. I saw that right away; I said this guy knows how to keep his mouth shut. Except last week; for somebody smart, you were pretty damn stupid. You’re lucky I was around; you woulda been in sad shape if I wasn’t.”
            “I know. I’m sorry.”
            “Yeah, I know Don’s an asshole. But he’ll find out who he is sooner or later. Maybe in basic, maybe out in the jungle. He knows he may die. He was scared shitless. I got a son; he’s over in Nam. I think about him every day.”
            Ellis looked up at the windows that Steve thought were steel plates. The sounds of gates and doorways being locked could be heard.
            “Yeah, he may change, or maybe not. In any case, he’s somebody’s son. If he get killed, somebody’s gonna cry over him like he was a saint. And that ain’t no lovin’ lie.”
            He put his hands on Steve’s shoulders. “You’re a good kid. I been known to do dumb things, we all do. So it was your turn, I guess. Spears say anything when you checked out?”
            “He said I’m not well-liked right now.”
            “Yeah, well he got that right; somewhat. Not everyone is angry. And people forget. You want to come back next year, I’ll put in a word to Spears. I’ll take you back.”
            “Thanks.”
            “A year from now hardly anyone will even remember who you are. Something tells me I won’t be seeing you, though.”
            “I don’t know.”
            “I don’t know either. You better go. I’ll walk with you. I’m going to the same place.”
            They walked down the corridor to the front door in silence. When they were in the parking lot, they walked to their cars which weren’t very far from each other. Ellis stood next to his car and shouted over the top of it. “One last question, Steve. You got a hot date for tonight?”
            “What do you think?” Steve shouted over the roof of his car.
            “You know what I think,” Ellis said and laughed his loud and wonderful laugh.

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BARRY GARELICK won 3rd Place of the Fiction Writing Contest. He writes about time, memory, and people who are facing transitions in their lives. His fiction is published in Cafe Lit, Opiate, and Fiction on the Web. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife.

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