Ain’t No Lovin’ Lie3rd Place in the Fiction Writing Contest
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Issue 19
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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. *** |
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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