Working Man - Part III - Shrimp, Trucks, Plants and Stocks

Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

My uncle John Hudacek was a chef at either The Metropolitan Club or the Gramercy Park Hotel (he had worked at both at various times, I don't recall which one he worked at during this time period). When he was at home Uncle John was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken guy who was usually overshadowed by his wife, my mother's sister Marion. I was quite surprised to discover that when he was at work, he was General Patton. He was a chef well before the days of celebrity chefs, but nonetheless, he was the king of the kitchen. I wasn't there long enough to learn much about how the kitchen worked - it was understood to be a temporary job - but as low man in the food chain, I got the low jobs. The one I remember with the greatest clarity was prepping shrimp. My memory presents a trash barrel quantity of shrimp which needed to be deveined, with the heads and tails removed. If I remember correct the "veins" were reused somehow, but the rest were disposed of. I swear cats were following me home that night!

After about a month I took my trip to Ohio, and shortly after returning home I found another job, this time as a stocker a Pergament Home Center, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. Pergament Home Centers was a family owned chain of hardware stores scattered throughout Long Island. The one where I worked was fairly close to home, just outside city limits at the south end of "Snake Road" which was what we called the winding, southern portion of Brookville Blvd. It was nestled in a little strip mall that included a May's Department Store and a grocery store. I was hired as a stocker, which meant I would mainly be unloading trucks and filling the shelves. It was one of the few union jobs that I have had. 

Unloading a truck at Pergament was not easy. There was no loading dock which trucks could back up to and remove pallets using a pallet jack. We had to hook up a "roller" to the back of the truck and toss individual cases of product down the rollers to be restacked on empty pallets on the floor of the stockroom. When a pallet was full it would be moved out to the sales floor where a second team would manually price each item with a pricing gun that disgorged small adhesive price tags and then place the product on the shelves. If this wasn't labor intensive enough, we sold carpet, paneling and lumber. Paneling was manhandled by two of us and slid down the roller to be placed on what we called a U-Boat, a cart with high sides that would be wheeled out so the plywood could be placed in a display rack. Lumber was gathered up in armloads and thrown off the back of the truck, aimed with great optimism at a U-Boat. All of this was back-breaking labor. Nonetheless we competed among ourselves - the stockers on the truck trying to roll down stock faster than the stockers on the floor could keep up. This process took hours and was often not completed before the store closed at 9:00pm. Being a union shop, we didn't stay late to finish the job, but locked up the truck, locked up the store and went home. Or somewhere. 

One of the more dangerous things we did was to tie customers' purchases of lumber, carpet or paneling to the roofs of their cars. This of course wasn't dangerous to us, but was potentially dangerous to the customer. First we would stack their purchase on top of the car. We'd then tie some heavy duty twine to the front bumper, over the top and loop it around the back of the paneling and back to the front bumper. This would theoretically prevent the load from slipping off backwards. We'd then do the same to the back bumper tying it in back and looping it around the front to prevent the whole load from flying forward when the driver hit the brakes. For good measure we'd run rope through the open doors to secure the whole pile. I don't recall anyone complaining about losing anything on the way home, but I did see someone fail to make it out of the parking lot once. We didn't even get them to sign a waiver.

Like most jobs it was the people who made it interesting. There was a lot of drinking and pot smoking after work and even during breaks. A lot of us socialized after work, hitting the bars and even forming a softball team. The most "out there" was Mike Morgillo, the senior stocker. Mike had a unique way of meeting women. When we were out at a bar, he would sit a few stools down from an attractive girl and start crying. He'd then start muttering "I'm garbage...just garbage". More often then not he would attract the girl's attention and sympathy as she tried to comfort him, and end up leaving with him. It sounds unlikely, but I witnessed this happen many times. (At work, his nickname became "Garbage", it may have even been on his name tag.) Mike's Casanova ways had a limit though. A woman from one of the other stores took a shine to him. She was tall, approaching six feet tall, built like an Olympic swimmer. As I recall she had a pretty face and a great personality, but she intimidated the heck out of Mr. Garbage. She showed up at a bar we were all hanging out at one night and he ran out the back door to get away! 

One time our store manager noticed that we were missing quite a few of our shopping carts and asked us to see if we could track them down. A couple of us had girlfriends who worked in the nearby Mays department store, who informed us that Mays was using our carts to store and stock merchandise. Mike and I, along with a couple of others, deputized ourselves as "Pergament Security". Mike got us fake security badges and we raided Mays' backrooms, shouting "Pergament Security - we're confiscating those carts" and brought back all the purloined property. 

Pergament Home Centers had a softball league that played games on Sunday, when the stores closed at 6:00pm. Our store fielded a coed team. We weren't really any good, but managed to win most of our games, due to our enthusiasm, and possibly alcohol and cheating. Our pitcher, Azard Hussein, who was from Trinidad and Tobago, had never played softball before and pitched cricket style. I think he scared the opposing team with his running overarm delivery. Other members of our team included Richie Pergament, our sixtyish store manager who was cousin to the company president, and his 10 year old son. One of our signature moves was to all don cowboy hats at some point during the game and howl or chant, or just make a lot of noise. I suspect that many of our wins could be attributed to our opponents just wanting to get away from us.  After the games, retaining the cowboy hats, we retired to a local bar, telling everyone we were a country band called The Worthless Brothers. I believe my name was Cuthbert Worthless. 

Speaking of sports, when I was working at the store I was in my last year playing roller hockey. For many years I played pickup games in local schoolyards and even on tennis courts (we managed to severely damage the courts' surface with out metal wheels and were banned from the park) and the occasional hockey league. The last few years a bunch of my friends, my brother and cousins formed a team that played in the Grant Park Roller Hockey League. Most of us were in our teens, and due to the fact that the other teams were composed of grown men, we got beaten, and beaten up, pretty regularly. I was not very athletic, and was not a very good player but  we had some decent players, my brother Mike and friend Anthony among them. My father was our coach. Since I was not very adept at scoring goals I took on the role of enforcer, clearing the path for the better players to get the puck in the net. My number, five, was known throughout the league as the guy most likely to spend time in the penalty box. My final game came after I had stopped playing actively due to school and work commitments. I had stopped at the park to watch my former team play. My friend Anthony hurt his hand badly mid game and had to sit out the third period. I put on his uniform and skates and took his place. I was recognized as "that (expletive) number five" and got involved in a bench clearing brawl. I think we won the game!

We were inventive (or maybe cruel) when it came to pranks. One of our regular truck drivers had recently gotten divorced. One of the areas of contention was the many cats that his wife had brought into their home. Mike would meow at him when he came to deliver a load, and one time found a stray cat and put it in the cab of his truck. We'd tie a stack of pallets to a truck with a long rope, causing a parade of pallets to follow the truck down the road. Most of the trucks had signs on the back that could be changed to reflect what was in the truck. One of them said "radioactive material aboard". That got the driver pulled over. We were pretty cruel to the manager's son who worked with us when he was on break from college. We convinced him that catching a load of lumber in his arms was a safe way to unload it. 

I ended up getting fired from Pergament for an act of vandalism. My coworker Jack and I smoked some pot on our lunch break and came back to work in no shape to make rational decisions. In fact, we decided to take an axe and pop some holes in the side of the truck we were unloading for ventilation. We had enough presence of mind to throw the axe in the creek than ran behind the store. When the truck arrived back at the warehouse, of course it was noticed that there were holes in the side of the truck. An investigation was launched, but since there were no security cameras and no one was talking, it didn't look like we would be caught. Until Derek, the only Black stocker on the crew, was accused of the vandalism and it looked like he would be fired. This was probably a ploy to smoke out (pun intended) the real vandals, so we confessed. Since we were unionized I received a check for all my unused vacation and sick time. 

I quickly found another job. It was in the same strip mall, in the Mays department store where I had previously repatriated our missing shopping carts. I wasn't there very long. If you've followed along with my series So, You Want to Join a Cult, this was after I had been involved in The Way for over a year. I had planned on going out as part of The Way's missionary type program (Word Over the World [WOW] Ambassadors) in August of 1979, but changed my mind. In anticipation of leaving the state I put my Toyota Corona in storage in a relative's garage, so I had no means of transportation. I ended up working at Mays for about a month or so, running the Garden Center, even though I knew nothing about plants. I managed to quit this job without getting fired, assaulting anyone or engaging in vandalism. Sorry, but no amusing anecdotes from my time at Mays, although it was ironic that I was in charge of plants, an assignment that I would reprise many years later at another job. I was moving out of my parents' home and into a house with several other Way people. Without a vehicle, I needed to find something either near my new home in Queens Village, near the Belmont Raceway, or something where I could take advantage of public transportation. I ended up with a position as a clerk in the stock brokerage form E.F. Hutton & Company in downtown Manhattan. 

This was the fall of 1979. Computers existed, but personal computers did not. My job consisted of tracking the buying and selling of stock by the company on behalf of clients. I reviewed reams of green bar paper and microfiche images and entered the information on forms that were forwarded to our data entry team on another floor. It did not pay well and wasn't very exciting. I have a vivid memory of there being pneumatic tubes in the office, like those you see in bank drive-up windows. When we would finish filling out a form we would tube it to data entry. Sometimes we'd include a bag of M&M's if we needed a rush job. At the time, not knowing that I would eventually decide to leave New York as a WOW a year later, I viewed it as a stepping stone to a more responsible and better paying position. I was also attending night school at the time. After graduating high school I enrolled at Baruch College, a unit of the City University of New York, but dropped out after two years due to poor grades. I took a year off and went back in 1979. My job was in Lower Manhattan, not far from Battery Park and college was a little further north. Monday through Friday I'd take the train to work, and then after my work day ended I'd take another train uptown to attend classes. The work day may have been grey and uninspiring, but what went on outside was interesting. 

I saw the high wire walker Phillippe Petit walk a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. I saw the Pope's motorcade drive by our office. But lunch time was the most interesting. The corner of Broad and Wall Streets was an historic corner. The New York Stock Exchange was on one side of the street with Federal Hall, which had at one time been the seat of government of the United States, was on the other side. Trinity Church, an Episcopal Church that boasted many of the nation's founders as congregants, was down the street. But what made it interesting was the street preachers. Several years previously, when working a summer job I became familiar with many of the regulars. It had been my first exposure to the fundamentalist and evangelical strains of Christianity. Being a little older and bolder and thinking I knew something about theology I engaged many of them in discussions that, as religious discussions often go, went nowhere. 

In the Spring of 1980 I had again decided that I would go out as a WOW for The Way. But first I would travel to Rome City Indiana to take their "Advanced Class" over two weeks in June. So I quit my job and temporarily moved back in with my parents. Amazingly I was able to leave another job in good standing sans violence. I attended the class in late June and headed to New Knoxville Ohio for a week before shipping out to Sidney Nebraska and my next adventure in employment.