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A Million Red Tickets

Jeff Nazzaro

    We called him Moneybags. It was sarcastic. We called him Moneybags because his pants were always stained, his shirt half untucked, and he drove this ancient Saab with like 170,000 miles on it that he thought was awesome but we knew was a piece of shit. He was our old boss, the Convention Services Manager at the hotel we worked part-time at in high school. We set up tables, chairs, and AV equipment for seminars and weddings. Moneybags made sure everything was in order. He was strict, too, the pencils on the notepads had to have the hotel logo facing up, the left point of the cocktail napkins flush with the top of the notepads, the mini rolls of Wint-O-Green or Spear-O-Mint Life Savers all turned the same way.
    It was sarcastic, Moneybags, but also, whenever he made us work a graveyard shift, when there were, say, two weddings on a Saturday night and a stamp- or coin- or baseball card-collecting show all day Sunday and the ballroom had to be turned over—he would buy the beer.
    He was the manager. It didn’t matter that he was just a few years older than we were, or that he had a wife and kid. It didn’t matter he lived forty-five minutes away in a one-bedroom apartment when we lived with our parents in houses whose value had appreciated twenty-fold since they’d bought them in the late sixties, or that we’d be off to college in the fall while he stayed tied to the whims of hotel management and the economy. It didn’t matter that he got fired for reasons we never knew. We never thought we’d see him again.
    Moneybags was looking for workers. We thought it was hilarious bumping into him in the middle of the mall. He asked us what we were doing, if we were still working at the hotel (we weren’t), and what our plans were, while we made fun of his stained pants and untucked shirt, same old Moneybags. And then he asked us, me and my friends Hop and Noah, wanna make some money?
    We hardly ever went to that mall, but there we were in the bustle of the atrium by a giant bench-ringed planter, talking to Moneybags not two minutes after my dumb agoraphobia joke. Right away Hop and Noah said no. They stopped laughing and sort of backed away, but I said, doing what? Moneybags said, it’s easy. Doing what? Hop said, let’s go. Moneybags said, moving a little furniture around, it’s nothing. No way, Noah said, let’s go. How much? I said. I can probably get you fifty bucks. Probably? For how long? Where? Doing what exactly? Hop and Noah tried to get me to leave, but Moneybags pleaded, come on, we really need the help, and finally, I’ll get you stoned, the time will go by like that. I hestitated still. There’s a party after I’ll bring you to, Moneybags promised, more dope, beer, probably be some hot-looking girls there, and I had nothing to do but spend another Friday night with Hop and Noah, hanging around, shooting the shit, all night sometimes. Hop at least liked to talk about things, Noah just seemed to take up time. He’d take it, abuse it, and he’d do it on purpose. He’d laugh as he’d light one more cigarette at four in the morning, daring you to kick him out of the car. You’d try. He wouldn’t get out. You’d plead. He’d sit and smoke and occupy the passenger seat with his fat body. Noah was fat. Hop was getting fat, too. Get some exercise, make some money, it will be good for you, Moneybags said. Moving furniture. It was work, I thought. Something to do. Pocket money, dope, beer. I never would have imagined willingly following someone like Moneybags into that kind of situation, but there was the money, there was the dope. Once we’d been incredulous that someone like Moneybags had been our boss, the way he talked, the things he said, but for me this sudden offer of money evened that out, and finally I said I’d go. It was a whim. What else did I have to do? I wanted to go. It would have been a lot easier just to leave with my friends, but I also liked being free to make my own decisions, to be the owner of my own ass, so to speak. I sure as shit didn’t own anything else in the world. And I wanted the extra money, the pot, the beer. I wanted to meet the kind of girl who’d be at a party with Moneybags.
    And then Hop and Noah were gone and I was alone with Moneybags. All negotiations over, I followed him out of the mall, my boldness gone along with my challenges and point-blank questions. Now I just followed, somehow bashful when he asked me in a lowered voice what I’d been up to since he’d left the hotel. Not much, school, was all I said. I asked if he found guys that way all the time. There are always guys willing to work, he said. Just go up and ask them. We stopped at a supermarket on the way to the furniture warehouse. He bought us Cokes. Standing in line he reached over and grabbed a pack of Marlboro reds off a metal display rack and slipped it in his shirt pocket. A man came over. He wore a white shirt and tie printed with Spam cans. What did you just put in your pocket? he said. Me? Nothing. Yes, you did. I saw you take a pack of cigarettes and put them in your shirt pocket, the man in the white shirt and Spam tie said. Moneybags dipped his fingers inside the pocket and pulled the cigarette pack halfway out. What, these? These are my cigarettes, he said. He looked the man straight in the face. The man looked back, then he said, Don’t come in this store again. Whatever you say, sir, Moneybags said. Outside, he laughed. A little five-finger discount, he called it.
    We stood in the warehouse parking lot beside the Saab, smoking a joint. I saw the loading dock of the furniture warehouse and a couple of panel trucks. The building went on and on. I tried asking Moneybags about the work, but he just passed the joint back and hissed through held breath, it’s nothing, it’ll go by like that. I thought we’d load up the truck, then take a drive, deliver a couch, go back and do it again. It didn’t sound too bad. Soon I was stoned and half my Coke was gone. Then I was deep in the warehouse, a dark, cramped space crammed with plastic-encased sofas, love seats, recliners and ottomans. I was introduced to my partner, JosŘ, who, if he spoke any English, didn’t speak any to me. Moneybags was gone. Then my Coke was, too. My mouth got so dry I couldn’t swallow. There were seven hours to go. Seven hours in the dim, dusty heat. Grab an end of a sofa, sweaty hands sliding on plastic, thrust a knee up, catch the frame on your shin, stick a hand up and under to get a grip on the nappy fabric, rips the skin; bend and pull, back through the labyrinth of furniture like an unnavigable losing Tetris board that never seemed to reset or open up. Then hurry back for the next piece. No matter how much furniture JosŘ and I lugged to the front, when we waded back in it seemed exactly the same.
    Everything was fucked up and it wasn’t just the weed. The weed actually helped justify the supreme strangeness I felt to be thrust into this odd place, charged with these odd tasks. Granted I felt that way a lot when I smoked weed; hell, I felt that way just walking down the street sometimes, but I always felt it when I started work at a new place. I felt like that for the first three months at least at the hotel, and again every time I had to set up some new room, or even use some unfamiliar configuration of tables and chairs. The supermarket I went to all the time with my mother growing up felt like another planet the first few weeks I stood at the end of the checkout line bagging the groceries of strangers, forget about mopping the floors. I used to love getting sent outside to fetch the shopping carts. Even in the rain with the poncho on it felt more normal.
    I zoned into the work. There were order slips with strings of numbers and letters, descriptions of styles and colors, an endless stream of notations to decipher. Or were there? After the first few orders we filled it just felt like an endless surplus of sofas displaced and never any added room. I thought each stick of furniture moved would somehow equal added space and elapsed time, but all I got was more tired, my throat drier and the old wall clock somehow hadn’t budged. The strangest thing was that even as time reluctantly dragged its ass along I didn’t see Moneybags again. It was just JosŘ and me sweating in the dark, shifting, shuffling, grunting. That’s the ticket, he started saying, and I was so grateful for the vernacular I started saying it, too. It became a joke between us—the ticket for each order, the solution for another successful collaborative furniture maneuver.
    The ticket. JosŘ got me thinking about World Ticket, this printing company I’d worked at the summer after my freshman year of college. What a disaster that was. The college, not the printing company. World Ticket was just down the street from this furniture warehouse. Talk about feeling strange. That was another planet in another galaxy. I worked there with Noah. His father’s old army buddy was the general manager and he got the union to vote to let us work for the summer without joining. I assisted a printer named Jimmy Reynolds who was in his late-50’s and looked like he was stuck in the late 1950’s. He kept a pack of king-size Chesterfields rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt, and almost always had one going. I didn’t know anyone else who smoked filterless cigarettes, but he said it was about loyalty. That and he collected the coupons inside. He told me once all the stuff he’d traded them in for over the years, including a black-and-white TV and a slew of limited edition Ronson and Zippo lighters. He’d worked at World since it opened in the 50’s, joining the union and doing whatever they needed around the shop while learning the printing trade. He did lots of different things, but every summer his main job was to fill the million-ticket order for General Cinemas. He held out an ordinary ticket, like you got at high school football games or whatever, and said, this is it, the classic red Admit One. This is what I’m printing. The order calls for one million tickets. You are going to help me fold them into bundles, box them, and label them to ship.
    You had to place a roll of tickets on a bobbin and then feed the tickets through a series of spindles. Then you used the foot pedal to run the tickets through, folding them into rectangular bundles. Jimmy showed me. Speed is the key, he said. You have to find the right speed. It’s a matter of touch. Start off slow, till you get the hang of it, but not too slow. You go too slow, forget it, they won’t fold right, and you’ll be here all night. Too fast is worse. You go too fast, you rip the tickets. Only a ticket taker should ever rip a ticket, he said. Then he ripped a ticket. He sped the machine up until the strip of tickets ripped. This will happen, he said, even given optimum speed, but when it does we have a special industrial-strength high-tech solution. Then he reached under the machine and produced a roll of Scotch tape. He taped the ticket back together, and kept folding. I couldn’t imagine getting a Scotch-taped ticket at the movie theater, but somewhere in America a ticket machine at a General Cinema would spit that baby out.
    I tried folding tickets. Jimmy watched. When I had a whole bundle folded, he showed me how to shrink-wrap it, then I placed it on a metal table and went back and folded more tickets. Fold a whole roll worth of bundles first, then wrap them, then at the end we’ll box them up. I’ll be in there printing more. I used to print these then come out here and fold them. Sometimes I still do. Then I box them up, stick the labels on, and wheel them down to shipping. I like it that way. It all becomes automatic after awhile. I’m like a well-oiled machine, and I don’t just mean the Brylcreem. I could do this shit in my sleep. Don’t get me wrong, kid, I’m grateful for the hand. Gives me a chance to get home at a decent hour for once. That overtime is a double-edged sword, I’ll tell you that much. I said, isn’t it optional? He laughed. It’s negotiated, which is kind of the same thing, he said. I asked him if they had ever gone on strike, and he said no, they didn’t really have to, and the operation was too small, anyway, that with a handful of untrained scabs management could keep the place going at ninety percent. The only thing he remembered was a few times back in the seventies when all that union busting shit started taking off and management tried squeezing this and that out of them, that the guys got together and decided they were going to follow every rule in the shop, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how far behind it got you, so say you were working with a certain ink and you didn’t have a respirator, or the safety goggles which you weren’t going to wear anyway had a scratched lens, you didn’t do anything until you had the proper equipment, or you stopped everything and changed the belts on a machine because it had been eighteen months or whatever. Everything by the book. It was an old trick. He said cab drivers in Paris do it when they have a beef. Everyone drives the speed limit and makes only legal turns and lane changes and whatnot and the next thing you know the whole city is fucking gridlock. They’d call us in for a meeting about the slowdown and how the safety regs are guidelines only but that we have to get the work done, then we’d hit them with our beef over starting an hour earlier or whatever. It worked more often than not.
    I feel like I’ve spent my whole life chained to these machines in some way, Jimmy said. Printer to cutter to folder to wrapper. You’re doing great, though. It’d be even faster if you had another guy to wrap them and box them up, but this way it breaks up the monotony a little. That’s what I was talking about before. I’m in there printing, I’m out here folding, I’m down there boxing, I’m working, you know, making something. And then I said something stupid to Jimmy, which was, why do they even need tickets at all, why not just pay the money and go in, why buy something that’s basically just a red little piece of money?
    I saw his face change and I thought he was mad, but he stopped what he was doing and looked at me. I paid off my mortgage, have my daughter about to graduate from private college up at Bowdoin—they didn’t even take girls there until ‘71—and my wife never worked a day in her life outside the home. I am very, very proud of those three things right there. So if I’m not making anything else, I’m making that. I’m telling you, but I work and then I get paid, same as any other guy, so it’s my concern, right? And this will probably sound pretty corny, but I think about stuff like this. He took over folding the tickets. Talking and folding. What am I making? Nothing until some kid like you steps up and lays the cash on the counter for one of these million red tickets. So in a way I’m putting that guy’s ass in the seat, and that makes the movie a movie. Ain’t a movie without asses in seats, am I right? And once that happens it can become part of a memory for some kid, he kisses a girl, maybe he cops a feel, maybe he ends up marrying her. Neither of us knows what goes on in that dark theater after one of these things gets sold, and that’s the point, it’s private, but maybe the kid goes home and slips the ticket in the corner of the mirror over his dresser, you know, by the Ace unbreakable and the Old Spice bottle. That’s what I’m making. And you, too.
    He left me there to fold tickets. I suddenly loved having a hand in the production of the things, and as I worked the pedal with my foot, guiding the bundles with my hands, I thought of the people who would be trading their cash for the tickets and the tickets for a movie. And folding those tickets I felt the same sort of feeling I remembered feeling whenever I left a movie theater, stepping out of the dark and air conditioned cold into a warm, sunny day, pumped up by the feeling of being a part of something, something we all shared. Jesus, it was corny. And then I laughed into the din of machines and thought about what Jimmy had been saying and what I had been thinking and thought, Admit One: what was it anyway, a ticket or a confession?
    I wanted to tell this stuff to JosŘ, confined in that tight dim space with him all night, but our conversation remained limited to that’s the ticket and sometimes okay, boss. So World Ticket was making movie magic, and they also did the tickets for the Bruins and Celtics. Noah helped a ticket cutter stack tickets for the Woods Hole ferry. But where in the scheme of things was this dingy furniture warehouse? Nowhere. A stopover on the way to some guy’s fat ass occupying a space for watching TV.
    We’d been at it for three hours straight and my mouth was so dry I could barely speak. I still hadn’t seen Moneybags. Was he avoiding me, thinking I’d try to bail, make him drive me home? I had no idea if I’d even get paid. What if he tried to give me a check and the thing bounced? What could I even say? The weed had worn off and all I felt was exhaustion. JosŘ and I lugged a sofa to the dock and they sent us to the very back of the warehouse for end tables. We hadn’t even been back there yet, but somehow we found tables, stacked inside each other on top of a stack of recliners. When we lifted the first table, the second came flying off the top with it. JosŘ and I, joined at the yoke all night, maintained our hold on the first table, but he pulled left and I pulled back and somehow that second one crashed down edge first into my right instep. I felt nothing at first and JosŘ took the first end table, leaving me the second. After two steps towards the loading dock I stopped. The pain was so bad I was sure my foot was broken. I put the table down, sat on it, and took off my shoe and my sock, half expecting to see fractured bone jutting out of the skin. There was nothing, no swelling, not even a red mark. I sat for a minute while JosŘ waited. Then shouts of hey, what the fuck you doing back there, jerking each other off, where are those end tables? I put my sock and shoe back on my throbbing foot and we took the tables to the dock. Then I demanded a drink of water before they could give us too much shit.
    Moneybags must have been off on a delivery, or smoking dope somewhere, laughing at me. There was a water fountain by the office. I limped to it. I had to press down hard on the button and then a thin warm trickle of metallic tasting liquid hit my lips. It was the best I’d felt since those first hits of pot chased with slugs of cold Coke, and I would have killed any motherfucker in the place for that trickle of water. I had a cheap jackknife with a thumb notch I kept clipped to my belt, and once I’d had my fill of water and JosŘ and I got a new order, I marched to the sofa, unclipped the knife, flipped open the blade, slipped my hand up and under the plastic, and sliced a foot-long gash through the back of the thing. Then I folded the knife closed, clipped it to my belt, and grabbed an end. What the fuck? JosŘ said. What the fuck what? I said. Okay, that’s enough, he said. Good, it’s enough, I said. It would be, too, when whoever delivered the thing had to deal with the problem and whoever was behind this whole shady operation lost a little precious profit. Fuck ‘em. That end table could have taken my whole fucking head off and they would have delivered me to a swamp somewhere and no one knows a fucking thing.
    I don’t know how I fell for this shit to begin with. I don’t know how I didn’t just get dumb Moneybags to get me stoned if that’s what I wanted. How did I get myself into this situation? There’s no way I did it willingly. But who would believe that? If I told the whole story, even to Hop and Noah, who’d been standing right there—hell, especially to them, they’d say I did it of my own free will. If Moneybags had lured me with dope and money into some kind of sexual violation I might have had a shot at convincing someone, but even then I would have at least had to have been under eighteen, and probably a girl. Luring me into labor with money? I could hear Hop and Noah laughing already, and for a paranoid moment I thought maybe they’d even prearranged the trip to the mall with Moneybags, led me there for him to leap out and throw a net over my head, then duck out with their cuts. But didn’t I need the cash? I was a long way from finishing school, if I even went back, and my father was starting to charge me rent on top of being a general pain in the ass. I had to do something. You’re always forced to do something and I was always somehow hanging around with nothing to do—at the mall, in Hop’s living room, Noah’s driveway. And yet there was always something new to fuck it up—a new job, new school, new nagging sense of obligation.
    Back to work. The summer after I worked at World Ticket, I got a job at a place called PrinTTech. Hop went to the same private high school as the owner’s son and got us both jobs. They did a lot of plastic membrane printing for the automobile industry, computer companies, stuff like that. Started in the early seventies. Non-union all the way. Hop told me that. He said don’t even mention it. They told you that when they interviewed you, he said. I was never interviewed, but I guess he was. The owner owned a parcel of land in North Carolina that he would move the company to the second even a losing union vote was taken, and everyone knew about it. Hop worked in the offices upstairs all summer while I worked for a printer named Bobby Kopaczewski.
    I liked Bobby. He said call me Bobby Coke-and-Pepsi. He reminded me of a younger version of Jimmy from World Ticket except he sometimes bitched about liberals and welfare and he never talked about his life outside the shop. He smoked filtered cigarettes. He printed on vinyl sheets. My job was to collect the freshly printed vinyl sheets as they emerged from the press on a conveyor belt, grabbing them by the edges and placing them on wire racks to dry. I sat there a lot just waiting. Sometimes a sheet came down the conveyor belt and Bobby walked down and picked it up himself and studied it on his way back to the press. Then I’d wait some more. The time dragged so slowly when there was nothing to do. There was a Dominican woman named Rita doing the same job as me at the next press. She did finishing work during down times, punching product from printed sheets, but no one gave me any work to do. I brought in a Harper’s magazine I had, rolled it up and stuffed it in my back pocket. When there was a lull I took it out. Bobby came down right away. What’s that, a book? he said. A magazine, I said. What’s it about? he asked. I don’t know, nothing really, I said. Put that away, he said, they won’t like it. Who? I never saw anyone but him and Rita and Billy Trammell, the printer at the next press. Anyone, Bobby said. There’s always someone watching around here. I remembered Jimmy at World Ticket telling me I better watch myself because I wasn’t in the union and the guys wouldn’t like it if the friend of the boss or whatever was goofing off. Then the black guy, I forget his name but he was the only black guy that worked there and he was the shop steward, caught Noah on one of his extended smoke breaks in the bathroom, even though you could smoke on the floor, and came around to me saying, your friend fell asleep in the shithouse, your friend fell asleep in the shithouse. Noah told me he hadn’t been sleeping, but I could imagine him taking a snooze on the crapper. Come up here, Bobby said, I’ll show you a good book. So I stuffed my Harper’s back in my pocket and while Bobby got the print job just right, I thumbed through his collection of Hustler magazines. I love that one, Bobby said, looking up from his work. That girl’s from Berlin. Do I make you hard as German steel? it says.
    When Bobby was printing good and the sheets were flowing down steady and wet, my nose and throat would start to burn from the ink. I looked at the ink can one day and it said the stuff was a known carcinogen. It said, this stuff causes lung cancer, so wear a respirator. There was very little ventilation in the shop—a couple of big fans in the wall, but they were never even on. I asked Bobby one time if they gave him a respirator to wear, a mask. He said no, and that he wouldn’t wear one anyway. I told him the guys over at World Ticket have to wear them. That’s because they have a union there, he said. Don’t need no union here, he said. All they do is take your money and don’t give you anything but stupid shit about wearing masks. I said, you ever read the side of the ink can? It says, this shit gives you lung cancer so you better wear a mask. He lit a cigarette and said, so’s this. There were two large presses in the room. Bobby called down to the other press. Hey Billy, you getting lung cancer down there? This kid says we’re all getting lung cancer in here. Billy Trammell popped up from under his press, coveralls half off, biceps bulging out of an oil-stained tank top, gripping a large wrench. He had narrow eyes over high cheekbones and a hooked nose, with a cascade of shoulder-length, dirty blond hair. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He said, lung cancer? Yeah, I’d say so. I asked them why they didn’t join a union. It seemed like a better idea than lung cancer. Billy said, yeah, right. Bobby said, sure thing. What about job security? I said. I got my job security right here, Billy said. They can’t fire me because I’m the only one who knows how to fix this press. This thing cost a hundred grand. Yeah, but are you fixing it or fucking breaking it over there? Bobby said. There were parts on the floor and tools. He turned to me and laughed. He knows once he fixes the thing he’ll be stuck to it printing. Plus, every time he puts it back together there’s a part left over he doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s right, Billy said, and when I get enough of those parts I’m going to make my own press and start my own fucking business. Keep dreaming, Billy, Bobby said. I have work to do.
    My foot felt better but my back was killing me and my eyes burned from the dust and squinting to read order slips in the furniture warehouse’s dim light. I snuck back to that bubbler every chance I got but the dryness never left my throat. Two hours to go. What was I going to do? Hop and Noah would be graduating next year, but though I started at the same time they did I still had less than a year of credits earned. Too much fucking around. I had hinted to Jimmy at the end of that summer about staying on at World Ticket, finishing folding the million ticket order—I left at 850,000—maybe learning how to print. He said, I told you my whole dumb story and what did you say? You said what’s the use? Okay, maybe you see through it, maybe you see around it, I don’t know, but you see something, and whatever that is tells me this isn’t for you. It ain’t for everybody. You have to find what’s of value to you and find a way to do that. My daughter gets it. She’s going to be a psychotherapist. She says to me, Daddy, I love you, I respect you more than any man I know, all that, but I could never do what you do all day. I have to work with people, not machines. What’s the difference? I thought, but I didn’t say that to her, Jimmy said. He said it to me, though. I went back to school, had one good semester, and then fucked up again. Now what, community college? Noah already has a sales job lined up through his father. Hop is applying to graduate schools in Boston and New York. They’re kicking back right now, drinking beer and watching the Red Sox on TV and I’m lugging couches in the dark.
    The owner of PrinTTech took the whole company to a Sox game one summer night and as Bobby and I settled into our seats in the back of the center field bleachers, cradling our beers, waiting for Roger Clemens to throw the first pitch, he said to me, see, no union shop takes everyone to a Red Sox game because they have to spend the money on the stupid union. When they shut the beer taps off after the seventh inning stretch, Billy Trammell broke out a pint of whiskey and passed it around and sometime before the game ended got in an argument with the owner’s son. I had no idea what was going on, and didn’t care, except I thought Billy was a tough son of a bitch and would destroy that rich prick if it ever came to it, even if the kid had been some kind of prep football star or something. Hop was right there, but all he said was it started over some dumb argument and Junior just laughed in Billy’s face. Then Billy said something like, well you’re not the boss yet, so I’m going to tell you to fuck off to your face while I still have the chance, and Junior got pissed. Then it got heated. I may have been scared of Billy, but Junior sure as shit wasn’t. He didn’t see the tough guy with the big arms working the wrench, he just saw the buffoon, like Lenny and Squiggy or something. A buffoon whose ass he would one day own.
    On Monday morning they fired Billy. Met him at his press with a cop, Bobby told me. We were eating lunch at one of the picnic tables by the parking lot. They were paying him to print off the thing, not fix it, Bobby said. The fact that the thing kept busting didn’t help him at all. They both were fucking useless. Bobby laughed. He said, I got a skill. I can print. But even if I could afford one of those monsters, where would I put it? My basement? Billy was the best printer this place had, but he had an attitude. I used to kid him that he broke his press on purpose, or took it apart just to put it back together like in auto shop with some old motor because he was bored with printing or something. Maybe he did. I got a skill, but even if I could work every press in this place and fix them, too, I’m not stupid enough to argue with the boss’s kid. You think I don’t know there’s an army of kids at Essex Tech right now training to do what I do? We’re all disposable.
    We walked past the roach coach on our way inside. The owner of the truck saw Bobby and said, you still owe me for that chili. Bobby said, I told you, it gave me diarrhea and I ain’t paying you for it. I’ll see you on Friday, the guy said. When we were inside I said, you don’t have to pay for stuff right away? He gives you a tab, Bobby said. Shit, what do you think the company does to us every week? You’re not going to pay him? I said. Fuck him, the big stiff, what’s he going to do to me? I don’t know, he’s pretty big. Bobby said, you go around being afraid of every guy who’s bigger than you, all you’ll ever do is be afraid. Maybe that was my problem. I kept thinking, if anyone comes and asks me to stay on, I’ll stay on. They never did. In the fall, after the high school kids went off to college, I got hired back at the hotel Convention Services, setting up tables and chairs again.
    When ten o’clock finally rolled around, I was too beat to be happy, but it felt so good just to get the fuck out of the warehouse, to step onto the parking lot, feel something different under my feet, get into Moneybags’s old Saab. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had gone like: get an order, get the furniture into the truck, drive the truck to the address, deliver the furniture, get the person to sign the form, go back and do it again. Confined to that dark, dusty warehouse wrestling with the same pieces of furniture all night like some dumb brute, no conversation even, had wasted me, and when we got to Moneybags’s friend’s house, I slumped down into the couch, one of the exact same models I’d been battling all night, my body inseparable from the thing. Moneybags brought me a beer and I drank half of it in a single drink. Recognize that sofa? he said. You should see my place. Automatic inventory reduction. Then he got the bong. It was just a plastic tube, open at both ends, with a hole in the center for the bowl. One end of the tube was the mouthpiece, the other the carburetor. You placed your hand over the back, sucked smoke into the tube and then took your hand away so the smoke rushed into your lungs. Moneybags was excited about it. He showed me how to do it. I wrenched myself up and took a hit. And then I was back on the couch, my body crippled, with whatever was left of my brains blasted out the back of my skull in a rush of carbureted smoke.

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