In Between Two Worlds 02 and 03

In Between Two Worlds 02

After leaving Marynook Novitiate after two thoroughly miserable months, I discovered that living my high school days in the all-male atmosphere of Maryhurst Prep had ill-prepared me for normal boy-girl relationships. As recorded elsewhere, during the summers when I had been home from Maryhurst (which was a boarding school where I lived for ten months of each year) on occasion I dated JoAnn C., literally the girl across the street. But that was it. After leaving Marynook, JoAnn and I dated regularly but broke up several times for months on end. During those separations I went out with a number of other girls but was very insecure, nervous, and unsure of myself.

It was a new world for me, driving, dating, and working. One that took me quite a while to adjust to. And one in which I never felt comfortable in many telling ways. Well, not the driving part, that’s for sure.

The first year I was back home I took JoAnn to her senior prom at Incarnate Word Academy. That occasion marked the first time I went to a formal dance in a tux. Afterwards we stayed out until 4:00 AM, parked just up the block from her house, necking and engaging in all sorts of heavy breathing, groping, and so forth. Her parents were justly furious. I had to call her father the next day and apologize for keeping her out so late. Maybe I just should have reassured him by saying that we were safely parked only a half block away playing kissy-face and touchy-feely until I thought I was going to explode. Nah. Probably would not have been a good move. Then I had to tip-toe around when I picked her up from her house for a couple weeks until all was forgiven.

Less than two weeks after returning from Wisconsin I landed a low-level job at R.L. Polk that introduced me to the ways of the business world. I worked in the shipping and receiving department and also as a bonded messenger. One of my duties as a bonded messenger was to pick up checks for shipping and handling from our local clients since R.L. Polk was one of the country’s largest Yellow Page and fulfillment firms. Many times these checks would be for thousands of dollars so when I was first hired the company had me fill out all kinds of forms and become bonded. No big deal.

Because the company refused to allow me to drive the company car and they were too cheap to pay for taxis, I had to take buses. To keep from dying of boredom, I would always bring a book with me and read it while riding the bus.

One day, my boss’s boss, a pinched-face, mean-spirited, ill-tempered bitch from Hell if ever there was one, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, saw me returning from a client’s office with a book in my hand. She ordered my boss, Mrs. S., to reprimand me for reading on company time and to prohibit me from doing it again or be fired.

Mrs. S. was very angry with me, a situation that, in my innocence, I could not understand. I asked her why, if it was all right for me to stare out the bus window on company time, it was not appropriate to read. No reading on company time, I was told, or you’ll be fired. Period.

I thought that that was absolute bullshit. So from then on I brought books to work and either hid them down on the first floor loading dock or put them in plain sight on the workbench where I regularly had lunch. A couple days after the first incident the front office bitch from Hell came through the loading area around 10:00 and must have seen my book on the shipping counter. Not a minute later Mrs. S. reprimanded me and asked if I wanted to be fired. This time I was ready and told her with a smile that I read while taking the bus to and from work and on my lunch break. I innocently asked if the company had a policy of not letting their employees read during lunch. With Alma, our union shop steward, listening to her every word, what could she say?

The very next time I had to pick up a check I slipped a book under my shirt and belt and sauntered out as meek as a lamb. Nobody was going to stop me from reading. Fuck them and their ignorant attitudes. Up the rebels!

Things went okay for a couple months and then, of all things, I got fired. It was sometime in late March. To set up the story properly, you have to know a little about the building, which was located downtown at the intersection of Tucker Boulevard and Washington Avenue. It was an old building and in poor condition, especially in the shipping and receiving area where I worked. The wooden floor was a patch-work quilt of sections of new hardwood boards, old but seemingly adequate boards, and decaying, rotten, and sometimes splintered boards that made pulling the heavy skids of paper and envelopes difficult, even for strong young men like my co-worker Roger and me.

One morning Mrs. S. told me to load up a skid of boxes filled with printed materials that had been damaged in shipping. The company had received permission from its insurance carrier to destroy them and she had called the man we used to take care of our bulk trash. Roger wasn’t busy so he and I loaded the skid. It was difficult since the boxes were different sizes and shapes. Tying them together so they would be stable and not fall over when they were moved proved a difficult task. There were simply too many boxes of varying sizes. In addition many of the boxes had been damaged and were no longer rigid or square. I warned Mrs. S. that it would take two people to move the skid over the floor to the shipping elevator since the boxes were unstable, one to pull the skid lift and the other to stabilize the boxes so they wouldn’t fall.

Not long after that I was dispatched to the Post Office to deliver a check for postage. When I returned, the building’s head shipping and receiving clerk, an older fellow named Bill, laughingly told me that when I went upstairs they were going to fire my ass. What? I thought he was joking. But when I got upstairs Mrs. S. told me to leave at once. I was being fired for loading the skid wrong.

It turned out that right after she sent me to the Post Office, one of the main folding machines broke, and Roger rushed off to a hardware store for a replacement part. That’s when the guy came for the skid of damaged boxes. Naturally, instead of waiting for either Roger or me to return, Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell tried to move the skid across that uneven floor to the freight elevator. And equally naturally, the boxes fell from the skid as they moved it, injuring Mrs. S’s ankle. Of course she looked around for a scapegoat and found me. I protested that the boxes were damaged and of unequal sizes and they could not be loaded right in the first place and that I had warned her of that problem.

“You’re fired,” was all she said, not being the slightest bit interested in logic or rationality. I angrily asked her if Roger was being fired as well since we both loaded the skid. Fat fucking chance. His nose was too far up her butt for that. It was my ass that was toast.

That’s when Alma, our union shop steward, pulled me aside. I know she saw the tears in my eyes; I hated the unfairness of it all. She told me not to worry, the union would get me back on by threatening to file a grievance for me and the company would almost certainly have to reinstate me. Just go home and relax for a few days, she said. I felt absolutely terrible, upset, ashamed, hurt at the rank injustice. Such the innocent.

A week and a half later I was back on the job. It turned out Alma had been right. The union had raised the issue that it was against work rules for supervisory personnel, like Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell, to move freight. And if they wanted a strike, they had one. Of course, the company backed down, knowing the union had them by the balls since everyone on the work floor had witnessed the two women moving the skid and said that it all was a misunderstanding. Certainly, that’s one reason I have been a strong union supporter all my adult life.

That next week I was back at work and was paid for the days I missed, I might add. But everything had changed; the atmosphere was absolutely poisonous. Mrs. S. spent most of her time trying to catch me doing something wrong and finding fault with everything I did, whether it was correct or not. She gave me every nasty and dirty job she could find and generally made my life miserable. It was brutal.

Roger’s head was so far up her ass you couldn’t see his shoulders and he stayed as far away from me as humanly possible and still work in the same place. Two months later they laid me off, ostensibly due to a lack of work. I was so exhausted from the stress and tension I was relieved and didn’t give a shit. Less than a month later I was working full-time with my brother, Jack, at the Dairy.

In Between 03

One quick summertime story before heading off to my college days. As little boys grown large, we were fascinated with firecrackers. And I mean utterly fascinated. During that magical summer before attending SLU Bob J. discovered that we could legally buy “Two Inch Salutes” in Alton, Illinois. They were reputed by the cognoscenti to be even more powerful than the justly famous cherry bombs.

Naturally, we decided we had to buy a whole bunch. One balmy early summer night after collecting a couple bucks from everyone, we drove to Alton in Bob J’s 1957 Chevy and bought a gross. Yes, Mother, we bought 12 dozen of those dangerous puppies. On the drive back to St. Louis, we immediately proceeded to try to kill each other with the fireworks, lighting them and casually tossing the lit mini-bombs out the windows as we drove along. Oh yes, we were mature, safety conscious guys.

The cool air rushed in the car filling it with all the various wonderful wetland smells generated by the nearby Missouri River and contrasting sounds of violent explosions as the salutes ripped the quiet night apart and set dozens of dogs barking madly.

My brother, Jack, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat, turned around and grabbed a salute from the rather large box John E. was holding on his lap. He lit the salute and with blasé indifference tossed it out the front passenger window. Unfortunately, it hit the vertical strut that separated the main window from the small vent window and bounced right back into the front seat. You have to remember, this thing is sputtering angrily as the short wick quickly burned down to nothing. And a whole gross of salutes was sitting in an open box in the back seat. Oh, yeah.

After several seconds of muffled curses and near absolute panic, I desperately slapped at the firecracker with my left hand, knocking it out the open window where, not ten feet from the car, it promptly exploded and almost deafened us. We six youthful fools sat absolutely still for a minute or two as the car whizzed down the highway. No one felt up to saying a word. I’m certain we all were thinking about the consequences if the damned thing had blown up inside the car. We could have been badly burned, seriously injured, deafened, or even killed in the resulting explosion, a sobering thought even for young idiots.

Then and there we passed a rule that we never broke. Only people sitting next to a window could light and throw the salutes. When you think about it, it wasn’t exactly a safety paradigm. But it was all a bunch of testosterone-crazed 19- and 20-year olds could agree to. And the truly surprising thing is we all thought of ourselves as responsible adults. No shit.

As ludicrous as it may sound, that turned into a strangely enchanted summer, tooling around in our friend’s 409 Impala, laying rubber with abandon, throwing fireworks at every possible target, and tasting the fruits of freedom as I had never experienced them before. By mid-summer we had gotten the timing of the firecracker wick down to a science. If we stopped at a traffic light, we could drop a lighted salute on the pavement timed to explode under the second, third, or fourth car behind us, depending on which was our target. I can’t tell you how many fights that little trick nearly got us into.

Naturally, Jack and I took several salutes home for our personal forms of devilment. One of the first things we did was conduct a “scientific test” of the power of the salute in our backyard and its ability to explode underwater. We filled Dad’s highly prized three-gallon metal bucket with water and tied a heavy bolt to the salute to make certain it sank to the bottom. Then we lit it, dropped it in the water and stepped back a healthy distance. Several long seconds later came a terrific Ka-Boom!

A perfectly formed column of water rose majestically straight in the air, as if shot from an enormous hose, followed shortly by the bucket itself, grossly deformed by the force of the explosion.

Our first reaction was to hide from the curiosity of the neighbors by ducking inside the house. After a few minutes inside we casually strolled into the back yard to examine the damage. The bucket was history. The bottom had separated from the sides and the metal seam holding the vertical sides of the bucket together had completely failed. The result was a totally flat, curvilinear piece of metal that didn’t even remotely resemble a bucket.

Naturally, we threw that incriminating evidence into the trunk of the car for later disposal far from home. For weeks, Dad searched the basement high and low, angrily complaining that someone had hidden or misplaced his favorite bucket. We claimed total innocence in the matter, saying not a word, knowing how justly outraged he would be if he ever found out we had destroyed it. We never did tell him. Never. And we never replaced the bucket since that would have announced our guilt. We were indeed idiots, but not stupid idiots.

In Between 01