Sometimes the good guys win (July 21, 1980)

The pattern never changes.

Corruption more than misery needs company, and can’t stand anyone who isn’t corrupt.

Innocent people generally don’t realize they are in a corrupt situation until it is too late and they have somehow stepped over the line, and made themselves vulnerable.

And then they are doomed.

Corrupt people recognize other corrupt people right away, almost by instinct or smell, and are drawn to it because the way drunks are drawn to each other.

Only other corrupt people can stand the stench of other corrupt, and hide their own stench in their company.

Whole social groups form around this concept. So if a boss is corrupt, then so are many of his following, some tying themselves to the bootstraps of the boss in order to lick bits of gravy that might fall off his plate and onto his boots.

Each institution changes the map of corruption, but essentially, it all gravitates to one or two powerful people. In jobs like mine -- such as at the hospital back in 1972, the shipping and receiving manager operated his own little network within the overall structure. I’m sure there was a larger, even more corrupt network in the main administration.

Here, the corruption operates from the central office where Proudy and his white collar henchmen rule over the rest of the store through a network of stooges, who do their bidding or inform on people not part of the inner circle.

Security answers directly to Proudy, and they are as corrupt as he is.

The minions outside this network live in fear, some are dishonest as well, and usually become fodder for the security. Most are honest, but are constantly watched.

Those who get too wise to the game become targets. Management starts to find things they do wrong, and starts to build a case against them – so as to justify firing them when they become too much a thorn in management’s side.

Management likes having scapegoats, people they can fire as examples to others not to get too far out of line.

The problem comes when they deal with people like me with a rich history for defying authority and hatred of corruption on any level.

Breaking my toe put them in a bad position because Proudy and his bunch are not the top of the heap, but only a small pyramid of power, and they live in fear of Vornado and the really powerful people there.

Proudy is scared to death that I might hobble over and talk to someone or file a complaint.

The worst thing for corrupt people is when someone like me has some legal leverage he can use.

One guy on the loading dock kept his job because someone screwed with his paycheck, and he talked to an attorney.

Proudy knows damned well I will take the long walk to upper management if I have a mind. I’ve done similar things before.

In the wine company, when the union rep got paid off by the owner to violate the contract, I took the trip of Union City to talk to the president of the union.

Nobody actually knows what happened to the union rep.

So it is a kind of Mexican stand off, a waiting game for when I leave on my own, an inevitable fact since I am going back to college next month.

Meanwhile, Proudy’s fears the worst – and I really get a kick out of that. Sometimes, the good guys win. Not often, but sometimes.

A boss with something to prove? (July 31, 1980)

 I wonder how we're supposed to feel?

 People around me each expect a specific response. The boss at work expects me to shrivel in my boots whenever he stares. As the newest boss on the block, Mr. Proudy has something to prove. After all, he's got bosses leaning on him, too. Yet how can we respect a man who came in here under false pretenses? When management introduced him to the workers they said he was ``a management trainee.''

 When I first saw him I thought him a little too simple for the job, another piece of dead wood at the top of his corporate tree for the workers along the roots to feed. He has a mean spirit, one that hides behind a mask of shyness, and one I would not have picked as store manager. Yet, I'm constantly surprise by who gets power, and just how that power twists people. One day as boss and Proudy's taken on airs. I heard him whisper to the warehouse manager: ``These people are goofing off.''

 He lacked courage to say it outloud, picturing us dragging him off to the guillotine. It takes balls to face down workers. Had he, I might have felt some respect for him.

 ``They get away with a lot back here,'' he mumbled.

 Yes, we do, almost as much as they do in the board room or the office of the manager, where security and the department heads gather for their two hour lunches. Agenda item for this Wednesday: How to keep the workers in line. If he can control us, he might just get another promotion to the national office. Lucky him. We're just rungs on his personal ladder: he builds his career with us, and doesn't even get his hands dirty.

 ``You're goofing off,'' he whispers with a dark look at me.

 How are we supposed to feel?

Grin and Bear It (Aug. 15, 1980)

                                                                                                                                     

 People used to hand me that tell me this all the time.

 When I fell out the kitchen window when I was a kid, and fell straight down into the basement, hitting my head on stone, my uncles leaned close as the ambulance rushed me to the hospital and said: "Try to grin and bear it."

 This despite my wails of pain that out blasted the siren, and the fact that some idiot had left the cellar door open so my head hit stone instead of wood.

 Grin and bear it! Grin and bear it!

 What about the concept of justice, and vengeance, and getting even for ills caused me by society? Am I supposed to walk around accepting every indignity, just in order to keep peace?

 Well, I'm in pain again, and again someone is telling me to "grin and bear it."

 Management told us to move some white goods from the store to the warehouse yesterday, giving us a few pallets and a hand truck, but nothing to the goods with, or enough people to manhandle these refrigerators, stoves and air-conditioners onto the pallets. So each grabbed a piece and did our best to fling them up. As a result, I pulled a muscle in my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack, and rushed to the hospital. A few muscle relaxers, pain-killers and a short night's sleep later, I was back in the labor pool waiting my next assignment.

 All this is nothing new.  I broke a toe earlier from having a pallet of oil fall on it, because management was too cheap to buy a ramp for the truck that wasn't warped. In other, less dramatic instances, I hurt my back, lifting boxes of sporting goods we should have repackaged. All this, I've suffered over a few sparse months.

 Others here, have suffered much worse and for longer. Like Barbara, who claims she gets hurt every time she comes into the store, and from the evidence I've seen, she's right. She cut her finger on a box staple she tried to undo with a scissor, when management refused to purchase the appropriate tool. Her visit to the hospital's emergency room resulted in 12 stitches, and light duty for a week -- light meaning she wouldn't have to open any more boxes, but still had to maintain the quota for checking things in. More than once, she had to use the women's room to stop her hand from bleeding.

 Donna, a veteran at 21, shuffles around the store with more wounds than she can count, moaning over some new affliction too minor to send her to the hospital, but painful enough for her to purchase a tin of aspirin a day. She does not eat breakfast. She does not eat lunch. She just pops pills and keeps on working, cringing to managements complaints about how slow she moves.

 Even Ed, who is the most loyal man in the store, gets shot down from time to time, management complaining about how long it takes him to get from one part of the store to the other, his limp so noticeable that we've joked about buying him a wheel chair, or building him one from container scraps. He secretly hates management, but would never think to complain, hobbling on, day after day, until he's forced to take a day off, for which he gets docked.

 "We don't have sick days here," management tells us.

 Of course, Tex mumbles from his corner of the loading dock, never so loud as to draw the wrath of management, but with a nearly non-stop rap that forms the backdrop of our existence here. He complains about the lack of cooperation we get from management, the lack of vision, and, of course, the lack of pay. Then, he had his car accident, and came back after many weeks, looking so pale and weak we thought management would let him go. Now, he takes off as many days as Ed does, and is docked so much, he can't save up enough to fix his car.

 Melissa is management's spokes person on the receiving doc, bearing a title and a little extra in her pay envelop. She complains constantly about our complaining, and constantly clutches her stomach as she walks, telling us that we're killing her. She eats Rolaids as much as Donna takes aspirin, but never escapes the pain, cringing and shaking whenever someone from the main office calls on the telephone, turning pale when management asks her to come up to the office for a talk.

 And over and over, the catch phrase echoes from management's lips, as if they hoped by saying it enough we might come to believe it: grin and bear it, grin and bear it, grin and bear it, and strangely, we do.

Hard to swallow (August 17, 1980)

This was my second visit to the Emergency room in less than a month. The first time, I thought I was having a heart attack, after I pulled a muscle in my chest lifting a refrigerator.

 This time, I thought I had a chicken bone stuck in my throat.

 At least, something stabbed me when I swallowed, and since my girl friend's family served chicken earlier that night, I assumed the worst.

 The doctors and nurses here giggled at me, clearly disbelieving everything I had to say.

 "If there's something down there," they told me. "We'll find it."

 The problem is nobody bothered to actually look down my throat. The minute I came through the door, the nurse said: "Take him for an X-ray."

 I protested, asking if he shouldn't take a peek first.

 The doctor gave me an evil look and asked: "Now just who is the doctor here?"

 I accepted his suggestion and under went the cold hands and cold machine, the hum and the grumble, and the clearing throats of the attendants who frowned at the results and then at me. They took their picture of my chest, my throat, my shoulder, though I could see from the glint in their eyes, they suspected the real problem higher up on my shoulders, and a condition no x-ray would find a cure for. In fact -- to make sure the bill was sufficiently well-endowed, they passed me from one room to another, from one set of cold hands to the next, each forming his or her conclusion about what might be wrong, each frowning at me when they came upon the blank x-ray. Finally, I had worked my way back to the doctor who just shook his head at me, saying, he didn't see anything wrong with me at all.

 "But it hurts, Doc," I said, and cringed as the imagined bone pinched me in the throat again.

 The doctor seeing this, nodded gravely.

 "Perhaps it would be a good idea to have look," he said, then stared down my open mouth, humming and grumbling as much as the machines. "I don't see... wait a minute, I do see something. Nurse, give me a set of forceps."

 A moment later, the doctor had retrieved a piece of spice, something like an extended grain, Susan's mother had used in the meal.

 "There's the culprit," the doctor said, holding it aloft, drawing nods from the others, and increased chuckles. "It would have dissolved sooner or later."

 Amazingly, I was cured. But by then, I was having trouble swallowing again, but only because the doctor had handed me my bill.

Blue shirts; white shirts (8/19/80)

You'd think College administrators would get it right. But tomorrow I have to register for classes, exchanging those I have to those I need, and the whole process will be a mess, lines of anxious coed stung our the doors of Raubinger Hall, clutching pieces of paper that authorize them to make the change.

 I never realized just how stupid humanity is until I got to college, where among the best and the brightest are the most bureaucratic, systems within systems that operate with one dismally slow pace, double and triple signing forms, making sure that every student complies to these rigid standards.

 All this comes at a bad time.

 I work full time and still can't pay the bills. And for this, I get treated like a slave by my blue-shirted bosses, who want to humiliate me before I go back to school, taking their shot at the college kid while they still can. Although they won't see me again after I leave in September, some college graduate will eventually make hell for them, coming out of college as a junior executive, a piece of paper issued by some institution saying this soul with 120 credits can now humiliate a supervisor working here 20 years.

 It makes no sense.

 I see their white shirts floundering in the front office like overpaid grocery clerks with pencils behind their ears, needing to justify their high salaries as the sweating people in the warehouse struggle to make rent -- like me.

 At college, the uneducated control the place, bristling with efficiency, while laughing behind the backs of graduates who won't find jobs as good as theirs, forcing each future white shirted fool to leap through hoops like trained dogs.

 "After all, you'll be a college grad some day," their eyes say, "And then you'll make me do as much."

 I don't know which side I hate more, the arrogant white shirts or the ignorant blue ones, each kicking me around with the presumption I'll get even some day.

Who loves the rain? (Aug. 8, 1980)

August 8, 1980

                   

After months of drought, rain comes, a trickle of water from a pale grey sky. We all expect more, staring out from the dusty side of the warehouse door, shocked and dismayed at the wet's paltry relief. Barbara, with her hair trimmed to a half inch, steps out, holding up her palms as if to catch a drink, the pellets of the brief shower striking at her face and eyes as she grinned. Around her, distant thunder moans in answer the quick blue flashes of lightning.

 She is gallant gal, but lonely, an 18-year old growing up in a generation of lonely people, good naturedly teasing Martha from the clothing department with the resigned grace of a wall flower at a dance -- Martha perpetually prodding her to talk more openly to boys.

 ``I love the rain,'' Barbara says and stares back in at me, curling her forefinger as invitation for me to join her. I shake my head. I am not afraid of getting wet, or what the boss will say if he catches the three of us dancing in the rain instead of working. I am afraid of Barbara and her teenage crush on me. Why do all girls her age find older men like me attractive? I do not advertise myself or push myself on her. She seeks me out, while a frustrated security guard named Rich glares. His vicious crush on Barbara scares me. While I'm afraid to hurt her in rejecting her; I fear more the rebound that will send her into his arms instead.

 Like many men entrusted with an ounce of power, he's grown warped. He likes to push people around, especially the clerks, reminding them that he can get them fired if he wants. He's made noise from time to time about becoming a cop, though he strikes me as too stupid to pass the entrance exam.

 Barbara, silver dots of rain clinging to her hair, steps back into the warehouse, clutching her side as she sits down on one of the packing crates.

 ``I'm all right,'' she says waving me and Martha off. ``This happens all the time. It's just stitches.''

 But Barbara has a habit of getting hurt. If she doesn't report some form of injury twice a week, the warehouse manager starts to worry, saying Barbara is due for a whopper. Sometimes, the manager will send Barbara home. In the year since starting work, she had broken two fingers, sprained three ankles, pulled out her back five times and come back in the morning with more bruises than anyone cares to record.

 Rich worries her, too. She's often hidden from him after work to avoid his ritual attempt at seduction. When she is less careful, he screeches up in his Chevy, leans out the window, and offers to drive her home. Only once did she ever take him up on the offer. Once was too much. She says he pulled the car over to the side of the road half way to her house.

 ``I thought he wanted to rape me when he reached across,'' she says. ``But all he did was pull a gun out of his glove compartment. A big silver gun that he sort of petted a lot, blowing on it when his fingers left marks on the barrel.

 `` `I only keep it in case someone gives me trouble,' he says to Me.'' she says.

 But we all know Rich and know who trouble always seems to find him, and how he roves through the store in the afternoon, his gaze searching out the faces of employees he doesn't like. I'm a particular target. The company raised the bounty on thieves. Last week, he got a clerk fired for taking a packet of gum. He would love to get me fired. I tell him off routinely just to watch his face grow red. He's even stopped me at the door, demanding to search my bag. He's always disappointment when the only thing the bag contains is books -- books with titles he's too stupid to recognize.

 I guess Rich is lonely, too. But he's not the wallflower kind. He doesn't celebrate a sprinkle of rain, and I see him in the shadows staring outside, scowling at the clouds, his gaze saying he'll likely have to rewash his car. He seems to hate the rain as much as he hates the rest of us. But the rain's safe. What's he going to shoot at? The sky? And what good will that do? It certainly won't make Barbara go out with him.

Christ as hippie (Aug. 24, 1980)

Each day slips away now as the summer comes slowly to a close. I am left with mixed feelings.

 Last night, I watched the movie version of "Hair" and came to realize just how much was lost with the end of the 1960s, how much human spirit, concern and action died when the Sixties stopped. Those children rebelled against the system and its dictates, exposing the fallacies by which people lived their lives.

 John Telson, my old co‑worker from Cosmetics Plus and later Wine Imports of America, came up to me after my second attempt to overflow what I saw as a fascist system of labor for thinking badly of me the first time. At Cosmetics Plus, I wrote letters to the manufactures to let them know the sneaky business practices my bosses employed. At Wine Imports, I wrote the head of the union to inform him about how corrupt our shop steward was. After both instances, I got fired.

 "You're the spirit of the Sixties that's been lost," John told me, but he was wrong.

 While some of the 1960s have rubbed off on me, much of what I believe came from earlier teachings, from lessons I learned in the 1950s when I attended Catholic School.

 Unlike my fellow students, I related to Christ in a special way, seeing him less as a teacher and preacher or a man whose life we should emulated, but as a troubled soul, struggling with critics outside and doubt within. I thought then and think now that Christ met with much of the same pain and abuse as I do in my effort to resist being shaped by forces and ideas I cannot believe.

 While I believe Christ has an influence of the rebels of the 1960s, a model of an early protestor the 1960s could fall back on, I see him as much more troubled as most of the 1960s rebels ever were, working his way through the details of his own protest the way I'm working through the details of mine.

 Now many of the 1960s rebels are old and disappointed, unprotected by the naivety that covered them when they were young. Now many who followed the up and down of various movements understand how they were manipulated, led by the nose by people with agendas other than those stated, left and right wing agendas now unveiled. We can not longer believe in dreams as we once did.

 Jerry Rubin, once a voice of our generation, works down on Wall Street and boasts of a new movement, he calls YUPPIES. The sad remnants of the Weather Underground make their stumbling way to the surface again, confessing their crimes so that they might be once more accepted into mainstream society.

 Meanwhile, those few valuable things gained through struggle in the 1960s are vanishing again, as the new masters of society feel free to reassert themselves. We will soon have the draft again, and will soon begin again to contemplate war. The abuses of workers are on the rise again, as the unskilled and the blue collar earn less and less. The power of a few evil men will now reemerge, although better disguised for their experience with our protests of the past.

 When I was a hippie my hippie friends kept telling me how Christ was a hippie, too, wearing sandals the way we wore them, protesting big government and wealthy men's abuses the way we did. But now, as I grow older I come to realize that Christ was also a man, full of the same doubt, and the same pain, and the same struggle to determine if his own motives were pure.

 I know he would tell slave master bosses like mine to go to hell when they demanded more work for less money. I know if he were to appear to day, in some modern guise, the world would treat him as badly as it did the first time, finding some new means of killing him.

 I am constantly shocked by how the world can sing the praises of a man it would hate if ever actually meeting him face to face.