Fan’s Complaint

It felt like a normal Monday morning, except I had filled my body with so much bourbon and smoke the night prior, that my tongue felt like a shag carpet. I threw up in the shower. It was Day 4 of The Rain, but the drive out to Totowa, NJ wasn’t all that bad, on account of everyone who had Columbus Day off.

I was starting a new project, at a new site. It was a new beginning, I thought–even though I would still be moving boxes, with the people I’ve worked with for nearly two years–this would surely jar me out of my rut.

The site turned out to be a warehouse/factory. There was an assembly line. Klaxons went off. Men and women in jumpsuits gathered in a dreary break room to have coffee with non-dairy creamer. They read El Diario and smoked Marlboro Lights out in the rain. A couple of them were assigned to us, so that we would not have to make boxes or move pallets ourselves. We were to be concentrating on the task at hand, which was sifting through contents of boxes, separating real garbage from fake garbage.

When I went outside to have a cigarette, the guard would not let me back in until I called my boss. At the end of the day, I said that I can’t stand working in this environment, and that I did not want to come back tomorrow. My boss said they really needed me, and so I gave in.

Two days later, Day 6 of The Rain, I woke up two hours late to find that my house was flooding. Water was coming in from the space between the door and the doorjamb. The carpet was soaking. I called work, and told my boss that the house was flooding, and I’d prefer not to come in. He said that they really needed me, and so I gave in.

The drive took two and a half hours. It was raining so hard that I feared for my life every time I was behind a vehicle that was taller than mine, which is just about every vehicle in America. It took another three hours to get home after work.

On the 8th day of The Rain, I woke up at one in the afternoon. The flooding had reached the bathroom door 12 feet away. I left a message on my boss’s voicemail to say that I wouldn’t be in, and I would come in on Monday if they needed me.

The next day it didn’t rain, so I bought new windshield wipers for my car. I got a voicemail from my boss that said they really needed me. So I gave in.

On Sunday I read “Bright Lights, Big City.” The main character was my age. He wrote, partied, had breakdowns, and did not move boxes in a factory where you need a jumpsuit to get past security.

Monday, four days ago, was the first sunny day since The Rain. I put on my In-n-Out burger T-shirt, got in the car, switched the playlist from Elliott Smith to the Beach Boys and drove to work. I was only 15 minutes late. I said hello to my boss, who said nothing. When my co-workers arrived, he gave them cheerful greetings. I worked for three hours, sifting through the personal effects of men and women who’d been laid off, while listening to my boss and my co-workers make small talk.

I asked one of my co-workers how old he was. He said he was fifty. I told him I was twenty-four. He said that I was little. I asked whether I was too old to be foolish and burning bridges, and he said that I most certainly was not.

So I went outside for a smoke, got in my car, hesitated for a moment at the turnoff for I-80 West, and drove to Denver.

No, I did not. It makes for a much nicer final sentence than driving home though, doesn’t it?

(more…)

“Of course my life is more interesting than yours. I have dozens of stories just from my escape attempts. There was this one time when a bunch of us who had been captured had to crouch down all in a line, so the guards could inspect the knots around our wrists,” my father proceeds to demonstrate, bending his sixty-year old knees and waddling around the kitchen with his arms behind his back.

“There was this one fella who was at the end of the line. He was eyeing the dog in the corner. I thought maybe he was afraid of the dog, but the moment the guard had his head turned, this fella waddles over to the dog and kicks it away. Then he started eating the dog’s food,” my father, still crouching, makes pecking motions towards the cat’s food dish.

“As soon as the guard noticed, he yelled and ran over. He starts kicking this fella in the behind, but the fella blocks the kicks with his tied hands,” my father says, as he pantomimes being kicked in the behind, while his hands are positioned over his tailbone. He starts to break out in laughter, “heh, damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. I was starving, but I still had my dignity.”

I remember the $6 broccoli and pasta with parmesan and vinegrette dressing I threw away at lunch for being soggy, and I laugh along with my father, uncomfortably, at the dog-food eating man’s utter lack of dignity.

In the absence of anything interesting to write about, I’ve decided to use this space for the big project that I’ve always wanted to do: The Story of My Father. This is sort of an ambitious undertaking, and I would not be surprised if I were to give up as early as tomorrow. But as of right now, I truly do feel as though we have entered a new era here at Fan’s Complaint.

Driving to work yesterday morning, I was thinking about how I could better utilize this space. My initial idea was to write a full report of my latest failure, and its resulting psychic trauma. Upon further introspection, however, I realized that there isn’t much psychic trauma at all (the bourbon fixed that), and that there is nothing about this failure that is different from previous ones. It’s about time to stop dredging up the recent past, don’t you think? It’s time to look forward! Yes! Look forward to the distant past!