I Am The Local Atheist

by Warwick Stubbs

  Part V

  – Transitions –

  My body ached, but that was only a minor concern; my arms worked like machinery, moving the bundles of white sheets from the inside of the container to the trolley waiting by the door frame outside. As a machine I had no concerns, I could begin to ignore the pain that had developed around my shoulders and the lower back muscles; the only concern I had was to move these sheets. With both feet planted on the floor of the container, I twisted my body like a crane backwards and forwards as my arms reached out to the bundles, fingers clasping their grip on the string that held the bundles together, biceps and forearms working to lift their weight and casting my whole body into a frame that supported their transition from the container to the trolley. The movement was very suggestive: for at one time the white bundles lay piled up together, almost existing as one mass, and then shifting their location, one always ahead of the other. From my superior position above those bundles I could look down on them and watch as they fell away from their amassed pile and moved to another less organised pile where they were collected together and shifted yet again – like drops of water falling from the accumulated mass of clouds in the sky and landing on a branch or a ledge, and then falling to collect in the dirt of earth.

  Like a kid being rushed and knocked to the ground by his superiors; like hands clasping his head, words being spat at him to invest the power of God within and to cast Satan out…

  I closed my eyes, let an internal scream blast from my mouth and smashed my head against the container wall. It hurt, but at least the memory was gone.

  I walked out of the container with the boss waddling up to me and asking if I was alright.

  “Yeah, I was thinking about something else and fell sideways.” I rubbed my head to put the point across and with a smile said “My fault” thus taking any weight off her shoulders as a responsible boss for the safety of her employees.

  “Okay well, perhaps you need a change. Would you like to go out to where the laundry gets washed and dried?”

  “What’s involved?”

  “Well, it’ll be the evening shift loading up the washing machines. It’s a lot of hauling overalls in and out of huge dryers.”

  It didn’t sound like fun. “Ummm, not really, eh.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry David but that wasn’t the right answer. You’ll have to start tonight.”

  “Any particular reason why I have to do this?”

  “A couple of my workers are on holiday.”

  I looked at her like that hadn’t answered anything.

  “So guess who I thought of to fill in for them.” She smiled cheese.

  “Thanks.”

  She put her hand on her hips and winked. “No problem!”

  I arrived at about quarter past four and parked my car where all the other cars were parked. As I opened the door the stench of meat, blood and bones began surrounding me and curling itself up my nose. It was disgusting and I wondered what I had got myself into. I guess I could have sat back in the car, turned the ignition on and driven away, but I chose not to. I’m not sure why, but other than having nothing else to go back to if I was fired from the laundry job, I still had an inner compulsion to fight. I still felt like I was, in some way, sparring with Satan, extracting from him the fight that I had asked for. Here was something that could scare me away just from the sheer size and smell of it, but I looked over the buildings that loomed before me, stepped out of the car and closed the door hoping that maybe here some kind of transformation would take place, some kind of levelling up of my skills and armour I had grinded through hours upon hours of gameplay for, some kind of monolithic discovery that would transport me into a higher state of being where I could find my way forward without having to rely on the physicalities of real life anymore.

  Finding the way in on foot was another matter entirely. I talked to five different people through five different sets of speaker-phones before anyone actually knew about my boss sending me here.

  I was let in through a sliding gate that was reminiscent of the type of thick bar gates they might have at a prison and walked down the road that led to open areas to my right while the buildings remained at my left. Where the road flattened out and the buildings took on the look of industrial mish-mash slaughterhouses, I began to feel like I was walking into a scene from the final showdown in RoboCop. Any minute I was expecting Clarence Boddicker and his thugs to pull up in their vans, start running all over the place with gleeful smiles and blowing shit up with their assault canons. My head pulled itself further into my shoulders, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. I was no Robocop. I was flesh and bone, and pain had always slowed me down.

  I passed a car parked outside a corrugated entrance and made my way down to a housing directly in front of me that had a sign on it mentioning something about ‘visitors’. As I walked up alongside it I could see a man sitting in one of the rooms, so I knocked on the door next to it.

  “Can I help you?” he said after opening the door and staring me down.

  “Uh, hello, I’m just looking for the laundry.”

  He looked at me like I was stupid. “You got something wrong with you?”

  “Urghh, no?”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve gone right past it haven’t you?” He stepped out from the door frame and pointed to the car that I had passed. “See where that car is? His tone was quite forceful. “It’s just in there.”

  “Thanks for that, they didn’t give me any directions,” I said smiling as though I had been thrown into one of those situations without any help and was looking for all the help I could get. He replied with a blank stare. I made my way back to the car wondering if the guy could do with finding a new job that was more customer friendly.

  Inside, the smell of death was dissipated with steam and hot air but it lingered around just to remind you that you couldn’t escape.

  The washing machines were separated from the dryers – huge industrial beasts left over from the Fifties. Massive machines that required cords to be pulled to open the air vents before each load was started. And then they would rumble on for half an hour or so at deafening decibels while I and the other worker (didn’t catch his name – the machines were going when he introduced himself) sat around waiting. Good to get paid for nothing.

  As I sat and watched the overalls tumble around and around I became extremely aware of ‘where’ the laundry had come from and saw the tumbling overalls in the dryers as part of a despicable practice that contributed to the slaughtering of sentient life by the hundreds, if not thousands (if not millions!). I had a sudden compulsion to no longer eat meat for the sake of separating myself from something I so despised in this moment. I wondered how God could have allowed us to go so far down this path without any sign of reprimand. How far did we have to go before God would step in and stop us from destroying ourselves?

  After about an hour or so the clothes were just clothes tumbling in a dryer and I was hungry again.

  “If you find money in the dryers dude, just take it.” The other worker sat with his legs resting on the kitchen sink.

  I stirred my cheap coffee. “I’d feel guilty.” It wasn’t true of course.

  “What’s lost is mine and yours for the finding. Finders keepers, losers can have a cry about it when they get home. Possession is nine tenths of the law dude. Those meat workers don’t have any claim over what we find here if they can’t prove it’s theirs. And fuck em anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s their fault for being dumb enough to not check their pockets after they’re done doing their shifts. Overalls come in, we clean them – none of them have names on them, they are just all generic overalls that get handed to them at the start of their shift and then get dumped down the laundry shoot at the end of their shift. Shit, one night I scored myself a whole video game’s worth of change! Ain’t like I’m gonna give that up. Not for nothing buddy.”

  “Interesting way of looking at it. I guess I could. I need t
he money. And no one’s getting hurt from it.” The words sounded hollow. It was like I was trying to somehow justify my behaviour. Up to this point I had only stolen what was being thrown away – waste not, want not. But – hell – let’s face it, God wasn’t exactly paying attention. I could probably do whatever I wanted and get away with it. It was like having no barriers anymore, nothing telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I could just go ahead and do it! “It would be like my own rumspringa” I blurted out.

  “Huh?”

  “Go wild and all. Let go. Be irresponsible. The Amish get to do it – why can’t I? Right?”

  “In other words, you just want to go through adolescence again?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not every sect of the Amish community views rumspringa as ‘running around’. For some, if not all, it is just the act of going through adolescence – whether or not that’s a chaotic period or a relatively calm period.”

  It used to really piss me off when other people knew more about religion than I did. “Are you Amish?”

  “Nah, just looked it up once. I don’t give a shit about anything religious man. That shit holds you back. I can do whatever I want and only have to answer to myself. Free will is mine for the taking.”

  They let me off at ten o’clock because it was my first night, but from the next day onwards I was working up till one o’clock in the morning before the night shift took over. By then I was a complete wreck staring at the tumbling clothes inside the dryers as my shoulder muscles ached from having to haul and drag so much laundry in and out of the same kind of trolleys that I had been using at the rental company. I was only thankful because there were long enough gaps between loads that I could rest and stare out the small square windows into a night that was so black that it felt like I was inside a ship traversing the unconquerable depths of space. The lights shone bright inside this room where I had some control over the rattling cages, the trolleys and the laundry, but out there in the blackness of space lurked unknowable dangers, exciting conquests and imaginative creatures unafflicted with human emotions.

  I sighed and turned back to the life I was living, waiting in dry hope for change to turn up.

  The clock on the wall gave me little indication of finishing soon: time seemed to drag on and on in this scummy room as I wandered back and forth between the window and dryers, occasionally skulking about looking for anything of worth secretly hidden in hard to find compartments – that no one would miss, if it were to suddenly disappear – but finding little more than detergent containers.

  I wish I had brought ear plugs with me. The huge industrial dryers shook and rattled with such a commotion of noise that I wondered if what I really needed was a shock-absorbing suit to stop my body from being pummelled by the air waves that the dryers generated.

  The job lasted about two weeks and I was glad to be rid of it; glad to be gone from the big black rubber mats that we were asked to treat just like the rest of the laundry as we battled valiantly to get them in and out of the dryers, fold them and redeposit them in the trolleys ready to be taken away and returned to the retail stores, the hospitals, the businesses; glad to be away from the hole they called a ‘tea room’ with its unwashed cups and used teaspoons sitting on the bench next to the cheap coffee; the dry air, the concrete floors and the mind numbing noise; glad to be away from a shift that left me wide awake when I got home and not hitting the bed until at least four o’clock in the morning, waking at one o’clock in the afternoon with only four hours left in my day before heading back out and starting the whole stupid shift all over again. Possibly the only thing I would miss was the spare change that was found in the dryers after putting a load of overalls through. My best find in one night was a total of twenty six dollars and five lighters – a very good score, considering that the lighters were a high trading commodity amongst smokers, and twenty six dollars was enough to make any struggling student salivate at the mouth (Martin was extremely jealous. “Fuck you David! Fuck you!” I smiled mischievously as I tossed the coins in front of him).

  But I was back at the Laundry Rentals for only one day before being asked to do the early morning laundry shift out at the other Freezing Works Plant. Great, I thought. From one shitty place to another. But this one was far worse.

  The morning air was stained with blood. As soon as I walked through the gates, I felt the smell of death grab at me like thousands of desperate souls trying to escape purgatory. I thought I might be sick, but I walked on ignoring the cries that I thought I was hearing, if only in my head.

  It was six o’clock in the morning. I walked through darkness lit by windows from a four storied building and a single lamp in a grass area where a lone tree stood and a chirping bird sang into the cool breeze. That was what surprised me the most about that job – every morning I arrived, that same bird would still be chirping. Herald death within.

  As I walked through the automatic sliding doors to the main building I heard a voice over a speaker welcome the workers to the plant and spout some kind of safety regulations. It carried on for a while talking about the weather a bit and the expected high. I didn’t pay much attention to it – just another automated voice pretending to be human.

  The stark concrete walls led me further and further down a corridor of lifeless faces transferring from the overnight shift into their morning lives: stares of boredom, stares of sacrifice, stares of facing death eye to eye like they were doing the bidding of a great overseer and couldn’t be released from his eternal grip; a medical bay containing a man screaming in pain as he held his wrist out to the doctor while it was strapped: “Just give me some fuckin’ pain relief!” A changing area where men struggled to take their bloody overalls off, change into their non-work clothes, slam their lockers shut as some kind of rebellion against being contained in such a horrifying stench-ridden place that dragged them back every night to relive every moment of torture and damnation upon their psyches. I turned a corner and was confronted by the picture of a man holding up one finger and a thumb while the other missing appendages splashed blood about him. He was laughing a happy warning: Remember to wear safety gear at ALL times! It made me chuckle.

  “My name is Ed!”

  I had walked into the sorting room and the bitterly twisted face of Ed stared at me from behind his desk. Strands of hair failed to cover all of his head, but looked like they were making a second attempt on his neck instead.

  “And I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like me! Y’ here to work – got that?”

  I nodded positively. “Got it.”

  “We get little shits like you in here thinking they got something on us, but y’ don’t – y’ hear me?”

  “I hear ya.”

  “Fuckin hell, if I have to put up with shit from… listen. I ain’t putting up with shit from you – got it? If y’ can’t do what y’ told, y’ back where y’ came from and that little lady of a boss can deal with ya.”

  “Got it.” Unfortunately, Ed was stuck with me. Perhaps he hadn’t been told that. And that little lady of a boss would have his head on a guillotine if he even dared to send me back.

  He leaned into his chair and looked me up and down.

  But then again, maybe he was just trying to assert some authority.

  A woman walked through his office door and yelled at the top of her voice “Ed you lazy cunt! When the fuck are our lockers getting fuckin’ fixed! That shit was supposed to be done last week for fuck’s sake!”

  Ed suddenly stood upright, looking half nervous. He looked at me standing there casually observing his reactions, and then decided to take the offensive.

  “As you can see I’m fuckin busy right now! Got this little shit that laundry has sent over for me to deal with. Can’t fuckin do everything you know.” He threw his hands up accusingly. “Maybe you should get a damn screwdriver and fix them yourself.”

  She snarled back at him. “Bet your own fuckin’ lockers behind you are just fine though, right?
”

  One of the doors to the locker behind Ed was open. A crowbar sat inside along with some of Ed’s personal gear. A brand new lock reflected light straight back at us.

  “You fuckin’ piece of shit, Ed!”

  He smiled through yellow teeth and licked his lips, considerably pleased at the result of the exchange as she walked out pulling her middle finger up at him and disappearing around the corner.

  Ed looked at me with, what was now more like, a lustful grin, and said “fuckin’ slut.”

  I had to hold back the vomit, push it back down deeper into the recesses of my being where I could keep emotion tucked away and out of sight for fear of my weakest spots being exposed and used against me.

  “Do you have a glass of water?” I asked.

  He looked confused. “What? Get over to that locker in the corner and put one of those overalls on. We start straight away.”

  The first job I was given was sorting white overalls stained with the left over splatter of blood. They fell down onto a table from chutes that I presumed could only be changing rooms above. I had to sort through them, check their tags and place them in the correct cages ready to be trucked off to the same laundry that I had been at previous to this. After I got most of that wrong and corrected through numerous abusive comments and furious swearing at my incompetence, we took a trolley outside into the cool dark air lit by lamps and a couple of spotlights that cast disturbing shadows everywhere. The path went around the back of the building and into a locker room.

  I wrapped my knuckles on one of the buckled doors expecting it to be locked shut. It swung open. “Are these the lockers the woman was talking about?”

  “No. And don’t put your nose where it doesn’t belong. None of your business.” He stepped in my way and I shuffled to the side. One of his hands began rifling though the contents of the locker, picking up a wallet, overturning some papers, shaking a box of cigarettes, opening the box of cigarettes, taking three for himself and placing them in one of his pockets. “Don’t even think about it.” He took the mass of keys from his other pocket, flicked through several until he found one and locked the door with a solid slamming in the process.