Chapter Eight
Stairway to Heaven
Whoa, man, do I have a headache. My brain seems to be functioning a bit better, but I’m so tired. I need to figure out where I am and how to get out of here. But I think I’ll snuggle up against this warm fur blanket and close my eyes for just another minute or two to conjugate some more about how I got here. Awww, that’s better…
Ok. The next twenty years relate only obliquely to my current situation. So this recollection will be with the remote on the three arrow fast forward setting with normal speed at the pertinent points. Kind of like the way most guys watch Wheel of Fortune slowing only when Vanna’s fine assets are on the move. If you want the details of twenty years of a young man’s laughs, tears, romance, drama, successes, failures, and pathos in the Carolinas, grab a book by Hart or Conroy. But I need to get on with it. There’s this small voice in my cranial cobwebs nagging about something important I need to do in a rather urgent manner. That is besides emptying my bladder.
I did take the job. On my first day, I was given the traditional tour by Bob (“call me ‘Diddy’”) Caddidy, Woodland’s Head of Security. Bob was a mixture of Barney Fife and Buford Pusser, if you can picture that. He stood about six three and was twig thin. He wore mirrored sunglasses outdoors and indoors both day and night. I later heard rumors that he wore them so no one could tell if he was awake or asleep.
“Welcome to Woodland, boy. I’m going to give you the nickel tour. You’ll have plenty of time to get into the details of everything if you stick around. And you will. This is one heck of a great place to work.” He was the head of security and part of Victoria’s cheerleading squad, apparently. “Now, I know you’ve already seen the office trailers. And I know you just walked right in the front door. So you must be thinking that I’m not doing much of a job of protecting the place.”
No, I really wasn’t thinking that at all. I was actually wondering if he carried a single bullet in his shirt pocket.
“But let me tell you. Victoria, there at the front, has a little red button under her desk she can push in case anything bad goes wrong. It alerts me and the sheriff. And you don’t want to be messing with me or the sheriff.” He actually hitched up his pants and made a loud sniffing sound as he said this. He was definitely straight out of central casting. “Mr. G. doesn’t want security to be too good in those trailers. You may have noticed he’s a pretty sly one. He’s got some papers laying around in there that look like they’d be plans for our equipment and our top secret formulas. But they’re not. If anyone sneaks in and takes those and tries to use them, well, I guess the things might go boom, if you know what I mean.”
I kind of did and I kind of didn’t. This was one strange plant tour.
“Now the barn here is a completely different story. You got to swipe your employee badge in this reader here to get in. And there is someone here watching over things twenty four / seven. That was me until today. Since you’ll be living here, I guess you and I will be sharing that duty.”
I might have to buy some mirrored sunglasses.
He badged us in. It certainly was no ordinary barn. Although the outside looked like a storage site that a serial killer might use for bodies, the inside was anything but. It was about a football field and a half long. And just as I had imagined, it had a gleaming clean concrete floor covered by a jungle of pipes, vessels and weird shaped metal whatnots. It was loud, hot and steamy.
“Kind of loud, hot and steamy in here,” Bob yelled. “I don’t much know the chemistry from a bump on my rear, but I know we’re trying to make some super duper new coating. If we succeed, Mr. G. says we will build a real manufacturing plant and I’ll get a real air conditioned guard house right out front. Now don’t that beat all?”
I guess it did. As I was to find out soon enough, Diddy was mostly right. It was a pilot plant designed to test if an advanced polymer that Chuck and his top notch research team had dreamed up could actually be manufactured at a cost that would allow commercial applications. Whoa. That almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about back then. At that point, in reality, I was much more like that dog looking at the RCA Victrola.
“Well, that about wraps up the tour.”
Huh? I think we had reached the end of the tour because we had reached the end of Mr. Diddy’s plant knowledge.
“Just one more thing. You see that concrete box up high up there at the top of them stairs? That’s the concrete box you’ll be living in. They tried to get me to move in there when I first joined. But I got a wife. She took one look and said not only no, but heck no. I’m sure it will be just fine for you. Go on up there and take you a look.”
I climbed the seemingly never ending spiral staircase. I knew I would have to be careful not to gain any weight or I might not make it up there again. The apartment was originally built for the pilot plant’s construction foreman so that he could be on site twenty four / seven. I understand he never moved in. I guess he had a wife, too. Being single, I moved in with my battered suitcase and wide-eyed optimism that very day.
While it wasn’t exactly Trump Tower, it was four hundred square feet of livable poorly air conditioned space with a small kitchenette (ok – hot plate and a Smurf sized refrigerator), some kind of a bed like thing, a mini shower and a seven inch black and white TV. It provided free steam heat from the plant below which was great in the winter but a mama bear in the summer. It was called the box because that it what it was - four walls and a top. There was a plywood enclosure in one corner that housed the personal plumbing facilities. Overall, it was what a good real estate agent might call rustic. The noise emanating from the plant below required me to crank my Emerson boom box up to a speaker cracking distortion crazed level nine if I wanted to even begin to hear Freddy praise fat bottomed girls. I decorated it in an early American poverty style with an emphasis on concrete block furniture sitting on a concrete floor. To top things off, it was only accessible by climbing seventy-two mostly rusted heart stopping stairs. But, it was a very short and easy commute to work! And it was my first place. I loved it.
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