Patty also always told us she was actually an artist. Her terrible paintings of seascapes taken from pictures in some book decorated the walls at Lewis’ Pizza, where customers could buy them, assuming they showed up for pizza with two hundred extra dollars shopping for an oil painting. No effort had been spared to make those pictures awful, and I grew up five hundred miles inland. I guess Patty was still good looking in that older bat shit crazy chick kinda way, but in truth, that relationship wasn’t going nowhere. Damaged, restock pile.
Now the Cart Guy at Bullseye was pretty funny. His job was to rodeo the carts outside the store. That’s it, but it still seemed to confuse him some days. Reminded me of Muley, who had joined the Army and left Reeve. Cart Guy must’ve put in five miles a day in the parking lot, summer and winter, rain and snow, and his feet was all calloused from the running. He used to stub out cigarettes against his bare heel in the break room to make us laugh. Great stories about long nights out, painting the floor with IHOP pancakes and vodka. He’d always do imitations of the guests, sayin’, “Excuse me, EXCUSE ME Sir, freaking excuse me, SIR.” He said one time, not fully joking, “Did you know ‘No Shirt, No Service’ applies to employees too?” Cart Guy’s cigarette trick got old and so that wasn’t going anywhere either, because the kid was like nineteen and even I could see he was already pretty much dead without knowing it. More damaged goods, return to vendor.
This girl named Leigh missed one day. She told Kevin the Store Manager she misread the schedule. Kevin said if she didn’t have no doctor’s note then one more time and she was gonna get excused, get back to work, have a good day. Excused was the word Bullseye used instead of fired, like us being valued associates instead of just workers. Words sort of meant something different inside Bullseye, like they never really wanted to make it clear what they meant. Kevin the Store Manager said one time he had worked twelve years for Bullseye, so he knew the special meaning words, and the rules and the tricks, and got to be the boss. Kevin the Store Manager loved rules. He was probably the only person who really didn’t stick Q-Tips in his ears just because the box said not to. Rules made him feel comfortable by making his choices smaller. At the same time, he’d flirt clumsily with the high school worker girls, and they’d flirt back without enthusiasm thinking it might be good for their jobs in some still-developing pubescent version of being nice to the boss. Everybody learned fast. Kevin had as his big responsibilities making sure the pricing guns were racked at the end of each shift, and doing bag searches for the cashiers on the way out the door so they wouldn’t steal. You could guess that this wasn’t Kevin’s dream job. It was nobody’s dream job. It was just somewhere you ended up and, if you were tired or unlucky, got stuck.
Out in the parking lot, this young guy with a clipboard came up.
“Hey, you got a minute? I’m from the union, wanna talk with you about a meeting we’re having soon.”
“Get away. We heard about you at the last team-building exercise. They said to stay away or we’d get fired. Said you can’t even be in this parking lot, it’s private property of Bullseye.”
“Just give me a minute. C’mon, they’re paying you, what, $4.25 an hour? Hell, that’s what a fast food lunch you gotta eat in your 15 minutes of break costs. Is that really what an hour of your labor, man, your life, is worth?”
“Mister, back off. We ain’t got much but these jobs. We’re scared. Some of us got kids and all of us got bills. We can’t afford to go to your meeting. Now leave us be with this.” Jeez, that union guy was out there all the time, even when it was raining. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why someone would be standing there in the rain then. Must have been somethin’ in it for him.
We all got little pins yesterday, as our store sold over one million dollars in stuff. Anyway, Bullseye got a million dollars, and I got a little pin to stick on my name tag, which I must wear. New thing: Everyone has to memorize the five rules of superior customer service and recite them on demand from Kevin the Store Manager. He actually walks around the store and stops us, saying, “Earl, tell me Rule Number Three.” Rule Three is, “Ask the guest if she has found everything she desires.” The hard part is about half the warehouse staff speak Spanish, and memorizing the rules is really hard for them. Thank you for listening to this and please come again (adapted by me from Rule Five).
New break policy: zero to five and a half hour shift, no break. New schedule policy: all shifts reduced to five and a half hours or less. Somebody said it was illegal not to give us breaks, but what can you do, call the cops like it was a real crime? Well, turns out the joke’s on me. I asked that union guy out in the parking lot about it, and he explained to me that we were in a “Right to Work” state. By law, employers are not required to grant breaks to anyone over age 16; Bullseye gives us some kinda break, but in other places minimum wage workers like us do eight and nine hour shifts without a meal or a chance to get off their feet for a few minutes. No one gets sick leave, holidays, or vacation time, of course.
I actually asked Kevin the Store Manager about this. He was always encouraging us to talk to him about anything. “My door is always open,” he said, before going into his office and closing the door. One time I knocked, and standing in the doorway I asked him about having a break more often, just a few minutes to sit down and take a load off, and Kevin the Store Manager said:
“You’re lucky to have this job. Lotta people out there who’d take your place.”
“I know Kevin, and I’m grateful. I’d just like a chance to sit down and eat a regular lunch on them long shifts.”
“Well, we all gotta do what is best for Bullseye. Careful you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
I got it. Even if I’m never fed.
People not caring like that let the bullies get in charge. Seemed familiar. When I was a kid I really believed the border between me and the world leaked both ways, so that I could maybe affect things instead of just being affected by them, but it’s different now when you work for a big company like Bullseye. At that point you realize that not everything is possible, and that changes everything.
I DID START talking once in a while with a woman named Jodie. She wasn’t very pretty, but she had that desperate available look in her eyes, the one women don’t see ’cause it ain’t there around women. Since we only had fifteen minutes for break every six hours, Jodie and me used to joke that we were speed-dating. “I got two kids,” Jodie told me. She was always tired, saying the one kid won’t sleep alone and insisted on crawling into her bed at night. “I told all the kids, Mama doesn’t have any more sugar, go to bed, but they keep coming around.” The older one watched the younger one all day while Jodie was at work, and at night he wanted time with Mom. Price on families is hard to measure but easy to see.
“After Chris, who used to be my boyfriend, lost his part time job and took up drinking full time, things went bad for us at home,” Jodie told me. “He’d come back later and later, and then started coming back so late it was early the next day. I knew what he was doing and, while it hurt me, it was more a problem that he was spending too much of what we had than the tomcatting. Too many times our money ran out ’fore the month did. Food bank at the Salvation Army looked like the Monroe Mall used to look, same people in line nowadays. It was first come, first served, and people with cars could get there before us that had to wait for the first bus at 4:22 a.m., so it wasn’t fair. The Salvo people tried though, letting us put our bags down to hold a place and giving us a seat inside on rainy days. Some food banks wouldn’t do that, and you’d be standing in the weather with the kids for three or four hours for boxes of macaroni and cheese.”
“Hey Jodie,” interrupted Ephraim, her Team Leader. “Can you quit break a few minutes early and clear off the end caps on aisles four and six? We got a load of those new iTablets coming in and corporate wants to give them a lot of shelf frontage before the holidays.”
“Sure Ephraim, I’ll get right to it. What do you want me to do with all t
he boxes of macaroni and cheese that’re out there now?”
“Just throw them away, Jodie. They’re half-stale, ready to expire. Nobody wants them. And get those tablets on the shelves right. Sales affect my bonus, corporate watches that stuff.”
I still had seven minutes left on break.
We caught up the next day, and Jodie continued remembering to me about her old man Chris.
“There was a while when things got a little better, because even though Chris was stayin’ out more, every once in a while he’d come home with a fair amount of cash. He’d smell funny, not alcohol-funny, but like he was working around paint or something. His eyes would be red and his hands sometimes too, but he’d have $200 in crumpled twenties on the kitchen table and just say, ‘buy the boys something.’”
Jodie knew. We did have one growth industry in our semi-rural area. We favored of course alcohol, and the men over forty practically had no idea there was any other kinda drugs. The younger guys weren’t interested in hagning around the bars. They hadn’t grown up with the social side of drinking, the beer after work kind of thing. Guys my age, we had smoked a little weed in high school, but you couldn’t really grow it in Ohio, and God only knows how it made its way from wherever it was grown to Reeve. I doubt they had a computer that ordered dope from a factory in Thailand like Bullseye, but it must’ve been something like that. Weed never took, though, not like beer and whiskey. It was expensive, it made you want to eat, which cost more money, it made you kind of sleepy later, and it wore off too fast after that. Not a Midwest kind of drug. The state of Ohio had the booze monopoly, retailing everything but beer and wine itself in the State stores. Taxed it to hell, too, what was called a sin tax. What they counted on was that tolerance to alcohol developed pretty fast. You drank to get drunk most times around here, but it kept taking more and more to get to the same place. That was a good business model for the sellers, but had its downside for the buyers.
So there was meth. Meth was cheap, really cheap, and you could make it in Ohio, a new industry. Anybody could do it, just use a recipe and add in stuff from decongestants from the drug store and solvents and salts. Making meth with this shit can result in explosions and toxic gas, a business risk. But, be careful, and follow the instructions people who paid attention in high school chemistry class wrote, and all of a sudden you’re an entrepreneur. Meth wasn’t a social drug, and so you didn’t need to hang around with old juicers in a dark bar. Meth came to you. Your friends were using it, if not selling it or cooking it, and the angry, speedo high it gave fit the young guys better. Meth wasn’t only for boys, either. Girls liked it too, and ’cause you never thought about eating on a meth cruise, they called it the Jenny Crank diet.
Butane lighter and a glass tube, or just smoke it off a hot light bulb, “will get you homeward bound ridin’ the pipe,” they’d say while they could still talk straight. We even had a bit of tradition from way, way back of making moonshine in the woods, so that fit too.
Meth and what happened to Ohio were just waiting for each other. I tried it a couple of times—everybody did—like a new restaurant in town most folks would eat there at least once, so they could talk about it with their friends. For a world stuck in shit, meth was the answer. This was a drug designed for unemployed people with crappy self-images and no confidence. And that was it. Meth wasn’t about having drugs, it was about not having no jobs. It don’t seep into your brain like weed, it comes in like an iron man fist. Imagine the feeling you get from the one thing that interests you the most, especially at that first hit of the session, zero-to-sixty. Imagine what it feels like to be the smartest, or the strongest, or the sexiest person in the world. Remember the most excited and energetic you’ve ever felt. Man, you feel like you accomplished stuff before you even got started, your brain running in crazy fast nervous wicked noisy circles. You wanna do everything at once, flying on the buzziness of the confusion. You are horny as hell, and it is so fucking good you bite a hole in your lip, and when you get off, it feels like only minutes speeded by. Get some clean stuff and handle it right, you could keep altitude for hours. Now, take all of these things and multiply them by a thousand or a million and there you have the feeling of meth. Until it fades. Then you blink away the dust and you’re back on the couch without a job or a hope in hell and not having slept or ate, and feeling inside like everyone you ever cared about just died. Then you just gotta do it again, only it takes just that much more. You of course started with just a taste or two and then you find yourself buying more weight, from a guy you don’t know with a gun in his belt, and you realize you’re now inside the reality that used to stay behind the curtain. See the problem? See the profit?
Jodie continued talking.
“Chris said at first he just wanted to play around cooking the stuff in the basement, like a hobby sort of, tryin’ it out to see if he could do it. But somewhere his hobby turned into a felony. He was bringing home money, but he was more and more violent towards me and the boys. He’d slap at me outta frustration and I understood, but with the boys most of the time it was real rage. I think because they were still young and Chris saw they still had a life ahead, that made him hate them. Meth made him angry right off, but then he’d see something on TV about jobs going, or some commercial for something he wanted, and he’d just turn purple. The boys would do something kids do, you know, trying to get Chris off the couch during the day to play or to get them some jelly sandwiches while I was working, and he’d just lash out at them with his fists. I knew he didn’t realize how hard he’d hit them, but they were just kids, you know, and it scared me more than not having money. Lotta rotten in those times, but then he’d say, ‘Come over here,’ when he wanted to make up with me, but I’d already been there. It was a hard calculation, but one night when Chris was out I packed up what I could, took as much of his shit as I could find, put the boys in the car and left. We spent a couple of nights out, spent some time with my sister, and after I sold Chris’ gun and stupid man-bracelet, we got a small place. At first I worried he’d show up some night, but he didn’t. Deputy Sheriff came to the house twice, once looking for him on a skipped warrant, once to tell me they’d found him, wrapped around a .45 hollow point.”
“The future scared me. I think it was only my own cowardice and the thought of what would happen to the kids that kept me alive. So this Bullseye job is a Godsend. I had no medical insurance and pay $60 a month on an $8,000 medical bill from after I fell. I just hurt my ankle, but going into the emergency room costs. I’ll have it paid off in maybe seven or twelve years, if things go well. I gotta pay on it so that I can go back to the hospital with the boys when I need to. If I don’t pay, they list me into collection and the hospital won’t touch me. This way though, I’m working one day a week for the hospital really. Not sure how to get ahead ’cause Bullseye caps us at thirty nine hours a week so we’re not full-time employees that receive benefits. Seems they just hire more part-timers instead of letting anyone jump to full time. I keep telling the Team Leader I just need more hours, not the benefits, but he only thanks me for my contribution, like I can feed my boys that shit. Then they keep changing which hours I work each week, so I never can plan nothing and it’s hard to have a second job. I got an hour bus ride here and an hour back, so when I get just a three hour shift it’s hardly even worth it. My friend at Jimba Juice, she says they even factor the weather reports into scheduling, so when the temperature drops shifts get cut without any notice.”
Bullseye was okay enough for me about the schedule though, as pretty much everyone who could find one worked at least two jobs. Had to. If the other job would agree to always give you Friday hours, then Bullseye would block those out. They as a business really adapted to this new economy thing, gotta give them credit. Only problem was on holidays, when everyone wanted workers in, and of course weekends, when people with better jobs were free to come out and consume. Bullseye had an electronic time clock. It wouldn’t let you punch in more than five minutes early,
and if you were more than five minutes late it’d send a message to your supervisor. You got deducted half a point for that; get six points in a six-month period and you were automatically fired. If you got three points in six months, the supervisor was required to give you a verbal warning, which they took way too seriously. If you called in sick, it was one point off, so most everyone came in coughing and sneezing no matter what. You also couldn’t clock out late, even if you were in the middle of something you were told to finish or else. You had to put it down, clock out on time, and then go back to finish up off the clock, ’cause even five minutes of unauthorized overtime bought you a half point off. Coming and going. It wasn’t about the money, ’cause at minimum wage the minutes were only worth pennies to Bullseye—it was about reminding us we should do what we were told to do.
That was it, right there. The trick to doing a good job was to learn how to do just a good enough job. Too much thinking and you’d surely step on some Bullseye rule, or cross some invisible line Kevin the Store Manager felt strongly about in his heart. You had to pay attention, but not too much. Enough time in this retail minimum economy and it was trained into you for life, but for newcomers like me it was a slow process of getting pushed back into the ground every time we had an accidental growth spurt. None of us were trying to be great, just satisfied.
Guests, which was a Bullseye word for what we used to call customers, were something. They were us, but a damn darker version of us. One of them made one of the high school girl associates cry, saying she was gonna ruin her kid’s birthday because we sold the last of some stupid ass toy before she got there. Kevin the Store Manager came over and apologized, stepping right between the red-faced consumer and the crying valued associate, promising a rain check special order and a swift and courteous checkout when the time came. Another one threatened to call the police on us because we closed earlier than he said we said we would.
Ghosts of Tom Joad Page 11