Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

  Funny thing happened one time. I was walking in to work, hat and jacket on outside so no one could see my Bullseye nametag and all. Some woman bumped into me by accident. She turned and apologized, said something about the weather getting colder and said sorry again, smiling. I then saw her like ten minutes later inside the store, me dressed as a Bullseye associate and her pushing a shopping cart. She almost ran over me, but didn’t say a word. Me, a person in the parking lot, but just an item inside.

  I had to work closing one time. Walking out to my car, which was still working at that time, with the others across the open empty parking lot, Kevin the Store Manager called me. I don’t think he remembered my name, because he said, “Hey Ryan,” but he said it towards me, so I walked over anyway. He saw me parked right there, and said employees couldn’t park closer than thirteen rows to the store so that the good close spaces would be for guests. I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought about asking him why thirteen rows and not twelve or fourteen, but I thought about it more and remembered it was better not to think about it. Then I noticed I was the only car parked anywhere near the front of the store. Everyone else but me believed already.

  This one older guy worked with us. He didn’t talk much, but said he used to be an accountant who got retired and then worked on the floor at Bullseye providing superior customer service because he had no pension. One day this customer like half his age called him stupid and said, “I suppose there’s a reason people like you have to work in places like this.” Somehow that set him off, and right in front of Kevin the Store Manager the old guy said, “fuck you” to the customer and, “I quit” to Kevin the Store Manager. The guy said to me on the way out that he doubted the woman he told to fuck off learned anything and that she likely took some pleasure in seeing him quit, no doubt a validation of her own superiority. I said “okay” because my break was ending and I couldn’t be late back to my station, especially with Kevin the Store Manager likely in a shitty mood.

  Then one day Jodie really got beaten up on by a customer. She wanted something we were out of, and Jodie told her we were out. The lady just lit up: “Where’s the manager, why won’t you check in the back again, when will it be in, what time does the truck come?” All over some thing she didn’t even know she wanted until the weekly ad came out and told her to want it. Jodie just stood there, not crying though, and apologized over and over, like we were told to do, waiting on the manager who would come and apologize some more, basically until the customer had enough or maybe was given enough. Man, some of them people would stick around like a piece of gristle between your teeth. We all learned the look, the minimum wage stare, the look that pleads with the customer to please just give up because we can’t fix it, but we won’t care about not fixing it. There was nothing else we could do; Bullseye brought the shit but didn’t give us a plunger. In return, the customer can say just about anything to us. Bullseye values its guests, so much that for a $4.99 purchase they can treat us this way. Self-respect goes cheap in Aisle 38.

  Most of us were just trying to make a little money. But some people were spayed. They’d been yelled at too many times, or were too afraid of losing their jobs. They were broke. People—and dogs—don’t get like that quickly; it has to build up on them, or tear down on them, like erosion, one thing after another nudging them deeper into it. Then one day, if the supervisor told them by mistake to hang a sign upside down, they’d do it, more afraid of contradicting the boss than making an obvious mistake. You’d see them rushing in like twenty minutes early to stand next to that clock so they wouldn’t be late. One associate broke down in tears when she accidentally dropped something, afraid she’d get fired on the spot for it. They all walked around like the floor was all stray cat tails, step on one and set off all the cats screaming. It was a shitty way to live as an adult, your only incentive to doing good work being they’d let you keep a job that made you hate yourself for another day.

  Fear controlled a lot of us, but there was something worse I think. Like with Muley and those sadistic bastard football coaches, some guys at Bullseye just didn’t get it. They really seemed to believe this shit about customer love and working harder. Most of us understood we had to pay it lip service around the managers, and they mostly knew they had to say it back at us. Both sides were looking the other way, a lot like whores and their customers saying “I love you” to each other I guess. But then there’d be a guy who just lived it, like a religious convert. He had a bunch of pins and buttons on his name tag lanyard, saying shit like YOU’RE MY NUMBER ONE CUSTOMER! And if someone said thank you for something, he’d say, “It was my pleasure to provide you with five-star service!” like he even knew what the hell that meant. I didn’t.

  In the break room I heard one valued associate say to another, “Man, I’m your friend, so I gotta tell you, you smell.”

  Then the other associate said back, “I know, I ain’t had a shower for a few days. No hot water at my place ’til I can pay the gas bill.”

  “We’re six days away from the next pay day.”

  “I know. I talked to my old guidance counselor and he’s gonna let me sneak into the high school and shower there.”

  That associate got fired the next week for stealing food, other associates’ lunches in the break room refrigerator.

  But most everybody found their way. It was all about money, surviving, providing, like with Jodie and her two kids and no boyfriend. Jodie wasn’t so unique; half of all single-parent families live in poverty. Our life at Bullseye wasn’t unique. Me and Jodie were actually part of a trend. Look at WalMart. I read somewhere they had revenue bigger than 170 different countries, including some of the Arab countries that have oil. Hell, Wal-Mart has more than two million employees, so if Wal-Mart was an army, it would be the largest military on the planet behind China. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the U.S.

  Jodie did ask me to move in with her. Her apartment was a mess. Junk from Bullseye, stuff from the used furniture store, paintings of Jesus in gold frames, a mix of Goodwill and pictures I’d seen of Graceland. I spent a few nights, but I couldn’t handle the kids tryin’ to get me to answer to “daddy, daddy, daddy.” She was always tryin’ to set up these domestic scenes with me and the kids, putting one of them on the floor with me piling up blocks, saying, “Want to grow up and work at Bullseye like Mommy and Uncle Earl?” while the other banged a spoon on the table for attention until I thought I’d go fucking nuts. Then one night in bed we was just lying there and she pulled my hand over to her warm belly and said, “Imagine one for us kicking inside.” I could, and then saying no was as simple in the doing as it was long-standing in the consequence. One time earlier when she was late and before we knew it was a false alarm, I was secretly ready to force myself to stay, hearing of all things Angie’s voice in my head telling me not to do to Jodie what everyone else was doing to me.

  As for them kids, the one was always trying to slide into bed with us, and the other, he never said much at all, just watched TV in a kind of creepy way. I had no idea how to be a real father to them. I would have loved to push my own kids on the swings, saying, “back and a-wwwway” while they laughed. But I was too poor to do it. Hell, my mom served portions, and threw away portions, that would have fed Fred Flintstone. I knew these kids was going to grow up never having enough now, meaning they would never be satisfied, never really full, later on. A lot like my dad’s foreman, Depression Kid—he kept old aluminum foil and shopping bags folded in the basement, never threw out anything, used to lick the dinner plates clean in the kitchen when he thought nobody was looking. No matter what he achieved, Eagle Scout, college degree, captain’s rank, he could never rest. Nothing could ever be enough.

  Before I gave up, there was a potential, a white shirt maybe a little dirty, but with another good washing left in it to carry it into tomorrow. I had known prosperity, I had a place, at least in theory, I could bounce back to. Not these kids. They are never going to know where back is. They ain’t never g
onna trust no one, never gonna trust nothing they didn’t put down with their own hand. When I was little, we all wanted to be astronauts. What do they have to grow up to be? To work at Bullseye? Jodie and those boys wanted me to give them some kind of a future when I couldn’t see down the road for myself, never mind for three other already wounded people. She said “I love you” to me a couple of times, but we both knew it wasn’t love or lust—maybe just comfort, or something practical. If they were lies, and you wanted to choose to believe them, then there wasn’t no sin. Sometimes that’s all you can expect, and sometimes that’s enough.

  Still, me and Jodie got along well even just as friends, and we both were hoping to get ahead some now that we had steady part-time work at Bullseye. We thought of ways we could help each other. One day her kids were sick and she didn’t want to leave them home alone, so she brought them in to work. She told them to stay in the toy aisle all day looking at things, pretending like they could buy them, and me and Jodie took turns quietly checking on them until quitting time. Some cough-soothing syrup went missing that day too between my picking and Pharmacy’s filling. That day of all days Jodie got asked again to work through her break, so I had to feed them sick kids Ho-Ho’s and red pop for lunch, which probably made them feel better than me overall.

  Our biggest attempt at trying to help each other was after Jodie transferred to sporting goods and one day told me how customers were always asking her for Ace bandages and white tape and stuff. That all was kept over in Pharmacy. Bullseye told us our guests were the most important product, and had Rule Number 3 that if a guest asked for something somewhere else in the store you couldn’t just say, “Sure, over in Aisle Seven,” but you had to walk them there as a courtesy and wait to see if they found what they were looking for or needed additional guest service interaction. Jodie said the problem was so many people kept asking for athletic tape that she was walking a lot and her team manager, Ephraim, was on her ass for not being at her station near the bowling items. She told Ephraim about the athletic tape taking her away, but he said something about her needing to learn to work smarter not harder, which did not seem to help, because the athletic tape was still not where customers were asking for it. Having to actually talk to the customers, we came to understand, was the weak link in the chain of efficiently transferring money from them to Bullseye.

  “So Earl,” Jodie said, sharing a Twinkie on break, “I know how we can get ahead here. We can do this thing called innovation Ephraim told us about at the last team-building meeting. He said we have to be ahead of our customers’ needs to succeed in this market. So, here’s my plan. You pick me some athletic bandages and tape, just a few at first, and put them in my tub instead of Pharmacy. I’ll have the new things set up all nice near my station, and when Ephraim comes by I’ll show them off. We’ll get promoted maybe. For sure win that ‘Catch Us Doing Our Best’ prize.”

  I think it was only because firing two valued teammates at the same time would’ve made Steve and Ephraim look bad, or because they couldn’t figure out a way to blame it on one another, that we didn’t get thrown out that day. Ephraim was a cooler Team Leader, explaining to Jodie about unit stock control, location sales metrics, and how important it was that each Bullseye store maintain its unique identical layout. Steve just told me never to do anything that wasn’t on the pick sheet again, or he’d call security and have me walked out. He also secretly tagged me as “IE” on my performance review, ineligible for rehire it meant, which I only found out later after I was laid off and trying to use Bullseye as a reference for Taco Bell. Jodie got reassigned to the children’s section, which everyone hated because it was where the most shoplifting took place and she was worried about having to see one of her mom friends doing it. Her first task was to put out only one shoe of a pair on display, keep the other one in the back until someone paid, to discourage people from stealing ’cause they couldn’t get the set. After customers just started stealing any old right shoe to go with any left shoe on the rack, Jodie had to redo it so there were only left shoes on display.

  I got put on busing tables at the Food Courtyard. Because the waitresses were supposed to share tips with us bus boys, the Bullseye family was not legally required to pay minimum wage, so I got three bucks less an hour than before. That most sales in the Courtyard were like four dollars for coffee and a sandwich, and the average tip thirty cents, and only about half the waitresses would share half the time anyway, it wasn’t the best. Throw some peanuts and watch the monkey dance. Sometimes though I was quicker and could slide the change off the table into my bus tray along with the dishes and cheat those bitches back. Most of the customers were daytime moms desperate for some little bit of adult human contact. You’d think there’d be a million stories in a place like this, but there’s only one. Even the food was gonna depress you; big colorful posters of perfect rounded burgers and stuffed sandwiches made by artists, and then we serve you a warmed over flat thing.

  One day I recognized one of the customers.

  “Earl, is that you? I haven’t seen you since when, high school?”

  “Yeah, hi, how you been?”

  “Great. Just home from the city for a few days to see the folks, you know. Had to pick up a few things and figured I’d grab a bite. You wanna sit down?”

  “I work here.”

  “Oh, well, yeah, cool, so this is what you do?”

  “I’ll just get someone to take your order.”

  At one point to fix the economy we were gonna have legalized gambling and build a casino in Reeve, but it turned out anybody who’d want to gamble around here didn’t have enough money to gamble it away. Then for a while the big hope was for a German car factory to locate in our part of Ohio. It was in all the news. At one point cars were pretty much made in Detroit, all around that Greenfield Village museum we took the field trip to in high school. Somehow we got from there to here, where cars are made by foreign companies and Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII and Dresden looks like Detroit before WWII. Still, if our state could give the Germans enough of our tax money as an incentive, and enough work visas for their most skilled workers and managers to come over from Germany, they’d build cars to sell us here in Ohio and we’d have some more jobs that the Germans didn’t get, which was a lot like stealing tips. I noticed some foreigners in nice clothes come in to the food court now and then, along with our politicians who were offering those incentives. I’d listen in on them while I was wiping things up, hoping to get the inside track on when those jobs would come.

  “Mr. Mayor, we thank you for your hospitality. Our friend here from your governor’s office has taken us around to so many of your rustic small towns. I must say, Ohio is quite beautiful.”

  “We do like it here Manfred—may I call you that? But of course in addition to being so pretty a countryside, we have a lot of hard-working Americans anxious to get started.”

  “And that, if I may be blunt Mr. Mayor, is our concern. The tax breaks are generous, and your promise of a better highway to allow us to ship parts from Munich via the Columbus airport is important. What worries us, frankly, are the workers. Our motorcars are complex machines, and our quality is our brand. Can your people meet our standards, at our price?”

  “These are good people, Manfred. Salt of the earth.”

  “Mr. Mayor, allow me to tell you a true story. Apple had redesigned their iPhone’s display literally at the last minute. New screens began arriving at the assembly plant in China near midnight the day before the units were to ship. A foreman roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, gave them each a hard biscuit and a cup of tea and sent them into the factory for work. Within thirty minutes of being woken, they started a twelve-hour shift fitting displays without a break to meet Apple’s deadline. Can your workers do that? Do they have those kinds of skills? Perhaps, of course, we would serve coffee instead of tea here. A little joke, yes?”

  “Um, well, Manfred, I just don’t know. I mean, we have laws here, a
bout people being able to sleep and how long they can work.”

  “In my China factories I do not even by law have to allow workers breaks for water or sanitation. We do find limited meals are necessary for productivity. Those are the skills I need. Can your people provide them?”

  “Manfred, really, those aren’t skills, getting out of bed to work in the middle of the night, twelve-hour shifts. You can’t bully your workers. Can you? What you’re talking is more like, well, I don’t know, more like you need farm animals than people.”

  “Ha yes, Mr. Mayor. I understand your joke in English. We indeed have such a saying in German as well. You are funny, but in North Carolina they are offering us the incentive of using prison labor if we locate the plant there, only a few of your pennies an hour. I do think it would cost more to feed farm animals. That is my joke to you. But yes, yes, of course I understand. I have opened factories for our company all over the world, and I have heard the same thing in Shenzhen and in Chennai. In the end, there I have found workers at our price point, in our needed quantity, with the skills we require, despite these so-called ‘laws.’ It is flexibility those places offer me. Of course, your people do speak good English, and that is a plus for us. But can you guarantee me that they’ll work to our standards? Can you assure me for example that there will not be a union here to disrupt our labor price calculations?”

  “Well, on the quality, sure, they’ll do it, of course. And now, you know I can’t control the thing about the union here—”

  “Mr. Mayor, again, we are in your country and I am happy to follow your custom of direct speech. My company needs a North American facility, but our margins are tight. I can drop this plant across the border in Mexico as easily as I can drop it here. You will please think about that. Meantime, allow me to think over what you have said, maybe take a closer look at your labor pool, ‘size them up,’ I think you say in English, no?”