“Yeah.”
The waitress brought us our meals, and I was in love with my avocado burger on the first bite. How have I never had this before? I thought.
We ate and watched surfers squeeze in a few after-work waves. As the sun set, my dad turned his head toward the horizon. “I can get used to this.”
A few weeks later my father and a few of the other higher-ups came down to the warehouse to address the workers. We made sure not to make eye contact. Pointing to my father, Suni nudged me.
“He’s a Canadian,” she said.
“One of those,” I responded.
My father and the rest of the guys in ties stood against the back wall of the warehouse. All the workers left their stations and gathered around.
“First off, I would just like to say thank you for all the hard work,” my dad said.
The workers looked at each other and smiled. I anticipated my dad was going to follow up with some bad news. Whenever someone thanks you for all your hard work, it’s usually followed with a “but we’re going to have to let you go” or “no more bagel Fridays at the end of the month.”
“We’ve got a tight deadline coming up and I’m going to have to implement mandatory overtime this week.”
I was right—bad news.
“Damn, overtime, this sucks,” I said to Jerry, after my dad and the rest of the higher-ups went back upstairs to their offices.
“This is good. More money,” he responded.
“Money, money, money,” Suni sang, rotating her arms doing an awkward version of the cabbage patch. “Time and a half!”
The first week of overtime was a complete one-eighty compared to my life in college. My five-class schedule and occasional odd job took twenty-five hours of my whole week. I chose how to spend the remaining time. Fifty hours of responsibility over five straight days was a drastic change. I was so exhausted that when I got home on Friday and my dad offered to take me to the beach for a surf lesson, I declined.
By the second week I adapted to the schedule and looked forward to the final two hours of the day because we were allowed to listen to the radio. Ranchera music overpowered the industrial hum that filled the space around my head during regular hours, putting me and everyone else in a positive mood.
“I can use this money to get my daughter those piano lessons she’s been asking for,” Suni said as she bobbed her head to the music.
“My son wants a skateboard,” Jerry said. “We’ll see what’s left over after all the bills.”
“Bills are no fun,” Suni said.
“Okay. Disneyland with the family!”
“You’re crazy, Yeddy!”
“How about you Steven? What will you spend the extra money on?”
“It’s going straight into savings for school.”
“Good boy,” she said. A new song came on the radio and she bobbed her head to the music. “Dance with me.” She grabbed my hand and raised it in the air and spun herself under it.
At the end of the week I felt rich. I’d never seen a paycheck that big with my name on it. It was nice to see my hard work boiled down to dollars and cents. Until that point my money had been going straight into my savings account reserved for books, pizza, and weed when I returned to college. I treated myself to a couple of Wu-Tang CDs and Bukowski’s Factotum.
On my last day Suni asked me where I went for lunch. I brought a sandwich every day, and even though I could have eaten in the cafeteria, I felt more comfortable sitting in my car alone with a book. I had enough trouble making small talk on the line. I found it easiest to drive two blocks down the road and eat in an empty parking lot while reading Alex Garland’s The Beach. The quiet time I spent lost in the story of a guy my age living life on a secluded island filled with marijuana plants was the perfect escape after four hours of robotic work. I had to set an alarm to alert myself when it was time to head back. Otherwise, I’d get so engulfed in the story I’d forget to return to my station.
“I read a book in my car,” I said.
“That’s sad. Eat with us in the cafeteria,” she said. “Meals should be shared with friends.”
The cafeteria was segregated into line workers, supervisors, tech support, and maintenance crew, which were then segregated into race. I sat with Jerry and Suni at the Filipino table with my PB&J.
“Speak English,” Suni said to the table as I sat down.
The table went quiet. Everyone stared into their Tupperware containers filled with rice and noodles in strange-colored sauces. One woman, who I’d never seen before, was spooning fist-sized spoonfuls of rice and beans in her mouth when she stopped and smiled at me.
“You’re so handsome,” she said. “Maybe I introduce you to my niece sometime.”
“Okay,” I said opening my sandwich bag revealing the familiar smell of peanut butter.
“Steven, you should try Yeddy’s balut,” Suni said.
“He won’t like it,” Jerry said.
“What is it?”
Jerry pushed a container in front of me and handed me a plastic fork. I glimpsed what looked like a hard-boiled egg, buried under grayish-brown stuff mixed with brown rice.
“He’s not going to eat it,” Suni said.
“I’ll try it,” I said. I’m not an adventurous eater. Growing up I spent most family dinners pushing my mother’s meatloaf or baked chicken around the plate, negotiating how many bites I had to take before I could just have Honey Nut Cheerios instead.
I cut off a small piece and brought it to my mouth. The fleshy glob dangled off the fork and smelled like spoiled shellfish. I placed it on my tongue and slowly moved it around my mouth afraid to bite down. It was slimy. Suni stared at my mouth anticipating that I would spit it out. It slid into the back of my throat. Suni gave me an encouraging head nod. I swallowed.
“You like?” Suni asked.
“It’s good,” I lied. It tasted like Silly Putty soaked in vinegar, but still better than raw pig parts stuffed into a PB&J, I imagined. I took a huge swig of my water to rinse my mouth.
“White boys usually don’t like balut,” Jerry said.
“Most white boys wouldn’t even try balut,” Suni said.
Jerry told me about growing up in a Filipino village that sometimes struggled to get clean water. At age twenty-two he’d saved enough money to move to America. He sent part of his paycheck back to his brother, who he hoped would join him in California when he got a visa. I was about to tell him that I was here with a green card, but quickly remembered that Steven Barton was American. It was disappointing that I couldn’t reveal that I was a fellow foreigner. Our coming-to-America stories were different, but we still shared the bond of being immigrants.
“Back to school,” Suni said toward the end of the day.
“You were fun to work with,” I said.
It wasn’t the beach summer I had hoped for. I didn’t play volleyball with any beach babes, but the time I spent with Suni and Jerry made the job a positive experience. Yet at the end of the two months I was ready to move on.
I was excited to get back on campus, fix my own schedule, and not be attached to a power drill. I craved the free time to read and have three-hour conversations on the underlying themes of loneliness and alienation in Hemingway’s work. Or sleep until noon simply because I felt like it.
“Will you eat balut when you get back to school?” Suni asked.
“They don’t serve it in the cafeteria. Maybe if I go to the international part of town. I bet they’d be impressed to see a white boy like me order balut.”
“Bring a girl. She’ll think you’re very exotic,” she said, laughing.
On the last day of August, I loaded my things into the back of my dad’s car. The weather was perfect, just the same as the day he picked me up, as well as every day in between. Before I headed into the airport, my dad pulled a crisp hundred-dollar bill from his money clip and handed it to me. “Fold this up and put it behind your license in your wallet.”
“Thanks, but
for what?”
“An emergency,” he said. “I missed out on a lot of fun when I was in college because I was always broke. Have some of the fun I missed.”
•
A few years later I was sitting in a cubicle drinking coffee and fighting with a spreadsheet. I was late on a deadline because I couldn’t figure out how to place a pie chart in the top left corner of the page. I looked up at the corkboard ceiling and calmed myself with a deep breath. I closed my eyes and remembered those repetitive days as Steven Barton. I missed the mindlessness of the work. I had a clearly defined task that I worked at until 3:30, and when I clocked out, my concerns about fans and hard drives disappeared until I returned the next day. I’d lost that feeling. Work was always on my mind. “Do I have a meeting tomorrow? Shit, I have to have that completed by noon. Man, I hate that jerk-off Bradley.”
I never thought like that at the warehouse. There’d always be more fans to drill, and that was that, which made it possible for Suni and Jerry to provide for their families, which in turn allowed my father to provide for his.
I noticed the drone of keyboard chatter for the first time that day and looked over at the girl across the aisle. She wore earphones and stared intently at her computer screen. We had traded smiles every morning and afternoon for the past three months. The only thing I knew about her was that she liked strawberry yogurt and was environmentally conscious enough to reuse the same plastic spoon for weeks at a time. I didn’t know if she had a daughter who wanted to learn piano or if she dreamed of one day taking her family to Disneyland. Had her name not been written on her cubicle wall I’m not even sure I’d have known it was Angela.
I never saw Suni or Jerry again after my final day. I believed they were both on the assembly line at that exact moment, chatting about their families while installing fans. Suni was probably nervously laughing after something she just said.
I stood up from my desk to fill up my coffee mug. As I passed by the girl in the cubicle I lingered for just a moment, hoping she might stop me and ask for a dance.
The Jump (It’s Only Temporary)
I kept my beer in my hand, never putting it down for fear of picking up the wrong one and drinking in a mouthful of ash and cigarette butts. A barefooted blonde sat across from me and puffed on a joint that popped every time the cherry burned through a seed.
It was a Tuesday night. I’d just gotten off work and was sitting on the couch in the living room of The Club House, a four-room crash pad in Ocean Beach that my buddy Daniel shared with a revolving door of tenants. It was supposed to be a low-key night, not like Friday or Saturday when we drank until the house was dry or the sun rose.
Daniel was a junior studying business at San Diego State; he still had time to make mistakes and run up his parents’ credit card without ever seeing a bill. I was a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate staying with my parents rent-free for the summer. I was building my savings before moving to Seattle in the fall.
I had a temp job picking and shipping in a medical supply warehouse. After work my mom cooked me dinner and I drank my father’s beers. Sometimes we played cards, and other nights I sat in the guest room watching HBO.
I spent weekends at The Club House, where I showed up Friday after work and didn’t leave until Sunday afternoon. I slept on the couch or on an oversize beanbag. One night I tried to steal Daniel’s bed, but I got out when he stripped off all his clothes and hopped in next to me and asked if I wanted to be the little spoon.
We’d known each other since we were kids living on the East Coast. I was close with his whole family and hung out in their kitchen after school and rummaged through their fridge. His older brother and I used to sneak cigarettes in the woods. I was happy to spend the summer living with my parents because I knew I could go to The Club House and live like I was still in college.
My girlfriend, Ashley, who was moving to Seattle with me, was on the East Coast for the summer. In August we’d drive up together, then rent an apartment, and I’d start my career. I felt like cohabitation and a full-time job were things expected of me after I received my degree.
Before Ashley went back east, my father pulled me aside and offered to get her a job at his company, so she could live with us for the summer. I never mentioned that opportunity to her. I wanted one last independent experience before we combined our lives into a one-bedroom apartment.
“I’ve got to be up early for work tomorrow,” I said.
“Work is lame,” Daniel said.
The blonde passed me the joint. The paper crackled as I inhaled. When I handed it back, she smiled, revealing a gap in her front teeth.
I liked talking with the California stoner chicks that hung around The Club House, and they seemed to like me. It never went past playful flirting, but sometimes I felt guilty.
“Hey guys,” we heard Todd say before he entered the room. He turned the corner, and I saw that he was wearing his CHICKS DIG ME trucker hat, which he only put on after eight beers. Most of the time he was a Dean’s List student and captain of the lacrosse team, but after sucking down a few beers, it was impossible to know he was on track to becoming a big shot in the financial world. “Want to jump off a bridge?”
“Are you serious?” Daniel asked.
“Yeah, it’s about fifty feet above the jetty.”
“Is it safe?”
“I don’t think anyone’s died,” Todd said. “It will get your adrenaline pumping. Take a risk.”
“I’m in,” I said.
I liked the guys I worked with at the warehouse even though I didn’t feel like one of them. They wore steel-toed boots and pants with double-stitched knees while I worked in cargo shorts and sneakers. They drove pickup trucks with cracked side view mirrors and had banged-up lunch boxes with matching thermoses filled with black coffee. They compared this warehouse to others they worked at—which one had the hottest women working the front desk and which one had the best vending machines. They smoked cigarette brands I’d never heard of that smelled like charcoal. Their children were always getting detention, and their ex-wives slept around. They spent weekends in casinos and strip clubs and always tried to get me to tag along. They thought I was crazy when I said strip clubs made me uncomfortable and casinos were a waste of money.
One day a man in a tie who worked in the air-conditioned office above the warehouse needed help loading boxes into his car. He asked me if I was in school, and I told him I had just graduated.
“Then why are you here?” he asked.
He was relieved when I told him it was only temporary.
One Sunday afternoon I was driving home from The Club House while I pounded Gatorade to cure my hangover. There was an accident on the highway, and traffic was stalled. I was dehydrated, and combined with the Monday’s-coming doldrums, my anxiety about the move revealed itself. I’d been suppressing my doubt since Ashley left, but as the car in front of me came to a full stop, I worried I wasn’t ready to live with someone and get a job that required a degree and forty hours a week.
What I really wanted to do was write, which had been a hobby until sophomore year of college when I read Brett Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. It was the first book I read and thought I could do that. Paying bills as a novelist seemed much more fulfilling than working in an office, but I never shared those thoughts with anyone. It was basically like telling someone I wanted to be an astronaut. “Oh, that’s cute, but when that doesn’t pan out, what would you actually like to do?” I assumed people would say.
I couldn’t image going to the same office every day for the next forty years of my life. My father was happy working sixty hours a week and spending half the year on business trips because it gave him satisfaction to know his hard work gave me opportunities he never had. I didn’t plan on having kids because I didn’t want someone depending on me for opportunities. I’d rather focus on making my own.
I knew I should have already been in my car headed home as the four of us walked down an unlit bike path. D
aniel passed me a bottle of tequila.
“Work’s going to be rough tomorrow,” I said after taking a swig that caused me to shiver.
“I have to work for two hours tomorrow,” Daniel responded.
“You mean sit at a desk and surf the web?” I said as a joint found its way to my lips. I took a sweet hit that made the back of my throat numb.
“Don’t knock my internship, man. It’s going to land me a job after I graduate.”
“Too early to worry about that,” I said.
“That’s the type of attitude that lands a college graduate living with his parents and working in a warehouse.” He pulled the joint from my hand, causing a dustup of orange embers that evaporated in the breeze.
“It’s just for the money,” I said. “This is my last hurrah in blue collar work.”
“Are you going home soon?” the blonde asked. I looked at her as we passed a faraway house with its porch light on and caught a glimpse of her face and the gap in her teeth. “You should stay longer,” she said.
“I have to work tomorrow, but we’ll see.”
The idea to move to Seattle came about after a drunken phone conversation with a college buddy who’d moved there a year prior. After graduation all my friends had left town and started careers while I was still living in the same apartment and working the same job delivering flowers. I was in need of a change and was sold on Seattle when my friend offered up his guestroom and Ashley said she’d go with me.
Since I planned on moving in the fall, I wasn’t picky when seeking out a summer job. I told the woman at the staffing agency I was looking for something short-term. I was presented with a few options and took a warehouse position because it was a mile from my parents’ house. I didn’t even have to get on the highway for the commute, and I could go home for lunch, but mainly I ate in the parking lot with Joey. He was my age and had a kid and an ex-wife.
Now for the Disappointing Part Page 3