Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Ted hung up. He was a short balding man, with a no-nonsense business-minded delivery which largely masked his more humorous and human side. “Paul,” he said as an introduction to tonight’s list of work, turning to him.

  Ted took Paul around the room and into the storage room behind the cafeteria, showing him tonight’s abundance of varied parts to be masked prior to painting. Meanwhile the rest of the team was filing in and the refinishing crew gathering up their things to leave. Sometimes some of them stayed on an extra hour, making for a crowded and unpleasant atmosphere, since the two shifts didn’t like each other. The first shift had largely instigated this situation by being overly protective of their work area and equipment, which the masking team came in and made use of.

  But tonight only one woman, Betty, stayed on to wait for her husband to come pick her up. She sat at her table looking weary with a coffee and her purse, already in her winter coat, watching the incoming crew come in.

  Paul’s entire crew was four women, all younger than his twenty-four years. Actually one of them, Abigail, had already been here an hour when he came in. Her husband came in at that time and molded downstairs, and Ted let her do refinishing work sometimes, like today. She came in a lot of Saturdays, too. Abigail began breaking out the masking tools, which they kept with all their equipment in a box behind a bean bag chair in the office, so as not to be stolen by the evil first shift. Abigail tore a production sheet from a pad and wrote her name and the date at the top with red felt pen. She was twenty-two, fairly shapely but for a little extra paunch since she and her husband stopped nearly every night at a truck stop restaurant on Route 9 that served beer. She had shortish dyed blond hair in bangs. Paul had known her for a number of years, since she had married his friend Tim. Abigail had only worked here for a little over a month but was a fast and skillful masker. She took it upon herself now to separate everybody’s tools and tear everyone a production sheet. She had once asked Paul if he’d make her his assistant. He had only laughed. An assistant boss and a team of three workers?

  Donna was nineteen. She lived with her thirty-year-old divorced boyfriend, who came every night, sometimes late, sometimes drunk, to pick her up. Donna was shortish and sexy-shapely, but the cotton jersey she wore tucked into her jeans showed she had a bit of soft, cushy beer belly too…though at this point it was still sexy and not paunchy. She had long brunette hair, rather sleepy-lidded eyes and the square-jawed perfect prettiness of today’s American beer-drinking blue collar dream girl. There was a seriousness about her, though, a bit at odds with the partying American dream girl’s rambunctious image.

  Maureen had arrived after Abigail and Donna to join this new-founded masking crew. Nineteen also, she lived with her divorced mother but was soon moving into an apartment with a young couple who were expecting a baby. The young man of that couple, Donny, worked in post-ops and had suggested this job to her. She was small and a trifle over-weight in a cuddly way. A thick, wavy mass of dark blondish hair, narrow pretty eyes in an apple-cheeked face, her mouth curling at the corners in cartoon cuteness.

  Jean was the newest recruit, this being her first week. Her live-in boyfriend Brad was also a second shift molder downstairs. She was twenty, and an old friend of Tim and Abigail She had gone to classes for hair styling and cosmetology. Her short dark hair was New Wave chic, and she wore a white T-shirt with purple and black squiggles, matching over-large purple earrings, designer jeans. Eye makeup and the thick dark eyebrows of a post-Brooke Shields Vogue cover. Actually, however, while certainly very attractive, it was part artifice and she was not as conventionally pretty as the more natural Donna.

  The girls ended up gravitating toward each other to await orders.

  Maureen plugged in her giant ghetto-blaster radio/tape player. Maureen shut off the transistor first shift had left running and turned on her own.

  She showed Jean what she had brought for lunch: in a Tupperware bowl was a wrinkly plump length of wiener and some mustard. The two girls laughed when Jean cracked, “ Who’d that come from?”

  “Okay?” Ted said.

  “Roger,” Paul replied.

  Ted began to break away to tend to other business. He’d leave at four-thirty. He said, “The only urgent priority is those front housings; I need them for painting tomorrow—all of ‘em. Okay? Does Maureen know how to do them?”

  “Ah, she did one, I think.”

  “Okay, you and, ah, Abby do them first. And what’s-her-face—

  Donna. Put the new ones on the other stuff.”

  “Yep.”

  Ted bustled off. Paul turned and headed toward his now expectant crew, Ted’s list in hand. Paul was short, slender, wiry. His dirty blond hair swung with his buoyant stride. He wore a mustache, darker like his eyebrows, and a scruffy neglected growth of beard you couldn’t call a beard, mostly collected on his chin in a rough goatee. His hair framed a bony, slim face—a good place for shadows to collect. Sensitive pursed lips, a rather large nose, deep-set sleepy-lidded green eyes. Some girls were attracted to his looks, others turned off by them. He acted, most times, like things like that didn’t matter to him. He had worked in various capacities here since he had dropped out of high school in his senior year at the age of nineteen, and had been fired from here twice for taking too many days off, but had twice been accepted back because the bosses liked him quite a bit. A good kid, Paulie—no troublemaker. He had up until little over a month ago been just another masker on first shift, but then all at once two maskers had quit and the group leader was replaced with Paul, the former leader to be sent to another branch of the company elsewhere in the state. A new, larger masking crew was established under Paul’s command to work nights. Actually, though, he had personal reasons why he had preferred working days with the earlier crew, promotion or no promotion…

  A bell rang. Three-forty. Various other crews were replaced. There was a back exit on this floor, steps leading down from the loading dock, and the sanders from upstairs came out this way since they had a punch clock up there and didn’t have to go through the molding department.

  Reaching the girls, Paul turned to glance at the sanders as they filed into the room, across it and out the dock door to their cars in the rear lot. These people were dusted from head to toe with powdered paint. Hair, skin, clothing, even lunch boxes faded to a gray-white. The factory’s effort to unite them into a uniformity, a one-toned wholeness with itself. They looked like a dull procession of ghosts filing out.

  ««—»»

  “Okay,” Paul said, and described how he was administering tonight’s work.“Why don’t you show Maureen and Jeanie how to do front housings tonight, too?” Abigail asked.

  “Because they’re new and there’s other work to do. You and me and Donna can handle it.”

  “Yeah, but they have to learn sometime. I did front housings my first night and so did Donna.”

  Paul sighed patiently. “We have a lot of other stuff to do, too.”

  “They’ll have to learn ‘em sometime.”

  “They will.” Paul started to walk away. “You and Donna can get started while I get the other stuff.”

  “Where are they, in the cage?” Abigail called.

  “Yup.”

  “Come on, Donna.”

  Paul lifted the garage door leading onto the loading dock, slipped through the translucent plastic strips hanging down to keep heat in. He used a hand truck to bring in six boxes of plastic parts that had been stored out there. He made three trips. Closed the garage door. By now Abigail and Donna had begun on the front housings, a large involved piece which required masking with tape and cardboard, pre-cut into spe-cific shapes.

  Paul deposited the six boxes near Maureen and Jean, the only two to share a table. They seemed to be becoming friends. “You’ve done these before,” he told Jean. “Maureen will show you as you go along so you won’t forget.”

  “What are these called again?” said Maureen, pen poised over her production sheet.

  “
Triple T Datas.” Paul wheeled the hand truck away.

  Office people came trickling sporadically out of a door which led into the main offices, wearing suit coats and carrying briefcases. Ted reappeared and talked with two of them. Betty sighed, her husband still not here, and scuffed into the shipping office to make a fresh cup of coffee.

  An office man on his way out said, “Hi, Paulie, how are you?”

  “Incredible, terrific, incredible.”

  The man stopped. “These girls behavin’ at night?”

  “Ahh, not on full moons, but I got a whip and chair.”

  He laughed. “Okay, as long as you got things under control. Take care. Don’t work too hard.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  Abigail sidled up to Paul out of nowhere, tapping her exacto knife in her palm, and whispered, “They took Tar-Fiend down.” She pointed the knife.Paul turned, and smirked bitterly at the barren yellow door to the cabinet near the elevator. Just a piece of tape remained.

  ««—»»

  Betty returned to her work table and sat quietly watching the kids work at the other end of the room, hunkered low over her coffee as if to hide from them. During the day she touched up painting errors, some due to their poor masking. She noticed Donna worked alone at the middle table, at the next table beyond Maureen and Jean joked quietly, at the next table Abigail worked alone, and at the last table, which was pushed up against the shipping office’s partition wall, Paul sat with his back turned to his crew.

  Betty looked up as her husband came through the dock door from outside. She sighed and gathered herself up. “Hi, Paulie,” her husband said.

  “Shalom.”

  “Shalom? What is that, the Star of David you’re wearing?”

  Paul laughed. “No, a pentagram.”

  “You worship the Devil or somethin’?”

  “No, it wards off evil spirits—like Abby.”

  “Thanks,” Abigail said.

  Betty’s husband laughed. “Shalom, everybody.”

  “Oy vey, have a nice shlep,” said Paul, in his famous old Yiddish man accent.

  At four-ten a truck arrived to pick up a shipment. Paul now handled night shipping for the building night foreman, Dave. The driver came in and Paul got up to load his truck for him using a hand fork. To one side of the room there were large boxes of foam-wrapped finished parts piled on wooden skids and lashed with plastic tape. Paul slid the fork under the skids and wheeled them out onto the dock. The girls shivered at the cold from the open garage door and Jean complained to Maureen.

  The driver signed the release and said, “See ya later.”

  “Doobie-doo,” said Paul. He slid the garage door shut.

  By now it was four-twenty-five, the first hour of the night nearly done. Ted had reappeared from wherever, slipping into his coat. His hat was already on. “Monitor got their shipment?” he noticed.

  “Yep, just left,” Paul said, masking.

  “Westman’s got two skids and that’s it for the night—they should be around ten. Okay? All set?”

  “Yep.”

  “Concentrate on getting those front housings out.” As Ted crossed the room he looked to the girls, addressed them. “We need ‘em all finished for morning.”

  “We’ll get ‘em, Ted, don’t worry,” Abby proclaimed.

  Ted left to go down through the molding area though he didn’t need to punch out. For the first time tonight the crew was alone. The way Paul liked it. Quiet, their own little world. He could relax…either extend himself to them or funnel into his own inner microcosm.

  Karma Chameleon, by Culture Club, came on Maureen’s ghetto-blaster, or “nigger box” as Abby called it. Paul wanted to ask her to turn it up but didn’t. His favorite current song, his first shift masking song, his rebirth song—his Tess song. Tess was a twenty-year-old woman who had worked with him on first shift. Married, a daughter. She had quit because she couldn’t get transportation anymore with one car and her husband working in another town. Tess was pudgy but cute and lovable and she had befriended Paul the first night she joined the shift. For a month she stayed, for a month he had felt human. A human became more important than this art, than witchcraft, the Mother Goddess and Horned God. She would impersonate Boy George, his mannerisms, dance like him and sing Karma Chameleon. He had hated music for years; the radio was a sewer.

  Her love of music had returned him to music. Now Tess was gone and he had only a musical shadow.

  Maureen stretched to the radio and spun the dial, searched and settled on a predominantly heavy metal station.

  Paul almost flinched at the break, and sizzled at her selection. But he kept his back to them and showed no change in mood. He funneled inside.

  ««—»»

  Two last office men emerged, and crossed into the cafeteria. Food machines in there, lots of bright yellow and orange tables and chairs. It was sectioned off from the work area, glass from waist level up. Beyond the cafeteria was the large dark storage room of stacked, unmade boxes, a veritable cardboard maze. Across from the longest wall of the cafeteria was the wire “cage” in which some parts were stored—glass wall and cage made a corridor which led into the dark other half of the single immense room. Paul now entered the wire-enclosed cage room to select another front housing to mask, his first one complete. He glanced across through glass into the cafeteria. The two men stood by the coffee machine. At a candy machine stood a little boy in a brown winter coat.

  His back was to Paul. He had blond hair, shiny clean. He stared in at the candy and Paul saw his face vaguely reflected in the glass machine front.

  One of the two men came over and bent, spoke to him. He slowly shook his head. The man spoke again. Shy…he didn’t respond. The man inserted some coins and asked him a question. The boy shrugged. The man chose a button…handed the boy a candy bar, patted him on the head and straightened. Rejoined his companion. The little boy turned and took the candy bar with him to a table. He sat. Paul saw part of his face and didn’t recognize him. He picked up a front housing and carried it back into the brightly lit work area.

  Maureen and Jean returned the small Triple T parts they were masking to the boxes they came in, vertical and divided by cardboard.

  Abby carried her second finished front housing and placed it near Paul’s and her first by the elevator. “You should get a rack for these,” she called to him over the music.

  “There’s none free upstairs—I looked.”

  Abby went to get another part from the cage.

  In the caf she saw the two men sitting at a table with coffee. One glanced to his watch, even though a clock was on the wall. Good, Abby thought, five—a half hour to break. She saw a little boy in a brown winter coat walking into the men’s room, which like the ladies’ room had no door but was designed at such an angle that you couldn’t look in. Cute boy. Abby shouldered two front housings and carried them back to her table, determined to show the others some real production tonight. She noted again that she was twice as fast as Paul, and he was the boss.

  Donna was mostly done with her first, but she didn’t wait to finish it or wait for break—she got up and headed quietly to the caf for a cigarette since no one was allowed to smoke out here. Flammable liquids…paint thinners and solvents. Paul looked over his shoulder. Shit. He knew what she was up to and wished his crew wouldn’t fuck off when office people were still around. Too often one would go and another would follow, and sometimes three or all four girls would take an unscheduled break at once, either in the girls’ room or the shipping office for a smoke. What if Dave strolled up here and saw only Paul working? He would try to sneak off for a butt himself once in a while and Abby would tag along, then Maureen and Jean would take notice and follow. It was getting out of hand. They knew he was easygoing, a pushover, and were taking advantage of him. Did he have to be a prick and crack down?

  The music, too. When it had just been him, Abby and Donna and the music had gotten too much, he had finally put his foot do
wn and written a letter. The letter told his crew how he liked them and how he wanted to maintain a friendly and casual atmosphere in his department, where bosses didn’t breathe down necks and everyone would get along. But loud music infringed on his working mood. It made him tense and frustrated. He didn’t want to tell people what to listen to, but he only asked that it be kept fairly low to insure a relaxed environment. Abby and Donna had complied and Abby had mercifully kept the transistor tuned to the less offensive top forty station first shift listened to.

  But Maureen and Jean had joined up lately. Maureen with her ghetto-blaster. She liked top forty and hard rock. She more than sensed that Paul hated blaring music but he had decided tonight that he was going to bring that letter in again tomorrow.

  “Come on, break,” Maureen moaned. “I’m starving.”

  “Gonna heat up your weanie?” asked Jean.

  “She can heat up my weanie,” said Paul.

  “Oh, you! ” Maureen hurled a near empty roll of masking tape at Paul’s back. “I don’t believe you said that!” Her cat-curled mouth curled further in a grin.

  Paul sat up. Glanced at a clock. “Five minutes. Better get something before the mutants pour in.” He got up and headed briskly for the caf. He hated being in there when the other departments flooded in. He was grateful they had lunch at eight when the rest of the place had lunch in here at seven-thirty.

  Humming, Paul bought a honey-glazed doughnut. Or tried to. The spiral which held it turned, the honey-glazed doughnut hung precariously off its cliff edge but didn’t drop. “Asshole,” Paul said. He shook the machine.

  Thank God—this time it dropped. Sometimes you got robbed, sometimes you got a Coke and all your money came back. Las Vegas. Paul turned back toward the shipping office where there’d be coffee for his doughnut.