Graduation Day

Excerpt from ZOEY'S TALE & OTHER SHORT FICTION, Highland Press, April 2012:

Upon graduating from Hancock Academy in the spring of 1973, I decided I would not go directly to college in the fall. Planning instead to take a year off and save some money before traveling across America by Greyhound bus, I landed work as an order-filler at Star Foods in South Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay.

Star Foods was a distributor of specialty foods like Gefelte fish, Matzoh balls, special candies, and other imported items such as cheese and high-end chocolate. They had a fleet of trucks delivering goods to ALMACS, and STOP & SHOP, and other major supermarkets throughout southern New England. Customers included many mom and pop stores scattered around Rhode Island. The business did quite well in those days, but I haven’t seen them around Providence for years. Given all that I saw going on there I suspect they went bust. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Each morning I’d grab an order sheet from the bin up front and begin running around the aisles of the warehouse with a hand truck, pulling boxes of goods from shelves, then building properly balanced, six-foot high stacks neatly down each aisle. The shelves I negotiated stood high, at least 25 or 30 feet above the floor below. Climbing way up to grab a container of 16-ounce kosher pickles in glass bottles in one hand, while easing down to the floor with the other, was precarious work. I did this dozens of times each shift, in spite of a serious aversion to heights. It was also exhausting work, even for a healthy young man brimming with energy. After a quick check by the supervisor to ensure the order was accurately filled, the truckers would pack the boxes into the back of their trucks for delivery. Packing the truck took skill, as every box needed to fit tightly to prevent shifting and subsequent breakage during transport. Jamming the boxes together too tightly invited disaster: broken jars of pickled beets splattered onto boxes of Toblerone chocolate did not go over well with the customers. It tended to piss off management something awful, too.

The warehouse was a cold, gloomy environment with filthy, cracked concrete aisles and no heat in the winter time. I quickly discovered the best thing to do, both to avoid boredom and stay warm, was to keep moving until quitting time. It wasn’t hard because every order we handled required our full attention and there always seemed to be orders to fill. It was important to retrieve the right item, flavor, size, and quantity when pulling boxes the first time around, otherwise you wasted precious minutes. Once in a while a box slipped from my cold, dirty hands and came crashing down on the floor below. Larry the supervisor–a mean SOB on a good day–would go berserk, cursing and jumping up and down before viciously hurling a mop and bucket towards me, screaming for me to cleanup my mess. A typical accident resulted in two or three busted bottles out of eight in a box, by no means a nominal cost for the warehouse owner. I knew Larry wanted to haul off and hit me during those obnoxious fits of his, but he never did–a good thing because he was huge and I was only a stick of a kid.

Two months after I began working at Star Foods a new worker showed up one morning. Vinny Pasquale was two years older than me, a short, muscular Italian guy with muscles rippling all over his compact body, with pitch-black long, greasy hair parted down the middle. He came from Johnston, an Italian enclave west of Providence. I disliked Vinny from the moment I first met him, which sometimes happens between me and new people. It was Vinny’s eyes that bothered me most. When I looked into them there was no life there, only pure, concentrated evil. Meeting Vinny was like being one of those unlucky victims in a horror movie when a new character suddenly appears and you immediately sense things are going to get a whole lot worse.

Rod Haynes
Renton, WA