Beginning Chapter Two;A New Friend, an Old Breast, and Bacon Flavored Novelties

A New Friend, an Old Breast, and Bacon Flavored Novelties Warehoused/one When I shut down the old Ford this morning and downed the last of my morning Coke I had a renewed zest about what I was aiming for, aspiring towards. I had a freshly laundered tee shirt and a clean shaven face. I looked more like they wanted me to look, and I marched right into Morgan’s office about five minutes after I clocked in and proceeded to shove my big nose right up her fallen ass. I asked her for a couple of minutes to talk and she listened. She more stared and waited for me to finish, but anyway, I explained the whole matter of “dressing for the job you want” and how the last few days of showing up in old clothes and unshorn was not a good representation of Pete Butler. I did express at the onset that although I realized the handbook stated the clean face rule mainly as a standard to be kept by folks in the public eye, or working on the floor of one of their stores, not us warehouse dogs, that I had been ashamed of the fact that I had been so poorly presented. At first she simply shook her head as if to say “yeah, it really doesn’t matter for the likes of your rank,” but when I explained further that between the adjustments to the new schedule as well as parental duties, things such as laundry and personal hygiene had taken a back seat, and I was happy to tell her that I now felt “presentable” as my mother would call it. Morgan smiled, “I bet you feel like a new man.” She said. I told her “yes ma’am, I really do!” smiling back at her. Then and there the deed was done, nose out of ass again and back to work I went, ready for just another day. It began as such at first. My initial p.o. required the throwing of about six medium weight boxes onto my table and opening them up to see what I would have to work on. There were wallets, tote bags, waterproof totes, sequined bags and some horrifically gaudy scarves. Everything was in one of three colors; tangerine dreams, indigo sky or sunflower burst. I sorted all of the different packages and then cut them all out of the cellophane wrappers and began applying the stickers to cover the “made in” words. I was a happy cog in the wheel of a utopian summer beach tourists dream shopping spree once again. While I was tagging everything and getting ready to throw it all in the respective boxes, bound for the different stores I noticed Alan at the table in front of me had moved on from the ladies dresses. I made a comment in that regard and he smiled an earnest sighing smile of relief and nodded, replaced his earplugs once again. Everyone but me; the old man, has a fancy twenty-first century music playing device about half the size of a deck of playing cards that fits right in the pocket. I have been familiar with this technology for years now, but dreadfully behind the times when it comes to utilizing it. No matter, I have plenty of music in my head. Somehow as the day progressed Alan and I began to chat more, mostly about music. I had initially taken him for a college kid, down for the summer and just working a job to pay the bills and buy some books for school while surfing and skating in his free time, and I wasn’t far off. What I didn’t expect was for him to be like a little brother in a way. This kid was smart. Although there were obvious gaps in some of the musical tastes, there were also similarities which I had to give him big credit for. When I was fourteen I was listening to what those young kids regard now as the stuff of legend; Black Flag, Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys. Alan was hip to most of it though, and also to the fact that I knew a lot of those pioneers; Greg Ginn, Mike Watt, Ian MacKaye, and further that I was currently working on a long term musical goal with a great guitarist/composer/producer out in Santa Monica named Peter DiStefano. Peter is the guitarist for a popular band called Porno For Pyros as well as Lance Herbstrong, Hellride and anything else that has gone gold out of California in the last fifteen years. I showed him the phone messages and stuff as proof and it got the old man a few wows. It’s always good for us oldies to seem relevant around the young crowd. We talked a lot of music and he suggested a few cool new bands that I should check out; it was a very nice and honest mutual exchange! I had made a new friend. As the day progressed so did our conversation. We began discussing our mutual disdain, or at least conflict of conscience as automatons that spent the day for a relatively low wage repackaging goods made by kids in third world sweatshops and then sent to different parts of the United states for our company to eventually order and have us tag as a more “politically correct” item for purchase. I had been noticing all of the Made in China stamps and so had Alan. We were not instructed to hide any of the obvious labeling so to speak, but anyone who thinks for a living as well as does would have a hard time not noticing the smoke and mirrors we were putting to use in our un-boxing and repackaging. We started talking about this strange twist when I brought up the walking leather ladies that come in from time to time to do their “inspections of the goods and their slaves.” He had noticed one of the older bags I described before, and we talked a little about my take on that type of person. We also discussed the global economic disaster as it applies to the working poor of our nation and how most poor people are fooled into buying cheaply made goods from mega stores that offer cheap prices by ordering in bulk, and about how that really drives our economy down in the long run, but it depends on the apathy that seems to go hand in hand with American poverty these days. We talked even further about the crooked lending institutions and practices, the consolidation of global wealth, and not from a conspiracy theorist standpoint, but from his, a student of international economics in school. “We just talked about all of this last semester!” he blurted. “Did you talk about FIAT currency?” I asked as he assured me right away that they had. We talked about the failure of the European Union and how Germany runs Europe now, and how the true economic prognosis is really dreary for those of our generation, well, more his, but for discussion’s sake we were definitely on the same page. It was invigorating. He got what I was saying and not only justified it by having recently studied the hard facts of it which I could only paraphrase, but he also understood my passion and sort of edified it with his zeal for discovering an awake human in the warehouse worker across the table from him. He studied and well understood the whole global economic mess, and I was able to approach it from angles which added a fresh twist on his learned knowledge. I said it earlier, I made a new friend. I was sort of sad when he told me that he’d be leaving in a week or so, but I understood, and it really didn’t matter, we had connected on a meaningful plain, and we would continue to do so. We were both sure of that fact. We talked quite a bit more over the course of the day, exchanging musical tastes and ideas, discussed my passion about the poorly handled infrastructure development of my Congressional district and the misguided leadership in general of our state and their energy policies. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” as it has become known is threatening to destroy the western part of North Carolina and the main energy corporation out there wants to spend a billion dollars to rehab a failing and aging nuclear facility. The power plant is downstream from a dam that could burst, which would give us a nuclear disaster effectively one hundred times as destructive as the Fukushima incident in Japan after the recent earthquake over there and the resulting tsunamis. We took a break and shook our heads. “It sucks, but it makes you feel so helpless, I mean, the people with the money don’t really care what we think.” said Alan. “I know” I said, “but I plan on running for the District One North Carolina Senate Seat in 2014, as an independent, I have no chance of winning one of the two major primaries, but I can get on the ballot as an independent.” Alan was thrilled. “Hell yeah man!” and he added “and even if you don’t win, maybe you can at least raise a few eyebrows to the issues that people are sort of blind to.” “My point exactly, and even if I don’t win, yeah, maybe someone more qualified will do it in 2016.” We talked a little more about the local politics of the beaches and coastal plain and of how no matter the science or geology mandated a serious change in the course of development in regard to sea level rise and climate change, the driving force in our area is tourism and tourist based real estate. I told him of a recent twenty some page study I’d read put out by Duke University about the effects of erosion on our barrier islands and the proposals of beach nourishment projects. Sadly, it all came down to the relative value of properties depending on their proximity to the ocean. There were many mathematical equations to work it all out for us, but the bottom line was simple; if the area generates more money than it costs to build and maintain fake beaches through destructive and wasteful beach nourishment projects, there was no argument. The answer would always be to protect the real estate, and the state’s cash cow. “Man, I never even think of stuff like that, but I really should” Alan sighed. “Shit man, don’t beat yourself up, I never used to myself before I spent ten years studying that sort of stuff as a tour guide, and besides, I’m an old guy” I winked, “ worry about it when you’re forty three.” I laughed. Lunchtime was coming on and we needed to finish working and at least appear busy so we returned to our tasks at hand, but the talk had been good. After lunch the day only got better. Working among all of those “better than you” types, you can’t help but feel a slight sense of victory when one of them slips up and shows you their ignorance, or in the case I was just lucky enough to be around for, one of their breasts. Ha! I was just finishing up my morning p.o. after the chicken salad sandwich I brought for lunch and all of the stimulating conversation with my young friend when while bent over and taping up another box to throw I saw it, a titty. Yep, it was just a glance, but a full and wondrous chance occurrence wherein one of the women from upstairs had to come down among us for some reason and just happened to be leaning over a box of the stuff we pack for one reason or another. As I said it was a quick look, out of the corner of my eye, and I had looked away as soon as I saw it, but being a sort of opportunistic if not dirty old man, I quickly took survey of the surrounding area, the eyes on me and the woman’s attention, and then took a nice good look, maybe a full second or two of focused gazing. She was wearing a loose fitting shirt and probably had no intention of bending over that far when she dressed for work that morning, but there she was, and there it was. Upon evaluation of the hanging mass I noticed that she was in fact wearing a bra, so there was no full pornographic image to carry away, but the satisfaction in seeing enough to assure me that had she known she would be made to feel uncomfortable was in itself a small victory. I lingered for a moment longer until she finished and walked away, and I surveyed the rest of what I had just stolen a peep of, and like most of the upstairs crowd, she was poorly aged and holding on for dear life to some semblance of youth, but as is the case for all of us, time and circumstance eventually undo the green of our youthful former selves. This fact was true in both of our cases, but in mine I make no attempt to hide or hike up anything, and she had taken a different road. “God bless her” as the older folks say, and yes, my warehouse tenure was certainly taking a turn for the better on this day. I relished the thought of what I had seen and thought for a slim second more, and then went to Morgan’s office for another assignment. Walking into the office is always a crap-shoot. You never really know what you might be in for, but depending on a person’s affinity or not for all things bacon, I had either hit the jackpot or really crapped out. I however LOVE bacon, and as I cut the tape on the next five boxes and began to unwrap their contents my heart soared. There were bacon flavored toothpicks and lip balm. Bandages that looked like bacon strips as well as pickle shaped bandages. I recall well over a half dozen moustache related gag items from candies and mints to actual fake moustache kits containing one for every day of the week, AND moustache bandages that when applied to the lip made a person to look like he or she was wearing a moustache. It just got better and better. The words on the packages and the descriptive directions for usage of all of the gag gift items had me snapping pictures and laughing out loud like a child. The package of self-adhesive stylish moustaches read “don’t be caught in public with a naked upper lip!” I LOVED it, maybe it was the heat, but it got even better; there was the classic “Two-Way SQUIRT CAMERA” with a cool black and white fifties style package that read: “A classic prank! Simply fill the camera with water and offer to take someone’s picture. When they pose…SQUIRT! What a gas! But wait…for double the fun, slyly rotate the hidden nozzle 180’ and offer to let THEM take YOUR picture…SQUIRT! You got them again!” That was my favorite really, but there were other highlights. There was the “Delinquents with Combs” switchblade comb with the fifties greaser thug on the package, the “Uh Oh EMERGENCY Underpants” and even “Squirrel Underpants “for some strange reason. Rounding it all off were three very disturbing masks; “the creepy pig head mask”, the “unicorn head mask” and the always popular “squirrel head mask.” I was in heaven for hours as I tagged, boxed and distributed all of that stuff to their respective boxes and bins. Before I knew it six o’clock was upon me and that meant quitting time. Alan and I discussed some stuff I’d written about my trilogy of novellas documenting my fall from grace as a mild-mannered tour guide into the bowels of Bedlam’s underworld as a serial killer and I promised to bring it to him the next day to check out and give me notes. I explained that it covered a lot of the sentiment I have and that we had discussed about the “shoppers from upstairs.” He said that’d be cool with him and he gave me a list of some new bands to check out. We exchanged the accepted hand shake stylings of the day and off he went on his skateboard while I walked quietly back to the Ford. It had been a hot day and I was sweating a fair amount, but when factoring in the late afternoon Outer Banks breeze, it only served to make those last few moments of work related walking seem a strange sort of sweet. As I strolled along the cracked concrete of the warehouse complex I listened to the Grey Catbirds call out. I took off my hat and rubbed my thinning hair and just breathed it all in; the disappearing gasoline laden exhaust of the cheap cars driven by those like us, the drying but still present smell of Japanese Honeysuckle, fiberglass, resin and fresh cut grass.