Welcome to the Working Week

Since I was a little kid, I always thought the world had something special in store for me. Like it was only a matter of time before I made my mark. I felt certain that I was cut out for Big Things. Notoriety, respect, achievement. Those words were all part of my future. Wherever I was at any moment was just a stepping stone on my way to greatness of some kind. I just knew it.

Well, yesterday at around 11:30am, about ten minutes into my first shift as a member of the University of Wisconsin Hospital's Patient Meal Service (PMS) division, I stopped feeling that way. I watched the conveyor belt go by, and I took a quick look around at the broken-down batch of losers and low-lifes who God had somehow swept into the exact same corner of the universe as He had swept me, and I stopped feeling that way forever.

That's right, I took the Hospital Job.

I rode my moped out to there yesterday in 19 degree weather. Maybe a fifteen minute ride. My rule for Winter moped use is that if the roads are clear, you can ride in just about any temperature. You just need to bundle up good.

I got there at 11:15 for my 11am "interview." I guess part of me was trying to blow the whole thing. I went into the administrative office and asked for Verna. The nice lady told me to wait, and that Lana would be out to talk to me in a minute. I guess Lana will do, I thought.

While I waited in the office I looked out onto the working floor. You know how sometimes your mind paints a picture of something, and then when you actually see it it looks nothing like what you had imagined? That wasn't the case here. The place was nearly exactly as I pictured it from hearing Max's stories about it. It was basically one big grey room full of people, food, and equipment. No style. No art. No Feng Shui. At the center of the room was a conveyor belt, maybe 35 feet long, adjoined on both sides by steel cases full of food, which were manned by workers in white outfits. They watched intently as the belt rolled past them. First would come a metal bracket with a piece of paper attached to it (I soon realized these were menus). Then came a cafeteria tray. Onto those trays the workers would slap the appropriate items: dollops of mashed potatoes were scooped into small ceramic bowls and loaded on, cubes of lasagna slapped into casserole dishes and spun into position. Plastic juice cups were haphazardly tossed onto the trays.

It looked like awful, menial, mindless work. With the added element of pressure. I almost got up and left. I didn't want to judge anybody, but to be honest, I was thinking, This job is beneath me. It's low. I don't know if I can do it.

But before I could explore that line of thinking any further, Lana entered the room. She was an immense woman -- maybe 300 pounds -- with a kind enough face, but an expression that seemed to indicate she'd long ago given up hope of ever finding another moment of happiness. Within five minutes of her arrival in the room, the following events had taken place:

1. She shook my hand and seemed totally fine with the fact that I was late and I hadn't even brought a résumé.

2. She offered me a job as an LTE, or Limited Term Employee. This meant that I could work there for up to 1000 hours, not a second more. It may have been that expiration date, a pre-imposed limit on this futureless job, that led me to...

3. ...accept the offer.

4. I was issued my very own paper hat and told to go observe the Trayline.

Holy shit. Joining the workforce is easy!

I put the hat on and walked out to the conveyor belt area, where I met up with Dennis, the day shift manager. Later on I overheard that the evening shift manager's name is also Dennis. In Fast Times, Brad's manager at All-American Burger was Dennis Taylor. I am not sure what exactly to do with this data, but I think I'm onto something.

Dennis the Day Shift Manager was a pale, skinny dude with a moustache who looked like a child molester but turned out to be pretty nice. He gave me the lowdown on what I'd be doing in my new job.

PMS is responsible for delivering food to every patient in the hospital, he said with what seemed to me a little too much pride. The food is cooked two thirds of the way through by the cooking crew (they work the overnight shift, under a third manager whose name I can only assume is Dennis), and then it's stored in walk-in fridges until it's time to serve it. At that point, it is microwaved for the final one third of the required cookage.

After the initial cook-through, the next step the food takes on the way to the patients is the Trayline, which starts every day at 11 am. That's what I had been watching from the office. Those steel workstations were each responsible for a specific meal component. One person mans the entree station, another the starch station, another does vegetables, and another does beverages and desserts. At the front of the line stands The Starter. He -- big surprise -- starts the Trayline. In his hands is the menu for each patient in the hospital, with their choices circled. The Starter's name is Ken -- he's about forty years old, bearded, and I'm pretty sure, gay. That's all I've observed about him so far. He takes the menus and attaches them to the little metal stand and sets it on the belt. Then he takes a tray, puts a paper placemat on it, puts the appropriate silverware and salt and pepper packet (there are about four different packets according to patients' needs: low salt, no sugar, no pepper for those with weakened immune systems, etc.), and sends it on down the line behind the corresponding menu.

The rest of the white hat crew who occupy the stations along the belt have to recognize what kind of a menu it is (again, low salt, low fat, low sugar, NFFV-No Fresh Fruit or Vegetables, low fat AND low salt, clear liquids, etc.) and serve up a helping of whatever menu choices the patient has circled. In the format which that menu requires. Meaning the starch guy was responsible for four different kinds of mashed potatoes and four different types of gravy, and he had to choose the right combination based on the patient's dietary needs.

This was a lot of information, and to be honest, I started thinking maybe I wasn't up to the job. Not that it was beneath me, but that it was too challenging for me. That belt was moving FAST. And all the dirtbags on the line were in constant motion trying to keep up.

Dennis told me to sit in behind Carmine on the entree station for a little while. Carmine didn't seem like a bad fellow, he didn't turn a cold shoulder to the new guy or anything. He knew Max and so I guess he figured if I was a friend of Max's I wasn't a complete jive turkey. He was from New Jersey and he had really long straight hair that he pulled into a pony tail. He was working the lasagna gracefully while explaining the job to me and still finding time to tell me stories about his motorcycle, his band, and his sex life. The first thing I noticed about him was that he had a beautiful speaking voice: low and intense, but with that unmistakable Jersey lilt that almost sounds Southern. Just a glorious voice that I'm sure he perfected through late nights of cigarette smoking. After I watched and listened to him him for about forty minutes, he threw me to the wolves.

"Alright, your turn," he said, switching places with me.

He had explained that if you fall behind, you're supposed to yell out "Hold the line!" and then the guy at the very end of the line (The Checker -- responsible for making sure each tray is correctly stocked) presses a button and the belt stops. Then you have to frantically catch up on whatever trays you missed. And I fell behind almost immediately. Trays zoomed past without entrees. I was whizzing lasagna down the line and asking people to put it on trays that were almost to the end of the line. I was hustling like crazy to keep up, or rather, hustling just to stay behind. I was a blur. An inefficient blur, but a blur nonetheless. It was completely reminiscent of "I Love Lucy." Since it was my first day, I would do anything to avoid saying "Hold the line!" It would be admitting defeat, and you don't admit defeat on Day One. Day Three, maybe.

The person across the line from me, the Starch Dude, was a guy named Mark, late 30's, long beard, glasses, deep voice, kinda scary looking. Like a hippie with a violent past. I've heard through Max that he's an underachieving intellectual type who's been working there for about ten years, just sticking around for the benefits. Sensing my struggle, he started grabbing trays to prevent them from getting past me. As he held them there with the belt running underneath them, and everyone staring at me, he'd read off the items I needed to put on: "Fat Free Lasagna, no sauce." "Next tray: Regular Lasagna, with sauce." "This one needs a chicken breast," etc. He was getting PISSED. I haven't mentioned the way it works: the sooner Trayline gets done, the sooner we all go on break, and the longer the break will be as a result. So teamwork is essential.

And I wasn't holding up my end. Even with his help, trays and menu holders were stacking up and clanging into each other.

Finally, Mark yelled out, "HOLD THE LINE!!!!!!!!!"

Then he ran back, grabbed the first tray that I had let slip by, and swept all the trays back to my station with one furious wave of his arm. Stuff was falling on the floor and getting all banged around, and the room went completely quiet. His face was bright red and the veins in his neck were beginning to bulge out. It looked like he might take a swing at me. He yelled at me about my hesitance to say "Hold the line." He read off all the items I was missing. Then the line started up again and we continued in silence.

It was at some point in there that I looked around and realized that I'm not destined for anything more in this world than $6.20 an hour and dirty white pants.

Never have I been happier than when I got back to my apartment around 7:30 that evening to find Vic watching TV.

"Darts?" he asked.

"Absolutely," I said. We grabbed a couple of Old Milwaukees out of the fridge and I didn't even care that he nearly shut me out in a game of cricket. At least I was home.

I'll tell you the rest of my day later, but suffice it to say that it was all grim. Today was more of the same. This is my life now. My schedule is going to work like this:

The hours are 10:30am-7pm exactly. We all gather in front of the time clock and we actually have to punch in and punch out, just like Fred Flintstone. I will get two days off every week, but usually not consecutively, and only once a month will they fall on the weekend.

I keep telling myself that this is a good life experience, that it'll teach me what the real world is all about, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, all that bullshit. The truth is it's an awful job and I better be careful not to get used to it.

984 hours to go.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Another bad weekend. Bad with the sauce.

It's always the sauce.

I woke up on Sunday morning trembling in what I assumed was a cold sweat. Normal, I thought. Then I realized I had wet my bed. I have no mattress pad cover, no bed frame, and for the last week or so I've been sleeping on the bare, sticky, scratchy mattress. I do have a comforter. Somebody was calling it a "duvet" the other day and I almost bopped him on the head. Anyway, my mattress is on the floor of the closet I sleep in, which is just about exactly big enough to fit a mattress and a pile of dirty laundry. It's wholly depressing, almost dehumanizing, living this way, but it's that or give up my privacy altogether.

So I guess you could say I woke up on Sunday morning in a cold piss. Between the ages of four and 18, I don't think I pissed myself once. Since then, maybe a dozen times.

I rolled out of bed, and before I even began recalling the details of the night before, before I allowed my standard case of paralyzing regret and anxiety take over, I went downstairs to see my roommates. They were already up and doing roommate things: reading the paper, playing Super Nintendo, watching NFL Today. I thought maybe I could head off my impending psychological breakdown by joining them. We could share a nice hangover with one another while basking in the simple pleasures of our happy little college apartment.

But instead of a basic and welcoming "What's up?" I got this, from Milo:

"Wow...THERE he is. How ya feeling today, buddy?"

"Not so good," I admitted. "I feel like somebody poured sand down my windpipe while I was sleeping."

"Do you remember what you did last night?" he asked.

If there is one question that sends my entire system into a panic, that turns my universe on its side, that's the one. My breathing gets labored, my heart speeds up, the back of my neck starts to sweat, and I have tangible fantasies of suicide. Right here on this spot, I'll think. If I just tighten my jaw and concentrate with all my might, my head will explode and I'll be done with all this.

Because of course I don't remember what I did, but I'm damned sure it wasn't good. It never is. The answer is never, "You don't remember? Dude, you shoved a blind man out of the way of a speeding car" or "You were well-mannered and thoughtful all night" or "You made major headway on Fermat's Last Theorem."

It's more like, "You insulted my cousin" or "You got us thrown out of x bar" or "You tried to steal a bicycle" or "You pissed on a hot grill." Stupid, stupid, fratboy stuff. I should know better.

Yesterday, when the question came -- do you remember what you did -- my mind started spinning through images from the night before, trying to piece them together into a storyline.

At first, all I could really remember was potatoes. Whole raw potatoes. A huge bag of 'em. Were we in somebody's car? Oh, yeah, Carl's car. His long green 1977 Olds. What the hell was he doing driving? He could have killed us all. And what's the deal with the potatoes?

"Oh, you mean with the potatoes?" I asked, pretending like it -- whatever we did with the potatoes -- was no big deal.

Milo looked up from his game of Super Mario and said, "Yeah, well that was part of it..."

Everybody kinda laughed, the knowing laugh of the weren't-as-drunk, the laugh that tells you they remember more than you do.

"That was quite a throw with the potato," Vic said between bites of hot scrambled eggs.

Then it came back to me. We had been riding around in the Olds, four of us -- me, Vic, Clyde and Carl -- drunk as could be. At some point, someone produced an industrial size bag of raw potatoes from the back seat. Moments later, we were throwing them out the window, one after the other. At what, I didn't remember right away.

Then another image flashed through my mind. We had pulled the Olds over off of Monroe Street onto Randall Avenue. Clyde knew somebody who lived in one of the apartments over there, a girl.

Someone requested that I throw a largish spud through her window. It was a good sixty feet from where we had pulled over. It was 3 in the morning. There was certainly someone sleeping right behind that window, deep in a peaceful dream about walking in a field or flying a kite or strumming a mandolin. This person, this gentle dreamer, had never done anything to me.

Yet there I was, cocking my arm back, not even hesitating for a moment to throw a potato through her window. I let it fly, and I could tell from the second it left my hand that it was going to shatter her window. A perfect throw at a tremendously imperfect moment. In my mind, looking back, I could see the impact, hear the crash, and then we all scrambled back into the car and took off. Of course, we got away. In my experience, the bad guys almost always got away.

"Oh, God," I said, back in my apartment on Sunday morning. "Oh, no. I broke somebody's window last night."

Clyde, who had taken to sleeping over at our apartment on weekends, instead of making the trip from the bar back to the apartment across campus that he shared with his brother, rolled over on the couch to join the conversation.

"It's not a big deal," he said. "It's possible you missed the window anyway. What was worse is that you got us thrown out of Taco John's."

"Oh God," I said again. "What did I do?" I didn't even remember being at Taco John's.

"You started eating food off of strangers' plates," Clyde said. "This is after the whole thing with the potato. You were singing, you were grabbing food off of plates, you challenged the entire place to a fight. Finally, the manager came and kicked you out, and it took a good five minutes for him to convince you to leave. And after we went outside, you went up to..."

"Stop. Please stop," I said. "I don't want to know any more." A week ago, I read an article in U., the free, generic campus weekly, about college drinking. It had a quiz on there to see if your drinking habits bordered on alcoholism. One of the questions was, Have you ever blacked out from alcohol? Shit, I thought, almost every time I drink it.

"That's it," I said. "I'm never drinking again."

The entire room started laughing at once. You see, I say that about once every three months. And I mean it each time. Life would be so much simpler. I'd rarely do bad things. I wouldn't hurt people. And I'd have money -- speaking of which, I have now officially emptied my bank account and I am living off a loan from my girlfriend.* She gave me $200 on Friday, which I've managed to turn into $40 rather quickly.

Most importantly, if I stopped drinking I wouldn't have the feeling that I had on Sunday morning ever again. It's a combination of several feelings, actually: guilt, anxiety, remorse, despair, suffocation, hopelessness, emptiness, worthlessness, and general self-hatred. That doesn't even touch on the physical symptoms or the fact that I woke up in my own pee.

"Suuuuuure you're not drinking again," Milo said. "Until tomorrow, right?"

I was reminded of my roommate Joe's standard one-liner.

"I don't drink anymore," he'd say to a friend he hadn't seen in a while. "...I don't drink any less, either."

He had two or three of those jokes, and they worked on me every time. Another one was:

"I wish I had a horse's cock...instead of this big thing."

Milo's sarcasm was not appreciated. I went back upstairs to be by myself. I wanted to lay down and sleep away my guilt, but my bed was still damp with piss. I wanted to take a shower, to bring myself back into the world where decent people live, but I didn't feel like I deserved it. I hadn't earned it. I needed to stew in my own juices for a while. So I flipped my mattress over, laid back down and tried to sleep. But all I could do was dwell on all the stupid things I'd done the night before. Finally I put on some dirty clothes and decided to go for a walk.

I walked toward Randall Avenue, to the house I'd hit with the potato. It had happened about 13 hours ago. From where I stood now, it was pretty clear that the window was not broken. Whether they'd had it fixed already or whether my potato missed its target, I didn't know. But I found it comforting to know that my victim had moved on with her life one way or the other.

It was probably about 20 degrees outside, and as I turned and walked towards Dayton street each house I passed had the lights and TV on. Everybody was inside watching the NFL playoffs and staying warm. Decent people have that right, I thought. Not me. John Elway was leading the Broncos to a dramatic 4th quarter comeback victory against the Oilers, I found out later. Hell of a game, too. Once again Elway comes through, but we all know he'll never win the big one.

I walked around for another half hour, until I felt I had suffered long enough. I went home, half-watched the Redskins pound on the Falcons while I ate Kraft Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese, and then I stumbled up to my closet and slept a guilty Sunday evening sleep. I woke up around 2am and stared at the ceiling for about two hours before I finally went down for good.

When I woke up this morning, I didn't feel much better about myself. It was almost noon and nobody else was home.

I decided I wanted to write something in my journal. I sat on the couch, turned on the stereo, and used the "Random Grab" technique to pick a CD off the shelf. Vic and I developed this game when we were preparing to go out for an evening on the town. You grabbed a CD without looking, and then you had to play it no matter what it was. Of course, we'd always grab something really shitty, put it back and try again until we got something we liked. Today, I reached in and came up with Vic's Material Issue CD.

This CD came out last year, and it's pretty fucking amazing. It's got like 11 three minute pop songs about girls. Simple, stupid, and catchy. I think the band kind of got lost in the whole Pearl Jam/Nirvana thing -- they came out with the right record at the wrong time. Once the Seattle stuff calms down, maybe a hole will open up for traditional pop music like this. We'll see.

I put it in and hit "shuffle."

The first song that came on was the lone ballad on the album, "The Very First Lie." Slow, sappy, unoriginal. I liked it.

I opened my journal, stared at the first blank page and came up with nothing. So I turned back to the page with "Verna Richardson - Hospital" written on it. Very calmly, without hesitation, I paused the CD and picked up the phone. I dialed Verna's number.

"Verna Richardson," she answered.

"Hi, my name is Hans Bungle and I got your number from my friend Max Armbruster, who works there..."

"Oh, hi Hans. Max told me you might be calling. Are you looking for a job?"

I paused for maybe three quarters of a second.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, I am."

"Well, do you want to come in and talk in person?" she asked. "Maybe tomorrow? Say around 11?"

I pretended to be looking at a calendar that didn't exist.

"Sure, tomorrow at 11 sounds great," I said. "Thank you."

"No problem, see you then," she said, and we both hung up.

I thought, man, couldn't we do this interview later in the week? Tomorrow seems really soon. They must be desperate.

I started the music again and picked up the Sunday comics section off the floor.

I'd like to wake up with you early in the morning

Or stay up late just playing records on your phonograph

I'd like to get to know your mother and your father

Maybe just once pretend to be somebody's better half

And I would like to tell the very first lie.

So today I'll listen to these songs of adolescent crushes and unattainable girls. Tomorrow I have a job interview at the University of Wisconsin Food Service Department, Patient Meal Service Division. Tomorrow, maybe, I become a man.

Wish me luck, whatever that means.

* She has asked that I not write about her here, and I will attempt to oblige her.