Stupid America

                I was gonna write about the Salvation Army drug rehab center but it was turning out kinda boring so I’m writing about this instead.  That’s what I do.  I change my goddam mind right in the middle of everything and hit delete and then start yammering about who knows what.  And if you wanna know the truth about it I don’t even know what .  Not until right….  Now!

                Okay, well I was just recently reminded of this story by an old friend so I guess I’ll tell it.  This old friend was my girlfriend at the time.  Or pretty much like my wife except that we didn’t see any reason to get god’s or the government’s approval so she was my girlfriend.  Jesus I’m getting old.  It’s kinda bullshit, really.  Whether or not it’s bullshit, it’s definitely strange.  I’m sure it just gets stranger and stranger, too.  I mean, I’m fixin to relate some forgettable little anecdote that happened 14 years ago and it seems like it only happened 3 years ago or something.  I knew a guy who was almost 80 who’d refer to people in their 50’s as “kids”.  Then he’d say, “Kids?  What the fuck am I talkin about?  They’re 57 for Chrissakes!”  Minus the profanity.  The guy was a Catholic ex-college professor.  Still, when you’re 77 just about everybody else is a kid.

                Hell, I might even say that this story that I haven’t even begun to tell happened when I was a kid.  Fuck it.  Kid or no kid, lemme get on with it and quit bothering me about my philosophies regarding age and mortality and all that.  Oh yeah, you didn’t ask, I’ve just had a bit too much coffee. 

                Okay so anyway my girlfriend and I had just finished working in Southern Minnesota at a sugar beet harvest, a job that I could probably write a goddam book about but which for now I’ll just say that it was a reasonably lucrative albeit boring job that we were both glad to have wrapped up.  I believe we were headed down to Tennessee to visit some friends after the beet harvest, but in the meantime we were hanging out in Minneapolis, living on our friend’s floor with our dogs and blowing all our beet money on booze. 

                Between the two of us we came up with the idea to work out of a day labor place just to replenish some of the savings that we were rapidly depleting by being unemployed drunks.  Not really caring what we do, figuring we could make fifty bucks a day each for the rest of the week and justify being unemployed drunks again for a little while, we stumbled into a temp place in Northeast Minneapolis.

                They called us in at some terrible time of the morning where we staggered in to get the address of the job that they had lined up for us.  It was in Edina or Eden Praire or some goddam E suburb of Minneapolis.  The Deli Express sandwich factory is what it turned out to be.  In the Twin Cities you wind up eating sandwiches outta the Super America dumpsters all the time.  Or you don’t.  You probably don’t.  But we sure as hell did.  God those things are terrible.  They’re even worse if you buy them cos then not only are you nauseous but you paid to get that way.  In fact, don’t ever buy one of those goddam things.  Steal it if you have to but if you buy one then I’m cutting you outta the will for being a fuckin moron.

                But yeah I don’t even know where the hell you can find a Deli Express sandwich in town, but I know where you can make them.  In Edina or Eden Prairie or some stupid suburb Southwest of Minneapolis that begins with the letter E.  Once we arrived at the factory we walked in a little sheepishly and asked to talk to whoever.  Whoever turned out to be a short hispanic lady who showed us around the areas that we’d need to know about.  The breakroom had a vending machine with all the Deli Express sandwiches you could eat.  Free of charge.  We’d later find out that nobody in the fuckin building would touch one of those stupid sandwiches.  And who could blame them?  Certainly not I.  Certainly not you.  These people were blameless.  Well, probably not but they weren’t stupid enough to eat outta that vending machine.

                So we got the tour.  Basically there were three or four conveyor belts where the sandwiches were manufactured.  I’m sure you know how to make a sandwich so I’m not gonna go into the details about what comes first and what comes next, but the conveyor belt ran rather quickly.  Most of the people who worked there were permanent employees of Central or South American descent who had been working there for years.  That made me feel a little like a snotty American bastard but whatever.  We weren’t too proud to make some fuckin sandwiches.  Mercifully enough, they’d assign you a different task after each break just to keep you from completely losing your fuckin mind.  And luckily for me, since I was a strapping young buck.  Wait.  I was a skinny little smelly white boy.  Good enough!  I landed the job of loading the front of the conveyor with bread and meat and cheese.  At least I got to do that for part of the day.  It wasn’t too bad, running around and moving shit or whatever.  I can do that without going insane.

                My girlfriend wasn’t so fortunate.  She got stuck on the conveyor belt the whole time.  Fuck.  I got stuck on there for a couple of hours.  I was the cheese straightener.  These pieces of bread were whizzing by and the cheese slicer thingy would drop the cheese on the bread all cattywampus and it was my job to make it look neat and tidy.  I quickly realized why whenever you get some crappy sandwich at the gas station that the cheese and meat are all fucked up, hanging halfway outta the bread, etc.  That’s because some poor asshole who doesn’t care who’s still got whiskey burps from last night is trying to straighten the goddam cheese at 65 miles an hour.  Once in a while they’d turn off the conveyor belt for some reason and then the whole goddam building would be going to the right until they got the machine running again.

                When I was being the bread and meat loader guy I saw the 55 gallon drum of meaty goop that fills the burritos, stuff that made you definitely not go for one of the burritos out there in that evil vending machine.  Stuff that nightmares are made of.  Oh yeah, I just remembered carrying the big meat logs to throw on the slicer kept making me think of Maggots: The Record by the Plasmatics, which if you've never heard is about giant maggots eating everybody in New York.  Big slimy cold meaty things.  I mean, the turkey loafs weren’t writhing but I used my imagination.  "Some of them are the size of a large knockwurst..."  My girlfriend got stuck on tuna patrol.  That was horrible looking.  Later, she assured me that it was as horrible as it looked.  What it was was a 55 gallon drum of tuna salad with a pump on it.  The bread would fly by and the pump would poop out these tuna salad turds onto the bread, whereupon whoever had the misfortune of being stuck on that line stood by with a butter knife and smeared the turd around on the bread as it whizzed by them.

                We could’ve finished out the week but we decided that being unemployed alcoholics was a little easier on the dignity and the sanity.