PERSONAL WORST: "1950 CHEVY PICK-UP"
BY DELL FRANKLIN
Miranda and I are living together in a one-bedroom cottage a block from the beach in Cayucos and she’s on my ass to get a job. With her masters in lit she’s working at the 7/11 in San Luis Obispo while searching for something better. I’ve been axed from my last jobs as bartender and cabbie and turned down at least 50 times and living on fumes. Now she’s coaxed me into applying for a job delivering newspapers. So I apply in Morro Bay and am hired by the man in charge, Chet, who looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade and tells me my l950 Chevy pick-up is not the ideal vehicle for delivering papers, especially since it gets 10 miles per gallon and is not very maneuverable.
I report to work at 3:30, bleary-eyed, disoriented. The warehouse is dank, chilly, illuminated by buzzing neon tubes. The papers have not arrived. But the carriers have, in a squabble of compacts and small pick-ups, bundled in coats and beanies. They mill around, glum, non-talkative, sipping coffee in personal mugs, until a big truck backs up to the warehouse and the driver hurls bundles of papers onto the concrete dock. The carriers haul in the bundles, rip off binding with box cutters and stack them beside stitching machines. Blowing on their hands, they grouse about this second job to make mortgage payments and will rush home to shower after deliveries and go to their main jobs. Go-getters
Chet shows me how to stitch my folded papers so they don’t flap apart. The stitching machine has the potential to chop off my finger and expose me as inept at perhaps the lowest, most menial job in America. Chet watches me struggle, shows me how to shove the folded sections of the thick papers into the steel clicker, where, upon touch, the paper is automatically stitched together with white string. But every time I shove the paper in the stitch-machine, nothing happens. Then I get the roll of string tangled. Chet patiently untangles and restrings the machine while I observe my peers work in rapid automation, shoving paper after paper rote-like into the machine, stacking them in big plastic tubs, like perfectly calibrated assembly lines, until the tubs are full and they begin filling another.
Soon they are hauling tubs of papers out to their vehicles and zooming off while I continue to mangle the stitching machine, sweat stinging my eyes as I mutter and curse, on the brink of pummeling the machine and storming out. But Chet is a patient man and helps me with the last batch of papers and helps me lug the boxes to my truck and hands me a notebook of addresses and names of papers and watches me drive off, the Chevy cold, back-firing, spewing smoke.
I deliver the L.A. Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fresno Bee, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Chet advises me to fling the papers over the cab in the opposite direction to attain leverage and accuracy. I am short on most of my heaves, which are supposed to find porches and driveways. Because certain customers are old and feeble, I am to halt my truck and carry papers to doorsteps. My mufferless truck which doesn’t need to pass the smog test because of its age creates a tank-like roar along the curb-less sloping streets of my territory—North Morro Bay and Cayucos. At 5:45 in the darkness, lights blink on in certain residences. On steep hills I must double-clutch, burning it out, grinding gears. A few of my papers burst apart when they hit the concrete, but I have no time to get out and take them to porches because people are already up and waiting anxiously for their papers to read with coffee before going to work. Many retirees from LA live here and wait for me on porches, eyeing me with suspicion as I toss the papers at their feet and roar on. In the darkness I find it difficult reading addresses, since the headlights on my truck are dull and off-kilter, one aiming at treetops, the other lighting up curbs. I finish around 8 and fall in bed with Miranda, informing her of the brutal and unsuspected hardships of my new job.
“You’re lucky to have any job,” she tells me.
Next morning Chet informs me of numerous complaints: papers in the street; papers unraveled and blowing apart in the wind, delivery of the LA Times to folks expecting the SF Chronicle, a mistake certain to poison a persons’ day. Poor Chet had to answer the phone service and substitute the correct paper, which did not arrive until after 9, a time in which the customer no longer wanted his paper after journeying to the liquor store for his paper and reminding Chet to subtract the price from his bill.
Chet observes me stitching papers. Though I’m improving, I am still slow compared to my fellow workers and have already cut my finger and sport a bandage. My peers snicker at the sight of me; but I plod on, and the following day I am not as late and get most of my papers to the correct addresses; though I miss two houses. Miranda perks up when I hand her a copy of the NY Times.
Within a week I am capable of stringing my papers without fucking up, but still cannot keep up with my peers. The quicker I learn to stitch and stack, get in and out, the happier will be my customers. Still, one old geezer is always waiting for me curbside, looking wroth and mottled; attempting to express his discontent when I jerk past after a quick hand-off. One morning he blocks the progress of my roaring truck, forcing me to stop, and comes around to my window.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he cries. Eyes sparking behind bottle-thick glasses, clad in a white shirt, linty Alpaca sweater and gabardine slacks. I hand him the paper. “Why you always an hour late?”
“I'm not always an hour late. Mostly I've been only fifteen minutes late. I'm improving.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look, I’m new at the job, but I aim to improve my effort,” I explain.
“The last guy, I had him four years, he was always on time, from day one. You, you’re always late, one time the Calendar section was missing…”
“I’m doing my level best, sir.”
“I like my paper with my coffee at six. I’m eighty years old, been getting the Times sixty years, down south, up here. In all that time I’ve never got worse service. And I’ll tell yah another thing: people up and down the block are bitchin’ about their papers. You throw ‘em in the gutter, in the goddam bushes, never where it’s supposed to be, it’s a mystery where the goddam thing’s gonna end up, and half the time the goddam paper’s fallin’ apart…damn, boy, what the hell’s WRONG with you? You hungover? You smell like booze…”
I tore away. Sunday mornings are the worst time. I usually do have a few drinks at the local tavern Saturday nights and arrive at the warehouse a little cloudy, which doesn’t help my dexterity in stitching together the thicker Sunday editions, which take up more room in my truck. A lot of folks order the Sunday paper only, so I have papers stacked so high I cannot see out my rear window, have them on my seat and floorboard and lap, falling all over the place, and they are so heavy and cumbersome it makes for more strenuous heaving. Often I short-arm these monster editions and they explode on the pavement, and I have to brake my truck and get out and refold and carry them to the porch so they do not blow away and make an eyesore of the neighborhood, and of course I run later than usual, and the geezer is always waiting for me, along with some other malcontents, all on the warpath to berate me, but never able to do so because I flip the papers at them and keep going, until the morning the geezer who’d been taking the Times for 62 years, along with a neighbor, again blocked my path, both growling at my window, the geezer pointing a gnarled finger at me.
“Why ain’t they fired your useless ass?” he demanded to know. “We complain every day to Chet! We told him we been takin’ the paper a combined l20 years and you’re the all
time worst, a disgrace!”
“Good help’s hard to find these days,” I tell them, and roar off.
Chet remains patient, insisting I’ll improve, and after a month or so I’ve pretty much mastered the routine and complaints mostly cease but for malcontents impossible to please, like the geezer and his crony, who lurk behind their front windows whenever I deliver, just waiting for a chance to bite my head off.
But now my truck is falling apart. I grow frustrated and gun it up steep hills, grind the clutch, smell curious fumes, find myself taking my frustration and anger at this shitty job out on my poor truck. One morning, around 5, I am drunk as a bat, tossing papers, and a cop patrols the neighborhood. He flashes his spotlight on me. I lift a paper and yell, “NEWSPAPER CARRIER!” The spotlight goes off and he mercifully leaves me alone.
When it rains, I have to wrap plastic sealing around each paper, an additional impediment and aggravation. I need my windows up to keep them from fogging since my defroster doesn’t work and I am generously sprayed. Cold and wet, I can hardly see where I’m going because my vacuum windshield wipers malfunction uphill and under 35 mph, so I’m like a blind man weaving about, bouncing off curbs, smashing into trash cans, slamming backwards into concrete fencing and fire hydrants, so that my truck, a vintage marvel of GM craftsmanship and durability, begins to resemble one of those pathetic victims of Demolition Derby, an old l950s program on TV where battered wrecks purposely rammed each other to see who could disable who first.
I am incrementally destroying a masterpiece of assembly line genius, a vehicle I once cherished. Each morning, when I finish my route, I gaze at my truck and want to cry, realizing the meager money I am earning has been canceled out by the damage I’ve inflicted on my truck.
“What are you doing to your poor truck?” Miranda asks me one morning. “It makes me sad to look at it, Honey. I know you love it so.”
A week later she watches as the truck refuses to start. After I jump it, using her battery, it conks out. A neighborhood pal who knows about cars says it’s in the fuel line. So I start up my duct-taped wrath-of-God ’76 Olds Cutless Salon, which runs well, but is also a gas guzzler, and prepare to go to work. Miranda, in bathrobe, near tears, approaches me.
“You have no money, and that old Cutless, it’s the only thing you have left that works, Honey. You better reconsider this job.”
I call in to Chet and quit.
Miranda and I are living together in a one-bedroom cottage a block from the beach in Cayucos and she’s on my ass to get a job. With her masters in lit she’s working at the 7/11 in San Luis Obispo while searching for something better. I’ve been axed from my last jobs as bartender and cabbie and turned down at least 50 times and living on fumes. Now she’s coaxed me into applying for a job delivering newspapers. So I apply in Morro Bay and am hired by the man in charge, Chet, who looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade and tells me my l950 Chevy pick-up is not the ideal vehicle for delivering papers, especially since it gets 10 miles per gallon and is not very maneuverable.
I report to work at 3:30, bleary-eyed, disoriented. The warehouse is dank, chilly, illuminated by buzzing neon tubes. The papers have not arrived. But the carriers have, in a squabble of compacts and small pick-ups, bundled in coats and beanies. They mill around, glum, non-talkative, sipping coffee in personal mugs, until a big truck backs up to the warehouse and the driver hurls bundles of papers onto the concrete dock. The carriers haul in the bundles, rip off binding with box cutters and stack them beside stitching machines. Blowing on their hands, they grouse about this second job to make mortgage payments and will rush home to shower after deliveries and go to their main jobs. Go-getters
Chet shows me how to stitch my folded papers so they don’t flap apart. The stitching machine has the potential to chop off my finger and expose me as inept at perhaps the lowest, most menial job in America. Chet watches me struggle, shows me how to shove the folded sections of the thick papers into the steel clicker, where, upon touch, the paper is automatically stitched together with white string. But every time I shove the paper in the stitch-machine, nothing happens. Then I get the roll of string tangled. Chet patiently untangles and restrings the machine while I observe my peers work in rapid automation, shoving paper after paper rote-like into the machine, stacking them in big plastic tubs, like perfectly calibrated assembly lines, until the tubs are full and they begin filling another.
Soon they are hauling tubs of papers out to their vehicles and zooming off while I continue to mangle the stitching machine, sweat stinging my eyes as I mutter and curse, on the brink of pummeling the machine and storming out. But Chet is a patient man and helps me with the last batch of papers and helps me lug the boxes to my truck and hands me a notebook of addresses and names of papers and watches me drive off, the Chevy cold, back-firing, spewing smoke.
I deliver the L.A. Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fresno Bee, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Chet advises me to fling the papers over the cab in the opposite direction to attain leverage and accuracy. I am short on most of my heaves, which are supposed to find porches and driveways. Because certain customers are old and feeble, I am to halt my truck and carry papers to doorsteps. My mufferless truck which doesn’t need to pass the smog test because of its age creates a tank-like roar along the curb-less sloping streets of my territory—North Morro Bay and Cayucos. At 5:45 in the darkness, lights blink on in certain residences. On steep hills I must double-clutch, burning it out, grinding gears. A few of my papers burst apart when they hit the concrete, but I have no time to get out and take them to porches because people are already up and waiting anxiously for their papers to read with coffee before going to work. Many retirees from LA live here and wait for me on porches, eyeing me with suspicion as I toss the papers at their feet and roar on. In the darkness I find it difficult reading addresses, since the headlights on my truck are dull and off-kilter, one aiming at treetops, the other lighting up curbs. I finish around 8 and fall in bed with Miranda, informing her of the brutal and unsuspected hardships of my new job.
“You’re lucky to have any job,” she tells me.
Next morning Chet informs me of numerous complaints: papers in the street; papers unraveled and blowing apart in the wind, delivery of the LA Times to folks expecting the SF Chronicle, a mistake certain to poison a persons’ day. Poor Chet had to answer the phone service and substitute the correct paper, which did not arrive until after 9, a time in which the customer no longer wanted his paper after journeying to the liquor store for his paper and reminding Chet to subtract the price from his bill.
Chet observes me stitching papers. Though I’m improving, I am still slow compared to my fellow workers and have already cut my finger and sport a bandage. My peers snicker at the sight of me; but I plod on, and the following day I am not as late and get most of my papers to the correct addresses; though I miss two houses. Miranda perks up when I hand her a copy of the NY Times.
Within a week I am capable of stringing my papers without fucking up, but still cannot keep up with my peers. The quicker I learn to stitch and stack, get in and out, the happier will be my customers. Still, one old geezer is always waiting for me curbside, looking wroth and mottled; attempting to express his discontent when I jerk past after a quick hand-off. One morning he blocks the progress of my roaring truck, forcing me to stop, and comes around to my window.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he cries. Eyes sparking behind bottle-thick glasses, clad in a white shirt, linty Alpaca sweater and gabardine slacks. I hand him the paper. “Why you always an hour late?”
“I'm not always an hour late. Mostly I've been only fifteen minutes late. I'm improving.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look, I’m new at the job, but I aim to improve my effort,” I explain.
“The last guy, I had him four years, he was always on time, from day one. You, you’re always late, one time the Calendar section was missing…”
“I’m doing my level best, sir.”
“I like my paper with my coffee at six. I’m eighty years old, been getting the Times sixty years, down south, up here. In all that time I’ve never got worse service. And I’ll tell yah another thing: people up and down the block are bitchin’ about their papers. You throw ‘em in the gutter, in the goddam bushes, never where it’s supposed to be, it’s a mystery where the goddam thing’s gonna end up, and half the time the goddam paper’s fallin’ apart…damn, boy, what the hell’s WRONG with you? You hungover? You smell like booze…”
I tore away. Sunday mornings are the worst time. I usually do have a few drinks at the local tavern Saturday nights and arrive at the warehouse a little cloudy, which doesn’t help my dexterity in stitching together the thicker Sunday editions, which take up more room in my truck. A lot of folks order the Sunday paper only, so I have papers stacked so high I cannot see out my rear window, have them on my seat and floorboard and lap, falling all over the place, and they are so heavy and cumbersome it makes for more strenuous heaving. Often I short-arm these monster editions and they explode on the pavement, and I have to brake my truck and get out and refold and carry them to the porch so they do not blow away and make an eyesore of the neighborhood, and of course I run later than usual, and the geezer is always waiting for me, along with some other malcontents, all on the warpath to berate me, but never able to do so because I flip the papers at them and keep going, until the morning the geezer who’d been taking the Times for 62 years, along with a neighbor, again blocked my path, both growling at my window, the geezer pointing a gnarled finger at me.
“Why ain’t they fired your useless ass?” he demanded to know. “We complain every day to Chet! We told him we been takin’ the paper a combined l20 years and you’re the all
time worst, a disgrace!”
“Good help’s hard to find these days,” I tell them, and roar off.
Chet remains patient, insisting I’ll improve, and after a month or so I’ve pretty much mastered the routine and complaints mostly cease but for malcontents impossible to please, like the geezer and his crony, who lurk behind their front windows whenever I deliver, just waiting for a chance to bite my head off.
But now my truck is falling apart. I grow frustrated and gun it up steep hills, grind the clutch, smell curious fumes, find myself taking my frustration and anger at this shitty job out on my poor truck. One morning, around 5, I am drunk as a bat, tossing papers, and a cop patrols the neighborhood. He flashes his spotlight on me. I lift a paper and yell, “NEWSPAPER CARRIER!” The spotlight goes off and he mercifully leaves me alone.
When it rains, I have to wrap plastic sealing around each paper, an additional impediment and aggravation. I need my windows up to keep them from fogging since my defroster doesn’t work and I am generously sprayed. Cold and wet, I can hardly see where I’m going because my vacuum windshield wipers malfunction uphill and under 35 mph, so I’m like a blind man weaving about, bouncing off curbs, smashing into trash cans, slamming backwards into concrete fencing and fire hydrants, so that my truck, a vintage marvel of GM craftsmanship and durability, begins to resemble one of those pathetic victims of Demolition Derby, an old l950s program on TV where battered wrecks purposely rammed each other to see who could disable who first.
I am incrementally destroying a masterpiece of assembly line genius, a vehicle I once cherished. Each morning, when I finish my route, I gaze at my truck and want to cry, realizing the meager money I am earning has been canceled out by the damage I’ve inflicted on my truck.
“What are you doing to your poor truck?” Miranda asks me one morning. “It makes me sad to look at it, Honey. I know you love it so.”
A week later she watches as the truck refuses to start. After I jump it, using her battery, it conks out. A neighborhood pal who knows about cars says it’s in the fuel line. So I start up my duct-taped wrath-of-God ’76 Olds Cutless Salon, which runs well, but is also a gas guzzler, and prepare to go to work. Miranda, in bathrobe, near tears, approaches me.
“You have no money, and that old Cutless, it’s the only thing you have left that works, Honey. You better reconsider this job.”
I call in to Chet and quit.
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