SCRIBBLES

Just a little bit of a ramble about the job I used to have...

Photo by Zac Edmonds on Unsplash

That looks close to what I used to drive when I worked at the mill. (It’s a Volvo, which prompted us into saying it was a Vulva—Q: what do you do at work? A: I get to drive a vulva all day.) It’s a different bucket, but looks like the same kind of machine—a little smaller. I’m prompted to write this because we went to a retirement “party” at the union hall yesterday. There were a lot of stories. In order for this to have any real context, you have to understand that this was the only job I’d ever had. I started working there when I was 19. I retired this year. I’m now 65. (I did have all of last year off, with pay, but if you want to know about that go to the archives in Scribbler and look for: “It was an accident, Steve.” We’re not talking about that today.) What we are talking about, is first impressions.

I didn’t know that what I’d stumbled into as a job, was not the norm. I had a boss who said the only excuse he’d accept for tardiness, was that you were late because you were having a piece of tail. Or a blowjob. Those were the only two excuses he’d accept, because it was the only reason he’d be late. “You can’t expect to stop mid-stroke and get ready for work.” I thought every boss thought along the same lines. They don’t. I mean, this man drove to my house in his 4x4 when it snowed once and I couldn’t get out of the driveway. Because he knew where I lived, and wouldn’t accept that I couldn’t get out of the driveway. I told him that meant he had to drive me home as well, or I wasn’t going with him. He agreed.

Anyway, back to first impressions. A really good friend of mine—we’ll call him Richard, because, well, that’s his name and he’s not on this page, so he can’t really say anything about it, can he?—but he was talking about the time he started at the mill on Weekend clean-up, which is basically coming in on the Graveyard shift Friday night and shovelling all the mess we made during the week. He said it was quite often that he’d walk into the lunch room and the afternoon shift would still be there, playing cards and drinking at 1:00 o’clock in the morning. But his first day of coming in? His first day was different…

He could hear them laughing and cheering in the little trailer. He opened the door, and the room was full of guys. They were passing around bottles of scotch—the East Indians liked to drink their scotch—while the white boys were sitting in the back of the room passing around joints. The bottles eventually made it to the back of the room, while the joints made it to the front of the room, and everybody was basically Fucked Right Up. There was a guy at the back of the room, elderly, looking like everybody’s favourite grandfather, standing at a super 8 projector showing porno movies splashed up against the wall. There was a guy laying on the floor in front of the wall, narrating the story because there was no sound. He was providing the dialogue, the sounds effects—the groaning and moaning and climaxing, all at the same time—while everybody roared with laughter…and Richard said he was 18. He’d never even seen a porno movie before, because this was before we had the internet, and about a year before they came out with VCR’s.

So he tells us this story and we all howl with laughter and say that it was a regular occurrence. I told him the first time I met this particular guy, Gordie (he’s dead now, so I can use his name) and the first thing he asked me was if I smoked dope. I said no, and he said, “Well, you do now.” Two weeks later, we were on the graveyard shift together, and he said, “So, you ready to smoke dope?” I said I was willing to try it. I was 19. I’d only smoked dope once before. He said, “Okay, we’ll meet up here at coffee time.”

At coffee time, he drove his little Mach I Mustang into the yard, right in front of the lunch room, and told me to get in. I asked him why we were going to sit in the car, and he said: “You want full contact when you smoke this shit.” There were four of us. Steve, (see the note above), Gordie, Larry, and myself. We smoke a joint and he says, “You’re not gonna get high off your first joint. You’ll have to wait until lunch time before that’ll happen.” And he was right. At lunch time, we all piled into his car again, he turned up the tunes, and we smoked two joints. And I got high.

I mean, strobing.

We go back to our jobs, and I stand where I’m supposed to stand, and turn around because I realize…I’m really high. I’d never been high before. There was a guy who used to feed cants of wood into a large Edger, it was a machine that cut the cants into 2x4s and 4x4s. That guy takes one look at me and gets on the whistle, pushing the button continuously to get the foreman’s attention. I look up, the foreman looks down, and then out of the mill to where Gordie worked in the back, driving the forklift.

He says nothing to me.

At last coffee, Gordie’s laughing—but Gordie was always laughing. I asked him what the foreman said, and he giggled. He said, “Yeah, Jack took one look at your eyes and knew you were stoned. He came out and told me: ‘Man, you can’t do that shit with the kid. He’s doesn’t look like he can handle it.’ You just need practice,” he said, and lit up another joint.

Jack caught us smoking dope, at work, seven times. I mean, he’d stick his head in the door of the lunchroom when Gordie had a joint in his mouth; he’d walk up to us from around a corner when Gordie was passing me a joint. Seven times. But if he liked you, he liked you. I think he liked me.

Now, I was 19 when all of this happened. Maybe working at the mill wasn’t the best job I could’ve had at the time, but it was a steady gig. I’d just written a poetic novel, (yeah seriously) and self published it with a vanity press, not knowing anything about the publishing business. I went to the local Credit Union and got a loan so I could publish it. In order to be able to pay for it, I had to have a job. My brother-in-law was kind enough to get me that job.

Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there while I still remembered it. Maybe I should write a few stories about the mill, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?