Summer Relief
The lessons and reward of having a factory summer job.
There was no joy approaching the punch-in clock. Sleepy-eyed, we plodded along the corridor, our timecards in hand. The stamping mechanism snapped angrily at every card fed. The foreman, who had signaled the start of our eight-hour shift, kept everyone moving in tight formation, as we shuffled toward the waiting freight elevator, a gaping maw. We were the fare.
The wire mesh walls of the elevator platform exposed a grimy shaft — the factory’s unsightly innards. On my floor — I think it was the third floor — large pedestal fans droned on all day in futile battle against the humid air, spewing fabric dust everywhere, doing little to cool us down as we pushed heavy racks of Brooks Brothers clothing over the wood floors. Thank the angels for the high ceilings that saved us from feeling doomed in the heat.
After my junior and senior years, I was the summer relief, covering for workers who took the summer off to care for their children home from school. I was sweating for college money, hoping for a future, and a disposition, much different from what I saw every morning as we bunched up at the employee’s entrance waiting for the foreman’s signal. It was my first exposure to what adults did after high school. No wonder people say, ‘one never forgets that first summer job.’ This is especially true at a monotonous and uninspiring blue-collar job.
I was assigned to help Raul in the shipping department. The elegant suits arrived from the other end of the floor in lots, ready to be sorted and shipped out to the branch stores. We processed the orders faster than the tailors, sewers, and pressers could finish the next lot, so we had plenty of down time. Once in a while, the master tailor, with his assistant in tow, would come over to inspect the finished suits, from 36R to 46L, hanging on our two-level holding racks. Both he and his assistant were older men who had learned their craft in old European cities. They dressed impeccably as if they owned Brooks Brothers. Like overly proud craftsmen, they were prone to meltdowns when things didn’t go right.
One time we pointed out to our forewoman, Ellie, that those decorative buttons on the sleeves didn’t match the buttons on the front of the jacket. Moments later, the tailor stormed in, with a gray cloth measuring tape hanging from his neck, to verify our report. He took one look, before spinning on his leather-soled shoes to get some sheepish sewers to take back the suits for repair. We felt good about catching the mistake, that is, until we heard someone getting berated on the other side of the semi-permanent wall that separated us from the sewers.
Raul kept a transistor radio tuned to WABC-AM Musicradio, a Top-40 station, to help us pass the time. That summer of ’74 belonged to Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.”
The elegiac piano, a relief from the bland but infectious “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” — a flute intro that still makes me groan. Fighting for supremacy, and often playing back-to-back, were the two “rock” songs, “Rock the Boat” and “Rock Your Baby.” George McCrae’s soulful wail on the latter, “Woooman, take me in your arms and rock me baby,” still feels good.
The only time the station changed from WABC was when Raul got angry at Ellie for some indiscretion, or more likely, because she gave us a new shipping order when we were supposed to be resting. Out of spite, he would switch the radio to WADO, the Spanish station, and turn up the volume. Blasting from the tinny speakers were the rapid-fire commercial spots and the salsas that would get him sliding around the floor, doing his dance steps with one hand across his stomach and the other raised to an invisible partner, driving Ellie bananas. Of course, that was the point. Fed up, she would walk over and turn it off, or abscond with it to her desk drawer until they made up. They always did, which baffled me.
Raul was a character. He was unlike anyone else I had encountered. He was macho and flamboyant, a duality difficult to explain. He seemed to have a need for only two things: food and sex, usually not in that order. He would recount his over-the-top escapades at the clubs, often in vulgar and explicit terms, knowing those around him would be appalled. At times his stories were uncomfortably graphic. I would slink away during his lunch time sessions. His flirting with every woman that crossed his path quickly became a tired act. One of his nonsensical rhymes became lore for its utter ridiculousness, “Quién fuera jabón para lavarte en tu corazón.” — “If only I were soap to wash in your heart,” recited with forlorn eyes aimed at the lady in his sight.
Then there were the days when Raul was sulking. He was quiet and melancholy, little to say all day, with no feisty remarks aimed at Ellie. Those days seemed longer without the entertainer present.
Mr. Pocaterra, who sat near Ellie, was a character out of central casting. Tall and bespectacled with a full head of white hair and fading handsomeness, he was the éminence grise of the motley crew. He didn’t seem to have an actual job other than to sit up front near Ellie and hold court, spreading his brand of street wisdom. Sometimes he came over to help us out with our sorting, mostly because he wanted to hide from Ellie, who could be temperamental and moody.
Mr. P tried to get Raul to snap out of his moping, stage whispering his analysis about what was troubling Raul to Ellie and the Greek ladies over for lunch, guessing at what might have happened to him the night before. He would pick on something Raul treasured, like his pointy light brown shoes, finding a way to make fun of them. “Hey amigo, I know why you’re not wearing those fancy shoes today,” he would stir up, “but brother, I hear it was better to get out barefoot than to have that angry man find you in his bedroom with his wife. I know those Yugoslavians, they aren’t calm like us Eye-talians. We’re gentlemen from the civilized side of the Adriatic.”
When Raul wouldn’t take the bait, a frustrated Mr. P would quip that he liked the quiet Raul better, before tossing out the perfect slam, “Anyhow, it was probably the wife who did the finding.”
The second summer was easier. I had learned the ways of the factory, how to stall, keeping at Raul’s pace, otherwise, he would accuse me of showing him up in front of the boss — not a venial sin. I learned to avoid asking Ellie for clarifications or help, especially when she had a friend at her side chair, which was most of the time. It was easier to just do what you thought was right than to have her pontificate that she had no clue how I got through high school, never mind, how I was going to survive college, a reaction that sometimes came before I had even posed the question. Just checking whether she had a second was enough to get her going. Most times, after my question, her usual low-key response was, “I check with boss.” It was theatrics, I now understand.
Following Raul’s example, I set up one of the huge boxes as a make-shift cot for lunchtime naps, layering suits for softness with a flat box over them so they wouldn’t wrinkle. I limited my naps to the lunch time hour. Raul could spend most of an afternoon in the box, expecting me to cover the work while he slept, especially if he had kept lookout during my lunch-hour nap. My naps were essential after a night of hanging out late with friends at Astoria Park, drinking Miller Eight-Packs under the Triboro Bridge. Those seven-ounce pony bottles were perfect to cool off the summer heat, the empties fitting like a ball in your palm to hurl against the farthest boulder sticking out of the water near the shore of the East River. We still had lots to learn.
I mastered the art of sealing industrial-strength boxes using nylon-reinforced paper tape, moistening the glue backing in a tray with water we kept by our table. It was messy and sticky. The boxes were further secured with yellow plastic straps, tightened with a handheld ratchet that added tension and a clamp to hold the ends together. Raul had a system to get the packing done to ensure ample down time. Timing was everything. Don’t finish an order too early with enough time in the afternoon to process another complete order. Better to leave it for the morning.
During the down time, I read the Daily News that was always around, and the science-fiction paperbacks I devoured. If we just hung around the table, listening to the radio loop on WABC, the days would feel interminable, as if the clock was going uphill towards 4:45.
August came soon enough. On my last day of my second year, it was sad saying good-bye to everyone. Unlike the previous year, I knew I wasn’t coming back. Ellie, Raul, and Mr. P wished me much success in college. Mr. P, who started with the “college boy” tag, had the best advice. He told me he didn’t want to see me back again next summer; that I was too smart to be working in this heat; and that I should be making lots of money working in a nice air-conditioned office. He reminded me, while Raul stood a few feet away, that Raul had a good heart, but he was a bad influence and to never follow in his footsteps, his carousing and drinking amounted to nothing. He admitted that he, too, was too smart for this place, but it was his lot in life to give back to those in need.
Those two summers I learned more about the real world and real people, than I had in any classroom to date. I was given a chance to play an adult when I wasn’t one yet. My co-workers treated me like a colleague, not a kid. They looked out for me, making sure no bossy foreman from another area came to borrow my time. I was expected to arrive on the clock, do the work, and leave at the whistle, ready to come back tomorrow for another round. The pay was minimum wage — two dollars an hour — but getting that paycheck was most rewarding.
When I was back with my classmates, I realized that some of them had a resemblance to the personalities of my co-workers. It was like I was seeing into their future, or at least, one possible future. This made me wonder whether my factory colleagues had foreseen their adult lives during their high school days, or whether they had had grander dreams. I was happy for the perspective I had gained. I recognized that the lives of my co-workers were tough, sometimes unsparing, but while they grumbled about work, their reward was the weekend. They enjoyed that time to the utmost, recharging and coming back on Mondays with stories to share.
(The names in this story have been changed.)
For my posts on Medium.com, see: medium.com/matiz.
