The Tao of Apathy

by Thomas Cannon

  Joe and Bigger sat taking their fifteen-minute break. In the last thirty-five minutes, they had noticed that everyone was talking about the union, except for the very large man in his usual corner and Father Chuck. As a rule, there was never just one conversation going on in the Butt Hutt, except after an airing of “When Celebrities Attack.” Of late though, everyone talked about the union and discussed all the problems it would solve in one large rap session. To avoid that, Bigger and Joe sat by a group of patients from the psych ward.

  “I am sick and tired of people saying, ‘Is it cold enough for you?” Joe said. “God no, I like it colder. I want it so cold that stupid people like you die.”

  Bigger wrapped himself tighter in the only jacket his wife let him wear out to the Butt Hutt. “I think they are just trying to be friendly. It’s people’s attempt at being civil.”

  “It’s called being stupid.”

  Dan, the audio/visual specialist/union representative walked into the room and stood in the center. He waited for conversation to stop. It did when everyone turned his or her attention to him. For a while no one said anything. Finally, Dr. Coxcombry snuffed out his cigarette, pinched off the ashes and put his cigarette back in the pack. Then he opened the door, turned his face toward the sun and stepped out into the parking lot to hear Dan begin to speak.

  “My fellow employees, I have just come from a meeting with Mr. Petty. We handed him the National Labor Relations Board certification that shows we have enough employee support to hold an election and we informed Petty that he will need to meet with us and the NLRB to set up an election date. Things are going well, but this union needs to address your needs otherwise we will not get the majority vote required. So I am making the rounds for your comments and to answer any ideas you might have.” Several people raised their hands and waited to be called on by Dan.

  “I have a question, Dan,” Joe called out.

  “Ask it my friend.”

  “Your job is running a VCR, right?”

  “Well, back in the day, I was always pushing a VCR on a cart somewhere, but we are going digital now. Anyway, that’s a small fraction of my job. My job is much more complicated. I am in charge of all-”

  “Yeah, anyway, can you tell me what’s the advantage of having four heads on a VCR? Susan wants me to buy a Blew-Jay, but I have a two head VCR and I just don’t see the difference.” Joe took a puff on his cigarette.

  “I am really here to discuss the vote on the union, Joe. We need to stand together on this-” Joe shook his head slowly. “Fine. Four heads make it so that you can freeze a frame without any lines or distortion. Then you can advance it frame by frame.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yeah, why? I’m watching a film, not examining footage of the JFK assassination.”

  “Well, you see-” Dan sat on the corner of the table the farthest from Joe.”

  “Stopping the film ruins the movie for me. I want action, not a picture. If I wanted a picture, I’d buy a camera.”

  “I would really just like to talk about the union.”

  “You’ve got a lame job, Dan.” Joe put out his cigarette and stood up. He was proud of the way he was treating Dan and of Dan himself. In the past, he had put down Dan’s job because Dan’s job was worthless. Today, he was putting his job down to keep Dan real. Joe didn’t want all the valuable things Dan was doing going to his head. “Our break is almost over, Biggs. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 24

  Gregg Seuss had put himself through college by working at McDonald’s. He had majored in Food Service at the University of Michigan after graduating from Hamburger University. Upon attaining his second degree, he became the head manager at a Sioux City, Iowa McDonald’s. He enjoyed the respect of the acne-faced fifteen-year-old working for him, but he wanted more. Following a closely plotted career plan, he worked day and night. Then at thirty, his Uncle Jonas hired him as director of Saint Jude’s Food Service Department as a favor to his sister. Seuss became the man with the big office and country club membership. For the next twenty-three years of his life, he was, in real life and not just a Mclife, well regarded and well-paid. But without his position, he would just be another guy who spent sleepless nights trying to avoid erotic dreams of his den mother from Boy Scouts. Seuss had no family except his mother and few friends he allowed over to sit on his leather furniture, but he had his directorship.

  And now, in the middle of the night, he sat on the edge of his couch and had one more thing to keep him awake. The union was eminent and as soon as his employees were empowered, they would be worthless. Worthless because he wouldn’t have any control over them.

  Somewhere, hidden well, but near the surface of his gray matter was the knowledge that there were only two reasons anyone in his department listened to him now. The first reason was they thought if they got in good with him, they could somehow get promoted from dishwasher to management. The other reason was that most of his employees were older women that had barely made it through high school and looked up to anyone that didn’t have to wear a hairnet.

  Seuss feared that his workers would begin to feel equal to him by being in the union and take that team crap to heart. He feared this would give them the impudence to suggest ideas about how to run the Food Service Department better. “How to run the Accredited Professional Roustabouts of Nutritional Services better,” Seuss corrected himself. Then, he bemoaned the fact that he would not get any sleep and would have to go into work tired and pale. He blamed his employees for this despite the fact those erotic dreams of that faceless den mother already keeping him awake. If there was anyone to blame, it was his mother. She held on to the secret that she had also been his den mother.

  Chapter 25

  “Yes, I love man with a haggard look,” Jan, Seuss’s secretary said. Jan had grown wide in the hips over the years, so that she was pear shaped. Her large, outdated glasses obstructed the view of her face that had once been striking and bright. She was developing jowls and lava flows of loose skin under her chin. Still, it was a pleasant face. She eagerly awaited her boss’s arrival everyday. They had casually dated for the last twelve years; they had been to many clandestine places and brunched every Sunday with his mother. She had a thing for him. However, for the last decade, she had been concerned because he had never made a proclamation of love for her or even tried to get into her pants. Yet each morning, he always looked like he had spent the night making love to one of original girls from “Save by the Bell.” She was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something suspicious about him.

  “I am talking about the union,” the vice-director’s secretary said. “Aren’t you excited that we will no longer be under our bosses, but toiling beside them?” (She had been an English major.)

  Someone coughed to get their attention.

  “Bigger, where did you come from? We didn’t even see you come in.”

  “Must be my invisibility. Can you see me now?” He waved his hands in their faces. “Mr. Seuss wants to meet with me.”

  “He overslept and is not in yet.”

  “The man is a workaholic. I heard that if your drive by his house, even in the middle of the night, he’ll have all his lights on,” the vice-director’s secretary said.

  “You heard that from me,” Jan said. “And I told you to keep it a secret. Bigger, I do have a message for you from Gregg. He says he isn’t meeting with you today because he doesn’t feel like it.” Jan squinted at Bigger who was again dressed all in white and was not flourishing in his state of compliance. In fact, his worrying about being demoted from food service worker to ghost was keeping him up, too. His worried, harried look peeked Jan’s interest. She smiled at him. “Are you doing anything for lunch, today, Bigger?”

  “Yes,” Bigger said putting on his paper hat. “Eating. Thank you, Jan.” Bigger stepped out of the office and grabbed a food cart that was waiting to go up and sent it rolling in front of him. “What does Seuss want with me now?” he wondered
. Seuss had come up to him earlier in the week and told him to meet with him. Seuss then spent five minutes setting up a good time with Bigger. When Bigger asked him if he was in trouble, Seuss had only replied that it would only take five minutes. Bigger had brooded over the meeting from that moment on and imagined that Seuss was going to do everything from fire him to pull out a gun and shoot him. Worried and pissed, Bigger bumped through the kitchen door and slammed his food cart into a housekeeping cart being pushed by Irene.

  Bigger ignored Irene (for she had retired and therefore was no longer here) and pushed his cart to the elevator doors. When the elevator opened, Bigger let a bunch of people out and then grazed the smallest one of the group with the side of the cart as he got on.

  Inside, there was the smell of bacon and cigarettes and a small man with his head bent down and eyes shut in a wince. “Hey, Dykes.”

  “Oh, Bigger, it’s you. Good. Last time I looked up there was a bunch of nurses and a doctor with me.” Dykes sprang up and smiled. “I tried to avoid it, but they all said ‘Good morning’ to me.”

  “Really?” The elevator stopped on Bigger’s floor. “I never had any doctor say hi to me or give me any acknowledgment that we were even in the same dimension.” Bigger slowly pushed his cart forward. “I don’t think I can handle being Mr. Annunzio much longer.

  Dykes held the door open for Bigger to get his cart out. “Consider yourself lucky,” he said.

  Bigger wished that someone would consider him important enough to be condescended to. To prove to himself that he was not a poltergeist, he veered his food cart into the calf of a nurse who was trying to squeeze on past him to prove to her that he existed. She fell to the elevator floor and yelled to Dykes who was facing a corner, “What the hell was that?”

  Chapter 26

  Joe mixed one hundred pounds of hamburger with a dozen eggs, two pounds of bread crumbs, a half gallon of milk, two handfuls of powdered onions, and a couple of three pound cans of tomato paste into the big mixer that stood five feet off the floor. He leaned an arm on the mixer and wiped his sweaty forehead. When the machine finished mixing, Joe picked up a glob of raw meatloaf and threw it on the scale. Five pounds. He then took the five pounds, rolled it in a cloth apron and spun it quickly. When he unrolled the meat into a large metal pan, it unrolled out of the apron a round loaf. He worked quickly; in ten minutes, he would slip out for a smoke.

  Joe was on his twelfth loaf when Seuss made his way to where Joe was in the back of the kitchen. Seuss wore his blue, pin-stripped suit and just had his haircut. Joe wore a white T-shirt that he had spilled beet juice on. “Joe,” Seuss called out.

  “Hey, Gregg,” Joe called out with cockiness and trepidation. Everyone called him Mr. Seuss like he was famous or an English butler, so it sounded strange to hear Seuss’s first name, even from his own mouth. But he was not going to call him Mr. Seuss when all of the other directors at the hospital were called by their first names by their subordinates. The rest of the food service employees called him Mister Seuss, though, and they didn’t even know why. Joe thought it was stupid. Bigger figured it was because a lot of the kitchen help had barely finished high school and did not feel worthy to call their boss by his first name. Bigger had finished high school Summa cum Laude but still called him Mr. Seuss, even when his mom had Gregg over for dinner.

  Seuss clearly enjoyed the extra respect. Whenever he could, he called himself Mr. Seuss. He might say, “If someone asks you why you are doing that that way, you can tell them because that’s what Mr. Seuss said.”

  “What can I do for you, Gregg?” Joe said, then whispered, “Besides not call you, Gregg.” He bent down for more raw meat out of the mixing bowl. Again, he felt some trepidation. Not from the name this time, but because he felt like he had just volunteered for something. What can I do for you were not the words Joe wanted to be taken literally by Seuss. It connoted a willingness to please and to help have the kitchen run smoothly, which was not there. Joe wanted things a mess and with Seuss’s management style, he was not often disappointed. He wanted Seuss to get an ulcer and have insomnia and he wanted to be the one that caused it. Seuss had those things, but he also always had the upper hand. If Joe disagreed or had any complaint, valid or not, Seuss could pull the attitude card. “Mr. Seuss thinks you are not being a team player with an attitude like that,” Mr. Seuss could say to anything that wasn’t what Mr. Seuss wanted to hear. No employee had a defense to that. All Joe could do was rely on his boss’s own ineffectiveness to keep things a mess and be diligent about inadvertently contributing something. Asking “What can I do for you?” was something Joe was usually smart enough not to do.

  “I am glad you asked, Joe. I am still working on getting Louise some help for the cafeteria line earlier. She says she needs help at eleven-forty and you don’t go help her until twelve.”

  “Why don’t you have the newbie go help her?” Joe said nodding toward where the new guy wasn’t which was his assigned area.

  Seuss leaned on one of the worktables. “He is too undependable and too lazy to rely on. And I wish you would stop telling him that I am going to fire him.”

  “If he’s so undependable, why keep him around?” Joe wiped under his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Because I need him around to fire him.” Seuss smirked the smirk of an evil genius.

  “You just said you’re not going to fire him because you’re going to fire him.” Joe gave him the puzzled look that Seuss had been looking for.

  “Right. It was the only reason I hired him.”

  “I knew that.”

  “I suppose you did. Did you, really?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Well, Joe. What is probably going to happen is each department is going to be asked to make a 6% cut in staff. So I hired this guy to by my 6%. That's his only job. My department doesn’t become smaller so that I don’t become less important and I still look good by cutting staff 6%.”

  “Did you ever think of running for Congress?”

  “It wouldn’t pay to give him this added responsibility. And everyone else is busy or on break at that time.”

  “I’m busy, too.”

  “Of course you are. Of course you are. I was just wondering, with what?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I need to know what you are doing then, so I can figure this problem out.”

  “Don’t you know? Aren’t you working on this problem with my new team guider babe, what’s-her-name?”

  “Yes, but you need to work as a team here. She has never worked in a kitchen, so you need to fill her in on what she is in charge of. It’s not her job, nor my job to know what you are doing. Now, what are you doing?”

  “I am rolling meat into meat loafs.”

  “Really? Neato. I always wondered how you got those so round. How did you ever figure out to roll the meat like that?” Seuss really wanted to know what Joe was doing from eleven-forty to noon everyday, but the kitchen held such wonders to him that he jumped at any chance to learn the mysteries of food service. He also wondered how they got the fruit into the middle of the Jell-O; why pudding goes from a liquid to a solid; why fresh fruit turns brown when cut up, but canned fruit doesn’t; why people do not like stale bread but put croutons on their salads; and how his employees get the cheese in the middle of the pizza burgers (they came frozen from the distributor that way).

  Joe looked at Mr. Seuss. Seuss stared at Joe. Joe wiped meat off his hands with the front of his apron.

  “…Well, I guess I’ll get back to you, Joe.” Seuss turned and sulked away, not knowing how to get back on the topic of helping Louise. He stopped to wet a paper towel in one of the small hand sinks and wiped small flecks of meat off his shoes before going back to his office.

  “What if,” Seuss said suddenly across the room, deciding to hit Joe while he had at least a chance of getting Joe to do what he wanted. He did not yell or raise his voice, yet Joe heard him over the sound of the ventilation fans that s
tirred the heat in the kitchen and the loud hum of the dish machine in the next room. “What if,” Seuss said, walking back to Joe. “What if I get Thelma to replace you for those few extra minutes while you go help Louise.”

  “Is she able to do that?” Joe asked, knowing that eventually he would end up doing what Seuss wanted, but trying to make it as difficult for Seuss as possible.

  “Hmm. I don’t know,” Seuss replied, knowing that he could not go back and ask Joe what he was actually doing when Louise wanted the help. He had left his flank exposed by talking foolishly about the meatloaf. He had tried to mount another attack, but now he must do the only thing to be done; retreat to his office and live to cause a fight another day. He couldn’t know if Thelma could do what Joe was doing at eleven forty, since he didn’t know what it was. However, he did know that whatever it was that Joe was doing, it wasn’t anything. “I’ll find out and get back to you. Joe thanks for all your help.”

  “Anytime,” Joe said and began pushing the half-filled cart of meatloaf into the walk-in refrigerator so that he could sneak out for his ten o’ clock cigarette.

  Chapter 27

  Mrs. Annunzio padded along the corridor in her slippers and nightgown. She picked up speed as she entered the dining room where a group of people sat around the long table. She scanned them carefully to find the person she was looking for. The first person was a man in his forties with long hair and an unkempt beard tying fishing flies from a big tackle box. Next to him was a young woman with several eyebrow piercings and a tattoo of the word SATAN on her neck. She was next to a young guy, clean cut, but unable to sit still. He could only squirm and he was talking incessantly to the woman with the SATAN tattoo. On the other side of the table was a plump woman wearing tight clothes and a neckline so plunging it exposed her appendectomy scar.