by Nancy Adams
Ten minutes later, the interview was over and I was given the job there and then, a firm handshake sealing the deal. He printed off my shift schedule—I would be working nights—and led me out of the place, waving me off as I got back into Sarah’s car.
“How’d it go?” she asked the moment I opened the door.
“Good. I got the job.”
“Ohh, Josh!” she squealed in delight, and flung herself across the car to grab me.
That was a week ago, and since then I’d been working ten hour nights, from six in the evening until four in the morning, humping shit out of the back of freezer trucks, loading it up onto pallets and having them taken into the chillers. If the day guy, Dodds, was happy and optimistic, then the night guy, Stan, who was to be my foreman, was exactly his opposite. He was morose to the point of sociopathy, cynical to the point of suicide. His glum face would haunt the place, a mixture of yellow skin up top and gray stumble at the bottom, a knitted bobble hat folded up to the size of a skull-cap covering the crown of his bald head. I could tell he was a drunk, too, because of the way his eyes were always bloodshot and the faint whiff of vodka I could make out hidden within the scent of peppermint chewing gum that always inhabited his chomping, angry mouth. He was a tall guy, broad of shoulder, and he scared the shit out of the rest of the staff. On my first night, he’d merely grunted at my introduction and pointed to the changing rooms. Not understanding his point, I asked what he meant, to which he’d shouted “Get changed” into my face with such a look of hatred that I thought he’d swing a punch at me if I stood there any longer.
This type of thing had been a regular occurrence in the week that followed. That first night, all my coworkers did was either warn me about our malevolent foreman or complain about him. ‘Hard-ass’ is what he was commonly called, or simply ‘asshole.’ On one occasion I was having trouble getting a trolley jack into a pallet. I was unaware that the pallet was slightly longer than the ones I’d previously worked on and, therefore, needed the forks of the jack to go in another foot. As I pumped it, the wheels were in the center rather than out the end, so the pallet began to crack apart. Seeing this as he passed by, Stan slid on the brakes of his forklift, jumped out and stormed toward me. He shoulder-barged me off the jack, almost sending me over, and pushed the thing all the way. But that wasn't enough for him. No. He had to then scream and shout at me, tell me I was fucking useless, that my momma would have done better to have given birth to me right on top of the toilet and to have flushed the chain after, as well as some other ingenious slights against me. Inwardly, I wanted to surge forward and break his gray, chewing-gum jaw. But this had been only my second night and the last thing I wanted was to lose my job so early. In the end, I merely nodded at his insults and even apologized afterward, making myself the picture of meekness.
Since then I’d done well to avoid the guy. Even at break-times, I sat as far from him as possible. And it was only during these times that he loosened a little, had the odd laugh, often at the expense of someone else. At least he involved himself in the general conversation, unlike the stern figure that prowled around the warehouse compartments and loading bay. Apart from a little sports talk, his favorite topic was shitting on Dodds and the day team. He appeared to hate them with a vicious fury, calling Dodds all sorts of names and complaining that he was always being given the shitty workers, while Dodds took all the good ones for himself. It never seemed to register with him that these sorts of speeches might insult many of those men in the room, being called ‘shitty workers.’ But no one seemed to question this; they simply let the big man pour out more bile from his hateful mouth. Heck, I even found myself on the end of one of these barbs one night, when he’d nodded his head in my general direction while bitching about how Dodds always gave him the losers. I merely turned away and ate my sandwich, thinking how I’d prefer to stuff the thing all the way down Stan’s throat until I was up to my elbow, choking the bastard.
Regarding my coworkers, they ranged from okay guys to absolute assholes. The okay guys were the ones that never let the place bother them, just got on with things, doing no more or less than they had to. They were often labeled shirkers by some of the other workers, but I thought they worked hard enough and never slowed things down unnecessarily, just got on with things. These guys were generally disgruntled by the mundane work of lifting shit out of trailers, but at least they could allow themselves to laugh and joke from time to time, sing a song while unloading stinking boxes of fish, their voices echoing all around the loading bay until Stan would zoom by in his forklift and shout for them to quit it, the man obviously hating any form of enjoyment as much as he did the day staffers.
The other workers, those closer to the asshole part of the spectrum, complained relentlessly about everything to do with the place. They’d warn me, as the new boy, that it was a terrible company to work for, that the work was shitty, the worker’s rights the worst, and that I was, basically, entering Hell. They’d spend every spare word slating the place and embellish the misery of it all with their constant whining. But the flip side of this was that these were always the most servile workers, the most loyal when it really came down to it, the ones who would stay behind for two hours after their initial shift to make sure that a truck was unloaded on time. They were also the longest servers. One guy I met on my first night began warning me about the place, ranting on about how much he wished he’d pull up to work one day to find the whole place had burned down. I asked him how long he’d been there. His answer astounded me. For all his bile toward the place he’d been there forty years! Forty years of complaining and yet he’d never done a damned thing about it. Why, if you hated something so much, would you remain doing it? There was so much in these people that amazed me, both in the small episodes of camaraderie that I witnessed, and in the damning hatred that the warehouse produced in them, as though the place were some haunted realm and we were all slowly becoming its ghosts.
I tried not to allow it to bother me, kept repeating that this was only temporary, that within a year or so, I’d be back at college and then I’d be moving on to bigger and better things. But when you spend the majority of your waking hours in such a place, it’s hard to see things that straight. You begin to feel yourself held there. And it’s not just the hours you spend locked among the filth of that warehouse that you feel tethered to it somehow; it enters your free time too. You wake up around three in the afternoon and you know for sure that there’s still three hours between you and work. But those hours aren’t yours. They belong to the warehouse, because the moment you get up, you know that it’s inevitable that any joy you feel in the next three hours will be short-lived and culminate in going back to that dreary place. I won't exaggerate and say it’s like being on death row, but it’s close. Those hours dissolve away and before you know it, the time has come to step out into the corridor and make that journey. And it’s not just your waking life that’s affected. That place made it into my dreams too. One morning I got back from work and during my two-hour snuggle with Sarah, she woke me up when I began fidgeting in bed, my arms moving about as though I were stacking something. I was dreaming of being back at the warehouse! One shift had ended and another begun.
It was now the end of my first week, Saturday morning to be precise. I had the next two days off and looked forward to resting my battered, aching body. Getting into the apartment, I listlessly removed my clothes, dropped them on the floor and got into bed with Sarah. As I nudged myself into her back, she drowsily awoke, turned her face to me, smiled and kissed me on the lips.
“You don’t wanna get a shower?” she asked. “You’re kinda stinky.”
“I’m too darn spent to shower,” I complained in an exhausted mumble. “All I want is to cuddle into you and fall into deep sleep, hopefully without dreaming of being back at that place.”
“Oh, poor baby!” she said soothingly, and her tone softly touched me, caressing my worn muscles. “Okay, sweetie,” she went on. “You’re allow
ed to stink this once. Anyway, I always like your smell. It means you’re a worker.”
“I wish I wasn’t,” I sighed softly as I closed my eyes and immediately felt myself drop through the mattress and into weary sleep, feeling my arms still encased around her supple body as we both drifted off into the never-never.
SARAH
I returned home from the food bank at four PM to find Josh still wrapped up in the sheets, asleep. I stood by the bed and watched him for a while. He slept so sweetly, the quilt pressed between his thighs and held within his arms, as though it was I who lay sheaved within his sinuous limbs. While I watched, as if aware of the sudden company, his eyes began to slowly open, until they were pointed on me and a smile gradually creased his lips.
“Hey, baby,” he sleepily said. “Jump in.”
He threw off the quilt, his reserve lover tossed from his arms now that his first lady had appeared. Without removing my clothing, I pounced into bed with him and was immediately enveloped in his arms. My nostrils, however, were instantly attacked by his stench of stagnant sweat and the pungent aromas brought back from the warehouse.
“Oh, Josh!” I exclaimed. “You stink terribly.”
“I know,” he said with a smile and pulled me into him with even more relish.
“Ah!” I squealed as he did.
“Now you can stink too. Together we can stink. They’ll call us the stinks and together we’ll smell awful forever.”
“I don't wanna stink.”
“But you have to. True lovers are supposed to share everything together. If one stinks then the other has to as well.”
“You can keep your stink.”
“But I can’t. I have to share it with you.”
Giggling and playfully rolling about, he placed himself on top of me and rubbed his chest against mine.
“You’re gonna stink real good soon,” he said as he did it. “But you can stop it.”
“How?” I chuckled outrageously.
“With a kiss.”
“Then a kiss it will have to be.”
I pursed my lips, closed my eyes, and soon we were in full embrace, kissing passionately upon the bed, his stench forgotten among the lasciviousness of our frenetic bodies wrapped within each other. We stopped on our sides where we’d rolled to and gazed into one another’s eyes, our mouths pressed into smiles.
“You know, you really should take a shower,” I suggested after some time of this dreamy gazing.
“You’re right,” he said, and he let go of me, before raising his creaking body out of bed. “You know,” he added as he started for the shower, “you could join me.”
“Josh,” I groaned, feeling some sort of pressure in his words.
“Only for a shower, Sarah. I’m not going to insist we have sex. Just to wash our bodies together. Why’s that so bad?”
“It’s not. I just…you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“If we’re in the shower, naked together, I might drift off into something…else. I just don't want to rush into things.”
Almost the moment I’d said this last part, I regretted it. I knew it would pique him, and even I got a sense that this was just a repeated statement that held very little meaning.
“Rush things!?” he called out in an aggrieved voice. “We’ve been together nearly three months. Lived together for three weeks.”
“Please, Josh.”
“I don't get it. You said you wanted to wait for the right time. I didn’t have sex with you in Havana because I wanted to respect that, didn’t want you losing your virginity for nothing. But surely now you see how committed I am, see that it wouldn’t be losing it for nothing. I love you; you love me; we live together; I’ve sacrificed so much for you; I’ve gotten some shitty, dead-end job, suffered in it all week long and will continue to for the foreseeable future; and yet still it’s not enough and we’re rushing things.”
I could feel every ounce of his sexual tension seeping out of him and his expression took on an affronted, wounded hue. I too held within me a level of sexual tension; in fact, more than I would have been willing to admit at the time. My body wanted him so much, but, as I’ve already told you, something held me back. One side of me said he’s right, informed me that he’d shown every level of commitment to our love and that I should let go of so many years of carnal frustration and explode on him. But then there was this other side that would tell me not to. And lately I’d begun to understand what this side of me wanted. It wanted matrimony. It wanted to lose my virginity within the confines of a union blessed by God.
“What is it, Sarah?” Josh finally asked.
“It’s because we’re not married,” I had to admit.
His face twisted between a series of expressions, ranging from utter consternation, through anger, to understanding.
“You mean to say,” he began, his tone a little gentler now, “that we have to marry before we can make love?”
“Yes,” I replied, gazing at the floor.
“But marriage is kinda…well, you know…a crock.”
I turned my eyes sharply upon him, a scornful look on my face, nose wrinkled.
“I certainly don't think it is. I think that there’s nothing more dignified and loving than dedicating your whole life to a partnership under the eyes of God.”
“But what happens if God doesn’t exist?” he shot back at me. “Then wouldn’t marriage be no more than a waste of time? We don’t need some certificate to show we’re dedicated to each other.”
“No we don’t; we need God’s blessing.”
“But I just put to you that He may not exist.”
“And I know He does.”
“Really!? Then tell me how that is?”
I closed my eyes and said solemnly, “By the way I feel Him in my heart. By an unspoken whisper that I feel flow through me. By the way I know He has an ultimate plan no matter how distorted it may seem to our simple eyes. By the way”—and here I opened my eyes and faced his—“it led me to you, that inner whisper, and tells me that this man is the one who you will spend the rest of your life with.”
This final announcement seemed to suppress his vexation and he didn’t say a word for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he finally muttered.
And with that, he turned and continued on his way to the shower.
While he was in there, a shroud of guilt dropped over me and I contemplated removing my clothes and joining him. Only innocently, of course. But it was the possibilities of my own lustful thoughts that stopped me. Just like him, I too wanted to make love, allow our animalism to break free from its fetters and rejoice in carnal interaction, the feel of his body pressed between my legs, my hands snatching at his muscular back, the feel of his hips grinding within mine. Lately, while we lay in bed together, as regularly as he’d been trapped in the displeasures of nightmares, I’d been just as trapped within the pleasures of lewd dreams. In my own mind, I’d made love to him countless times. But the ethereal world of dreams is a very different place from the real one of consciousness. And in that real world, I felt extremely inclined to do things under God’s will.
Later on, once I too had had a shower, I made Josh something to eat and turned the sofa-bed back into a sofa. We sat in silence and watched television for some time. As always, Josh was grouchy after waking up following work, and over this past week I’d become conscious of not wanting to upset him. The physical nature of the work was taking some getting used to, and it left him in a constant state of tiredness. Even after he’d slept eight or ten hours, he had the haggard look of a man in need of another twelve. I hoped that he would become accustomed to it soon and his spirits would enliven once more.
“Oh, darn it,” I suddenly exclaimed as we sat there, Josh having just finished his food.
“What?”
“We need coffee.”
“I’m sure we had nearly a whole jar of it earlier this morning.”
“Yeah, but I took it to the food bank fo
r refreshments and forgot to bring it back.”
“Then can’t we just leave it? I don't feel like coffee and the store’ll be open tomorrow.”
“Yeah, but not until ten on a Sunday. Plus, we’ll be at church until twelve, so…”
“Sooo…drink tea instead in the morning.”
“But I need my caffeine fix first thing.”
“Well, then go to the store.”
“Can’t you?” I put to him.
“Really!?”
“I’ve been at the food bank all day and you’ve been in bed.”
“After spending ten hours busting my hump,” he added.
“Please.”
He groaned but ultimately agreed.
“Okay,” I said next. “But I need you to get it from the general store, not the local one.”
“What!? But that’s across town.”
“It’s almost a dollar more at the local one, and they don’t do the big size we have. We’ve really got to economize.”
Another groan.
“Okay, okay,” he grumbled, before getting up and grabbing the car keys.
“Love you.”
“You too,” he sighed as he left through the front door.
