Naked (21 page)

With no one to talk to, I began putting my various thoughts and opinions into letters that were weighty in the literal rather
than figurative sense of the word. I wrote my friend Evelyn a seventeen-page letter describing how I’d felt after the cat
ran off. Two weeks later, having received no response, I crossed her name out of my address book. One by one, I eliminated
them all. Eight pages to Ted Woestendiek on what it’s like to wash your hair with laundry detergent. No answer. Twelve and
a half pages to Lisa, forgiving her for being born. Nothing.

“Dear Miss Chestnut, You’re probably wondering what I’ve been up to since the third grade…”

I might spend an entire evening on a single letter, but with the exception of Veronica — “No, my boyfriend has
not
left me yet, but thanks for asking” — nobody responded to any of them. This understandably put me in a foul mood. I’d thought
I would return to North Carolina after the season ended, but once we moved into the Golden Delicious, I started having second
thoughts. What was there to return to? How had I ever considered those people to be my friends when they were too lazy to
pick up a pencil and write a letter? Surely, they missed me. Perhaps the best strategy was to see that they missed me even
more. I’d live under a bridge before I’d ever go back there. Oh, they’d talk about me, wondering where I was and what I was
up to. Someone would hear a rumor that I was skating my way across Europe or sharing a penthouse apartment with Michael Landon,
but they’d never know anything for certain, I’d make sure of that. They’d had their chance to share in the fascinating details
of my life and had blown it, every last one of them except for Veronica, who I planned to forgive as soon as she broke it
off with that troglodyte.

When the last bin had been carted away, Hobbs asked if I might be interested in a job at the local packing plant. They were
looking for people, and he could put in a word with the manager and let me stay on in the trailer just so long as I paid for
my own electricity and promised not to knock on his door.

“It’s nothing you’d want to make a career out of,” he said. “The job is good for a few months, but after that I’ll guarantee
you’ll never want to see a goddamned apple for the rest of your natural life.” He studied the tip of his cigarette for a moment
before lighting it. “A peach maybe, but, no sir, not an apple. Nope, no way.”

The plant was located midway between town and the farm. A corrugated, ramshackle eyesore of a building, it housed an archaic
network of shuddering conveyor belts that moved as if they were powered by a team of squirrels running a tread-mill somewhere
in the basement. Nothing about the place was inviting, but I suspected that might change the moment they handed me my union
card. I would soon be a Teamster, a title guaranteed to cost my father a good three nights’ sleep and to drive my former friends
wild with envy. In time, everyone would be affected. Looking out upon the busy plant floor, I imagined all these people seated
in folding chairs as I addressed them from the stage of the meeting hall. “Brothers and sisters,” I would yell, clutching
a bullhorn in one callused hand and a stack of documents in the other, “the time to act is
now!
They call this a contract? Well, I call it a
contrast,
the difference between the way things
are
and the way things
ought to be!
” I would need to pause here, as the applause would be deafening. “It’s
us,
the working people of this country, who make the world go round, and until management opens their eyes to that fact, until
the fat daddies upstairs are ready to park their Cadillacs and negotiate a decent wage,
this
is what I have to say to their contract.” My fellow Teamsters would stand on their seats and cheer as I ripped the contract
into pieces and tossed it over my shoulder.

I had never organized so much as a dinner party, but surely that would change as soon as my fellow workers recognized my way
with words and the natural leadership qualities I had suppressed in the name of humility. I’d always had a way with the little
people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted, empty lives. If these people wanted
to make me their leader, I had no choice but to accept with my own brand of quiet dignity. “Dav-id, Dav-id, Dav-id.” The convention
floor would quake with their chant.

If on the off chance these things
didn’t
happen, at least I’d be working alongside other people. They might not be as perceptive as I was, but still I welcomed the
opportunity to speak to something born without a stem or a tail. Somewhere in this room, a friend was waiting. “I knew it
the first time I saw you,” this person would say over dinner some night. “I took one look and said to myself, ‘Damn, that
guy is someone I’d like to know.’”

I was hired for the second shift, which began at 3 and ended at 11 P.M. My job was to stand in place and pull the leaves off
the apples as they passed before me on the conveyor belt. There was a woman standing no more than four feet away from me,
but the constant rattling din made it impossible to carry on a discussion. Forklifts droned in the background while men sawed
and pounded wooden pallets. Sprayers, belts, and generators; the noise was oppressive and relentless. The doors to the loading
dock were left open, ensuring that we’d never find ourselves complaining about the heat. I picked the leaves off the passing
fruit and tossed them into a cold, wet pile that quickly grew to cover my numb feet. During my first hour I made the mistake
of biting into one of the apples. Fresh from its chemical bath, it burned my lips and the flesh at the corners of my mouth,
leaving a harsh aftertaste that lingered long after I’d run to the bathroom and washed my mouth out with soap.

Hobbs had been right about never wanting to see another apple, but his timing was off. I was ready to banish them from my
sight after my first forty-five minutes. They were merciless, pouring down the belt without interruption twenty-four hours
a day, turning the concept of world hunger into either a myth or a very cruel joke. During a single half hour I had surely
handled enough apples for every man, woman, and child with the teeth to bite them or the will to mash them into sauce.

It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of
cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat,
and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal.
I’d now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays.
That
’s where the real tragedy lies. Cigarettes, crackers, gum: everything I saw would now be tainted by the reminder of my job.
“Brothers and sisters, RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The time crawled by. I’d lift my rubber glove and scrape the frost off my watch, discovering that the last hour amounted to
nothing more than seven minutes. We were given a half-hour dinner break and three ten-minute rest periods, which seemed to
pass before my hands regained enough feeling to hold a cigarette. Dinner was taken from coin-operated machines in a lounge
overlooking the plant floor, so you could chew your sandwich without forgetting where you’d be when the time came to digest
it. Except for me, all the belt workers were middle-aged women who endured the packing season and then stayed on for the canning.
Their ringleader was a stocky, no-nonsense woman named Dorothy, who wore her son’s football jacket beneath a soiled apron
reading SHUT UP AND EAT!

“Alls I can tell you about the union is they better lay off monkeying with my benefits or they’ll find themselves picking
their teeth from out between my bleeding knuckles,” she said. “And I’ll see to that personally!”

She led me to a bulletin board posted with the minutes of the last meeting. Every sentence included a long list of initials,
and after a while I stopped asking what they stood for. Compared to a roll-call vote on severance payments, anything, even
my job, seemed exciting. By the time I qualified for dental insurance, I’d be so old we’d be talking dentures, not fillings.
“You’d be surprised,” Dorothy said. “The years have a way of adding up.”

I was sure they did, but couldn’t they add up to something more than this?

We were taking our break one evening when I asked if anyone happened to speak Italian. “I studied it for a year back in college,”
I said. “And now I’ve completely forgotten the word for ‘tragedy.’ Oh, I know Spanish, too, and a wee bit of Greek, but Italian
is just so, well,
bellissimo,
isn’t it?”

My attempts to impress them failed miserably. The women took to calling me Einstein. “I could tell you were a smart one the
first time I saw you bite into one of those apples,” Trish brayed. “I said to myself, now
there’s
someone with a good head on his shoulders.”

The break room filled with laughter. “Hey, Einstein, what’s the Latin word for ‘blowhard’?”

“Tell me, Einstein,” Dorothy asked, “for five bonus points, which local high-school football team is headed for the state
finals?”

“Aw, leave the kid alone.” This was a man’s voice coming from somewhere behind me. “The guy’s got better things to think about
than your fat-assed son running interference for those sorry Polecats.”

“My boy’s a quarterback,” Dorothy shouted. “And for your information those are the Catamounts, and they’re regional champs!
So put
that
in your pipe and smoke it.”

The man thumbed his nose and gestured for me to join him at his table. “Goddamned flock of silly hens is what they are, but
don’t you worry, they’ll get what’s coming to them. Once they get too old to lay eggs, we take them out back and wring their
necks.”

“Watch it, buster,” Dorothy said, tugging at the strings of her apron.

The man introduced himself as Timothy, adding that all his real friends refer to him as Curly, a curious nickname given that
his thin, wheat-colored hair fell straight down from his balding scalp. “It must be hard, a person such as yourself stuck
in a place like this. These morons resent any-one with brains and a decent education; it makes them feel trapped and threatened
and, oh boy, we can’t have that, can we! Heavens no, they can’t staaannndddd that.” He shuddered and hugged himself, pretending
to be frightened.

“I know just what you’re going through because you and me are a lot alike,” he said. “I’m probably a good fifteen years older
and nowhere near as smart as yourself, but come January I’m enrolling in a management class over at the community college.
It’s time I put on the old thinking cap and hitch this nose to the grindstone. I’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

Curly was sort of hokey, but I was in no position to refuse anyone’s friendship. I grew to appreciate his company, sometimes
almost wishing we could talk about something besides me. “Say, Dave, tell me once more about that dream you had last night,
the one with the shrunken heads lined up inside the egg carton. There’s some powerful symbolism there, let’s see if we can’t
figure it out.” He wasn’t the brightest person in the world, but his heart was in the right place.

Curly worked the first shift as a forklift operator, often staying late to collect overtime. Other nights he sometimes drove
back to the plant just to join me for dinner. He spoke to the foreman and had me promoted to the position of sorter. The leafless,
glistening apples passed along the belt, and my job was to separate the fancy from the extra fancy. At no point did anyone
point out the distinction between these two categories. I tried asking Gail and Dorothy, but angry that I had been promoted
without seniority, they ignored me. I observed and did what they did: working a stick of chewing gum, I crossed my arms and
sat on a stool until a manager came into view, at which point I would rapidly and randomly discriminate, placing this apple
on the fancy belt and its neighbor on extra fancy. Rotten fruit was thrown down a chute, where it would be mashed into baby
food. The raise was twenty-five cents an hour. This was drier than my earlier job but no more exciting.

“Someone sure slept his way to the middle,” I heard Connie whisper to Trish over the coffee machine. “Next thing you know,
he’ll be wearing fur-lined gloves with a cushion propped under his little fanny.”

I assumed they were talking about me, as I was the only person at Duckwall-Pooley in possession of what might be described
as a little fanny. Curly had been right about these women; they were just as petty and small-minded as they could be. “Slept
his way to the middle.” If I were asleep on the job, did they honestly think someone would have me promoted?

“It’s a regular Cutthroat Island around here, and don’t let anyone tell you any different,” Curly would say. “You’re lucky
you’ve got someone to watch your back, my friend. They’re nothing but a flock of stupid sheep, and one of these days they’re
going to get sheared.”

I’d been at the plant for three weeks when Curly invited me to his trailer for a drink. He lived just outside Hood River in
a double-wide he shared with his mother, a woman he often spoke about. “I told Mother what you said about Dorothy’s mouth
looking like a gunshot wound and, Lord, she just about bust a gut, she was laughing so hard. She is one funny lady, my mother.
Nothing tickles her funny bone better than a knock-knock joke. You know any good sidesplitters?”

Desperate as I was for company, I understood that I was clearly dealing with a loser. Management seemed the perfect career
for a person like Curly. I could easily picture him in a short-sleeved shirt, the pocket lined with pens. Someone would ask
him to check the time cards and he’d probably say something goofy like “Okey-dokey, artichokey.” I’d tried to straighten him
out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

He pulled the pickup into the driveway of his trailer, which sat parked beneath a stand of fir trees. It was a cold night,
and clear enough to see the steaming breath of the advancing German shepherd.