Big Garage Doors and a Broke Drug Dealer

    At some point in my late teens I needed to start looking for a job. Before then I had been making money selling weed and occasionally other drugs. But I was becoming a shitty drug dealer over the last year, not answering my phone at all and/or making people wait for hours until I left my house to bring them what they wanted. More and more people had stopped contacting me about buying weed. My stash of money was running low. I wasn’t going to be able to support my growing alcohol problem if I didn’t get some real type of job. I wasn’t making much money selling to the few people who still put up with me, and I also couldn’t trust them to stay around much longer. So I had to bite the bullet. But I didn’t know how. When you’re a high school dropout, options for employment often seem thin. So I did what everyone told me was my only choice. I went down to the job agency.

    When I got there they had me fill out a few forms. That was it. They told me they’d call me when they had a job that suited my application. 

    The next morning I was woken up by the sound of my phone ringing. I picked it up and the lady on the other end told me there was a job available for me, if I wanted it. I asked what it was and she told me it was a job unloading trucks. At some garage door warehouse. She told me the address. I got dressed and took the bus there. 

    I was unhappy sitting at home all the time, with no money. Always hoping that someone would call me to buy weed. They never did. On desperate occasions I’d send out a mass message to everyone that had stopped buying from me, informing them of my low prices and high grade buds. One or two people might text back, just saying, “Nah.” I would sit there on days when I didn’t have enough money to buy beer and dream about shooting myself. I would search up things like “Quick, easy, money making scams,” on different websites. I would hope that one of my friends would come over with a case of beer. I would walk around the house going insane, trying to stop the constant thinking. Always thoughts. Thoughts about nothing in particular.

    I walked into the warehouse and looked around. I met the people I’d be working with and they seemed tolerable. Nice people, even. It seemed like it was going to be a good day. Just doing a job, in a warehouse, with other humans. I was trying to be optimistic.

    We started working and everything was fine. We were walking around the warehouse smoking cigarettes and straightening everything out. We were just joking around with each other and carrying different things up to the storage area of the warehouse. Which was up two flights of shoddy wooden stairs. Probably stairs built by one of the full-timers who worked at the warehouse. We did this for a couple hours. I started thinking this is how we’d spend the day. Just bring shit up stairs and then go home after eight hours or something. It was getting kind of hot in the warehouse, since it was the middle of summer, but it wasn’t unbearable. I was starting to settle into the job. That’s when the truck arrived.

    It pulled into the dock and then someone ran over and opened the sliding metal door attached to the warehouse. Then he unlatched the door at the back of the truck and swung it open. He put a tiny metal bridge in between the concrete floor of the warehouse and the aluminum floor of the trailer, so people could walk back and forth, instead of jumping over the gap that separated the two. The boss called us all over to him. We formed a circle around him and he explained what he wanted us to do. He told us we had to work in pairs and unload the boxes from the truck. He said the boxes contained panels of garage doors. He explained that one man wouldn’t be able to carry the panels on his own, so we were supposed to evenly divide the load. He pointed at the trailer and told us to get started. If we had any questions he told us to find him in his office and ask him. I walked toward the truck with three other guys. We walked across the bridge and it bounced and shook. We were about to do something that would earn us money. Then we could spend the money on things and not be homeless.

    We started lifting the boxes of garage door panels one by one. And we stayed lifting them one by one. Those boxes were heavier than they looked. They must have been, like, industrial garage doors. Like garage doors that had been lifting weights, or something. It seemed like the trailer was a never-ending tunnel. 

    An hour passed and the tunnel turned into an oven. The sun was beating down directly on the metal truck and we were inside being cooked as we carried these boxes. The sweat was pouring off my face and dripping onto the floor. It was dripping off my lips and soaking the cigarettes in my mouth. I just shut my brain off and went into a trance. Lifting and walking. Walking and lifting. Back and forth.

    Eventually they told us to go eat lunch. We all dropped what we were doing and headed straight for the front doors of the warehouse. The other guys walked up to the food truck and got something in their stomachs. I just kept on walking. I hit the street and walked a few blocks. I sat down at a bus stop and waited for a bus. I hopped on the bus and went home. I got home and took a shower. Then I turned my phone off and went for a nap on the couch.

   Later I realized that I hadn’t gotten my timesheet signed and I wouldn’t be getting paid.