It has happened many times before when the sawmill has given us workers ample notice they are going to shut up the joint for a while: just about everybody was on something on Friday. At least a couple of the guys were puking in the parking lot on their way in for a shift they could not give a shit about.
The first aid room was a little busier than usual but nobody got maimed too bad or killed. We all know we are doomed, born to lose and from the wrong side of the tracks no matter which side of the tracks we are on.
Most of us will make more money on the side in the dope industry than we would have ever made in our overground jobs and as a bonus we do not have to listen to a fucking foreman and we get to collect job loss insurance from the fucking government. I will be taking my insurance money to the local Standardbred track. Going to bet inside horses with late speed and low odds.
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I worked the last night at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue Assembly plant. That was Detroit in the '70's. Pretty much everyone brought a bottle to work. That place was falling apart before the layoffs started. It reminded me of the bridge scene from Apocalypse Now: "Hey soldier. Who's the C.O. here?"- "Ain't you?" I was put on a job I'd never done before, given half an hour to learn it. It was customary to work with a partner for at least ten days on a new job. I was supposed to be attaching fan shrouds to radiator frames. After about twenty cars, I realized that I was using my air wrench to drive screws right into the radiator core, not the radiator frame. I fucked around on a couple more cars and realized that it was almost impossible to find the holes on the frames, so I just went back to driving screws through the radiator of each car as it went by. I kept that up, six screws per radiator, a car every sixty seconds, for eight hours. What were they gonna do? Lay me off?
Detroit too had a dope boom, along with a night club boom. Twenty five thousand of us lost our jobs in one city in one night. The next morning we were all down at the unemployment office. All of us. The line went a long way down the street. I think about half of us took our last paycheck and bought some weight in drugs. Those that did, spent the next year hanging out in night clubs, selling each other drugs until the unemployment ran out and the dope ran out. By then, I'd left town.
Back then you could always go to Texas and get a job. Nowadays, I don't think there's anyplace to go.
The Last Day before a business shuts down is always special. I was working the last shift, a night shift on the river, when an old sawmill shut down for good. I was the boom chargehand that night. The guys got a little more loaded than usual, took a sidewinder upriver a ways, and sank the motherfucker. There's a million ways to say, "Fuck you too," when you are set free by a company.
You might want to try outside late speed when Santa Anita opens on the 26th.
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