When I get home, the sun is out and the rest of the city is awake. I have plenty of time to cool down, stretch again, then eat and get to work by seven-thirty.
* * *
I’ve been at the warehouse for ten years. I started out of high school. I work on the stock floor. We’re called Central Supply, and we assemble and ship orders for the county school district, everything from chalk and erasers to lightbulbs and toilet paper and basketballs on up to filing cabinets and desks. I used to be the newest guy until Ruben was hired. But they still call me the New Guy. Some kind of joke, I guess.
Ruben is about my age, and every afternoon he disappears with one of the drivers to smoke a joint out back behind the dumpsters. Ruben is Mexican, and when he first started here, he corrected us when we called him Ruben, telling us that it should be pronounced Ruben. From then on everybody made sure to call him Ruben, which is what he goes by now.
The rest of the guys have been at the warehouse forever. Dave has been here the longest. Our foreman, Mack, says Dave came with the building — he was seventeen when he started, and it’s been twenty-four years now. In a way I owe my life to Dave. With the exception of Ruben, the men I work with are old and unhealthy. They’re all overweight, and they smoke constantly, even while they eat. Dave is the worst of them. I’ve watched him get older and sicker — he had cancer surgery a while ago — and after a few years he started getting to me. I drank a lot then, nights after work, weekends in front of the TV. You could say I was another person back then. I lived with my folks rent-free. Nothing was expected of me. I thought I had it made. But I started worrying about things. I was afraid the warehouse would be my whole life, like it was for Dave. I counted the cigarettes he smoked and the cups of coffee he drank. I counted the sugar cubes he ate. He grabbed them by the handful and snacked on them. “Sweets for the sweet,” he’d say. I watched him lick the mayonnaise off his fingers from the sandwiches his wife made him. I watched him hop down from the loading dock — a three-foot jump — and then stoop for a minute to catch his breath. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, and he got annoyed. “Am I making your heart go pitty-pat?” he said. In a way, he was. I started running that night. I went out after dark so nobody would see me. I didn’t even make it around the block before I ended up puking in somebody’s bushes. I thought I was going to die. My folks thought I was nuts. I kept at it, though, probably the only thing I’ve ever kept at.
I run every day now. I dropped forty-five pounds, and I don’t drink anymore. My heart rate at rest is just under fifty beats per minute. I fall asleep every night like that, and I never need more than six hours. When I look in the mirror now, I see somebody who doesn’t disgust me. I see somebody who knows the difference between what he does for a paycheck and what really matters in this life. At work Mack is always telling me to slow down. “You get paid by the hour,” he says, “not by the order.” I don’t argue. So I slack off at work because my foreman tells me to. But I know who I am.
And I know this, too: that I owe nothing to Dave, that I owe nothing to anybody. You get where you are by yourself. There’s no regret in that. That’s just the way it is.
Rilke says: Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you.
* * *
There was one person I liked. Her name was Dot, and she always referred to herself as “this old broad.” She never said “I” or “me.” She worked in Receiving, and I hated going in there. Receiving is full of middle-aged women, all married or widowed or divorced, and whenever I walked in, they’d stop talking and look at me with these little smiles on their faces, like I’d caught them at something. I liked Dot because when I started running, she was the first to notice the change in me, and not just losing the weight. Everybody noticed that at first. The guys said things like “You look lovely today.” And even the women in Receiving made a few cracks. Dot said they didn’t know anything. The body was a temple, she said, and we could all benefit from sprucing up our temples. She said I seemed calmer, settled somehow, like I’d made a decision I was comfortable with. She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. I liked that she told it to me. She wasn’t making fun of me. When she retired last summer, they had a little party for her, and she said if I ever wanted to pop a few beers with a tough old broad, to come on by. I would have. A few months later she had a stroke and had to move in with her son Phil, who works on the loading dock. Nobody has seen her since, and Phil never talks about her. If you ask him how Dot’s doing, he just glares at you. So we stopped asking. If she died, I’m sure he’d tell us.
Phil’s been stealing from the stock for the past year now. He hasn’t been very secretive about it, and I don’t know why he bothers, because it’s never anything big — a few rolls of film or a box of ballpoint pens. Nobody says anything, and even Mack, who’s kind of a stickler, pretty much ignores it. I guess we’re all thinking the same thing: If they fired Phil, what would happen to Dot?
* * *
I suppose I was friends with Ruben once. When he first started working here and found out I ran, he told me that running was for pussies and that you had to lift weights. It was his way of inviting me to his gym. We went there one night after work, a twenty-four-hour place with a juice bar and music piped in through speakers and mirrors everywhere. Ruben introduced me around. He called me a buddy from work who was a pussy runner, and everybody laughed. I didn’t get mad. I recognized this as a kind of respect. Ruben joined a group of guys around a weight machine. I never liked lifting weights. Half the time you’re standing around with your hands on your hips, waiting for somebody else to finish. And then there’s the mirrors, mirrors everywhere so you could watch yourself, so that everywhere you turned, there you were. One room even had mirrors on the ceiling. I got out of there and worked on a treadmill until Ruben was done. After we got cleaned up, we went out to the parking lot and joined his buddies. They were all drinking beers out of a cooler in somebody’s car trunk. They were talking about the women in the gym, about who was hot and all that. And I guess in all the talk I let a few things slip. It wasn’t the beer. I only had one bottle. So it wasn’t the beer. It’s just that when you’re talking and everybody’s having a good time, when people are talking to you and everything feels okay, you just let your guard down. I should have known what to expect from people. I should have known better.
Later that week, Eugene sat down next to me at lunch and handed me a doughnut and asked if I wanted a moment alone with it. I didn’t get it. Then Ruben slid the whole box over, a big pink box filled with doughnuts and little packs of condoms. They called it the virgin assortment, and they said I had to fuck every doughnut before attempting real pussy. Then Dave put his cigarette down and stood up. They’d cut one of his lungs out, and he was still smoking. He stood up and pumped at the table with his hips, and said the best woman he ever had anyway was a butterscotch custard bar. Mack finally told them to knock it off, and they did, and he changed the subject. But nobody was listening to him. They were all sitting there, grinning down into their thermoses and ashtrays. They were having a great time.
That was it for me. I eat by myself now, out on the loading dock. Mack didn’t like that at first. He said it creates discord. “You have to eat chow with your shipmates,” he told me. But since I still take breaks with them, he lets me eat lunch alone. I’ve got a spot at the far end of the dock where they recharge the forklifts and pallet movers at night. I can catch the last of the noontime sun before it swings to the other side of the building. I like it out here in the fresh air, in the sunlight, away from the smoke and the smell from the crap they heat up in the microwave.