I was a teenage soldier
I'm not a writer. I have to admit. Although I do walk around thinking as if I am writing. Imagining everything as if it were a paragraph in a book, a very proper and matter of fact book. As read by a well pronounced man who speaks "the queen's english".
It never leaves my head like that. I feel like a deaf person trying to pronounce words they can't hear when I write, I imagine the words I write must sound like the awkward grunts of a person who has no idea what the words they are saying sound like.
Also I have to admit-- I have been forced to admit, there are things that have happened in my life and the lives of those that I know in which people seem interested. I guess I want to share them too. I admit there's a small part of me that's broken, a valve that gets stuck, and something backs up and then bursts.
Sometimes I delight in the pained faces of the people I tell my absurd and true tales of horror and glee. Sometimes I enjoy leaving people speechless or stuttering and the thought of a life they never imagined, a life like a firey clown car crash or being skewered on the top of a brightly colored umbrela. That's wearing off I'm afraid.
I'm socially awkward, and I find that my mind doesn't moderate itself quite the same way other people's minds do. Usually when I am talking to people I find myself grappling for something to say, and usually when I do say something it's the first thing that I relate to whatever they said, the same way a rorschach test works.
The fact of the matter is it's true. I was a teenage soldier. I told this story a million times to a series of unbelieving faces. During my 9th and 10th grade years, I chose to be in the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corp as one as my electives. This meant Army uniforms and ribbons, and insignia. This meant shooting pellet guns at small targets and learining to read contour maps. This meant leaving school during the afternoon to attend funerals. This meant, marching band without the band part.
This was a class for real assholes, in whatever way you want to imagine it. And of course I thrived.
I tried all night to escape this seemingly Waiting for Godot world. I read a story recently called "My life as Samuel Beckett", and ever since have been completly in love with his nothingness. For a while having been hearing endlessly about Samuel Beckett I thought perhaps the world was steering me into him and there was something about him that I needed to find a kinship with and embrace, but my mind's changed about this. It's not him my life is steering me into, it's nothingness.
There was a play at the theatre where I work more than a month ago. It was a play about James Joyce, but Samuel Beckett was in it, as played by a patient in a mental institution in the play. It wasn't a tasteless play. I guess the reason the show struck me as funny and not offensive is the really distressing thing about dealing with someone with schitzophrenia is the inability to bring them out of that character. You want it to be a character. And honestly the things my sister comes up with and the way she acts when she is ill can be humorous, out of context.(her first major bout of illness came about during O.J. Simpson's chase with police and much of her delusion focused on that, strongly influenced by the fact that we had met Oj on a city street while visiting NYC, when young girls of only 12 and 14, further complicated by the fact that the shroud of turin was in town at the same time) But, this distance, anxiety and frustration that is created when your loved one asks you imploringly and without understanding "am I alive?", could never be fully communicated in something with a finite ending.
The Beckett character was a mere sidenote in the production, as played by a well worn and pleasant musician who was seemingly half muppet half zappa child, who kind of meandered around the theater during the play and on his offtime.
For the last few weeks, since May 4th exactly, I have spent about 40 minutes three days a week fashioning a story about nothingness. My nothingness is a two pronged nothingness. My story details a lack of use and a lack of emotion. I write it during the long intervals between sound cues I have for the current production at our theatre.
The play is two hours long, and through out the two hours there are 5 instances where in it is necessary for a low groaning, squealing and rumbling. These sound cues are played at a decible barely audible to the audience. They are played during four dream sequences and once for the "lighting at the light tower in the center of town". They are on a minidisk and are played and stopped with simple cd player function. In my spare time between the harsh pokes in the side from the stage manager (we have no headsets) I write or read. I finished the Prince of Providence - the story about the corrupt and incarcerated former mayor of Providence, in about a week. I've moved on to the Mc Sweeneys 12th edition which I bought around the corner from a bookstore that sells remainder books for a mere $1.98. I read 12 during the play and usually skip around Nick Hornby's Songbook while doing laundry.
I hadn't yet read "My Life as Samuel Beckett", when I started my story of nothingness. I had actually begun wanting to write a play about a stage manager who murdered their assistant stage manager called "Snuff", the neat thing about it was that being that the assistant stage manager was dead the props all moved around quite seemingly floatingly (think fishing wire), and there was the amazing situation of having the audience being in the back stage area with the stage manager and the ghost, while a performance continued in the foreground, barely audible and somewhat unimportantly. I scribbled a few notes down invisioning the lengths that the assistant stage manager went to that aggrivated her stage manager so, and what her motiviations and ineptitudes were, but it kind of fizzled out like everything else I do. I put my pen down. I posted one or two here on the blog as they were written without editing.
I tried to imagine a time wherein I was at a job were I was any less useful than I was right at this job- with the five sound cues in the two hours. And then it came to me.
I had a job at a factory that made cookies and animal crackers for a large scale food vending service. These were cookies that came in large white boxes with blue lettering on the side that said only "chocolate chip". They came to school cafaterias and prisons and hospitals, institutions everywhere in desire of bland affordable cookies. I imagine they handed them out during blood drives.
These cookies were packaged in with bare hands. I never understood this having temped at so many food service jobs, this was the first one where the women acutally used their grubby fingers to shove the cookies whirring down the belt at them into packaging rows.
The smell of cookies permeated blocks. And unlike the other large manufacturing bakeries I had worked at which were stationed at some remote industrial center on the outskirts of town, this one was smack dab in the middle of the pitiful city in which I lived.
They did however make me wear a hairnet. The regular girls had ridiculous uniforms, but I was only a temp so I somehow avoided that atrocity.
I'm not sure how long I worked there, only a weeks worth of shifts I believe. My job, as it were, entailed nothing more than standing for the shift beneath the wending and weiling conveyors above in a place far off from everyone else where the cookies entered the room from the oven. I worked the gingersnaps line. I had a stack of cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags. If at any time the line would back up at the point where the conveyor would meet the other conveyor warm steaming cookies would rain down from above and fall into the box in front of me. My job, if I chose to accept it, was to make sure there was another box there below, if the first box should get full. i was encouraged to eat whatever cookies fell. Someone else, another worker came around from the packing end and poked at the conveyor with a long metal pole with something plastic on the end to get them unstuck.
The first night I worked, I believe the box became half full. It's an experience that was both painful and enjoyable.
Here's something to understand about the manufacturing world of baked goods. Preservatives are not magical powders which seemlesly seep into your foods. Perservatives are like vinegar sprayed across your cookies. When I worked at another factory I remember them making pizzas for me before the preservatives, but also remember stealing peices of the dough after it had been stuck near the hoses where the preservatives were sprayed. Kind of bitter and like having been soaked with vinegar, my mouth with burn and tingle afterwords the way no vinegar could have.
That being said, these cookies were still soft, and not yet covered in preservatives. They were soft, warm, just out of the oven and falling from overhead at an unpredicted interval. But most times never more than one or two at a time, just happened to slip through where the conveyor belts met.
VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGO; What for?
VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Ah! (Silence.) He didn't come?
VLADIMIR: No.
So there I stood and there I waited each night silently and without much purpose about me, sampling warm ginger snaps. If not enough cookies fell for me to eat, I could walk about three feet ahead, where the conveyor snaked around again and grab some from there. They were slightly less warm and slightly less delicious than the cookies that fell from the sky, but only slightly less.
posted by S.L.Reiter @ 8:34 PM
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