They’re No Better Than Me by Travis Oltmann
I was working temp shifts at a warehouse, living the dream. That’s what we said when someone asked how we were doing. “Living the dream,” we’d say. It was funny because no one would ever dream about working in a warehouse.
The building was in an industrial park called The Industrial Park. It had no windows and rows and rows and rows of shelves. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen walls. In the lunchroom we sometimes talked about the outside like Columbus hadn’t sailed there yet.
There were regulars but they didn’t seem to like the temps. They talked to me like I barely graduated high school, like I didn’t know what I wanted in life but I knew I didn’t want to work in a warehouse like them. They talked to others like they were unstable and prone to violent outbursts or they lived on the streets and might steal some of the capitalist excrement we were constantly shuffling around.
I had to get my timesheets signed before I started. That way I didn’t work for free.
The guy who signed the timesheets sat in a tiny office the entire day. Every time I walked in there he had his hands over his belly like it might float away if he didn’t.
There was a stack of papers on his desk that could support the pantheon.
He would just sit there with his hands on his belly. His helium belly.
“What you need son?” He would say.
I never needed anything from him except a signature on my timesheet.
“I need a signature,” I would say.
Then I would go to a gate and there would be a trailer parked there. The driver would nuzzle the trailer up against these dirty pads and we would open the doors. The trailers were like tombs in every way except the old rotting corpses.
The regulars would look inside the trailers and say things like, “Fucking watermelons again?” or, “fucking water softener again?”
The regulars were never happy about what we had to unload.
There was this temp I worked with, Maurice, who offered me a bunch of pills from his pocket. There was red and blue pills, really dark obsidian pills, white pills that looked like normal pills. I asked about the white ones, asked if they took care of a headache or an upset stomach. He said, “Nononono. These here make you work better. The red and blue are fine if you got some sleep. The dark ones are the best but they make your skull feel like it’s going to rip through your face. The white ones are like the dark ones but they make you constipated. So I take one of the darks with one of the whites until they’re done, then I take the red and blue ones. Trust me, this place will want to hire me for good when they see how quickly we finish. So what’s up, you want some? Two dollars apiece.”
“No, I’m alright,” I said.
He took a dark one and a white one and started throwing boxes at me. I think he was upset I didn’t buy his pills or maybe he wanted to show their powers.
I couldn’t keep up. I was stacking them as quickly as I could.
He kept saying, “C’mon now, c’mon now, c’mon now, here we go.”
A box would hit me in the chest.
“C’mon now, c’mon now, here we go.”
I’d be picking up the previous box when another would come my way.
When we were done unloading the boxes I was sweating.
A regular came by to pick up the skids with a forklift. He said, “Shit you unloaded that quickly.”
Then he took a dark pill and a white pill.
A man with a clipboard, a regular, but a more regular regular, walked over to us. “We got one more truck today. We won’t need both of you. Why don’t you go home,” he said to me, “and you stay,” he said to Maurice.
“We’ll need you both tomorrow morning, though,” he said.
I walked into helium belly’s office and had him sign my papers.
The next morning I came in and a regular was mopping the floor. There was pylons around the area he was mopping.
“What happened?” I asked.
“That fucking drug addict shit his pants,” the guy said.
One afternoon I was unloading a freezer truck. There was a load of turkeys. This was right before Thanksgiving when the weather reminded everyone they chose stability over contentment.
A woman was there in the cooler area. I thought she was lost. Thought she was looking for popsicles in the grocery store and took a wrong turn into one of the trailers. She didn’t have a jacket and she was shivering.
“It’s cold in here, aren’t you guys cold?”
“I’m Laney, I’m in the HR department,” she said.
I had a turkey in my hands so I kind of just stood there. I think she was waiting for a handshake.
I didn’t like the custom of handshaking so I thought when I finally got out of that place and found a decent job, maybe I could carry around a frozen turkey.
“How long have you been in here?”
“Do they give you a break? Seems like they should let you warm up every hour or so.”
“They don’t really do that, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Let me see what I can do,” she said.
I kept unloading the turkeys. We unloaded turkeys for a week and a half. They were my entire life for ten days.
Some temps couldn’t handle it.
One went crazy and started throwing turkeys. A regular was saying, “Calm down there buddy. Calm down,” as he was skipping over turkeys.
Another guy tried to steal one in his backpack. When they found it, he said, “That isn’t mine.”
He said, “Maybe my woman packed it for lunch.”
They said, “Your wife packed you a frozen turkey for lunch? Where were you going to cook it?”
He said, “Maannn, I don’t know, she a crazy ass bitch.”
I started seeing turkeys in my dreams. They had no feathers but they had a head and that red scrotum thing that wouldn’t be healthy on any other animal. They also had little sneakers. They danced around and sang a song about how much they hated bread, sage, celery, onion, and thyme.
When we finished with the turkeys, Laney was there in the warehouse, talking to helium belly about his chair, asking if it was comfortable and there was proper back support.
“I’m working on the cold storage breaks,” she said.
“I have a request in to the assistant operations manager. He has to approve it, then he’ll give it to the operations manager. Once he approves it, then we’re really close.”
I didn’t know where any of these managers were. I imagined they were on a shelf somewhere in the warehouse and a forklift had to bring them down.
She was young like me and I think she wanted to change the world one ten minute break at a time. I didn’t really want to change the world. I wanted out of it. Not by dying, just by finding a nice quiet place where I didn’t have to be anywhere at a certain time.
“We’re close. I promise. Temps are part of our family too,” she said.
She got walked out a month later. At least that’s what a regular told me.
He said management was restructuring.
I imagined a guy in a suit watching a guy in a hard hat as he slapped mortar on bricks and stacked them. Everything was going well until there was a desk in the way. The guy in the hard hat looked at the guy in the suit, and the guy in the suit said, “Damn.”
I forgot about her by Christmas. There was just too much going on.
Too much going on to remember people.
The days began to get mixed together.
Early on I would remember unloading cabbage and grapefruits on Tuesday, toilet paper on Friday, shit like that. I would remember when someone had body odor. I would remember what kind of shirts helium belly wore. He only had a couple.
Then one day a regular came up to me and said, “Hey, I just saw a mouse. You remember when Jerry stomped on that one?”
I did remember it. A regular found it and went to call animal control. Jerry said, “Animal control?” then brought his boot down on the little guy. The corpse formed into the treads. Jerry picked it out with a palette shard.
I said, “Yeah, ha ha, what happened to that guy?”
“He died two years ago,” the regular said.
Eventually I started driving a forklift. I found a deserted part of the warehouse and lifted the forks as far as they could go, way up past the top shelves. They stopped right before the orange light fixtures.
I was sad. I thought they would go right through the roof and I would climb up the mast and out into the atmosphere.
I would look at the sky and throw my hands out and spin around. If it was warm I would feel the warmth on my face. If it was raining I would open my mouth and stick my tongue out.
Instead I was stuck with the warehouse’s atmosphere.
It was a corrugated ceiling thick with dust.
The forklifts beeped every thirty seconds to limit the casualties of industry. Problem was, the beeps blended into the silence when you heard them enough.
A regular ran over a temp’s leg when he was turning a corner. I heard the screaming so I drove over to get a look. The man’s leg was snapped and the bone had ripped through his flesh.
I knew bones were white but I never knew how white.
The regular took off the temp’s dirty sock. His small toe and the one next to it were flat. That stirred the regular’s stomach. He went to vomit but didn’t want to vomit on the temp, so he hung the sock on the bone and turned his head just as a gut truck sandwich and diet coke ejected from his nose and mouth.
The dirty sock was hanging from the white bone.
There was puddles of vomit and blood.
The temp said, “Thank god!”
Workers compensation sent him a check and I never saw him again.
But I never saw most temps again. They passed through for a day or two before being taken out by whatever storm brought them in.
The temps kept things interesting. The regulars only talked about the weather and sports and things that annoyed them.
One day I accidentally pulled a skid from the wrong bin location. The skid had a big box with a hole in the side. I looked in and there was a bed made out of plastic wrap and packing peanuts and shredded newspapers. I returned the skid to its bin location and parked the forklift near the others.
I walked back and climbed the shelves.
I went inside the box and made myself comfortable. It was nice and dark and I felt like the only person in the world.
I wondered if I could stay in there forever.
“They’re No Better Than Me” by Travis Oltmann, originally published in (parenthetical) issue six
