__ When you walked down the mud
entrance road, the place looked as
if it covered half the city: huge
angular peaks of rusted scrap steel
were flung across the lot, each
_ Sloping down briefly to a valley
where the railway tracks cut
_ through, Then they rose up again to
block the view beyond. In the
middle of it all there was a cluster
of brown and grey buildings that
looked as though they had been
thrust onto the ste merely to
establish some human presence in
this strange landscape of rusted
steel and broken, battered car
bodies.
I checked the name up on the
“side of the corrugated iron shed.
Yes, this was the place.

“I go a job for one man over at

Acme Salvage,’’ Maggie, the
dispatcher at the. union hall, said
when I arrived there after a layoff.
“It’s starting Monday.”

. “Pl take it,” I said. “I reached
inside the wicket for the dispatch
Slip.

“You'll take it?” Maggie was
incredulous. ‘““You want to go over
to Acme Salvage?” Her voice
lingered heavily on the word
“want”.

“Well, sure,’’ I replied. I’d with-
drawn my hand from the wicket a
little but with only two weeks left to
-go.until Christmas, I wasn’t about
to let a job go by when I didn’t have
one.

“You know that’s the scrap yard
over on Eighth Avenue?” she
asked, holding back the slip again.
I didn’t but I nodded as I tood it.

“Okay,” she said, shrugging.

She wrote my name in the

dispatch book, gave me the star-

_ting time on Monday and told me
where to go when I arrived.

What she didn’t tell me is that the
union -hadn’t been able to find

_ anybody who would willingly take
a job at Acme Salvage for two
years.

The office where the road ended
had a kind of Dickensian splendor
about it, set as it was in the midst
of all the cast-off hardware for
which society no longer had any
use. The counter was burnished
where you opened the door and
behind it, the timekeeper was half
in darkness as he leaned over an
ancient desk oit by a solitary bulb
hanging from the ceiling. He was
on the phone—the only apparent
concession to the 20th century—
when J arrived, and as I walked in
___ he put his hand over the receiver in
surprise. Obviously few strangers
came through the door.

“The union sent me down.”’ I
said. I tried to sound authoritative
but I was suddenly seized with an
overwhelming compulsion to ask if
his name was Cratchit. I sup-
pressed it.

“Qh . . yourethenew man,”’ he
answered, with a faint trace of
doubt. “You can leave your em-
ployment card on the counter. The
lunchroom is down the road.”

The lunchroom, . as The
timekeeper had euphemistically
called it, was only a room by virtue
of the fact that it had four walls —
at least, most of four walls — and
something that had once been a
roof over the top. The windows had
long ago given up transmitting
light and the bulb stuck
precariously in the ceiling was
coated with the accretions of
decades. A steam pipe, coming
from an adjacent boiler shed and
passing through the wall, created a
foggy gloom as the warm, moist
air hit the colder air streaming
through the innumerable cracks in
the corrugated iron. On the edge of
the mist, I could see three men
sitting by the pipe — the only place
it was warm.

I waited by the door, studying the
toes of my boots as I meticulously
opened the two folds in the dispatch
slip. “Shop steward here?” I asked
of no one in particular.

The voice that answered had a
startled edge to it. “Yeah, I’m the
shop steward — the name’s
Scottie.”

I walked over and handed him
the slip, seizing the opportunity to
take up a spot by the pipe where I
could see the others. There was
Scottie, a short, stubby fellow with
a bristling shock of grey hair that
stuck out from underneath his cap.
Beside him was a taller man, slim
almost to the point of being gaunt
and wearing a look of infinite
sadness. At the other end of the
pipe was a younger man with dark,
pleasant features set off by a smile

that he flashed as I nodded in his:

dir ection.

Scottie had finished looking at
the dispatch slip. “The union sent
you down?”’ he asked. I nodded in
affirmation.

“Well, I'll be damned.” He
waved the slip in the direction of
the others and looked at me again
as if searching for some key to
what seemed to be incredible
behavior.

It was my turn to be startled.
“what's wrong?” I asked, looking
from one to another. They looked
at Scottie.

“We haven’t had a man down
here from the union for .: . let me
see”. .. must be better’n two years.
Anybody that has come has come
through Manpower,” he said.

“How come?” I asked, already
half knowing the answer. I began
to remember that there had been
several others waiting in the
dispatch hall when Maggie an-
nounced the opening at Acme. I
was the only one to respond — and I
was not high on the seniority list.

Scottie chuckled sardonically.
“Guess nobody wants to come

down to this god-forsaken place,”

he replied.
There was silence while
everybody weighed that. Scottie
studied the dispatch slip,
fascinated.

“you ever work in a scrap yard
before?” he asked suddenly. There
had to be an_ explanation
somewhere.

“No,” I allowed. I was thinking
of telling him that I had once
known someone who had but I
didn’t think I could convince him
that I had gained any experience
through association.

“Jt’s a miserable job,” he said
with acertain finality. There was a
murmur of assent and another
silence.

I broke it this time. “I just take
any job the union gives,” I said.
“specially when there’s only two
weeks till Christmas.” —

That remark must have moved
even the old man sitting beside
Scottie for he nodded fervently in
my direction. ‘‘Oh,”’ Scottie broke
in, “this here’s Eric and over
there’s Mario.” He swung his head
in Mario’s direction. ‘“‘You’ll be
working with us up on the tin
press?’ d

Mario was just about to
acknowledge the introduction
when another man appeared in the
doorway and looked quickly
around the room. Mario jumped up
as the newcomer noticed him.

“Get the hell up on that tin press,
Mario — I’ve told you to be up
there before the whistle goes, not
after. Moveit, or I’ll send you back
down to Manpower where you
came from.” :

“And this here’s Pete,” Scottie
said to me as the man finished his
tirade and began moving in my
direction. ‘‘He’s the yard boss.”

“So you're the new man the
union sent down, eh?” The con-
denscension dripped from his
words. ‘‘Don’t know why that union
evenhasa hiring hall — they don’t
know what to do with it. And
anyway, all of this union hiring
stuff isn’t worth a crock. . ”’

That digression completed, Pete
got to the point. “J guess since
we've got you we'll put you to
work. But I’m warning you —
there’s none of your fringe benefits
around here. If you don’t like it,
you might as well quit now.”

He stood imperiously in front of
me, waiting. Scottie and Eric
watched from the door.

“I’m not quitting,” I proclaimed.
I tried to think of something else to
say but no words came.

He shrugged and turned on his
heel to go out the door. I followed
the three of them up the mud-filled
path to the spot where the cars
were strewn around like the af-
termath of some monumental
demolition derby.

Quaint as the name sounded, ‘‘tin
press’ was a misnomer. Tpacer-

Griffin

tainly wasn’t tin and “press”
hardly began to describe the an-
cient hydraulic monster that
groaned and shrieked hideously as
it-engulfed various chunks of a
car’s anatomy, rendered them into
compact, bite-sized chunks and
then spat them out disdainfully.
And it soon became apparent why
Scottie, who took the controls of an
equally ancient electromagnetic
crane the loomed watchfully over
the yard, was working here: he
was the only man, probably on
earth, who could keep the beast
running. As for Eric, his was a job
that only someone of his en-
scrutable nature would undertake.
The levers on the press jarred
every bone in his slight frame from
morning until quitting time.

The job never ended or altered.
As fast as Mario and I peeled the
upholstery off car doors, stripped
speedometers and gauges out of
dashboards and heaved the car-
cass into the insatiable maw of the
press, more cars would be dumped
on the heap. Scottie claimed that
he carefully selected what color
car he would pick up each time
(just to ward off the inevitable
boredom) but it made no dif-
ference to us. There was always
the same dissection to perform
before throwing the remains into
the press; always the same blocks
coming out from under Eric’s
levers.

And always there was Pete, the
yard boss. ;

To any student of labor-
management relations, Pete was a
collector’s item. One of the last of
the old school (although he was
scarcely more than 40), he was
everything that the owners of
Acme could possibly wantin a yard
boss. He wrung every last ounce of
value out of his tiny work force and

as he did so, he sought to convince

them that what he was doing, both
for them as well as for the com-
pany, was of the highest moral
calling. He ranted on the work
ethic with all the zeal of a fun-
damentalist minister although his

methods were utterly primitive: he

literally drove his charges by the
sheer force of verbal abuse.

For the eight or nine months that
he had worked there, it was Mario
who had borne the brunt of Pete’s

invective. For Pete was as much a
bigot as he wasa driver and a bully
and he uttered every slur that he
could remember against Mario’s
Italian heritage and rode him
mercilessly. He stopped only long.
enough to replenish his stock of
epithets.

Yet Mario, for whom this was the
first job in. a newly adopted
country, never complained. He
maintained a stolid silence, never
venturing a retort and never taking
his grievances to Scottie who was
usually up in his crane and beyond
the range of hearing when Pete
launched his attacks.

But then Pete found a new target
in me. For one thing I was green
and vulnerable. But I had also been
dispatched by the union; I had th-
warted Pete’s design to hire only
through Manpower. He declared
open season.

_ The barrage was constant: I was"

too slow, I didn’t strip the
upholstery properly, I spent too
much time pushing the bales into
the boxcar or I took too long
coming back from the railway
tracks where the cars were
spotted. When the possibilities
dwindled in these areas, Pete
found new ones: he began hurling”
insults about my family lineage,
about the way in which I was put on
the earth, previous occupations
that I was supposed to have had
(most of these were merely
variations on the same theme) and
my educational background.

It was all intended to force me to
quit or, failing that, to protest. I
would do neither, I resolved. To
quit would mean capitulation; to
protest, while the probationary
period was still in effect, would
only give him the satisfaction of
being able to fire me _ without
recourse.

But the whole affair had a
startling effect on the usually
placid Mario.

For months he had borne Pete’s
insults and orders stoically, saying
nothing and accepting everything.
But now, when I was the target
instead of him, his manner
changed; his eyes would flash
angrily when Pete launched into
oneof histirades. And one day, just
before Christmas, I could see his
face contort with anger as Pete
bellowed at me with more than the
usual vehemence.

Yet he said nothing of it at lunch.
His mind had turned to other
things.

“Christmas Eve tomorrow, no?”’
he cried joyously. “Then we get
two days off.” He exulted over the
prospect of his first Christmas ina
new country, over the thought of
two days off to spend with his
family. _

“two days off without Pete,” I

Concluded on pg. 14

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DECEMBER 17, 1976—Page 7