Since released from jail two months ago for being caught at a traffic stop with a tiny plastic bag of grass, under the passenger seat, left there three years ago, believed lost and forgotten, was sentenced to 8 months behind bars. This short stay with my fellow criminals felt like 8 years rather than months. I made friends with a serial shop lifter and a man awaiting trial for beating up his wife nearly killing her. I didn’t ask the alleged attempted murderer questions, and he never wanted to talk about it. The dude had been awaiting trial for over a year. He was bitter and would take it out on the pots and pans when on kitchen duty. The echoing clang of the communal soup bucket slammed against the concrete wall seemed the assuage the frustration of his situation.
My shoplifting cellmate was more congenial to conversation. He was a resourceful individual, stealing small bags of two-minute noodles from the prison pantry and taking it back to our cage. We became friends on those dark nights in our cell, sucking on our chicken flavored contraband. It was a month after my release that “Hank” the serial shoplifter knocked on the front door of my father’s house offering me a job at the laundry factory.
Any individual who has spent a stint in jail even for a minor offence knows that admitting to it on a job application can prevent employment. As Hank and I sat at the table in the company’s lunchroom, the application in front of me, pencil in hand, there it was: ‘Have you ever been convicted of a serious crime and/or incarcerated? A moment of truth. I only had two choices: admit to my convict status or lie on the form? Well, hell. I thought. This insignificant infraction in my mind would follow me around for years if I didn’t make a stand and own it. So, I checked the YES box, sat back hoping for the best.
The manager entered the room. Frank had to be in his late fifties, balding grey hair, a watermelon sized gut, and bulbous red nose, revealing his lifetime love for malt whiskey.
“You boy’s finished the forms?”
Frank picked up our applications and said, “You boy’s sit back and have a coffee or something. I’ll look at these and get right back to ya.”
Hank made us both some bad coffee, and we waited for at least 30 minutes, when Frank sauntered back into the lunchroom.
“Alrighty now. I want you to fill out these tax forms. You know the government must get its share. I want both you lads to start tomorrow morning at 7:00am sharp. Do you have a problem with that?”
Like shocked 6th graders in the principal's office, finally hearing our fate, we both nodded yes without saying a word.
Walking out to Hank’s car, he said, “We’ve got to celebrate man. I know a cool pub just around the corner from here.”
Hank was correct, it was a cool pub. Claiming to be a Bonafide Irish Establishment, the Guinness was on tap. My memory of that stout-filled afternoon is spotted and hazy. What I do remember is waking up in the back seat of Hank’s beat up Ford, the dawn sun hurting my eyes. My watch read 6:45am.
“Hank! Wake the hell up dude, we’ll be late on our first day.” He finally came to, started the car and we raced to our new place of employment – hung over, dazed with a tiny feeling of regret for drinking 15 glasses of Guinness before embarking on my new career.
Never again I thought. Never again.
The Laundry Factory’s warehouse floor was about half the size of a high school soccer pitch. As we were led around the place with Frank, he shouted above the noise of the various machines, all of which I had never seen before. He explained the assembly line type stations responsible for each step of the cleaning process. In the back of the building was the unloading dock. Trucks full of linen from restaurants, sheets, blankets; hospital-stained diapers, bloody surgeon gowns and masks, mucus laden bed sheets, tablecloths, napkins and hundreds of tea towels.
The trucks would roll in the dock and unload the dirty laundry in large baskets that were lifted by pullies to the first station responsible for separating each item that then travelled down on a moving rubber platform to the industrial washing machines on the bottom floor. The air temperature in the sorting section had to be 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Loading the huge washing machines was not only heavy and arduous but by the third load, you wanted to quit and call it a day.
Break time finally arrived at 9:45 am and we had a full 15 minutes. There was an area on the side of the building for smokers. Hank pulled out a plastic baggy. The contents I recognized immediately as the highly pungent tobacco shared, traded and marketed in jails across the state. In current time tobacco is disallowed in prisons. Now you’re sentenced and are given nicotine patches to wear along with your prison uniform. For any heavy smoker, life-long or otherwise, this is cruel and unusual punishment, at the level of water boarding or solitary confinement. The patches also give you nightmares. Hank was adept at rolling and had two smokes done in a matter of minutes.
‘What station do you think they’re going to put us on?’ Hank asked.
"I don’t know, man.” I said. “But I hope it’s not the sorting room on the top level. You could die up there from the heat or catch something from those blood drenched sheets.”
One thing I’ve learned in this life, if anything wrong can happen, it will happen. When you’re hoping for the best-case scenario for a future outcome, I could always rely on the worst-case scenario to manifest. As it turned out, in this case, my first assignment on the new job was to report to the second floor in the sorting unit.
The team leader in this hell hole was a friendly Asian guy who called himself Fred Li. His accent was mild, but he spoke at lightning speed.
‘You separate sheet from clothes, and towels from everything else. You understand?”
The buddles of dirty laundry were coming hard and fast. There were sheets tied to surgeon gowns, and tablecloths stuck to soiled adult nappies. We were only given cheap disposable gloves, and they would continue to rip apart, forcing you to put on new ones, which slowed down the assembly line, causing the laundry to back up and pile up at the start. Once this happened, Fred Li would run down the aisle, screaming obscenities in Mandarin, pulling laundry from the ever-growing piles, ensuring a free flow to the industrial washing machines below.
After about half an hour of this on-going mayhem, the temperature was so high, my body heat reached boiling point, stumbling backwards, almost falling off the ledge above the dock, I passed out. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of the airconditioned lunchroom with a crowd standing above me.
As I sat down on a chair drinking water Frank walked in the room. There was no doubt in my mind that he would fire me on the spot. Instead, he said, “Take another ten minutes and we’ll put you on ‘folding’ with your friend. You’ll be on ‘folding’ till lunch.”
The Industrial drying machine was impressive. Four people in a line would feed the tea towels and white serviettes into a space above a moving cylinder. The contraption would smooth-out cloth, and push it through a folding mechanism, ending up on the other side where people would stack them neatly on large carts ready to be sent back to the client.
Hank and I stood side by side next to two Vietnamese girls. Our simple task was to insert the towels evenly above the cylinder, where it would suck it in at a fast rate into the machine. Hank had been working at this station all morning and seemed to have the hang of it. The two young ladies appeared to have been working this station for years. The speed in which they moved the material into the contraption was nothing less than phenomenal. For every one towel Hank and I inserted, the girl’s had completed five moving on to their sixth. It was then Hank proposed: “This is embarrassing, man. We got to speed up. Let’s really do this.”
The problem is that the placement of the towel above the moving cylinder needed to be even. A little uneven didn’t make a difference. Inserting the material too much on an angle could clog the folding process inside, causing the entire process to come to an abrupt halt, with a siren and red light coming to life alerting the entire workplace.
At first, we managed to insert two towels to the girl's five. Overtime, we moved it up to three, but that’s when all hell broke loose.
In Hank’s rush to match the girl’s input, one of his tea towels was placed into the machine at an angle. In seconds, the contraption came to a halt, and the siren started to wail, including a swirling red light above us on the ceiling.
I looked at Hank. "Oh shit.”
This was our first opportunity to meet Olga, the floor manager in charge of the ‘folding’ section of the operation. Olga was a Romanian emigre’ who came to Australia because of political persecution. Evidently, she had only been living in the country for about 4 years. She was a big woman standing at about 4.10 feet and a body as wide and intimidating as her loud, accented voice.
As if she had been observing us the whole time, Olga walked straight to Hank, and looking up at him said,
“You put towel in wrong. Here I’ll show.”
Olga proceeded to show Hank the proper angle to insert the cloth, preventing any future emergencies.
Olga flipped a big switch on the wall next to the machine, and we were back in business. Hank had lost all confidence in his “folding” abilities. He inserted one cloth to my three, and the two girls seemed to have sped up, doubling their input. In a matter of only a few minutes Hank was removed from “folding” disappearing somewhere in the corner of the plant.
Hank’s replacement was a young, blond Australian girl who had the same skill level as my two Vietnamese collogues. It was evident she was a “veteran folder”. Time elapsed and my skill level improved until the lunch siren sounded, alerting us it was time to eat.
Walking into the lunchroom, Hank was nowhere to be found. Thinking he was outside having a smoke, opened the door to the designated smoking area, where again, he was nowhere to be found. As I was walking back to the common area, Frank stopped me and asked me to go with him to the front office.
“What’s up, Frank?” I asked.
“We caught your friend on our CCTV cameras, stuffing expensive linen down his pants. He denied it at first, but when we showed him the footage, he had to admit it, so we had to let him go.”
‘You’re a stupid prick, Hank.’ I thought.
“We’re not going to have any problems with you, young man?” Frank asked.
“No Frank. I’ve enough tea towels at home.”
“That’s funny kid. Now go have some lunch and return to ‘folding’. You seem to be getting the hang of it.”
After eating a dry hot dog and small chocolate milk, the siren sounded for us to report back to our stations. The young Australian girl and two Vietnamese ladies were already at work, stuffing linen into the machine at superhuman speed. I started out slow to find a comfortable rhythm for the task. After a while, mentally I went into a trance-like state, inserting towel after napkin like an automaton on lifelong batteries. This action went on for hours until the folding machine came to a stop. I was so immersed in my work, that I failed to hear the siren alerting us for our afternoon break.
My pretty Australian co-worker tapped me on the shoulder. “Would you like to go have a smoke with me outside?” she asked.
As I was following her outside, I thought about what I’d say to her. ‘What’s a gorgeous girl like you doing in a place like this?’ That was way too lame, so I decided against it.
Once outside she sat on a plastic stool provided by our employers. Lighting up, the pungent scent of the smoke was obvious, a short, thin joint. At first, I wanted to escape, but the temptation was too great, and we shared her ‘refreshment’ and soon it was gone.
Back in the day I imbibed every day in the ‘devils' lettuce’: breakfast, lunch and dinner including at midnight when I couldn’t get to sleep. After a solid year of this practice, I came to my senses, realizing that travelling through my life stoned all the time, would never be conducive to a fulfilling existence, so I quit. This was the first time in three years that I put joint to mouth. I knew once the ‘high’ hit me, nothing would go well.
If you have ever been stoned on good weed before, depending on the strain, one’s perception of your surroundings are highly exaggerated. So once the girl and I returned to our station, the folding machine became a dangerous monster. The noise around the entire plant echoed in my ears, and it felt like I was drowning in sound. Then comes the paranoia. ‘I know I’m on CCTV. They’ve got to know that I’m stoned out of my mind.’ Luckily, similar to earlier in the day, by the grace of a higher power, I found my rhythm and was inserting two tea towels for every four the girls produced.
This action went on for the remaining hours of the day. The siren to stop work sounded and the machines all came to a grinding halt. Despite being very stoned, I had managed to work hard and not screw up.
Walking into the break room, Frank approached me, placing his hand on my shoulder.
“You did well today. I’ll see you tomorrow at 7 sharp.”
Feeling relieved and exiting the building, I realized Hank had been sacked and I needed a ride home. As I was headed up to the main road in search of a bus stop, an old, clunky Toyota pulled up and it was my pretty blond fellow-stoner.
“You need a ride?” she asked.
In retrospect, using 20/20 hindsight and all that, I should have caught the bus. Unfortunately, I was too stoned, and she was way too pretty to knock back the offer.
As we turned the corner to get on the freeway, my pretty friend pulled out another joint, took a big drag, and handed it over to me. Looking at the side mirror, a police cruiser pulled up behind us, the blue and red lights filling the late afternoon sun. My friend slowed and parked her beat up Toyota on the side of the highway. Two cops approached on either side of the vehicle. We opened our windows at the same time, and the thick smoke from the newly lighted joint floated out of the car. Busted.
Because I was on parole, a second offence landed me straight back to jail. To make matters worse, my beautiful laundry colleague had several ounces of weed under the back seat. We were charged with possession with intent to sell an illegal substance. I was given two years and my friend with the aid of a clever and expensive lawyer, managed to only get 5 years' probation. Who said that life was fair?
As I think I’ve mentioned, in this life for me, one could always count on the worst possible outcome in any situation.
The funny aspect to these set of unlucky circumstances, out of some ironic fate, Hank landed back in jail again for petty larceny. He also became my cellmate once again. He also landed a position as a cook with easy access to the prison's pantry. At least twice a week, we enjoyed our contraband of two-minute noodles.
Added to this set of strange coincidences, because of my one-day experience at the laundry factory, over the two years of my sentence, I was made manager of the prison's entire laundry facility, washing and drying the general population’s uniforms including personal items for the guards.
Who says that God doesn’t have a sense of humor?
.jpg)
