E.J. Budrowski

                                                                             The same day
                                                                          September, 1973
                                                                     DuBois, Pennsylvania

This was not one of my better days. I think I'll down a 6-pack and try to forget about it.

I'm 25 years old and work in a bottling plant. I should say "worked" in a bottling plant because I got fired today. When I punched the clock 15 minutes late, the boss collared me and said, "Budrowski, this is the fifth time you've been late this month. Do you have something more important to do in the mornings than show up to work on time?"

"No, boss. I had to get a jump for my car this morning, and it set me back a few minutes. I think it needs a new battery."

"I can't tell you how many times I've heard that excuse before or one just like it. I don't care about your supposed car problems. If you're going to be late one more time, don't bother even coming in!" He stormed out then.

Alright, so I was a little hung over this morning and overslept. Maybe I need a job where you don't have to punch a time clock.

I stuffed my earplugs in my ears then and sat down next to my bottle explosion machine. This is actually a pretty cool invention. It takes in all these plastic pre-forms that look like test tubes, heats them up, and explodes them into molds for two-liter bottles. That explosion is pretty loud, hence the ear plugs, which do a fair job of muffling the sound.

My job was to babysit this behemoth and make sure that when the 20 bottles came out of it on the conveyor belt, they were all standing up straight. If any of them had fallen down, I had to straighten them back up before they were funneled into the filling station where they got filled with soda pop.

This was not a very challenging job as you can imagine, and it afforded me plenty of time to take nips from the hip flask I always carry around in my back pocket. After a few hours, I was usually feeling pretty fine, but the downside was that it was very hard to stay awake. The muffled sound due to the ear plugs, the booze, and the lack of physical activity (as hardly any bottles ever need straightening up) tended to put me to sleep. It was all I could do to stay awake sometimes

I sat there musing about how I'd ended up in a job like this, and of course my thoughts went to my dad and what he would have thought about it. He's not around anymore to tell me, thank God, or he would have said something like, "Maybe you've finally found a job even you couldn't screw up!"

How many nights had I gone to bed thinking about what I had done that day to piss him off. I never did anything right in his eyes. Being an only child to a narcissistic surgeon created a lot of expectations. There was no room for making mistakes in his world.

As I drifted off, I thought about the time I had to pick him and Mom up from the airport after a cruise they took. This was at a time when you had both a door lock/ignition key as well as a separate trunk key for the car. For some reason, I had removed the trunk key from my key ring days before, and when I got there to pick them up, we couldn't get into the trunk to store their many pieces of luggage, and we ended up piling it all in the car with them sitting on top of it for an uncomfortable ride home.

"E.J., you're worthless!" I heard as I opened my eyes with a start. But it was not my dad standing over me screaming; it was my boss, and he appeared fit to be tied. There were knocked-over bottles everywhere--on the conveyor and all over the floor. Evidently several had fallen over on the conveyor belt, and because I was asleep and failed to straighten them up, this caused a clog further down the line. This shut down the line but not before causing a chain reaction of knocked-over bottles to spill everywhere.

I can't say this was the first time that had ever happened to me, but it was definitely the last time because the boss fired me on the spot. Coupled with my tardiness, this was the last straw.

(See Dad? I even managed to screw this one up.)

Guess I'll have to think about getting another job now. I've thought about it before, and maybe I'll try caddying. I used to play golf, but gave it up. I still like being on a golf course, though. Plus, caddies don't punch a time clock!