First Day At the Furniture Factory

First Day At The Furniture Factory


It was a long day.
I'd spent it hauling boxes on a handtruck from the plastics
department to assembly.
I'd caught the 6:30 bus at the Mall near my apartment, trans-
ferred in town and was barely on time.
I rode bus number 13 and was assigned to Department 76. It
was September 13. An auspicious beginning.
Sometime during the day it started to rain and it rained inter-
mittently from then on.
At 4 o'clock, quitting time, I was already thinking of hot
supper and bed
but then they asked me to work over till six and since it was my
first day, I didn't want to say no.
By 6 o'clock I was really tired and it was raining again.
The old buildings looked like grey consumptive ghosts in the
fading light as autumn fell through the rain.
The bus passed at six on the dot so I ran for the front gate.
It was closed. I learned later that they closed it at 4.
So, rather than miss my bus, I climbed the fence--
which was OK except that I caught my shirt on the barbed wire
at the top
and when I landed with a thud on the other side, my shirt was
missing a sleeve and my arm was bleeding.
And the bus was gone.
So I started thumbing with the rain coming down harder than ever
and the carlights slashing the darkness as they whizzed past me
spraying light and water.
I waited a long time in the dark with the rain seeping into me.
Finally a Chicano in a pickup stopped and, though it was out of
his way, dropped me in town
where I stumbled into the Greyhound station, got coffee
and sat out front smoking and shivering, waiting for my bus,
peering out at the world from the dark cave of my skull,
wondering what the poor people were doing.

Albert Huffstickler

October, 1974
Posted over on Vagabond