Job #2 Bakery Clerk circa '94-'96

This was my longest term of employment. I spent 3 solid years employed at the Hy-Vee bakery in Macomb, Illinois as a Wrapper during high school. Good times. My sister got me the job, as she worked there too. I, in turn, got my buddy Wilson a job there. The job entailed wrapping/bagging all the baked goods that the bakers Pat and Juan had baked during the day and then cleaning the place up. I'd come in after school and work a 4-8 shift and work one 7-3 shift on the weekend. Usually Sundays. The evenings were all right. Work by myself and just get shit done but Sundays now that was a fun time. I'd work with Juan Guzman and sometimes both Wilson and I would be working. We got to help bake and then as the bread cooled we would wrap. Spent a good part of the day bullshitting with Juan at the big, wooden baking table rolling out, kneading, and forming bread, bagels, and donuts. And we'd have the occasional dough ball fight.



One Sunday morning the doughnut fryer was still there and the four of us were sporadically placed throughout the bakery in defensive positions winging little dough balls at each other. Generally our doughy missiles were quite well aimed, as we were well practiced, but occasionally there was an errant throw. That morning one dough ball flew through the bakery, into the deli, and straight into the hot case where it rested next to the mashed potatoes. While another flew out into aisle 1, narrowly missed an old lady, and tagged a bag of Wonder Bread. It's a good thing Juan was the Bakery Manager at the time or we might have gotten into trouble.



There was all kinds of bullshit with the job though. When I first started working there we wore polo shirts as uniforms but it wasn't long before they started making us wear black dress pants, a white dress shirt and a tie. At a fucking bakery? Still can't believe it. The ties were a complete pain in the ass. And black pants were immediately white with flower, dress shirts covered in dough. It was ridiculous. We always joked that somebody's tie was gonna get caught in the giant mixer and they'd be sucked into the bowl and become the finishing touch on the french bread.



The assistant store manager was an utter moron by the name Jim Heschke, I believe. Got his job by marrying the district manager's daughter. We were on strict orders by Juan to just smile and nod at anything Jim said or asked us to do but never to actually do it. This was because he had me put bread crumbs in the oven over night with the intent to dry them out for stuffing. It was a ton of bread that we had shreaded to make crumbs for dressing and Jim told me to put it all in the oven overnight, so that the heat from the pilot lights could dry it and we'd have stuffing in the morning. So I did it, knowing what would happen, because the assistant store manager told me to, right? Next morning Juan came in to find all the stuffing we had made the day before charred to blackened bits in the oven. That was one pissed off Mexican.



They made him Bakery Manager and then worked him to death, treated him like shit, and pushed him around. For the longest time they wouldn't hire him a second baker so he had to bake 7 days a week plus do all the management duties. Then they finally hired him a baker but pulled that guy off into another department the week before Thanksgiving. That was the final straw for Juan, he walked out, called us and let me and Wilson know. So we went in together, grabbed a free doughnut and found the store manager in the back room. As we ate our free doughnuts we told the guy we quit, weren't coming in for our next shift and that he needed to learn how to treat his employees with respect. The fryer quit too. I've never felt so good to be quitting a job. That time I felt perfectly justified to fuck them during the busiest week of the year.

My First Job- Corn Detassler circa 1992

So, I was telling an old friend about my current miserable employment at Safeway cooking food in the Deli and she suggested I write about the different jobs I've worked over the years. I've found myself in many different professions and never settled into one for very long. I kind of liked the idea so I figured I'd start it off in this here blog. My first job was detassling corn for Pioneer Seed Company. This is a job for migrant workers or 14 year olds which is what I was. Either way you're supposed to get proper paperwork from the government to attain employment but not all of us did. For those who don't know the tassle is the business end of the corn. When the corn is mature pollin from the tassle gets released into the air and blown across the field and thus corn pollinates corn. That's the simple version. Well Pioneer didn't want corn cross pollinating they wanted to do the pollinating themselves, the selfish pricks. So, our job was to pull the tassle off every stalk of corn. If you've ever been to the midwest you would know this is a very big job.

Some fields we'd walk in groups. Each person taking a row and walking and yanking, yanking and walking. Others would be done in tractors with large arms reaching out over the rows with baskets hanging in between the rows. In the basket you would lean out into your row and essentially swim through the row yanking tassles arm over arm. Sweepers would follow behind yanking the tassles that the basket men would inevitably miss.

It was hard hot work under the Illinois sun and paid minimum wage, which at the time was $4.25 I believe. Miserable but I met one of my best and lifelong friends in one of those fields. The friend I would eventually move to Alaska with 6 years later in 1998. One day we were walking a field and bitching about our plight in life. Oh, the miseries of being a 14 year old working for 3 weeks in the summer. The Horror, the Horror....Anyway, there we were bitching about the job and coming up with new names for our boss such as "Dumbfuck Dom" for example. We were on a roll insulting Dom and detassling when what would you know Dom storms through several rows of corn like a blustering bull red faced and fuming, "This may be the worst fucking job in the world but it's the only fucking job you have!" and then he stormed off. We did feel kind of bad, for who knows how long he had been walking along with us just a couple rows to the side but almost 20 years later Neal and I are still laughing about the look on his face as he burst through that corn.

Every day we would all meet in the Hardees parking lot. I remember my dad driving me in to town every day at about 6 am to go to work. He'd drop me off in the lot. I'd sit off to the side on a parking block and watch the workers gather. At 6 am we'd all pile into an old school bus and drive out north of town to hit the fields. Most people would take the bus but there were a few that would drive themselves. There was one group of poor white trash that drove their beater every day out to the fields but they didn't last long. They hit the mother load or at least thought they did. They came across a whole crop of marijuana ditch weed growing alongside the field we were working. They couldn't believe their luck or that they were the only ones that knew what this stuff was. They quit work and somewhere found a bunch of big black trash bags and just went after it, ripping the ditch weed right out of the ground and shoving plant after plant into hefty bags, laughing and joking the whole time. Once they'd harvested the whole crop they jumped into their beater and headed off. Never saw them again. Problem with ditch weed is that it's a weed. It is marijuana but it's wild grown, not cultivated and thus doesn't have the THC content in it that the crop has. Grows all over Illinois, often in ditches, hence the name. Won't get you high, though I've heard you can get quite the headache. I remember it happened at lunch so the rest of us were all sitting in the grass watching the show. I'm not sure how but they seemed to be the only ones around that didn't know they were complete idiots. Some things in life just aren't fair.

Two summers I worked this job for a grand total of 6 weeks.

I nearly cried tonight as Annie G and I nosed our way out of town, coffee in hand, and nothing ahead of us but open road and hot springs. I let myself believe that when I got there I wouldn't have to turn around and come right back. I allowed myself to forget work in the morning. The road allowed me to forget everything else. All that existed was the possibility of the road, the promise of something new, and the freedom to pursue it. I had a few provisions in the seat next to me, two spare tires in the bed that may or may not hold air, a fresh pair of socks, and my Australia '00 mix tape.

I had been forced into the passenger seat for so long, deprived of that certain freedom that is only provided by a truck and road, that I had become numb to the absence of possibility. Only able to go where a bike could take me and having to beg friends to take me to the cabin had restricted my mind, my imagination, and deadened by dreams. Tonight, all I was missing was a cigar. Suddenly the world was there again...No clouds cleared, no curtains lifted...One second there was nothing but grayness, and the next there was a world of possibility spreading out before me, unrolling like carpet, revealing dreams I had forgotten.

For the last several weeks it's been hard to pull my bike into the Safeway parking lot, and walk through those doors. A couple days ago I very nearly rode right on by. What was nearly impossible, just became infinitely more difficult. Tomorrow at 6:45 am I could drive to Safeway, work a 7 hour shift, and hate most every minute of it. Or, I could drive to Seward.