I held out the jar. He looked at it and smiled, rising up from
behind his beautiful desk, an old executive’s model probably saved from the
dump in recent years.
God was sixty-something years old with gray hair
and a paunch littered with pipe ashes. He
was well over six and a half feet
tall. He just kept going when he stood
up, and I followed him until my neck
clicked. Resembling a heavy-set Moses, he would
have passed for a Charlton Heston, though he had less hair.
God looked down from his lofty height and
regarded me with a face full of condescension,
He stalked around to the front of his desk and motioned for me to follow
him to the florescent light cartons.
Here he allowed me the honor of dragging 500 light bulbs in their boxes
over to the conveyor belt to prepare them for their trip to the shipping area
below. The belt ran at a steep angle
down between floors and had to be loaded carefully.
“Cock the boxes a little, like this,” he said, “so
they don’t all slide off and crash when you get the belt moving.”
While I worked, he bestowed upon me some of his
encyclopedic knowledge of light bulbs, and droned on through their entire
history since Edison. This God loved light bulbs and everything
about then. As he talked on and on, I
became less patient.
And I was in a hurry, to tell the truth. I wanted to get back down to the office floor
to watch blonde and blousy Belinda, the girl who answered the warehouse telephone. When it rang, she would set her body’s poetry
to motion. She had a way of picking up
the phone that just set my heart all a-titter.
As she raised the instrument to
her ear, shiny bracelets and bangles would slide and clang as one lovely arm brushed across her
bosom. I liked that part. She flipped her head and pulled her hair back
to swing a four inch long earring out of the way. And just before she said “Hello,” … I swear I didn’t imagine it, even if I was
seventeen … a tiny shrug would begin in her shoulders and flow down over her body. With clinks and jingles, she greeted the no
doubt surprised caller. To me, her ritual was frankly erotic and might
have been outlawed in an earlier time.
Anyway ….. I was still stuck upstairs and God was
beginning to bore me with his prodigious knowledge of lighting technology and his
sermon on lumens and filament tensile strengths. He paced around the floor as he talked, stooping
to look out the various windows as though awaiting the return of a lost squad
of angels. He lectured about power
ratings and glass safety and Underwriters Laboratories. He said his biggest vexation was when stuff
was left on the belt down on the dock.
It backed up his system. ”God
can’t deliver if the world isn’t ready to receive,” he said. I hurried through my task without much
attention to how I placed the cartons on the belt.
When I could no longer stand his oration, I pronounced
the loading task complete and interrupted his monologue.
“So,” I said, “you’re the God of light bulbs?” Turning hard eyes my way, he reared up to his
full height and looked down on me.
"I
am," he said, "the most senior employee in this company. Mr. Lewis (the owner) was in diapers when his
father hired me."
"Well,
that's certainly very interesting," I said, as only a disinterested
teenager could say it.
"And
this entire business,” he said, “all the people in it, and now yourself included,
appear to have no other purpose in life than to entirely piss me off."
"Well..."
I began, in defense.
"Except
for Belinda," he interrupted.
"She's a lovely girl."
"Yes,
she's very...."
"I've
seen you mooning at her. Make one move
toward that girl and I'll break both your legs and send you back down the
conveyor belt where you came from."
Oddly, I was more impressed with his concern for
Belinda than his bullying of me. I
simply nodded and left his presence.
The Lord Herb Almighty
wasn’t the only employee with a biblical perspective. The entire crew of men played out a farce all
through the work day by speaking only to each other as you might imagine the
Apostles did … at least on parchment … always with a religious overtone or subtext. I suppose I might have doubted their
sincerity, but at that age I seldom questioned the motives of adults.
“Behold, His only
begotten son,” Huey said of Gordon one afternoon. And Louie would ask, “If I’m a worker in the
vineyard, where is the wine cellar?” But I more often heard biblical references to
forgiveness. “All blasphemy will be
forgiven, except that against God,” Gordon told Dewey. “Stop swearing so God damned much,” Hughie
told Louie,
The Biblical bits and bites the men used no doubt came from
Sunday mornings when their wives dragged them off to church. They may have been unable or unwilling to
accept the proclaimed precepts heard there, because the faith of their fathers had been warped by feminized Christian sensitivities a century before. This was especially true of the music. It was doubtful Gordon or his friends would
have been comfortable singing the hymn
about “laying my head tenderly on Jesus’ breast.” So the men cobbled together their own
theology to suit the world as they knew it, a process not entirely different
from that used by better known theologians.
On a cold afternoon as
Christmas neared, the pace got very hectic.
I am still clueless as to why an electrical supply house got so terribly
busy around the holidays. God was
thundering around up on the top floor and bellowing down the conveyer belt
shaft, damning everyone to hell for all eternity. Huey,
Dewey and Louie were arguing and getting in each others’ way. Gordon called us into his tiny cubicle. We all took a deep breath and let our
shoulders sag. Opening a desk drawer, he
brought out a Roy Rogers thermos jug, intended for milk in some kid’s lunch
box. Four shot glasses appeared and,
excluding me, he poured a finger into each from the thermos that had Trigger’s
picture on it. As they lifted the
tumblers, Gordon pronounced, “There is a spirit here that commands
forgiveness. We’re lucky to have
it. It is our covenant.” As scripture citations go, that was close enough. Huey said, “Thank you, Jesus.” Louie said, “Thank you, Roy.”
I grew accustomed to the men’s chatter and after a while I began to discern a shape to their banter. They were certainly trying to get along with each other for eight hours a day, yes, but there was more to it than social grease.
I grew accustomed to the men’s chatter and after a while I began to discern a shape to their banter. They were certainly trying to get along with each other for eight hours a day, yes, but there was more to it than social grease.
Later in the morning that Saturday, after having
loaded the belt upstairs to the best of my lackadaisical ability, I descended
from light bulb heaven back to the first floor, where I stationed myself at the
foot of the conveyor belt on the indoor part of the dock.
Crossing my fingers … an intemperate act for a Catholic … I pressed the
button to start the conveyor belt. As I
stood waiting for the first box of bulbs to come down, I heard a thump above me,
followed by a couple more thumps and then a lot of thumps in rapid succession. Just
as I heard the first crunch of breaking glass above me, an avalanche of boxes
came down the belt out of the ceiling, breaking open and bursting out into millions
of pieces of glass. It happened so fast! I stood there in shock as a Niagara Falls of florescent bulbs showered
me from on high.
Gordon ran out of his little cubicle and stood
with me among the destruction and debris.
Mr. Lewis came running, too, slipping on the tiny particles of glass
strewn across the floor.
“My fault,” Gordon said to Mr. Lewis. “I guess I
didn’t load the cartons as well as I thought I had. We’ll clean this up. There aren’t as many broken bulbs as it appears.” Mr. Lewis harrumphed and turned to regard
me. I was trying to look like the most innocent
of bystanders. He spun around and stomped
back to his office.
“Geez, I’m sorry, Gordon, “I said.
Gordon looked at me. “Just think of me as the son of God, sent
down to save your sorry ass.”
“Herb’s your father?” I asked.
“That’s what he tells me, Dave. And he’s the biggest guy here, so I’m not
going to argue.”
Over the years I’ve come to realize these young husbands
and fathers, who were not especially religious, were working out their personal
beliefs as they improvised an on-going religious skit, performed as a kind of joke but staged on the
more serious premise of locating themselves in the universe. They
had only a few years before seen their young lives through the lens of the
Korean War, and often endured harrowing combat experiences. Gordon and his crew … sometimes with the mature
leading from “God” on the third floor, when he was behaving himself … wanted answers and sought a prescription for
living. Not always consciously, the men hammered
out a theology … spelled with a small
“t” … that made sense to them and helped to answer their questions and to ease
their fears. They somehow sensed their friendship could be a sacrament … an outward sign of
their regard for each other. As well,
they felt the human need for the mystical.
In the hurly burley of everyday
work, even at home in the stressful affairs of heart and family, they yearned
for peace and purpose amid the numerous klaxons demanding their attention. In one way or another, they prayed their
lives would not end in desperation.
The son of God and I
were down on our knees behind the conveyor belt cleaning up the debris and were
unseen by Belinda when she entered the
dock area, hiked up her skirt and tugged her stocking tops up where they
belonged. The most beautiful girl in the
world within sight shimmied her skirt back down and then quickly returned to the
telephone and desk inside, jingle-jangling all the way. We had evidently discovered her secret dressing
room, and I wondered what else she fiddled with during the course of her work
day.
As our eyes followed her
back through the door to the office I wondered how I might appease God and gain
permission to flirt with Belinda. I
whispered, “Does God ever grant wishes?”
Gordon turned from
watching the girl and looked at me. “Tomorrow,
you could take him two jars of marmalade.”
Copyright by David Griffin, 2007
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
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