The Calligrapher

We boasted the largest salad bar in town.
Sixteen items. One was lettuce, four were dressings.

After high school I embarked upon my working career by holding a number of low-paying, dead-end jobs.  I cooked at Pizza Hut and The Golden Corral. I worked at the town's hospital.  I sold burial insurance door-to-door. And I stapled together sofa frames at a company called Lloyd Manufacturing.

Lloyd's sold furniture to the economically and taste challenged residents of Southside Virginia and Northern North Carolina. The factory was contained in a large corrugated metal building with a cement floor and no air conditioning.  The wood went in one side and colonial-style sofas, chairs, and love seats emerged out of the other. I was 19 years old at the time and had neither the experience or skill set that would otherwise qualify me to work there. I was hired just because I was friends with the manager's son.

Very similar to this. 

The plant had four departments: woodwork, frames, springs, upholstery and finishing. Orders came into the front office were given to the guys who cut plywood into the shapes of backs, arms, and wings. These pieces of wood were placed on shelves according to the style number. The framers (my department) selected the proper pieces, assembled them into frames, and delivered them to the springs department.  These folks added springs to the seats and backs, loaded their finished product onto a rolling table, and took it to upholstery. Finally, the upholsters finished it up with the addition of batting and fabric. After a quick once over with a shop vac, the showroom-ready furniture was placed in a giant plastic bag and loaded onto a waiting truck.

The tool that was most used in the process was a pneumatic staple gun. Ours probably weighed about five pounds and felt much heavier at the end of the day than in the morning. The gun had a safety and would not fire unless the trigger was pulled at same time the muzzle guard was depressed by something solid, like a piece of wood or a finger. Pulling that trigger a thousand times a day could be very tiring, so the guys came up with a solution. They taped the trigger down so the safety guard became the firing mechanism. By balancing the pressure on the guard with the bounce of the recoil, an experienced worker could chatter out several staples a second. It sounded like a burst from a machine gun. Bratatatatat. Bratatatatat. By comparison I sounded like a seven year old who discovered a sheet of bubble wrap. Pop. Pop. Pause, align, squeeze trigger, and....pop! I was a very slow worker and that didn't sit well with Ralph.

The black knob on the front is the muzzle guard.

Ralph was my counterpart. He was my springs guy and about 8 years older than me. When I  finished a frame I delivered it to him for springs. He hated me from the moment he saw my face, which at the time was behind a pair of safety goggles. I don't know why I was the only person in the plant who wore eye and ear protection, but in his mind that made me and incredible wimp, a sissy, and a perfect target to pick on. He called me a dork....asshole.....faggot. But what made him hate me the most was he knew I was the reason he was no longer getting his bonus. Employees were paid a small additional sum of money if we made production quotas, but there was no way he could spring enough frames if I couldn't make them fast enough. Every time I wheeled up a frame he was standing around waiting and he was pissed.  He cursed me and told me I was worthless. He said he'd like to beat me up and it would be so easy, etc, etc, etc. I decided to ignore him, because you never want a conversation to deteriorate when the starting point is "you pussy I'm going to kick your ass."

Safety goggles are sexy, baby.

One day, as part of his normal diatribe, he began showing off his muscles so I could fear the manner of my future thrashing. He said "LOOK AT THIS!" and flexed his bicep to impress me. In the middle of his upper arm was a tattoo, obviously homemade, that read "Diane". It was his very own jailhouse handwriting. A prison tattoo is created by taking a straight pin or sharpened paper clip and dipping the point into a colorant, usually cigarette ashes, and repeatedly pricking the skin to create the desired image. These lack the artistry of a professional tattoo applied in a clinical setting, but when you're in the yard you can only spend so much time lifting weights and playing basketball, so why not?  I really tried to ignore him, but one day I pretended to be impressed, not with the muscle, but by the artwork. Placing my hands over my heart I said "That is a LOVELY tattoo! Did you do that yourself? Wow....I didn't know you were a calligrapher!  HUNNN-EEE  I'm not kidding, you are special!"

You are! That is why you are in the springs department!

One of the problems with being a smart ass is that sometimes you might say something that is really just for your own amusement, but it has the unfortunate side affect of pissing people off. This was one of those times. I would bet every dollar I had in the bank, in those days there were about 14 of them, that Ralph had never even heard the word "calligrapher." Even though he was ignorant on that point he did know that I was teasing him and he didn't like it. He seethed but was too confused to respond. I didn't care. I didn't have to work with him and he couldn't berate me any more than he already was, so it didn't matter.

There were four people that worked in the framing department. One guy made chairs, another made loveseats, but since sofas were larger it was a two-man operation. I had a partner, a man they called "Speck".  Because I was so slow the division of labor was such that Speck actually did most of the work, but he never complained. One day he wasn't at work. I was told he had been moved to another department and I'd be getting a new workmate. I hoped that meant some sort of raise or promotion for him, but I doubted it. A few minutes later I got my new partner.

It was Ralph.

Even though Ralph was new to framing  he was just as fast as the other guys. Unlike Speck, there was absolutely no way he was going to place one staple more than required by his half of the sofa. To make matters worse, when he was finished he would throw the whole frame onto the floor.  "Oh you're not done yet?! You should be done by now!!" Then I had to pick it up, place it back on the work table, and finish while Ralph yelled obscenties. We went through two sofas this way. When the third frame prematurely hit the floor I finally had had enough. I said, "RALPH SHUT UP!! JUST STOP!! You've been telling me forever that you are going to kick my ass but you haven't done it, because you probably can't. And you know why? Because you are nothing but a little boy. You just need to shut up and do your work, little boy."

Some little boys should be left alone.

In retrospect I can see that I could have chosen my words a bit more carefully.

Ralph took a couple of swings in the air with his hammer and then threw it against the wall.  Then he came at me with his fists. I immediately assumed a Rope-A-Dope stance. To some it might have looked like I adopted another defensive posture called the Cower Like A Frightened Puppy, but in fact it was the Rope-A-Dope. It was just a couple of seconds before the other guys pulled him off me and told him to go cool down. In the meantime I went back to stapling because there were still double wides that needed furnishing. About 15 minutes later Ralph returned and resumed work. I said "No Ralph, I'm not working with you anymore." He spit his reply, "THEN WHY DON'T YA GO AND QUIT, YA PUSSY!!" Note: this was an example of Ralph AFTER he had cooled off.

So I went to find the boss.

The general manager went by the honorific of "Mr. Bob." He occupied the only office in the whole place. It was a small room with a cheap desk, a metal filing cabinet, and an oscillating fan with streamers of dust as thick as seaweed. The desk was covered with a fake wood grain that was chipped in several places around the edge. The underlying particle board had ball point doodles that were appropriate to the shape of the missing formica. It had probably been salvaged from the dump. Mr. Bob was at his desk when I found him.  I asked if I could work with someone other than Ralph. He wanted to know why and I said I just thought I would be a bit more productive working with someone else. He said, "No. You tell me why." So I told him what had just happened. At that point he went to the door anded yell across the floor to the production manager, who was named RC. (Yes, just like the cola.) When RC arrived Mr. Bob summarized everything quite nicely by saying, "RC, Ralph has done shown his ass AGAIN!" Then he had me repeat the story. Apparently the only reason Ralph was reassigned to framing in the first place was because no one in springs could stand working with him. They went back and fired him on the spot.


I only saw Ralph a few times after that. On a couple of occasions he showed up in the parking lot to see Diane. He dangled his elbow out of the truck window to flatten his bicep on the door to make it look bigger, but we lost touch over the years. This unfortunate event soured our relationship. Speck returned to the framing department and continued to assemble two thirds of every sofa frame.

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