Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Sweat Shop

Two weeks of Moose left.

I was away this weekend, got to relax a bit and read Fables V6 as well as the first issue of Miriam’s jobnik! Fables is just such a guilty little fun. It’s not great comic booking but it doesn’t have to be – it’s just a shitload of chuckles and “ohhhs”, isn’t it? Watching Little Boy Blue wreck shop in the Homelands, cutting people in half and lopping off heads – that’s good ole’ popcorn flick comic booking right there. I’d love to see this made into a movie – probably more so than any comic book around now – it’s just made like a movie, a healthy dose of sex, violence, adventure and fantasy.

jobnik!, completely different but just as good. It wasn’t at all what I expected, subtle little things that you need to look over several times because you’re not sure whether you’re seeing what you thought you saw the first time around, an interesting character study where the writer is the character she’s studying. Miriam puts it all out there, I give it up to her – readers of this site know that I’m a fan of honesty and reflection. I learned a lot about myself by doing this site – you kind of see a sense of self realization within Miriam as you turn the pages of her book.

Good comic booking all around this weekend.

And I got a hot stone message. Goddamn that felt good. And my masseuse had some sexy-ass feet. I love feet.

_____________________________

The summer before I started college my father convinced me that I needed to get a real job and make some money before going off to Boston – the video store wasn’t going to pay me enough to get through the summer and buy my school books. So my father set me up with a job at the print shop he worked at in Queens.

My father, at this point, was a hot shot printer. He was running a big-ass press, running off baseball cards and what not. His press was on the second floor of his shop, all clean looking and right near the corporate offices. He never really got to see how the other half lived, the downstairs people who were running the collating machines and the shitty printing presses – it was essentially a sweat shop.

And I worked down there for two summers – earning minimum wage – while my bourgeois father got air conditioning and a clean, safe working environment.

I was the only American born in the massive, windowless bottom-floor, the only one who spoke fluent English, really. There were three groups of people – the Hispanic women who were fresh off the boat and did the most mindless jobs imaginable like labeling boxes, the Hispanic men who worked the dangerous presses like the ones that applied ultraviolet ink and corrosive chemicals, and then there was Tony, the Asian guy who fixed everything.

My first couple of weeks on the job I was just sort of filler, if someone didn’t show up I took their place. This had me occasionally applying labels with the Hispanic female crew, rumors started going around that I was hot for one of them. She was the only young one of the bunch, probably 19 or 20. She was cute, had a little bit of a femme-stashe but the kind that was still a little on the sexy side in a weird sort of way. She didn’t speak a word of English though, when the rumor that I was hot for her got to my pops he joked with me that the only word that girl knew was “Green Card”.

Anyway, nothing happened there – I can’t even say I was interested and the fact that she was attractive didn’t even occur to me until people started telling me I was supposedly hooking up with her. It’s hard to notice things like cute girls when it’s 95-degrees with no air circulation or sun light and you’re getting paid five bucks an hour to huff boxes across the print-shop.

Usually the only thing you see is spots.

One time Tony, the Asian fixer-upper, needed my help for something and we fixed a printing press together. Tony took a bit of a liking to me and I became his assistant for the rest of the summer, hung out in his workshop until we were needed.

Life got a lot easier.

We spent a lot of time outside, one of the projects we got tasked involved installing a new ventilation system on the roof of the print shop. Tony had a thick Asian accent and one day he was telling me we need to do some extra work on the roof because it’s not “yevow”. I kept asking his why the roof being yellow matters and he was yelling back, “No, no, it’s not “yevow”. Finally I’m like, “Ohhh…level…”

That pretty much summarizes every day with Tony.

One time during the roof project my ladder fell and Tony was nowhere in site. I had to climb down through the window of the third floor (which was a floor much like the first but with more immigrants and windows) and ran through the floor, embarrassed, no-one up there knew who I was and I didn’t want anyone to accuse my ass of trespassing. People were getting all freaked out because some white boy came through their window and started running around, they likely thought I was INS or some shit.

And that was that summer, every day it was a different story involving me looking like an idiot (like the time I broke the sink). The following summer working there, however…that was a little different.

This guy Cliff picked me up before Tony got a chance to – I worked the boxing machine all summer, the most mindless job imaginable. I don’t know if it was called the boxing machine but that’s what I did – the boxes came to me folded up and I put shit in them, taped it up, and put them on a skit. That was my day. For eight hours, five days a week, all summer. I’d actually count boxes to past time – when your best entertainment is to count the hundreds of boxes that pass through your hands, you know your job sucks.

If someone ever needed me to run some other errand I’d just disappear and never come back, no-one knew I was missing. I’d get called away, some Hispanic woman would take my place, and I’d finish my task in two minutes and then climb on top of a massive pile of boxes and take a nap. I used to actually refer to myself as “Silent Ninja Deadly Cat” and I’d crawl around these fourteen foot high pile of boxes (and skits) until I felt confident in finding one outside the line of sight of anyone on the floor.

And then just sleep. Maybe read some comics. Punch out five hours later.

My father told me he wanted me to work at his shop to make some college money but, in all honesty, I think he wanted me to do it to teach me a lesson – do good in school, no college grad will work the jobs I was working no matter how you do.

I got a new level of respect for my dad out of it. When I was going up he worked in the windowless print shop, the big-ass machine and the lack of circulation – he worked the day and night shift when I was kid to do right by his kids. And he made well with it but it took him over twenty years to get there.

You respect someone a lot more when you see where they started as opposed to where they ended up.

Labels: mitc

Sweat Shop

Monday, January 23, 2006

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