Loading Doc

"They were getting very serious. One guy said a semi can go 200 miles an hour, then the other guy said, 'No, they don't do over 60.' Then it becomes a major issue; they were getting furious. One guy says, 'Shut up.' The other guy says, 'Make me.' And it was all over at that point; they jump off the dock and go at it.

"There was this guy who does inventory there, they call him Blinky because he wears glasses and blinks constantly. He comes up and says, 'Hey, I heard there were some problems out here.' I was laughing, and I said, 'You won't believe it, man. You're really going to laugh when you hear this--they were fighting over how fast can a semi go!'

"He looks at me quietly and blinks a couple times, and says, 'You know, those things can get going pretty good.'"

Of all the boys at the warehouse, it seems that Missouri, the thin man from the Midwest, received more than his share of action.

"He was like a gnat," says Dirk. "He'd bug people until they would attack him. One day he was just doing it a little too much, and three guys were standing around and they tackled him. Then it became like five guys, five guys with packing tape, and they taped him up. They put him in a recliner box and taped it up and put it on a lift and put it into the racks. Actually, a couple guys got taped up. But that stopped after a while."

Then there were the shirt-tearing incidents.
"That was Missouri again. He was mouthing off to this tough, big bulky kid. He was getting in his face, he grabbed his shirt, the guy pushed him and he ripped his shirt a little bit.

"He goes, 'You ripped my fucking shirt!' and he grabs Missouri's shirt by the collar and tears it in two and rips it right off him. And, of course, he's this skinny, hideous creature like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons, and he's half-naked all of a sudden. Everybody was horrified and embarrassed at the same time. The pathos; like when the Phantom gets his mask ripped off. That happened twice to him.

"In fits of frustration, it wasn't uncommon to see things fly off the top racks, just for kicks," explains Dirk. Bear in mind that those racks are three stories high. "Big stuff. Entertainment centers. Just to watch it explode and shatter in a million pieces. It was always an accident, of course. You got to get your sea legs up there, trying to move this giant piece of furniture three stories in the air.

"One guy put it like this: The managers at the front don't give a fuck about the salesmen. The salesmen don't give a fuck about the people at the front desk. The people at the front desk don't give a fuck about the warehouse guys, and the warehouse guys don't give a fuck about the furniture.

"About three times, the electricity went out at night during a storm, and the crazy guy who was in charge of the place would get really uptight and say, 'Lock those doors, goddamnit! Lock 'em, now! And give me your .45!' And the guy hands him his gun, he's running around the store with a gun. And I'm like, 'Who's going to come in here and rip off furniture? Someone's gonna say, "The electricity's off--let's go get a sleeper!"'

"We would just go hide in the darkest parts of the warehouse, and he'd be yelling, 'Get your asses out here and help us block these exits!'"

As you read this, Dirk is probably out of work, out of a job that you don't want, or one like you may have had, or one like you might be hoping to get. Bread must somehow arrive on the table; bar tabs don't pay themselves.

As Dirk relates this stuff, he laughs a lot, seems to be almost affectionate about Missouri, Blinky, Crazy Brian, XYY and all that male-driven crap. I ask him if he's going to miss it.

"No," he says, grin dropping like toxic waste. "Hell, no.