“A wild longing for strong emotions & sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal & sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps … or myself.”
Hermann Hesse
 
“I’d rather be dead than work in a warehouse.”
Jpegmafia, rapper

I only worked at the Supersize Abrazos FilFulDistroCenter for 5 months and a few days. Long enough to make comparisons between slave labor and gig work, between behavior mod and motivational tactics. I was a drudge although Abrazos preferred “associate.”
     We all knew that “FilFul” was an anagram for “fullfilled” and that fulfillment means – I looked it up: achieving something desired; or happiness as a result of fully developing one’s potential. You had to snicker at the irony of the Center’s name. We preferred: “The Full-of-shit Center.” But sarcasm can only protect you for so long before the drudgery begins to seep into your heart.
     Drudgery is a key characteristic of nonplaces, non-towns of endless billboards, of wobbly chain link fenced-in lots littered with for-sale retread tires, of dubious pleasure venues, the firing range where for $100 you can shoot at a target of a despised Democrat, strip joints where regulations require strippers to cover their nipples with a sequined pasty or a Band-aid, endless drainage ditches filled with the discarded rubble of the passionless or attractions where speed is a substitute for satisfaction – going very fast to nowhere.
     It makes no sense to mention the soulless, sprawling subdivisions quaintly named after massacred tribes. Most residents have a piece of petrified wood on a shelf some place and a golf handicap or they can fake it. If you offer directions like southeast of Phoenix, off US 10, people will act like they know it and in disbelief declare: “But there’s nothin’ out there.” They’d be wrong but also spot on.
     It had been a week since Ron Konig’s let-go. He of the kid-like face, pink meatiness – big guy, gentle giant. He had punched in, second shift every day, 6 days a week for a year. Never missed a day. Mentored the greenhorns. With a self-deprecating smirk, he’d explain to the drudges that “könig” is “king” in German, many of whom, although claiming to have high school diplomas or bachelor’s degrees had no idea about German, where Germany was on a map, or how important it had been for American history. But anyway, names are unimportant here because the turnover’s high and somebody’s gone before you even hear their last names, their dreams, their marital woes.
     Ron had left his wife – although it was more likely vice versa – and lived in his Chrysler Mini-van, “residing” on the outer edge of the Abrazos lot, where the weeds met the asphalt for which he paid a reasonable under-the-table parking fee to local Seguridad Parking Systems guards. He’d lope into work early to avoid the heat, declaring: “My car’s my castle,” which was sardonic and pathetic all at once because a car is hardly a castle and he didn’t even really own this “castle,” as we found out when the repo man came by to tow it away, leaving behind only a ghostly imprint matching the van’s dimensions. I drew a mental photo of him staring down the Abrazos aisle, face pale, bloodless, carless upon realizing being nice ain’t shit.
     You know why he got fired? He wore a “Suburban Ambush” tee shirt to work – I never figured out whether it was a band or an attitude. The tee shirt showed a cartoon of a man standing next to a barbecue, wearing an Army helmet, brandishing an AR-15 instead of a grill spatula. Big whoop, considering he was as peaceful as a lake on a windless day. People had forgotten irony, mistook it for aggression or insubordination. “I told’m I didn’ wanna strip my shirt off to save’m the horror of seeing my nakedness, which I figgered was worse’n that tee shirt.” Not even wit is worth a dime anymore.
     A red badger (team leader, glorified drudge) told him to remove it; when he refused, they let him go right there – no recourse, no ceremony, no due process – just like that. He passed me on the way to his locker in the middle of this huge mind crater of a warehouse, gliding on a perhaps deceptively self-assured grin-sneer, like the starting pitcher who, as he’s being yanked for a reliever, pounds the ball into the manager’s palm with a certain indignation but appreciation for absurdity. He whispered hoarsely: “Hey man, it’s a matter of principle. I gotta move forward.”
     And like many of us, he had merely been acting like his actions were consequent, could change the spin of the earth if even for just one second ... and that he had a plan. He didn’t. On top of that they withheld a week’s pay and, after just a few hours, he in all his purported unforgettable uniqueness, had been replaced, name tag removed from his locker, and a day later I noticed we had already stopped talking about him.
     “I gotta move forward,” his famous last words, were the same words defiantly uttered by a thousand before and after him. We all sort of knew that forward meant him driving 250 miles further west or east to follow up on a want ad for a job already filled by somebody 20 years his junior. That’s no future, but that’s the future – Abrazos alt dictum that you figured out mighty quick around here.
     Me and Ron had tried to explain to the others how Boss Božo Abrazos, the son of Slavic-Mexican parents, earned – I looked it up – in one minute earned more than what we earned in a day. I know that knowing this does not give us any advantage anywhere. I thought of helping with the job search, the resumé, emphasize his military service, his summer camp leadership years, but these thoughts went ragged and thin like vapor trails, until there was very little left of him to think about.
     Abrazos had recently won a government research grant worth nearly $500 million. It authorized Abrazos to test a new motivational drug on drudge associates who figured that by applying early they’d get brownie points. The prescription, the Abrazos Motivational Cocktail [AMC] consisted of precise measures of methamphetamine [motivation], testosterone [assertiveness], and adrenaline [memory]. And, although free, it was not optional – say “no” and you’re let go.
     So, we had to line up off to the side, down a dour hallway, to get our daily AMC injections in the upper deltoid portion of the arm in the stainless steel Health Inspection Maintenance Station [HIMS]. The sign on the wall reads: “WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR WORKPLACE INJURIES BECAUSE WE FULLY EMBRACE PRIDE AS THE INTEGRITY OF HUMANS ASSUMING THEIR OWN PERSONAL LIABILITY – ABRAZOS.
     AMCs were administered by a nurse’s aide to prevent abuse or injury. My favorite was sultry and had a temporary tattoo going from her middle finger up her arm, spelling out Abrazo’s motto: “ABRAZOS EMBRACES HARD WORKERS EVERYWHARE.” This temp tat lasted 6 weeks. I imagine us getting together as I slowly break it to her that “everywhere” is spelled w-h-e-r-e. And, in the dream, she’d point out that the misspelling was a sign of resistance to the reigning conformity – a middle finger to spelling rules and, by extension, Abrazos. I always wake up before she reveals the tattoo on her inner left thigh depicting a hand drill below which it says “You Bore Me”.
     HIMS is also where they perform “randomized-profiling” breathalyzers, deep body cavity searches [pre- and post-shift], needle insertion sites to monitor infection, as well as periodic Abrazos Cognition Assessment Tests. Humiliation is no fun and, I read, an essential aspect of control.
     All drudges are carefully monitored with Monitron Sensors, that were originally used to monitor the condition of warehouse equipment. The Monitrons were re-apped to track employee reactions to the AMC – and monitor company loyalty inside and outside – or so the rumors flew. Chief behavioral scientists are convinced that if AMC s are administered using personal body type and mental health data, the cocktail can serve as an essential motivator, leading to increased productivity and self-esteem – and loyalty. [Preliminary data shows a 12% increase in overall productivity. Meanwhile, behavioral scientists disagree about whether loyalty can ever be induced chemically.]
     I was just one of 4,000 drudges daily injected with this loyalty-ensuring cocktail, coincidentally just as our very toil stripped us of all dignity. But I was flying and feeling no pain. I saw it somewhere described as “the inverse relation paradigm between dignity and loyalty.” The tired-wired zombie effect.
     Some were lucky; they got hired full-time and wore red badges. I was one of the others, one of the temps “promised” an eventual red badge. I liked to think my badge was pink, not white. But, at the end of the day, my badge was white. You can’t believe how the pursuit of a red badge begins to infect your every thought like a loyalty-enhancing incentivizing virus. But as I remember Ron observing: “The red badge ain’t shit, like the bull seeing there’s nothing behind the Toreador’s red cape, just stinky, dusty, dead air.” Or had I only imagined he had ever said anything like this to ennoble his memory?
     We white badgers did the same work as the red badgers but we contributed more wealth to the company because, simply put, we earned less and received NO benefits – N.O. period. Us non-reds earned worthless phonescreen icons, Abrazos badges and empty praise – Collect 50 Abrazos and you earn a cafeteria cappuccino in a special royal gold Abrazos cup.
     I was a skinny picker – lost 26 pounds my first month – armed with a scanner gun that read barcodes, measured performance, and gathered data to calibrate daily workforce capacity. I carried my handheld scanner in a holster fashioned from a discarded BelliBag, pushing a huge trolley with a capacity of 100± orders. My scanner: it’s not MINE to keep actually, but if I lost it I’d have to fork over $250. Fairness is something we only used when talking about football refs.
     I was hired to assemble orders during holiday madness – where you end up absorbing the maddening high – and stayed on. I felt the AMC from my fingertips to my toes. My mental ability to memorize maps made me almost super-human. I jogged 16 miles daily (5.5 more than other drudges) in Abrazos that covers 12 football fields, a long haul even for an ex-cross-country runner. There’s supposedly a video showing me squeezing between palettes, like a speed-reader on speed, pixelated beyond recognition, dashing from Homebase Defibrilators to Marilyn Monroe/Lady Gaga Loofah Sponges, dodging dollies stacked with Avatar and Kim Possible-themed doilies made in China. I did my job well, exceptionally well, if you talked to my superiors – in my presence, of course. What they said about me behind my back pissed me off but also made me proud to be someone important enough to grouse about.
     You must learn to do well, make them notice, but not too well, which meant pacing yourself [130 items per hour max], calibrate it to the pace of the others [95± per hour]. Do things too well, hit it out of the park too often, I learned the hard way, you throw off the curve and, in no time, management’s adjusting the algorithm to your pace and that means others will fail, lose their jobs – their kids go hungry. You’re scorned, excommunicated. [The general stats are mind-boggling: I gathered 800 items per day, multiply that by 4000 employees times 175 FilFulDistroCenters times, 7 days times 52 weeks and you begin to wonder what holes all this stuff is filling in our souls because all that obsessive plenty does not produce any increased satisfaction or lower domestic violence stats.
     So, I kept my jog but, as a joke, sometimes faked the staccato stiffness of robots to show I was just part of the greater mechanism, no better than the rest with their uncertain shit-eating survivor-smiles of cowedness.
     My gig entailed venturing into the furthest XYZ regions that did not appear on Abrazos maps and was where the most outlandish, unclassifiable, and controversial items were kept. I’ve been here when for a few glitched minutes this place was almost empty and for a minute you could hear your voice careening, echoing in all directions, defining its awesome almost cathedral-like dimensions, a sensation I hadn’t felt since I was 10 when I was invincible, immortal, and on vacation as I let out my Roy Rogers-style yodel along the trail in Watkins Glen. If only I had had something earth-shattering to say to myself or anyone at that precise moment.
     Upon my return from the XYZ outback where some drudges refused to roam, the Expendables would gather around my squeaky-wheeled stockpiled trolley for a stolen moment of WOW. My stash included the dodgiest products involving unspeakable sex acts, creative revenge manuals, shady financial tip bibles, outlier activity destinations, extreme parkour in world capitals, the Anarchist Cookbook, SmartSexAides®, Keith Haring ButtPlugs®, Cruel Tyrant Masks®, NakidLady® Stress Ball, Breast Gearshift Knobs®, Exorcist Theme Pillowcase Set®, Charles Manson Kitchen Knife Collection®, Kid Kolor Attraktive GPS Distance Connektion Collars®, Micro-tiny Cheating Partner WiFi Wireless Spy Camera®, Pink Glock® for young girls – shoots BBs, White Power Iron-On Transfers®, CIA-Approved Rectal Nutrient Alimentation® equipment [not approved for adolescent “difficult-eaters”], controversial Filipino PPA in strange shades, Cosplay armor, and a home electroshock therapy kit that included equipment to monitor vital signs and manage medical emergencies, intubation equipment, pulse waveform ECT device, EEG, blood pressure measurement device, and an oxygen delivery system.
     This made the task somewhat bearable and, as long as you didn’t mind coming home after a shift feeling like a balloon with an invisible pinprick that, by the time you drive the 50 miles home, is deflated and shriveled and any message emblazoned on its side is long gone, you could survive.
     I had Sundays off but the Ben-Gay odor, bitter taste of painkillers and lukewarm beer eventually got to me. Zeke [Ron’s replacement] asked why can’t they flavor painkillers like children’s aspirin? At work, despite AMC, we often mocked symptoms of exhaustion – gimpy-legged, ditzy talk, fat-lidded eyes – to defeat these very symptoms. Like the marionette who fake-cuts the strings of the puppeteer in an instant of symbolic liberation.
     AMC cocktail extractions came at the end of your shift in the stainless steel clock-out area. It was performed to encourage a good nights sleep. You await your turn outside HIMS to have the reusable remnants of the cocktail extracted, as you watch a hygienic smart-vacuum extraction hypodermic fill with murky fluid that will be recycled and reboosted with supplemental active ingredients and readministered into a 3rd-shift drudge. We all loved that cocktail because it made us feel like brave hunter-gatherers or some-time super-heroes, like we could fly like Captain Marvel or Superman. We called ourselves the “Expendables” – it sounded like we were super-heroes, but that’s the joke.
     I imagined the drudge receiving my recycled cocktail, acquiring my dreams, my motivations, my dirty habits. Ron claimed that you could even inherit the aches and pains of a first shifter, or the bad dreams of a guy arranging a hit on his wife. This is an interesting scenario but further research is needed. The lullaby goes something like: dream my dreams my little one / your adventure’s just begun.
     Associate Lydia was a recognized stacker, perky, with a sense of balance and her mysterious “toasted-cheese smile.” You always felt that she wanted to be more than who she was or at least join the Expendables. She tried to defy destiny, read poetry, carrying a paperback Norton Anthology in her bellibag, mentioned self-help videos to make her taller, more attractive, diets, make-up strategies, joke telling. But some Expendables thought she was just too much of a judgmental mom to ever really fit in.
     She brooded too much. Her eyes seemed to say: When did meaning well stop being enough? Something just wasn’t right with her … Weeks later we learned that somebody had stolen the promise rings she’d bought on layaway at Walmart plus a set of expensive speakers. Of course, everybody had an idea of who it was.
     That and her mother’s friend, Marcos “M&M” Mendoza, dying on the job, seeing surveillance footage showing security dragging him off Abrazos property, moaning and dying on the way out. He, like the other 3 company deaths, died of “natural causes.” They all do. To avoid liability they ensure the outcome and make it impossible for surviving family to prove it happened on the job. In his coffin he wore his trademark dickie to cover up a gruesome neck slash from a knife fight.
     One day they waved me over to post-shift HIMS inspection. Here they patted me down, confiscating my BelliBag, claiming it was “safety-hazard, non-regulation-wear.” It felt like payback for something and, ultimately, it signaled the beginning of the end.
     The AMC extraction process was obviously only somewhat successful with many of the active ingredients already absorbed into the veins, lingering like unnamed stars in a night sky. The upside: lots of energy to complete household chores like scrubbing the gunk from behind the fridge, put all my books in alphabetical order, lists of things probably never to be accomplished ...
     The downside: I’m always up and about like perpetual wakefulness in the land of the Midnight Sun where sunset melts into sunrise. Perspective and depth vanish. Affection becomes weakness. People you see may not be who they appear to be or even there at all.
     Just before I got canned, Zeke, who wore his baseball cap so low I never saw his eyes, had set out to prove that he was the next-generation me. Anyhow, that’s how it looked. My suspicion was he’d been getting my recycled AMCs. And, although fascinating from a sci-fi perspective, this may not have served Zeke all that well.
     His goodbye kiss to me involved an elaborate prank that only someone who lives alone can hatch – someone not unlike me. I’d gone to XYZ to fetch a trolley full of bizarre gadgetry and there I scanned the code, X150266 – a box containing a SuitXO Robotic Skeleton Suit with a RealitéMask. I picked up the mask and wondered whether it was my addled tired-wired mind, poor diet, the AMCs, or just Zeke playing tricks on me because the mask – it creeped me royally! – was of me, was me.
     I returned with my loaded trolley and noticed Zeke unable to contain a smirk.
     The rumor is he had secretly photographed me, sent the headshot to a 3D imaging company that uses Art-In facial recognition software to “sketch” an accurate likeness onto a latex RealitéMask. The made-to-my-measure SuitXO exoskeleton uniform consisted of an intricate network of electronic circuitry, motors, pneumatics and smart tech, which, when I put it on, amplified my strength by a factor of 25, so that lifting 200 pounds felt like lifting 8.
     Was my brain’s curiosity region [hippocampus] just not curious enough to look up the customer’s shipping label to learn who it was [Zeke?] who would soon be replacing me with a cosplay version of me? I suspected that the Abrazos nurse [not really a nurse] who I’d complimented by saying: “You wear the uniform well,” and who may have been annoyed by her secretly being flattered by what I’d said, would be glad to see me gone, replaced by a stiffer, more chemically balanced and reliable drudge.
     Arriving for my shift, I discovered that my badge was turned off – no more access to the warehouse, had to call on an external intercom to return my badge or pay a $25 replacement fee. They get you coming and going.
     They say Abrazos is about to purchase SuitXO Inc., with the long-term goal of outfitting entire FilFulDistroCenter workforces with these uniforms, enabling Abrazos to potentially reduce its workforce of 4,000 down to 150-ish. Looked at this way, the future will indeed be a less crowded workplace.
     They say the let-go never includes a going-away party. They say you’ll feel liberated after, although some say you’ll feel ostracized like you didn’t belong to anything after all. I felt more neither-here-nor-there like when you park in a lot and you take up 2 spaces and later can’t find where you parked because they’ve your car [not unheard of].
     They say the future is super-imposed over our daily lives to make us forget the past like a smiley sticker plastered over a bullet hole in a wall.
     SMS from Zeke a day after my let-go: even superheros must face their own demise.

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