Michael Flanagan

BEGINNINGS

The first full time job I ever had was on the seventeenth floor
of a thirty-six floor building, a cork lined soundproof section
in the middle of the purchasing department, a fully equipped
in house print shop. I was the barely educated eighteen year
old odd job guy, pulling pages from reports to insert newer,
crisper versions fresh off one of the three printing presses,
delivering stacks of these reports to various middle
management hacks hungover at their desks. This was
the corporate offices of an insurance company, down near
Wall St. Russ ran one of the presses, talked about his wife,
kids, brown bagged his lunch, went straight home after work.
I became fast friends with Spanish Dave, who manned
the addressograph machine, addressing envelopes all day.
We smoked weed at lunch, hung out with Marilyn
from the twentieth floor, who had one lazy eye and a bad
haircut. I did my first line of coke with Dave, stunning
my heart huffing the whole gram down in one snort. Billy Lapp
was the wise older dude at twenty-nine, flush from a lawsuit
after lung surgery left a sponge in him. He still smoked
two packs of Marlboro Red a day, coughing up barroom
etiquette and lies about real life that amused him to watch
me believe. Vinnie was the assistant supervisor, with a wardrobe
mostly from hat day, windbreaker day, out at the Meadowlands
racetrack. OTB was his lunchtime hang out. He was always
down about fifty bucks, scratching his disheveled head while
reading the days card, grimy in thrift store pants, five o’clock
shadow. Phil was a good guy from a bad place. Nights
and weekends he sold after hours bootleg booze from behind
a boarded up window in an abandoned South Bronx building.
He had a gun for protection, a low voice, and good work ethic.
Steve, who got Phil his job, couldn’t cover his body odor
even with the cologne he doused himself with daily. Believing
himself a ladies man he’d stand in front of the building
lunchtime with one of the guys who worked in the loading
bay in the basement, catcalling girls, asking if they were too
stuck up to talk, at least give a smile. I never saw him
get any attention from any of the women walking by,
but he never stopped the whole two years I worked there.

One Friday night doing overtime to get out a thousand
copies of a hundred page report no one was likely to read,
Jimmy, the shop supervisor, drank almost a quart of vodka.
Around eight o’clock he fell off a table, cracking his head open.
After an ambulance carted Jimmy away Bill said we should
call it a night. Vinnie grunted okay so we left without finishing.
Jimmy didn’t show up until the following Wednesday. They
called him in and asked if he’d been drinking. He quit, telling
them to go fuck themselves. Vinnie was in charge now
and the place became a kind of hell. He was always checking
the clock when you left for lunch, checking when you came back.
He fired Spanish Dave when he took a week off claiming,
for the third time, his father had died. Bill became the assistant.
Russ resented him for it, saying it was politics, that Bill
was drinking buddies with the manager, that he had kids
to feed. Bill was replaced on his printing press by an oily
little munchkin who kept mouthing off, acting tough. Vinnie
finally told him to take a walk with him back to the supply
room so he could whip his ass. The company bought
a computerized ink jet printer the size of a small dumpster,
flying in people from Chicago to teach me and an alleged
computer whiz from another floor how to run it, promising
raises once we learned. The computer whiz was a straight
laced albino I didn’t get along with. When they refused
the raises they’d promised I gave my two weeks, moving
on to an office boy position my childhood friend got me
in a publishing company, bringing a disastrous amount
of the bad habits I’d acquired to midtown with me.

Michael Flanagan was born in the Bronx, N.Y. and currently lives in Canada, on Prince Edward Island. Poems and stories of his have been published widely. His full length poetry collection, Days Like These, is now out from (Luchador Press). His chapbook, A Million Years Gone, won the 2009 Nerve Cowboy chapbook contest, and is available from Nerve Cowboy’s Liquid Paper Press.