David DeMilo spent the summer of 1977 working in a warehouse in the Boston area. This short story describes the unexpected events of that summer.

Guy pensively scrubbed his fat cheeks, coated with an eternal day's growth of beard, and looked up at me half-angrily, simultaneously releasing a fart which echoed across the huge warehouse.

"Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-HA! HEE-HEE-HEE!" As he held his bulge in hilarity, his spaced-out set of teeth stood out like stones under his silly gondola mustache. The day had officially begun.

The bright horn of the lunch truck cut the morning haze like an air-raid siren, marking the day with the 10:15 break. The store personnel gradually wound down their activities and wandered outside to the aluminum shelves full of packaged milk and pre-sandwiches.

But the construction workers on the site dropped everything immediately. It didn't matter. All kinds of shit hit the floor--pieces of iron they had half-welded into place, plaster board, hammers, showers of nails, hunks of pipe, rolls of insulation. As soon as that siren sounds, it's not in their contract.

I got into line to buy my chocolate milk behind this hardhat in a dirty white t-shirt. He had faded tatoos on both arms, a thin, mean-looking moustache, and a thin, mean-looking face. He didn't say much, just picked his poison from the truck and paid his dues--a pack of Luckies, a meatball sub and a donut--all washed down by the Bud in his thermos.

All the employees in the place (and the owners as well) were forced out onto this same summer asphalt to eat--execs and hardhats alike--to eat with the same hunger that serves for sustenance.

Eyes burn on the smooth, neat secretaries from upstairs. They were mostly married and pert, taking diet Tab, yogurt and Benson and Hedges from the truck with proud, married smiles and long legs.

"The Big Gunner"--the union spray painter from Revere--had sparkling eyes on such occasions. He brought his 18-year-old son to work with him as sort of an apprentice to his messy but profitable work. The union painter made $13 an hour, eight hours a day, plus time and a half on Saturdays and double time on Sundays.

"Huh, he'll make enough to pay for his funeral," Guy mumbled to me, spitting pastroml sandwich all over me as he talked and chewed. The painter talked Red Sox with his boy; they were leaning up against the food truck drinking Bud, eating subs and smoking Camels. Camels. They were already covered head-to-toe with white paint from the awkward hissing machine they worked, their lips and the hairs that just brushed out from the nose were tinged with white paint. They smiled behind the white masks ghost faces of miners who look hungrily out of the darkness--inhuman mutants of the mechanical tool jungle, the wonder of a smile that shines through latex.

Rene stood on the loading dock and waved his arms frantically at me; it was time to get back to work. Rene never took a break. I never saw him take lunch. I never even saw him leave work.

He was always there, walking briskly everywhere in endless emergency, heavy Sparrish eyebrows pushing down his square face into nothing but total seriousness. Every once in a while, a vague grin would drift momentarily onto his face, like he was recalling an old joke that made him silly, but the smile would quickly dissipate as he whistled and pointed and bristled down the aisle.

Rene had me back on the forklift until lunch, when Buzzy stumbled into work. He had a dentist's appointment that morning, and he looked high from a dose of sodium pentathol. Buzzy was an appetite suppressant freak, you see. These forklifts were Buzzy's machines--he charged them and took care of them and drove them with a facility no one else could approach--and he was very proud of that fact.

Buzzy whizzed a few palates into place and took his lunch at 12:30 and urged me to do the same. So Buzzy, Jeff from the item warehouse and I grabbed our lunches and ran over to Buzzy's car, a banged-in '68 Mustang. Once inside, we stashed our lunches into the glove compartment and waited for Buzzy to drive us down the street, near the junction at 128. We swung into an empty parking lot and stopped. Here, we pulled out some joints and lit them up, trying to get as much toke to the minute as possible. We hadn't much time.

Buzzy lit up his hash pipe and roared out of the parking lot--he swung onto the street off the whiptail of a 40-mph 360-degree-turn, just for momentum. Now we were ready to eat lunch.