Bart the driver

I just now had a flashback to the remote past so hard it's like being there all over again. I can smell it. I can feel all the vibes of that time. I thoroughly feel the apprehension of joining a new work crew, an established clique with their strange cohesion, their obvious pecking order, all males except for one young woman with a learning challenge who was hired by a unique arrangement, and an old man who smokes a pipe, a very odd old-school boss. This would be a tough nut to crack. It was the night shift, and that is a whole different vibe. At the end of the work cycle, work so strange involving turning trays of processed checks into bundles with their page of computer listing and sorting piles of bundles of checks into a wall of bins made of metal shelving, then at the end of it large canvas sacks containing bundles of checks processed that night through Federal Reserve Bank high speed sorters must be delivered to five major downtown banks so they can get a jump on their own processing, and the rest delivered to the downtown U.S. Post Office nearby. Other sacks would be picked up by delivery companies hired by various banks. It was a quick trip around the downtown area, actually a circle within a grid map of the city, but considering the sums involved it was strange for the bank to assign the task to two little dummkopfs like us.

Bart trained me. And Bart was the worst of the lot when it came to responsibility. He drove like a maniac. He didn't care about damaging the delivery truck. He ran right up on sidewalks, bashed through snow banks, He tossed the bags into corners as if they were potatoes. We were twenty years of age. Bart looked like the cartoon in the Gorillaz video Feel Good; 5'7 or so, thin as a rail, thick shoulder-length raven hair, blue denim shirt, skinny jeans, oversized heavy mountain boots, his trademark. He drove a vintage jeep that he restored himself and taught himself to play the banjo, the one thing he was good at. He is second generation Mexican but speaks only vulgar Spanish. We hung out, eventually became friends. To my dismay this break away from the bank after a night of work and constraint for the independent task of delivery, an undesirable task relegated to the bottom rung of the totem pole, the two new guys, was Bart's opportunity to torch up and I am now complicit in a minor crime, at least a firing offense.

The first night delivering bags of checks and driving through the icy downtown streets, the whole thing completely new to me, a bit overwhelmed by the fortress aspect of the bank, with their own FRB guards who have their own firing range right there in the basement, and having just departed the containment bay of the garage where armored trucks deliver and accept the same canvas sacks of coins, that purposefully slows entry and egress and runs parallel with a port staffed by guards behind bulletproof glass so that they can inspect and control the set of seven-ton doors that closed slowly behind us before the regular garage doors rolled up to release us, one bay for entry another bay for exit, this song came on the radio and Bart turned it up loud as the radio goes in the dead of the cold winter early morning when regular people are fast asleep. Neither of us heard this song before but it's so engaging and so simple we both started singing along automatically because we actually were hitting the road and given the choice we would just as soon not come back.

What a trip. That was a very long time ago, the very beginning of my work experience. My only work experience. I grew up there.