Author: Donald Guenther
Written: 2016

Summer Job

While in high school, summers found  Johnny and Donny working at Red Jordan’s meats and poultry warehouse where their dad worked. The swearing and cussing there surprised the two boys. They had never heard such colorful language. Beula, Red’s wife, was the worst. A woman cussing was shocking. Cussing and swearing was strictly forbidden at home. Fortunately, they had gained a little experience at high school. Their dad would be careful to catch himself when the boys were in the workplace and tone it down,  saying things like “Gol darn it” or “The heck with it”. Donny slipped a few times, but he was very diligent to confess the sin in the confessional, absolving him of all eternal punishment. The priest advised him to say “Oh beaches” instead of cussing. Next to Red’s talented tongue, “Oh beaches” just wasn’t an option.  Johnny and Donny became very creative in the way they handled some of those crotchety old workers without cussing. There was Phil E. for instance, an ex-convict, and he could cuss as good as Beula.

Pepper in the Coffee

The boys felt they  were overworked and underpaid and being cussed at just ascerbated the problem. The warehouse men all sat around drinking coffee as Johnny and Donny loaded their trucks. One day Johnny and Donny brainstormed a brilliant idea. They  put hot pepper in the coffee pot and then stayed close for the fireworks. As their custom was, as the boys started working, the men gathered around the coffee pot. In unison they all started coughing and spitting the nasty tasting stuff all over the floor. Now as luck would have it, the boys had come by their shenanigans ideas honestly; their dad was an expert. So, as might be figured, their dad got called in by Red and took the blame. As a pay back their dad shut the boys  up in the walk-in deep freezer for a spell.  You’d think those boys would learn.

Dry Ice in the Toilet

A particularly irritating person was this Phil E., already mentioned. He would go sit in the bathroom all morning while Johnny and Donny did his work plus their own. The guy was a low down no account. He later tried to rob Red’s and tied their dad up in the process. The local cops caught him and he was returned to prison. Still, Phil was part of the entertainment at Red’s place. One morning Johnny and Donny had another idea. They put some dry ice in the toilet. Poor Phil didn’t spend much time in there that morning. It became an explosive place. All the men got a laugh out of that joke, but Phil was fuming. Phil wasn’t a bad sort, all things considered, except for the robbery thing.

The Pallet of Eggs

Johnny and Donny were know-it-all’s. They figured they could always outsmart the adults and by all accounts they usually did, but not this time. Their dad and the others at Red’s warehouse told them they had to unload the eggs a box at a time on a hand truck, absolutely under no conditions should they try the whole pallet at a time. But Johnny and Donny thought these guys were all crazy. Why, with a little muscle and lots of brains they could get the whole pallet off in one fell swoop: the pallet jack could do it! Why hadn’t those old geezers figured that out? They would show everybody and maybe even get a raise. Johnny got under the pallet with the jack, jacked it up,  and started to pull.  Donny was right there with him, pushing like a banshee!  Halfway down the ramp coming off the truck, the egg boxes went every which way. Johnny managed to catch one box of eggs. These were big boxes containing many smaller egg cartons. They lost a whole pallet full of eggs as the egg boxes tumbled off the ramp. All except Johnny’s box. They spent half the day sorting the good eggs from the broken eggs, somehow feeling like they got the short end of the stick. Red yelled at their dad. Turned out everybody had had similar experiences. So Donny and Donny didn’t have to pay for the $80 of broken eggs.  At their wages they would have been working there yet to pay for it.

Red’s Expert Help

Once when delivering meat to Millacoma Grocery, Donny was told by the grocer to mark the price on the packages and stock them on the shelves. This was perplexing to the inexperienced Donny so he called Red. Red told him to take the meat and cram it up the guy’s — and hung up. Donny didn’t know what to do. Fortunately there was stock on the shelves so he used the grocer’s labeler, marked the price on the package and put the new packages behind the older stock, very smartly rotating the old meat forward. He felt like he was on top of the world handling the situation like that. He never called Red for help again.

Red Jordan retired. He left Beula and remarried. He’d stop by every now and then. His hair was no longer red and his  speaking vocabulary vastly improved. Perhaps the presence of Donny’s mother helped curb the tongue. Somehow, it just didn’t seem like the same old Red, not swearing or anything. Maybe Beula had been a bad influence. Turned out he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.