On Oil & Plastic

Today on Facebook, a friend shared a link to an interesting story (http://www.flixxy.com/convert-plastic-to-oil.htm#.UbZsZo8qQWA.facebook) about reverting plastic to oil and it reminded me of one of my dozens (perhaps hundreds, I have lost count) of temp jobs - one that made me take a closer look at the way people on the so-called 'fringe' of society are treated by those entrusted with their care, and may have been an influential experience for my novel. I guess I wanted to write about this experience because I'm afraid that a time will come when I forget some of the details.

In the early 90s, I lived in Lima, Ohio and worked one of my many jobs with a vending company. My job was fairly simple: travel between assigned customers (P & G, the local prison, and a few smaller business) to fill/refill the machines, report mechanical problems, empty the cash, and file some ridiculous reports on losses and expired product. One of my daily stops was at a 'training' center for disabled adults. The clients were paid a small wage (so it wouldn't hurt their SSI benefits) and performed what many would consider menial tasks: sorting nuts and bolts, making brooms, short-step assembly, packaging, etc. My employer didn't care what time of the day I went to which site, as long as I completed the prison first thing in the morning on its assigned days, but I always managed to arrive at this training center at lunch time and I found myself compelled to return at lunch time for one person: Vaughn. At over 50, Vaughn was a spry, flirtations fellow with Down Syndrome. He loved the music playing throughout the building (mostly Top 40 stuff from the 50s, 60s, and 70s) and would dance with his broom (a handy partner he always had with him, as Vaughn was also the resident floor sweeper) throughout the area set aside as the cafeteria. Vaughn always dressed in a classic plaid short-sleeve shirt, high-waisted polyester pants, dress shoes, and his camel-colored suspenders. Sometimes he'd be wearing his eyeglasses, and sometimes he wouldn't. Evidently, he broke them often, and the staff would put them away during work hours. I probably wouldn't have noticed Vaughn among all the other clients of the training center (as many had far more shocking behavioral issues involving some gross and sexual acts - often in tandem), but one day he practically demanded my attention. I was locking a snack machine and noticed an odd silhouette in the glass: a figure seemingly taller than anyone else in the room moving against the rhythm of the music playing, but somehow still dancing to the song. When I turned around, a diminutive man with a half-toothless grin was dancing on an oversized picnic table to one of my favorite songs, Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." He spun around and moved his broom back and forth as if imitating an animated version in a Disney movie. One of the instructors attempted to coax him down from the table, but allowed him to stay there long enough for the song to finish and then he carefully crawled down from the table and went about his business.

Although Vaughn was the best part of going to this particular site, another opportunity came out of my daily visits: a temporary job that paid fairly well at the time. The best part of the job was that it fit into my schedule and would only be two days a week for about five weeks. On my first night at the job, one of the center's supervisors handed me two buckets, a very heavy vest, and a magnifying glass. We headed for some benches on the far side of the warehouse and received one set of instructions for both the titled 'handicapable' and 'temp workers' (I kind of wished I was in the first category because 'temp worker' sounds incapable). We each received a 5-gallon bucket full of tiny plastic chips. We were to sort the chips into our two empty buckets - one for clear plastic chips and one for plastic chips with visible fragments/particles. We were to use the magnifying glass when necessary to determine which of the two categories our plastic chips fell into. "And this thing?" I asked, attempting to hold up the heavy vest. "Oh," our supervisor said, "YOU should put that on." So I did. I expected to get an x-ray or call my squire for armor at any moment. The damn thing must have weighed 20 pounds and was more like a smock than a vest. I noticed a lot of people didn't wear it, so as the evening went on and conversations started, I asked the older woman next to me about her decision to not wear the vest. "I'm too old for that," she said. "I'm going through the change and it's too hot." Made sense to me, until, of course, I noticed the label on the side of the pallet holding on the buckets: radioactive. Apparently, the plastic chips were by-products from the BP oil refinery and the particle-chips we were separating may have or may not have been exposed to radiation. I had seen pictures of three-eyed fish taken from the river near the refinery. I kept the vest on.

The next evening I returned to the same: bending and sorting, chit-chatting, watching shaking hands drop potentially radioactive plastic pellets on the floor, and avoiding eating any of the sandwiches I had placed in the machines just hours before. I wore the vest like chainmail, though I am sure I didn't believe the thing was as protective as I was supposed to feel it was.

After lunch I sat by one of the center's clients I knew well. Mary was a very bright young woman who was so proud of earning her high school diploma, she kept a photocopy of it in her purse (along with a few meals and a lot of Hello Kitty stuff). Mary believed in doing a good and thorough job. She often chastised her fellow clients for their lack of commitment to detail and quality. I asked her why she didn't wear her vest and she said that the supervisor didn't give her one and she thought they were very heavy and got in the way of doing her job. Later, I asked the supervisor why none of the center's clients were wearing the vests and she said, "It's probably better that they don't; it'll lower their chances of having children...eventually."

I never returned to the radioactive sorting job. Something about it bothered me. I suppose I didn't realize in my bubble of an early-20s life that what I had witnessed was not new and that something probably could have been done about it. As I continue to work on my novel, I wonder about Mary. She was certainly more capable than most of the other clients at the center. She could cook and navigated the bus schedule on her own; she could handle money and was very outgoing. She probably could have been a parent and perhaps she is today; then again, it's possible that she never had the chance to be.