Back to Willowbrook again May 29, 1985
I don’t trust
Phil. He’s one of those All-American business types always looking for a way to
stab you in the back.
And I don’t
like the way he refers to black people, mocking them as if he is speaking to a
lower life form.
“I’m hiring new
people,” he told me last week over the telephone. “I’m trying to get the place
back to half and half again.”
I would say he
reminds me of Old South plantation owners, only the most of these treated their
slaves better than he does.
I could not
imagine Phil letting his kids eat or play with the kids of the blacks he employees
or working side by side with his black workers the way most slave owners did in
the cotton fields of the south.
He’s more like
the northern liberal hypocrite who pretends to love black people, but disparages
them when he thinks its safe, such as when he talks to me, mumbling about how
he doesn’t think those “niggers” are good for anything, especially work.
And I must be
crazy for going back to work for him, knowing that somewhere in the pea brain
of his, Phil is working on a new scheme.
Maybe he’s
building up the staff so he can sell the place the way he did the last time,
hoping to reap the same lucrative profit he got when the place fell apart after
the sale and he got to buy it back at a discount.
I keep thinking sooner or later somebody is going
to wise up to him, but they never do.
In a pool full
of sharks, big fish-eating little fish, he’s the shark with the bloated belly,
while I keep hoping that a bigger fish might come along and devour him, too.
I gave up the
Bloomfield job this week, a secure position that might have lasted year, and
returned here too broody Phil and his store in the mall.
God knows why?
Maybe I’m just tired of being a gypsy, working here and there, and want just
one steady gig.
But the mall
isn’t the same now as when I left it. People come and go, moving on to
something else, leaving behind the impression of radical change when in
reality, only the faces do. Wild Bill, who spent three years here as the night guard,
suddenly decided to come a porter, then quit entirely, and left his old duties
to two crazy men, who can’t fill Bill’s shoes or his former partner, Dan’s.
Nobody takes
these two seriously or fears them like they did Bill.
Bill was a
special man, stupid sometimes, stubborn as a mule, yet in other ways, he was a
very wise man, picking up on details other people could not and putting
together the pieces that came out as truth.
He confronted issues
head on. At the same time, he could also be a bit of Nazi, such as the time he
started locking the outside mall door so I could not get out without him, and
sometimes had to wait for him to complete his rounds to get back to this side
of the mall with the keys.
He was obsessed with thieves and was
convinced that if he left that one door opens in the most remote part of the
mall, someone would walk out with the entire inventory. This isn’t entirely his
fault. Mall management has the same misconceptions, painting everybody as a
potential thief that needs to be locked in to keep up from our worst instincts.
This is a kind
of preventive punishment, punishing people before they actually get the chance
to do anything wrong.
I told Dan when
he locked the door that imprisoning me was a crime against humanity, leaving
Dan to decide between obeying his boss or pissing me off.
It took Dan a long time, eventually he kept
the door unlocked. He replacements also leave the door open – and will until
upper management discovers the fact and then the doors will get locked again.
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