JOURNAL: I Was A Union Autoworker

The story goes the Strand Bookstore, that venerable institution, late in those heady 1970's of Broadway, was infiltrated by a couple of clever commies, and somehow, someway, the stranded workers of the institution were swallowed up by the UAW.  How bookstore clerks could be unionized as autoworkers can probably be best explained at this point by: It was Broadway in 1978.
Fast-forward my entire life.  I get a job unloading trucks of books on Broadway at the Strand.  I had two interviews; the second interview was with the big boss, and that interview came about because, if the under-management thought one had the erudition to work out front of store, they sent them to the top office; if you you told the big boss you were a young writer, or why you loved the Strand, and if you fit the hipster profile, you might get the cush spots in-store, discussing Johnny Lethem with noontime rich people.
I told her I wasn't much of a reader.
It was upstairs for me.  Upstairs was the Charles Foster Kane storage floors where hundreds of thousands of books are stacked in cardboard boxes with fantastic magic marker scribbles from generations of grunts, which (sometimes accurately) announce what is inside.
To make claims of hard work, any reader can chalk up to revision, but fine, let's go with it: I worked for that 8 dollars an hour like it was meat.  And it was.  I took every day like a contest, and here is why: The Strand hired on a month try-out, and after that month, if they kept you, you got unionized, (the last thing the store wanted).  So really the Strand ate kids up.  It was sick in there.  Everyone knew they had barely a month of half their bills paid coming out of the ordeal, before likely getting cut days before the union locked you in.  When I went in I met the kids who were in the last week of their month, I was their replacement basically, and they were understandably unhappy to see me.  Fine by me.  For the first month I barely talked.  When trucks of books purchased overseas showed up on Broadway, I was downstairs licking my chops.  If I lost this job I was going home from NYC two months from arriving.  I was spooky.  I'd take my non-lunches with the books while everyone else went to Giant Bagel.  The black girls at the pharmacy around the block used to say, "Yellow-eyes, these Red Bulls aren't good for you.  Eat a candy bar."  
No Thanks.
(No thanks?  Sound like you too scared to be eatin.)
I was.  How to tell your girl you can't make your rent.  So make your rent.
I hefted books.
Boys around me were waving at Drew Barrymore out at Storefront, and I was gunning past them like what I was, an undrafted free agent desperate to hang on.  
And it worked.  I got my spot.
A manager upstairs quoted Horace to me: Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant. 
Horace you say?  I'll check it out.
Before this situation I had never tried too hard.  In my mind, I was a talented guy.  Unmerited belief in this difficult to define "talent" had made me a lazy person.  Being just a grunt, another body, feels bad to a blown-up sense of self, but it can will that body to grind.  
Six months in they asked me to run a computer.  A sad twenty-five cent raise, and while I would still need to unload books, I would also inventory them, warehouse to store to store to warehouse.  Sure I will.  Why not.  I became the fifth floor drill sergeant, computer whiz, and spartan infantry, for 8.25, and a union card.
Flash-Forward a year and a half: I have a girl I live with.  I can't skip another Christmas with the family.  I tell her I have the days off.  I don't.  But so what?  People read worth; these old managers upstairs won't fire me for two days, on a weekend no less.
I go out of state.  Then I come back.
Cut to me returning to work.  Three managers, older managers with spots secure, okay the time I've missed.  One manager, a manager my age has put in the order to fire me.  And he has gone on vacation.  The other managers raise their hands, You have to go, they tell me.
I leave the store.  I walk to Times Square.  I buy a ticket to Seabiscuit.  I watch the movie at 11:45AM with three other people.  I've just barely paid my Manhattan rent on 8 dollars an hour for two years, but I have made it, and now I'm out.  I want to cry.
All the kids I saw get swept out of this place, now it's me.
I went to the Union.  I met a rep; I remember he had the kind of accent that comes from growing up in Harlem with Haitian parents, like Robert DeNiro playing a Rastafari.  I told him I missed two days of work, the only two in two years.  We set up a hearing.  What this did ultimately was buy me a few weeks of pay, waiting for this manager to come back from his vacation.  The deal went like this: over the objection of this manager, I could come back to work, but would be moved down to the mail room.  I went back to the store, hugged my friends, and, in front of a dozen people I had spent two years with, I told this manager that I was going to make it my mission to rip his job from him.  Then I went down to the mail room, high-fived the Puerto Ricans, and quit.
Probably no moral to this story.  Maybe just that I'm a belligerent prick with unmerited self-confidence.  Dudes like that get fired.  Go UAW.  Rah.