The Anarchist’s Compass No. 3

One summer break during college I worked the night shift at a liquor factory. There I learned two things:

1. Tequila is great at getting hellacious stains out of concrete (maybe humans shouldn’t drink it?).

2. An uneducated person might also be a genius.

My shift manager, Steve, was a few years older than me. He had never finished middle school and clearly struggled to read or write (though he tried like hell to do both). But he had an amazing memory and could visualize problems in three-dimensional space better than anyone I’ve ever met.

Every few nights, he would make up a “Jeopardy” game for the shift. He made up all the answers/questions, created the categories and put them up on a board in the break room. He’d play Alex Trebek, and we’d take turns being the contestants and the audience.

Pretty much every other word on the board was misspelled. But the questions were about Dutch history in the 17th century. Or chemistry. Or constitutional law.

When we weren’t playing “Liquor Warehouse Jeopardy,” we were preparing pallets of Tia Maria and peach schnapps to be loaded into semi-trailers. Steve was the only one on the shift certified to drive a forklift, so many times we would prep the pallets then watch him load the trailer.

I’ve spent a lot of time in warehouses and with forklifts. This was like watching a propane-powered ballet. Steve could look at a bunch of pallets on the loading dock and instantly know if they would all fit, or if we were short.

Those three months at the liquor plant were like living on a moon colony. I went to work as the sun was going down and the roads were empty of traffic. While on break, the roach wagon would come and sell us sodas and chips, and you could feel the heat of the daytime rising from the asphalt to be replaced with cool night air.

When the shift ended, there was nowhere to go. Nothing was open except the Denny’s. So all of us on the shift sort of banded together. One of my co-workers had a neighbor with an above-ground pool, so we’d put our feet in the pool, drink Old Milwaukee and wait for the world to wake up. That’s when it was time to go to bed.

I returned to college in Chicago in the fall, and my first class fall quarter was “Political Literature.” The first book we read was Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” followed by “The Fountainhead.” During high school I had always been a sucker for self-determination – my school nominated me for the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Award. (Look it up if you must.)

But something during the summer had rearranged the tumblers in my head. I suddenly saw this Ayn Rand stuff for what it was: Dime-store Friedrich Nietzsche “superman theory” bullshit.

And I think I know what did it.