That Dirty Jew

 

They call my name over the warehouse public address system and I know I’m doomed.

Why on earth did I write those letters?

And why didn’t I get another job before I mailed them?

It’s Michele’s fault, I think, as the PA announces me again, more insistently, with a tone that says “You don’t want us to call the police, do you?”

I think “Police?” and wonder if it really will come down to that?

Then conclude, of course it will.

A man doesn’t sabotage another man’s livelihood and expect to walk away unscathed.

Even a thief hates a thief when he’s the victim.

But I’m not thief, I tell myself as the PA rants again my name, and John, my fellow worker on the conveyor belts yells, “You’re wanted in the office,” as if I’ve turned stone deaf all of a sudden and can’t hear my name blaring out of a speaker ten feet above my head.

I put down my clipboard and make my way out to the aisle for that long, final walk up front where I fully expect to get my head handed to me.

All this comes from being in love, me being peeved at the boss for picking on a bubble-headed sweetie in the outlet next door I hope will become my girlfriend when I deep down know she won’t.

I’m not sure who I’m peeved at more, him for hurting her, or her for hurting me, or perhaps me for letting myself get in the middle of it all, for needing to prove my life to her by hurting him back.

I hit him where it hurt most, his wallet, by writing letters to everybody he doesn’t business with and telling them precisely how he’s managed to rip them off all these years, and exactly how much more he makes off of them than he claims to.

I call him “a dirty Jew”, knowing how much those wasps in the south secretly hated him anyway,  how they hold their noses to do  business with him when thinking they have the better part of the deal.

Now, they know better and they had him all the more for it, as if they are telling themselves they should have known no one like them can pull anything over on “a Jew,” though my letter gives them bullets to hold him hostage for a better deal or they will take their business to somebody else.

I don’t hate him for being a Jew. I hate him for being my boss, as if I’m Karl Marx seeking to start my own workers’ revolution, to overturn all the oppressors and give the oppressed to do some oppressing for a change.

I keep singing Sympathy for the Devil in my head, even now, as I walk up to the office and see my boss and my supervisors and others I don’t know looking out the window at the warehouse – all of them wearing expressions so serious you might think someone just died, and soon will.

“You called for me, boss?” I ask as I step inside the crowded office.

“That’s right,” my Jewish boss says. “David just quit me for another job. I’m promoting your to warehouse supervisor.”