8 Million Stories: Chicks, Flicks and Lunatics

“You don’t have a problem with adult material, do you?” asked the woman from the temp agency.

I figured that she probably meant pornography, and I was OK with that. Fresh out of college, I found myself on a couch in a distant friend’s apartment near Dumbo one wet October. Just north of desperate, I called a temp agency recommended to me by my college’s alumni network. I expected data entry, customer service, telesales—something mindless from which I could guiltlessly walk away. I would have stopped short of making my onscreen debut, but if it meant staying on in the city, I was ready for almost anything else. I wrote down the building address on the back of a matchbook.

The temp job was a one-day assignment with an 8 a.m. Monday start. I checked in at a card table, which also doubled as the front desk in a dark room in a warehouse not far from my friend’s apartment. A woman wearing a visor looked up from a magazine, her hair held in a frosty blond ponytail.

“You Matt?” she asked. I nodded.

She swiveled in her chair and drew back one side of a curtain. Through the Plexiglas window I saw people mostly standing around in the warehouse. Some talked and gestured in groups of twos and threes, others carried clipboards. DVDs were piled on tables like jagged anthills.

“Today you’ll be doing what they’re doing,” she said. “Basically stickering and sorting and packing. There’s a big shipment going out tomorrow.”

She led me inside and sat me down at a long conference table. My job was to go through a wheel of stickers and parcel them out into rough geographical regions. The first five DVDs would be routed to Belgium, Canada, Brazil, Canada and Thailand. I pretended this was an internship at the U.N. and I was stuffing envelopes for galas. This was important, global work. When I felt something slither across my cheek and flop onto the table—a yellow dildo the size of a zucchini, it turned out—that fantasy was dashed.

Hyena laughter built up over my head. A back was slapped. But the joke soon lost fuel and the crowd thinned. One of the pranksters pulled up a chair and introduced himself as Jeff. He said he worked nights at a newspaper plant, but his wife got pregnant, and he had to take a second job. He wasn’t pleased.

“Why did she have to go and do that?” he asked me. “Another fuckin’ mouth to feed.”

“Ain’t that a bitch,” I said. He sighed. Then he was on his feet as if yanked by a string. “Follow me,” he said.

He walked very fast; every step of his was two steps of mine. I lost him at a water cooler and gave up the chase near a tall row of metal shelves. At the middle of each shelf was a letter of the alphabet crudely written on a piece of notebook paper, a wedge of DVDs stuffed under each one. The letters were category headings: A for “Anal Freaks;” B for “Bondage;” C for “Cheerleader” and so forth. I wandered the rows and pulled down one of the DVDs. The cover showed a medieval tableau with bosomy women in tight lace bodices, and a court jester leering. Although he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, I worried for the jester. He was someone’s son, after all, and he didn’t look much older than me. He worked to maintain a certain lifestyle, just as I would have.

Then a loud voice called out, “They’re gonna overdose on poison!”

I shelved the DVD and headed for the main staging area. A new group filed into the room, among them a young African-American man who wore a hockey helmet.

“They’re gonna overdose on poison!” he yelled again.

The regular workers formed a circle around the newcomers, and I found Jeff with a hand shoved in his back pocket.

“I forgot they were coming today,” he said.

A woman in a wool skirt put her arm around the man in the helmet.

“Who are these people?” I asked.

“They’re on leave from the Mental Health Department. You ever see The Dream Team? This is our Dream Team.”

The MHD bused in a group of inpatients once a week from the local hospital, I learned. They did the same work I was hired to do: distribute pornographic DVDs. They were unruly and not used to the freedom to work with their hands. Every few minutes a patient-worker crawled under a sawhorse or loading table and had to be corralled. I didn’t rush to help.

I hadn’t done much actual work since I’d signed my timecard. I took frequent water and bathroom breaks and counted the wood grains on the table until I left the warehouse at 5 o’clock.

The following Monday I woke up early and battled Manhattan-bound commuters to reach the agency as it opened. Envelope in hand, I walked outside and ducked into the nearest check-cashing spot. The teller counted out the bills, which seemed to spread like fungus as they left his hands. I spent that money fast—half on heavy paper stock for printing out resumes, the rest on lunch.