Centum utres dolor in muro centum lagenas cervisiae.
Si
quis forte inciderit utres, quam multa utres cervisie in murum?
—from an old Roman drinking tune
I left
the $2.10 per hour demolition job at the Powers Hotel—soon to be the Powers
Office Building—for a better paying job at the Genesee Brewery. Some would say
a raise to $2.30 isn’t worth the trouble of switching a bus route. They might
be right. And certainly, when you throw in the $60 initiation fee I had to pay
to join the Teamsters Union and the $15.00 monthly dues it really didn’t make
much sense at all.
But money
isn’t everything. Maybe I had learned
everything there was to learn about tearing down a wall. Maybe it was just time to move on, to expand
my horizons, to learn different skills, to challenge myself. Maybe it was time to find a job that let me
drink beer while I worked. Yes,
I think that was it—and the other stuff, too.
I heard the
brewery was looking for a forklift driver and I had done a little bit at the paper
warehouse the previous summer so I went down there one day after knocking down
another wall and took the forklift driving test.
This is
what the forklift driving test consists of: You turn it on, level the blades
and line them up with a pallet that has about 25 cases of beer on it. Then you drive the blades into the pallet,
tilt them back, lift the pallet up and set it on top of another pallet of beer
cases. Then you repeat the procedure
with those two pallets by stacking them on top of two other pallets of
beer. If you do this without dropping
the pallets or hooking any other stacks or spilling any beer or breaking any
bottles, you’re pretty much in.
I asked the
forklift-driving test instructor when I could start and he told me I could
begin immediately, explaining that the man I was replacing left for lunch and
never came back. I guess I was fortunate that demolition work doesn’t require
two weeks notice to leave and forklift driving doesn’t require two weeks of
training to begin.
All in all,
I did pretty well. I kept those cases
moving, those stacks growing, and the beer flowing. It was on that very first day that I learned that the real
Genesecret was not Hemlock Lake water or even the postcard portrayal of 20 men
standing along the shore of Hemlock Lake peeing into it, but rather the part
about “Keeping the beer flowing.”
