The Sandwich
I’m sure at some point most of you have heard or read somewhere the statement that “We are all one.” Many dismiss this idea outright as psychobabble. But I know it to be fact and I have a very odd story to back it up.
Eventually there was an opening. It was finally my time. I was so excited to finally try one of those sandwiches. My first night of work came soon enough. I walked into a large room set up like a laundromat with four commercial wash- ers and four commercial dryers. In front of the washers there was a huge pile of clothes and I thought, that’s a lot, but not too much. My second thought was, OH MY GOD, when my coworker said, “When the washers are loaded, I’ll go get some more.” As the first round gets washed and dried, there’s a lull when we can sit and watch TV. After that, it’s on and cracking. I never counted how many shirts or pants I folded each round, but the piles were roughly nine feet long and three feet high, each time we emptied the dryers. The work was extremely repetitive: fold in half, fold the arms in, fold in half again, stack. Fold in half, fold the arms in, fold again, stack. Over and over again, fold in half, fold the arms in, fold again, stack. I worked every night, seven days a week from 9pm until 5am, washing, drying and folding.
My job was constant and never once let up, from the day I started until the day I was released from custody. My employer was the Humboldt County Correctional Facility. My pay was five small cups of coffee, no cream, no sugar, five small cups of Kool-Aid, usually watered down, and a sandwich at midnight. Oh yeah, back to the sandwich. Ironically enough, the sandwich was just terrible. A real grass is always greener feeling as I took my first bite and felt in my mouth how soggy the bread was—like a wet, doughy blob in my mouth. I can describe the experience as eating an old gas station sand- wich that was made days or even weeks before I bought it; like chewing on an old soggy sponge. I’m glad that I did the work, and wouldn’t change it if I could. It taught me to do a task until it was completed. And no matter how big my personal laundry piles are, they will never compare to the piles of laundry I washed, folded, and put away in that time of my life.
