Jefferson Elementary Beach Chairs

Hello. Hopefully you're not me, but even if you are, I wish you the best of luck.

I work in a warehouse that ships beach chairs all over the country. I've never been to the beach. That's not to say it's very far away – no more than thirty or forty-five minutes by car. I've just never made the trip. I might have been taken when I was younger and since forgotten about it, but I don't think so. I'm not the sort of guy that forgets about stuff like that.

My warehouse is in what used to be Jefferson Elementary School in Benjamin, Massachusetts: a brick building and the oldest school in town. It's snowing outside right now, but that isn't anything special; besides, I like the snow. I was talking to Janet the other day. She sells jackets at the flea market, and she told me that in Massachusetts "we actually have the longest winters in the nation." "Well, that's nice," I said, "because I like the snow. I really do." I didn't believe her about us having the longest winters – I mean, that's the same stuff everyone always says when it's snowing in April – but it was nice to talk to someone. It can be from time to time.

I met Janet two months ago at the flea market. She sells jackets out of her station wagon. I go to the flea market every Sunday morning. Janet said that she liked the jacket I was wearing. I like my jacket too. It's a navy-blue down jacket with big shoulders that sort of fits like a leather jacket. It was my fathers. I've worn it for about ten years and it's held together with duct tape in parts.

When I met Janet her hair was long and brown and wet and smelled like she just came from the shower. She wore jeans and a thermal shirt and had a band of small white seashells tied around her wrist. We sat in the grass by her car and around lunchtime we went out into the woods to get high and eat fried dough. When I finished my fried dough she took my hand and stuck my index finger in her mouth. She sucked on my finger and played with it using her tongue. It was unexpected. I hung out by her station wagon until the flea market closed around six, then we went and shot pool for awhile. She was bad at pool. Bad, but in an entertaining sort of way, I guess. After I beat her a couple times, we went across the street and bought a pint of Dori's Vodka. We drank it in the dimly lit supermarket parking lot, listening to the car radio and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Janet asked if she could crash at my place and I told her to "feel free." She smiled with her

Janet is leaving. I'm going with her.

The town of Benjamin is a distant Boston suburb. It was named after Benjamin Franklin in the hopes that he would donate a giant bell. I guess around the time the town was founded, everyone was naming their towns after Benjamin Franklin, and in response Franklin was handing out lots of free bells.

When I was born in Benjamin, it had been growing pretty rapidly for a number of years. There were a lot of well-paying jobs in nearby towns and Boston is only about forty-five minutes away by train. Kids who had been born into second or third generation New York City families escaped to scenic New England where they could produce offspring in a quiet suburban environment. In Benjamin they lived tolerably happy lives, raising children who grew to hate the quiet dullness of their scenic hometown. They all grew up and left at the first available opportunity.

As the size of Benjamin grew, Jefferson Elementary went south. Overuse and under-funding had caused Jefferson to decay more rapidly than expected and it slowly became a health concern. Once the town of Benjamin began building new schools, it was decided that Jefferson was beyond repair and keeping it active would be impossible. The school board closed the doors on Jefferson Elementary – however, the public would not see it destroyed.

That's how Jefferson Elementary came to be mine. Jefferson was left standing, and the school board couldn't stand to see such a large empty building go to waste. To remedy this situation, Jefferson Elementary was leased out by a dot-com business that sells pretty much everything, and now it's a distribution hub for their beach chairs. I'm the only person working at Jefferson Elementary. I'm sort of the president while being the janitor at the same time. I like it.

Most of Jefferson Elementary is closed off. Its heavy metal doors are bolted and most of the utilities are deactivated to save money. It hasn't got heat or hot water. I tried for awhile to get someone to pay for some portable heating units, but it was a hopeless task. I just went down to Wal-Mart and grabbed a few on sale.

The electricity still works fine. I never get any bills so I assume someone else is taking care of it, but I half expect to walk in one day and have the lights not work anymore. Neon tubes line the hallways, flickering with a cream-colored glow. A couple of lights don't work anymore – one in the hallway in front of my office and another by a drinking fountain which doesn't work anyway. They both went out sometime this fall.

When I receive new beach chairs they come in brown rectangular boxes with soft brown tape around the edges. Some of the boxes are really dusty and when I move them the dust gets all over my hands and clothes. Others are completely new like they might've been packed yesterday. I open up all the new boxes to find out what color the chairs are and then I write the color on the box using a red marker.

I have six classrooms on the first floor and six on the second. I used to try to keep the rooms separated by color, but not so much anymore. I know where everything is, so it's no big deal really if an orange beach chair is stacked along with the greens, and I like finding a chair somewhere it doesn't belong. When things get too organized I don't have anything to do, and I like sorting through the boxes from time to time. I can't have things becoming too organized.

My office is surrounded by thick glass windows with thin diagonal black lines that cross over one another forming diamonds. The windows are riddled with small chunks of Scotch Tape which have been there since I started. The traces of scotch tape inspired me, so from time to time I hang things from the windows. Not a lot of things. I don't like clutter. Every now and then it just feels good to hang something from one of the windows.

I'll be at home going through my mail or reading a magazine and I'll find something that should be on my office window. I'll tear the page out, fold it up into eighths and stuff it into the back-left pocket of my work pants. It's important that I fold the paper – I'm not really into things being smooth and clean. I find creases and crumbles deeply satisfying. The next day when I find it in my pocket, I'll unfold the paper slowly. After spending a bit of time looking at the piece of paper, I hang it from inside one of my office windows using two or three little bits of scotch tape. Two bits for the top corners, one bit for the bottom middle to keep the paper from flapping. There isn't much air circulation in Jefferson Elementary so the paper probably wouldn't flap anyway, but I don't like the possibility that it could. The possibility makes me antsy and frustrated. If I thought the paper was going to flap around like an idiot when I wasn't around I probably wouldn't even be able to hang it up.

For awhile I had a photograph of a big brown bear beside a river with a struggling fish in its mouth hanging on my office window. The photograph was blurred a little – I think because the fish was struggling so hard. I thought the picture was funny. I imagine a fish that tenacious has to taste delicious. Before that I had a menu for a local pizza restaurant hung up for some time. I'd never actually ordered pizza from them, but I really like pizza. I've always loved pizza.        Sometimes I'll hang things I made on my office windows – things I made with pencils that I'll find behind radiators or stuck in odd places. I'll use those pencils to draw pictures of dinosaurs. For awhile my favorite dinosaur picture was a Tyrannosaurus Rex with large spindly legs and a black felt hat. "T-rex ready for a night on the town," I called it. The picture was less important than the pencil I used to draw it. Sometimes when I find a pencil which allows me to draw a picture that I'm particularly fond of, I'll take the pencil out into the parking lot at the end of the day and smash it with a claw hammer I keep in the trunk of my car. I smash it into shards and I keep the shards in a red pencil box with a green sea turtle on the cover that I've got stashed in my trunk. I have yet to find an appropriate location where I can dispose of these pieces but I'm not really looking very hard just yet.

I told Janet about my pencil box and she got really excited. She had me get the box out of the trunk to prove to her that I really did it like I said I did. The pencils were all in little fragments and you couldn't put one back together even if you tried. It's colorful like confetti. I put the box back in my trunk and picked up the hammer I use to smash the pencils. I like to hold it sometimes. It has a nice weight to it. Janet said we should go out and find a place and bury the pencils. I said "Right now?" And she said, "Yes." I tossed my hammer back into the trunk. It landed with a thump. I like the way it sounds when it lands in my trunk. I told Janet that I wasn't quite finished filling the box yet but once I was done with it she could have it and do whatever she wanted with it. She asked me, "Are you sure?" I told her that I'd rather give it to someone else than dispose of it myself, and that she was the only one who I was interested in having it. I told her she could do whatever she wanted with it. She smiled. She had blue eyes. They were heavy and satisfied me like the thump of my hammer. She grabbed me around the neck and jumped on me and I almost fell into my trunk.

In my office I have an old desk with a computer on top, which is where I get emails with beach chair orders to fill. People order the beach chairs through a website that sells virtually everything you could ever want. Literally. I assume hundreds of warehouses like mine exist all over the United States, and as people buy things their orders are forwarded to people like me. For whatever reason, when people place their orders there is no box to check to indicate the color of the beach chair that they want. I spent several months trying to contact someone about this but eventually I gave up. Now when I receive an order, I reply back to ask the customer what color beach chair they would like to have. I enjoy it actually. Some of the replies I get are quite elaborate. People will go into great detail explaining what color chair they would really like and why. Or they will tell me what color chairs are absolutely unacceptable. Or they will tell me how they just moved to the beach. Or how they are about to go on some vacation. Sometimes people don't reply at all, or even try to cancel their orders when I contact them – but I can't cancel orders. All I can do is ship beach chairs. Everyone gets a beach chair that ordered one. It's just my job to ship them. If I can, I try to get them the color chair that they want, but sometimes even that is impossible.

Inside every box with a chair I include an invoice and a catalogue of goods available from the website that sells my beach chairs. Sometimes I'll stop shipping the chairs with catalogues for awhile. I used to get bitter about being alone here and I started to wonder whether I really wanted to include one of their fucking catalogues with my beach chairs – but that's childish. Now I send the chairs with catalogues as often as I can.

I've never received an order for more than one beach chair. This is puzzling. Do people go to the beach alone? When people go to the beach alone is it important that they have something they can sit on? What clicked in their mind that sent them onto the internet looking for a beach chair? Just one? Only one beach chair per customer. It's not a rule. Or maybe it is. Maybe it's a flaw in the website – the same sort of flaw that doesn't allow customers to select the color of their beach chairs. For whatever reason, one beach chair per customer is just the way it is; so I feel it's all the more important to make sure everyone gets the color beach chair that they're looking for.

I can't really complain about my job. They pay me regularly, I haven't got a boss, and it's quiet. It's my place. It's not a second home, it never will be, but it's a good place to sit and think – and I like having a quiet place where I can sit and think even if it is empty, dusty, and near-frozen half the time.

And I can't really complain about Benjamin. It's a nice clean town full of charming and thoughtful people who are all trying to make life as painless as possible for themselves and their children. I was raised here. I've never been robbed or experienced any sort of physical violence. No one has ever bothered me about anything.

Still, I can't stay. Janet's headed down to Pennsylvania for a few months. Somewhere near Scranton. She says the jacket market's dry here in Benjamin and she'll sell jackets better down there. I figure she knows what she's talking about – she sells jackets really well. She asked me to come with her and I told her I would.

I'm not sure how long it'll take for anyone to notice there's nobody shipping beach chairs from Jefferson Elementary anymore. Probably awhile. I'm leaving my heaters, toaster oven, and hot plate for whoever ends up here next, if someone should ever replace me. It could be me, in fact. I could be back. Who knows? This job's pretty alright. I like Jefferson Elementary. And I like Benjamin. Really. I really do.

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