I arrived at work a half-hour early on that morning. Bill’s Concessions was expecting a delivery, the final stock truck of the season. Deliveries were always scheduled before noon to minimize distraction, uniformed employees unloading a tractor trailer full of plush. It was up a ramp, across the boards, along the carousel, in through a golf course, one step up, then 10 more down, before continuing into a room where bags of plush were stacked like loaves.
That particular morning I opted to stack rather than carry. It was mid-August and it was hot and there were 400 textile lions that needed to come off of that trailer. By one o’clock the truck was empty, and yet the work downstairs had just begun. The air ran dank and desolate in those stock rooms, indicative of why so many supervisors disappeared beneath the pier to drink or drug, take naps or fuck. There was a rumor – long-standing, unsubstantiated – that an employee’d lost his job back in the 70s for poking holes inside these animals then screwing them inside pier stock rooms. And yet these rumors, they tended to mothball, to the extent one risked integrity by telling them. There were more than ample truths to go around, dispensing any need for smoke and mirrors.
I finished stacking around two, at which point I emerged to find a happening – local authorities and EMTs, a network news van, low-circling copters. There was a barricade set up along the north side of the pier, and Donna White, a pier employee, was being rushed toward First Aid in tears. There had been an accident, a nearby maintenance man informed me, and it was believed that Donna’s husband, Dallas White, had died.
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