LIVING IN THE REAL AMERICA                                      by King Wenclas                         (First appeared in NEW PHILISTINE #41 in 1997.) Currently I work as a release clerk/truck dispatcher for a customshouse broker at Detroit's Ambassador Bridge, the great commercial NAFTA gateway of North America, the bridge burdened with trucks day and night seven days a week noise black smoke filling the sky unending flow of cargo passing through the inspection compound infinite numbers of smelly primeval industrial beast drivers who live in their rigs stumbling through the flimsy falling-apart metal structure where I and other release clerks like me with other companies work. It's a long line of tiny grimy offices in which we exist, our chairs and desks crammed-in between computers, copiers, and fax machines. When it rains the ceiling leaks. We have no place to hang our coats, we have no lunch room, we grab food when we can in-between processing the unceasing paperwork and dealing with the multiplying regulations of numerous government agencies building empires through the constantly reproducing computer screens FDA product codes classifications rejects quotas tenth-day entries intensive examinations pre-reviews IRS numbers textile decs DOT FCC TSCA EPA and on and on forever. Phones constantly ring. "The container hasn't arrived." It's sitting in a railyard in Detroit came last night through the underground 1905 railroad tunnel upstream from the bridge; the computers don't show it as arrived; the container has no 19-digit CPRS computer number, therefore it doesn't exist. A truck driver without paperwork stands stupidly in front of me. What persons come into this line of work? Young Latino girls, east side ghetto blacks, downriver white trash, and broke losers like myself. The pay ranges between minimum wage and ten dollars an hour. We endure working conditions worse than those that caused Bartleby to go insane. How many hours do you want? 60? 70? 16-hour shifts? We work hard. . . . All of us are in debt, optimists grasping desperately for shards of the American dream. The cleaning guy brags to me he works three jobs and sleeps four hours a night. "I had a 104 temperature last week." A girl in my office brought bags of belongings with her when she arrived each day, she had no phone number, we discovered she lived at a church, in a homeless shelter. She didn't last. We are one step up from the underclass. Above us are armed Customs inspectors in the next building, thoroughly unimaginative middle class Gestapo in training, self-important government flunkies with tunnel vision who presume themselves to be gods (that's how we're expected to approach them) who cannot see the big picture, the giant machine in which they and us are mere tiny unthinking cogs. "I'm mentally exhausted," I tell Tabitha, a skinny freckled white girl passing by my office rushing back to her own from the john. She giggles, "Yeah. Life sucks," she says. "See ya! I got drivers." We have no rights, we have no unions, we have no time, money, or energy with which to enjoy any but the barest existence. We are the new American worker: economic slaves. The scene repeats itself across the city, across the American land. (Meanwhile the stock market, barometer of the rich, continues to skyrocket.) The imbalance of wealth in this country, the condition of the lower classes, has returned to that of 100 years ago. Working overtime, early evening I step outside to the dock, needing a break from my tiny hole. The sky fills with industrial smoke, the black silhouette of the monstrous metal bridge rising up as apt icon for this heartless town. I see the line of trucks awaiting their turn, jamming the compound, encircling it as they come down from the heavily ladened crossing. Amid the madness, on the dock observing the activity sits a four-month old white baby strapped into a plastic seat. He's one of Tabitha's, who can't afford sitters. I step inside. "Tabitha!" I yell. "You left your kid on the dock." "My mother's picking him up," she yells back. "I got drivers! Could you keep an eye on him?" The baby waves his arms. I wait with him, past and future wondering what the world has in store for us.