Author’s Proof
Copyright 2024 James LaFond
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart Publisher
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Dust Cover
During the wee hours of the week of Monday August 5 thru Sunday August 11, the author was harrowed in his high desert sleep by a chain dream, a repeating thread of overlapping, entwining dream, by which his rejected past seized hold of his errant soul. Finally, on Monday August 12, between 2 and 5 in the morning, as rain pattered down and traffic wooshed down Utah State Route #32, the entire chain dream, that had continued to overlap, reiterate and overtake his sleep, drew him in for three full hours. No matter if he woke, cleared his mind, and returned to sleep, he awakened immediately, within the Dream, at the feet of the Pitiless Dreamer. Morning Road is one harrowed writer’s recollection of some 24 hours imprisoned in Dream.
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Author’s Note
Since abruptly quitting my last supermarket job on Tuesday Morning, December 12th, 2017, I have experienced the occasional supermarket nightmare. The quitting of that job had been my cowardly response to two pair of muggers, almost getting me the previous night between 10:00 PM and Midnight. The final pair, giant, ebony men, who were sphinx-like in their hunting silence, speaking only with their eyes, without even a nodding of their heads, which seemed to belong to twins, were, I think, Dark Angels, demanding that I leave.
I had, in September, given two months notice to train my replacement. John, the manager, kept drawing me out, asking for another week, and giving me no time to train Steevo, who was to take over as night dairy clerk. I told John and Larry, the Grocery manager, the next morning, in the bread aisle that, “I’m done—you won’t see me again,” and walked. They seemed angrily in disbelief, as if I should forever be their $10.25 per hour chump.
Ever since, I have had recurring nightmares of being stuck in one of the locations where I worked, and where John had also been a manager at a time when I was not at that location. The man who would become my store manager at Geresbeck’s Grocery Store in Middle River, a humble private outfit with low pay and great working conditions, had, for 15 years of my time spent as a night clerk working for UFCW Local #27, been the District Supervisor for Basics/Metro/Shoppers as it morphed from one failed model to another. Our relationship was strange. He had once, when I was the overnight dairy clerk at Eastpoint, working for him, caught me working on the side one morning, at Gersebecks, while he was checking prices. He could have fired me then and there and seemed inclined to. But, the CEO, John Ryder, who liked me, and called me “My Fucking Hippie!” and had named me the best clerk in the chain, standing besides him, told old “By-the-book” Stricker that I was an exception to their moonlighting, or in that case, daylighting, rule.
To our mutual surprise, 17 years later, John Stricker would end up hiring me to work at that very place, both of us having sought the cozy conditions of an employee-friendly, family-operated business, to the savagery of corporate/union politics. We two old retail bulls had sought the same pasture for our semi retirement from the rat race. I hear John retired a few years after I quit, doing it by-the-book, as I had burnt that last bridge to the business that had consumed my energy and wrecked my body over the previous 38 years leading to that 2017 decision to break all economic ties with the labor market and be a full time writer.
John and Larry were good bosses, even put up with me walking in 12 hours late, after having waited for a bus that never came for hours and then walking 12 miles out of the city and deep into the county waterfront to do the assigned work. My greatest stress in working night supermarkets, before the bus system was reconfigured and upgraded between 2018 and 2023, to accommodate the mass immigration of Third World folks, was getting to work. God seemed to have decreed that when I was transferred from one store to another, that the new location was further away. It was almost comedic, that when I lived in the city I worked in the county and that when I lived in the county I worked in the city! In all cases, I was lucky in store directors, in that the Union policies dictated that I be fired after 17 latenesses in a year. Due to bus drivers quitting, being attacked, calling out—especially on Monday after a football game or holiday—the low frequency of the schedule, and also the fact that many black bus drivers refused to stop at a stop where no one was getting off and there was only one piece of white trash wanting on, despite budgeting 2 to 3 hours for transit, one way, I averaged 1 lateness per week. Due to my extreme productivity, which drew the hatred of ALL of my union coworkers, the Store Directer would look at my terminal write up and place it in the round janitorial file.
In addition, during my four years as Baltimore’s lowest paid store director, I was on constant call when at home and spent much time in transit. Then, after quitting that job, I was offered 9 unsolicited managerial positions with other outfits. I was always tempted by such approval and had to fight the need for positive recognition, which has not come as a writer often.
There is also the fact that two coworkers once tried, to kill me at work, coming close to success, and that hundreds of attempts and threats on my life were made by criminals, coworkers and even cops, some who wanted access after hours to loot the store I managed.
The result is a weird, pulsating, overlapping menagerie of nightmares that mix the slavish fear of employer rejection, to fear of the powerlessness brought on by a predatory attack, the creeping menace of thugs challenging to fight, of bad women suggesting a sensual night, or drug dealers and cops trying to entice with drugs and accusations, and, my greatest fear, getting soaked in the rain, working all night on sub-zero coolers and in low and mid-temp walk-ins while soaked, and of standing, by morning sodden and alone at the bus stop as the nice black driver shakes her head, “No,” and leaves me waiting for another hour, hoping that one good negro would cut a soggy cracker a break.
Perhaps I will avoid writing this, my 19th in progress novel currently on my babbling ether ledger. The Dreamer will decide, if he keeps afflicting me with the petty well of my pitiful slave fears.
-James LaFond, Oakley, Utah, Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Form of Novel
Written in myopic first person, as it was dreamed, hopefully for the better purpose of expanding the writer’s limited range. I cannot write it as a cohesive dream, as it embodied a thread of narrative discord. This form is selected, in part, from cowardice, to discourage my finishing THIS novel, which I do detest.
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Inspirational Quote
“Don’t go with her.”
-Dream Phantom, 4:47 A.M., 8/13/24
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Dedication
For Vincent, who had it so much worse than this here wretch, and who lacked the words to unburden the Curses bestowed by The Dreamer.
Apologies
For The Dreamer, who I have fought, hid from, run from and sought to become numb to, these past 8 days. I dislike you strongly, on principal, and am sorry if you have perceived this as hate.
