Carrier Stories
I spent seven years working as a circulation manager of a local media company. My responsibilities included the contracting of carriers to deliver copies of the printed newspaper to subscribers.
I once had a boss half-jokingly remark that she thought over half of all of our carriers “lived in the same damn corner of the trailer park.” This followed a particularly rough week of carriers quitting and performing pitifully on their assigned routes, along with my boss taking a header on an icy porch while attempting to stuff a copy of The Freeport Journal Standard into a box by a subscriber’s front door. Not sure exactly how she slipped and fell, but had it not been for a fellow employee’s due diligence, she may have been lying on those stairs for a good while longer. Carriers should have been thankful: her chilly experience produced a willingness to be much more generous when it came to pay.
That winter was one of the worst I’d ever experienced since moving out to Jo Daviess County. It was also my first winter at the paper, hired as a district manager for circulation. Lots of cold. Lots of snow. Lots of reasons for carriers to quit and to mine excuses for not completing their routes. So when I showed up at the paper’s place of business over on Main St.in Freeport in the first week of January, my work was cut out for me. Not only did I have to deliver a bunch of down routes, but I had to make time to contract a whole new crew of carriers.
Which brings me to Billy.
Billy was a tough-looking dude. About thirty-five, but he looked and sounded about ten years older. Years of smoking and drinking. Not tall either. Only about 5' 6". Stocky. Tattooed — including one of a teardrop, inked just below one of his eyes. He’d confessed to having spent time in the joint, but I never bothered to ask if the tattoo preceded his time there or not.
I was reluctant to give him a route; not because of his looks or background, but because he didn’t have a car. He’d be riding his bicycle, or walking if the weather sucked. After a quick consultation with my boss, I was permitted to contract him. Gotta give a guy a chance “to better himself,” she said. Which I did.
Believe it or not, Billy did a hell of a job. He was out tossing papers in even the worst of weather. If the roads were real bad, his bike stayed at home and he walked the route. I can still recall seeing him mounting snow banks on Galena Avenue, determined to get the paper to where it had to go. Billy may have had good reason to have spent time behind bars; but even if he did, doing so did nothing to his work ethic. He was up and out delivering just about every day that he was under contract with the FJS. And that is saying something.
Billy lasted about two years, if memory serves. He lived just blocks away from the paper, in a garden apartment below his mother’s place. I had to wake him a time or two, so I got to know his address pretty well. He had quite a few cats. Three may have actually been his. The rest were strays that took advantage of his kindness. No discrimination was allowed. Neither he nor his mom had much money but they always managed to find a few dollars to spend on cat food. Whenever I did get over to his place, I was sure to see one or two of his furry friends in his arms.
Then one warm spring morning Billy didn’t show up for work. I gave him the usual benefit of the doubt, went over to his apartment and knocked on his door. No answer. Just a cat or two sitting in the screened window, meowing. I yelled his name a few times. Again no answer. His mother had no idea where he was either. So I took off, muttering obscenities, as I made mental arrangements of how I would deliver his route and how I was going to lay into him for not showing up. At least he could have called, I thought. The asshole.
Later that day word had gotten around that Billy had gotten into trouble, and he was back in the county jail. This turned out to be false. Billy wasn’t in prison; in fact he was very much dead. He’d mixed prescription drugs and alcohol the night before, fell asleep, then suffocated on his own vomit. Just like how a few rock stars had exited this world.
Billy was my first hire, and the only carrier that ever died while under contract. He made the effort to better himself; for that, he deserves all the kudos in the world. It’s a real shame that his past just would not let the future into his present. I prayed then as I do now. May God have mercy. Rest in peace.
Living Large with Brandon
“They’re lucky they even got a damn paper!”
I wasn’t sure of what to make of those words. This, after a trying morning of delivering a porch route in rather wintry weather, not unlike what we’re experiencing now. I’ll admit to a certain level of sympathy; it was a miserable experience. We’d had days of them, in fact. But Brandon, the utterer of those words, who was also out in the elements that morning, delivering an all-too-familiar route on the northwest side of Freeport, had upped the ante, once again revealing himself to be the unvarnished id of the circulation department’s collective personality. (By the time he had returned to the office from “delivering,” a new high for complaints from subscribers had been attained on that route — over sixty! — many of whom we’re ready to clobber him with the paper he had thrown from his car into bushes, on lawns, into the gutter…everywhere but to the front door, which is where he knew it belonged.)
Brandon was a big guy, probably the most overweight person I’d ever met. Back when the two of us were still working for the Journal Standard, he was tipping the scales at over four-hundred pounds. And he was a young fellow, too; mid or late twenties, I think. He’d been working for the paper before I came along, happily, I gathered, in production until corporate decided to relocate all printing services to Rockford. I’m not sure if he passed on an opportunity to work out of that facility or if corporate passed on him. Either way, he ended up in circulation, where his mother also happened to be director. This proved to be an undeniably mixed blessing for both of them, as motherly influence/nepotism can only reach so far, even at a small-town newspaper. A point was eventually reached where his performance had become so lousy that even she couldn’t cover for him anymore. He had simply worked himself out of a job; there was nothing left for him to do poorly.
Brandon wasn’t easy to warm up to at first. For one, he had somehow got into his head that he had earned the right to the position that I’d been hired for. Along with responding to service issues — what we refer to as “running shorts” (i.e., re-delivering a missed subscriber) — , he would also fill in as a dock assistant, which entailed preparing the newspapers for delivery first thing in the morning and occasionally assisting with “down routes” (i.e., unfilled carrier positions). Delivering down routes was when I worked closest with Brandon, as he became my de facto trainer as I gradually learned my way around Freeport. He and I would tag-team deliveries during my first couple of weeks at the paper, with him driving the company pick-up as I rode shotgun. Time and time again, he’d complain about the company failing to appreciate both his obvious talent and amazing work ethic, and how he should have been given the district manager position, not me. If anything, he told me, I should be dock manager at most, barely insinuating that I hadn’t paid my dues. In other words, I lacked his great wealth of experience, including his unparalleled ability to “control the carriers,” something I’d yet to have been a witness to, apparently, because up until that point, all I’d seen was Brandon sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper, while the supposedly servile carrier force did whatever the hell they wanted on the dock. To a person, it seemed to me, none of them took him very seriously at all.
When delivering, it was difficult to not feel just a pang of sympathy for “Bubba,” as his closest friends in and around Orangeville called him. And it became apparent almost immediately as to why newspapers ended up where they weren’t supposed to be. Just getting in and out of the vehicle was an ordeal for him.
First, I have to mention his “winter wear.” Which was non-existent. Despite subzero temperatures and a foot of snow on the ground, along with icy walks, streets and porches, Brandon wore nothing but gym shoes with one pair of socks; a lone pair of jeans — no long underwear or thermal anything — ; a t-shirt; and a windbreaker. That’s it. And not once did he ever complain of being cold! Of course, because he never wore boots, he was constantly on the verge of falling from slipping on ice, something he did accomplish a number of times while I worked with him. Thankfully, never so badly where he became injured.
Brandon’s biggest problem in terms of his attire, as far as I was concerned anyway, was finding a suitably-sized pair of britches. They seldom stayed put. So when exiting the pick-up, not only did he struggle to secure his footing, but he struggled with keeping his pants up, which often led to embarrassing moments — not for him, because he never seemed bothered by it — but for me, as I got one too many views of his underwear, as hands went to grab a truck door to stay sturdy instead of holding up his Levis. None of this was done quickly, mind you. Not only did locating terra firma take way more time than it should have, but reaching the point of delivery for the paper seemed to take forever. Worse, his effort was often so half-assed (no pun intended) that the object seldom met its target. Things finally got to the point where I grew so frustrated with how long it was taking us to get done, that I just had Brandon drive and I did the running to porches. By then I’d calculated that I could deliver three papers for every one that he sort of delivered. And that is no exaggeration, folks. Whether Brandon had calculated that I’d do this, too, I left for God to sort out.
As I grew into my position and Brandon grew out of his, I had less and less to do with him. We’d work together occasionally but not for any long stretches of time. And I even grew to like him. He had an odd sense of humor; plus he even managed to laugh at himself once in a while. He also enjoyed fishing, something we had planned to do at some point together but never did. Towards the end of his tenure at the FJS, he claimed to have lost weight, thanks to having dropped his drinking liters and liters of soda each day. I never saw him eat much of anything, but I did see him slugging down pop. According to him, his drinking of chocolate milk — by the half-gallon — was what had produced the weight loss!
After he was finally axed by the paper, thanks to working himself out of anything else we could possibly use him for, I kept loose contact with him. He would sub a route once in a while for a relative of his. Another time he foolishly attempted to deliver a route of his own out near my home. I knew it was a bad idea, given the commute from Orangeville, but he insisted. Well, less than two weeks into his contract, one morning he called to say that he’d run out of gas on the route and he’d have to quit. And that was really the last dealing I had with him.
Brandon died at the age of thirty-five about a year ago. I can’t remember the hows and whys, but given his size, one may assume his death was weight-related somehow. Despite his travails at the paper, it’s hard to believe that his life could not have turned out differently. For one, much to my surprise, he had a steady girlfriend. Secondly, he had parents who loved and took care of him. And third, he tried to be independent. So to my mind, there was unrealized potential.
A fellow employee, who happened to be friends with one of Brandon’s high school teachers, once told me that his teacher thought that a boat had been prepared for Brandon, all ready to go, pointed in the right direction, and then set sail. Brandon just forgot to hop on board.
