Every year corporate CEOs spend literally billions of dollars on human resource consultants and airport bookstore management books trying to capture what I shall call the Unconquerable Nut.  The Unconquerable Nut is that space in every working day made up of all the inefficiency, slackness, boredom, pilfering, resistance, poor morale, day dreaming, prayer, hangovers, anger, laziness, joking around, gossiping, and fear.  In the American Corporation, the Unconquerable Nut is viewed like the mercury in the body of the mighty salmon.  Every single one partakes of the toxin to a greater of lesser degree, but since every one has at least some of it, no one can taste the poison any more.

Most of the working day of any line manager is spent attacking the Nut.  One thing about the Nut is that the smaller it gets, the harder it gets.  This is a physical law.  One can sometimes change the size of the Nut, at least for a while, but no one can ever kill it.  I have worked in, observed, or read about hundreds of companies and there is only a single case that I know of where someone even came close to conquering the Unconquerable Nut.

And it all started with a dozen missing boxes of frozen chickens.

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Despite the fact that the used car lot was a full fledged capitalist operation, one that by the Iron Laws of Capitalism could be deemed successful because it hadn’t failed yet, it couldn’t really be called a model of efficiency.  Efficiency is about the effective management of time.  But there is a problem when different members of the staff are addicted to different kinds of chemicals and therefore experience time in their own personal way.  Put a drunk, a coke head, a doper, and a meth addict in a room and ask each of them what time it is and you won’t get an answer.  But each one will not be answering for a different reason.

Compounding this time problem was the assembly line issue.  Unlike a relatively more efficient Japanese auto plant where a new part rolls past your face every 7.5 seconds, the speed of the used car conveyor belt depended on what kind of customer was sitting on it at the time.  Fast Eddie outlined the science of it, and it would have made Frederick Taylor, the founder of Scientific Management proud.  Or at least amused.

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One of the very great impediments to my own spiritual development is the delicious solace I take in believing that no matter what kind of sinner I am, there are far worse sinners out there.  I would not be surprised to find that there is engraved on the stone threshold of Hell (where all the short sighted people can see it) the words “YES, BUT AT LEAST I DIDN’T….

I was well aware of my tendency to feel this wicked pleasure (although I didn’t think of it as an impediment at the time) when I was surrounded day in and day out by the outrageous rogues at the used car lot.  I even used to fancy that I provided a ray of moral sunshine to the place; that perhaps the staff was less excessive and blatantly dishonest when I was around.  Now I can see that my attitude probably contributed to the “sincerity” that the customers believed that I had that made me such a good Pencil Man capable of getting them to sign notes at 35 plus percent interest for 48 months.

I know now that my co-workers were not so different from me in the way that they thought of themselves.  They certainly took pride in the fact that compared to most of our customers, they led very responsible and disciplined lives.  They also believed that they compared favorably to the squares that worked downtown in the straight jobs.  The used car guys thought that they led lives of greater freedom and individuality, without necessarily even compromising their material standards.  George, for example, the cocaine-blown ruined businessman maintained much the same lifestyle that he had when he had still been relatively sane.  He would point out that his high personal standards still required him to send all of his laundry to the cleaners, including his t-shirts, and that he was still able to live up to his life long vow of never living outside of the square made by the Chicago River, Division Street, Michigan Avenue, and the lake.

He considered himself a modern parent and a progressive in all things.

“How many other fathers do you know that would give their kids a good bump of blow?” he proudly asked us once after he had had them over to his studio apartment for a very rare weekend visit.  Fast Eddie would laugh about this.  “George is such a piece of work.  Picking up his 17 year old son and saying “Here kid, have a bump” while they are still pulling away from his ex-wife’s house.”  And Eddie would shake his head in disgust as only a man could who had only recently pulled a 500 pound coke monkey off his own back; a coke monkey that had always been well marinated in Jack Daniels (Black).  Eddie had just managed to move back in with his family a few months earlier as a reward for being verifiably sober for 18 consecutive months, and his only little vice now was when he would take the sales guys out to a brothel in the suburb of Cicero when they had a good week.  Fast Eddie considered himself a sort of latter day Ward Cleaver.

But within this refined system of moral gradation, there was another group that cast its well organized and prosperous shadow over Cicero Avenue.  This was the Chicago Mob, a member of which happened to be our landlord.

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At the used car lot, the dreaded high point of the week was the trip to the car auction to see what kind of pretty shells might have washed up on the beach recently.  Everyone, even Ratso, was required to go, except for the Chung Brothers.  We would also leave one man behind to watch the store.  By tradition, this job always fell to the person with the worst hangover that morning, i.e. George.  It wasn’t that George necessarily drank more than anyone else; it was just that his drinking had the latest start.  His drug of choice was the white powder.  So around 3 am, when his co-workers were already winding down, he would have to knock back a tumbler of straight bourbon to relax enough to get a few hours of sleep.

While George would cower like a molting lizard on the big chair behind the front desk, the rest of us would clown-car it to the auction house, located in one of the more proletarian suburbs of Chicago.  Except for the occasional thin faced Eastern European who thought he could buck the overwhelming odds and drive off with a bargain, the auction was strictly for professional dealers.  The cars were mostly from the South and looked better and more suntanned than their leprous Northern counterparts.  This did not, of course, mean that they had all been once owned by the legendary little old lady.  But the dealers knew that their customers did not buy cars so much as buy fantasies and dreams.  And to the dealers’ jaded eyes, the question was whether there was enough car there to make the buyer’s dreams come true for the time it would take them to sign the contract and slap the money down on the desk.

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