LA CRETA (Continued)

[SYNOPSIS] La Creta hates El Porteno and she means to do him harm.

La Creta would watch with infuriated obsession as El Porteño would jump from screen to screen on the monitor all day long: directing men around, lugging 50 lb. Bags of seasonings, checking computers, feeling the dough. Sometimes, unsatisfied by the consistency of the great 400 lb. loads of dough that fell out of the mixers he would send the dough maker to another job and mix it himself, keeping three machines running, while at the time directing the flow of carts into the cooler, or making sure the right flavors were being baked for the production schedule.


These details had to be supervised on a continual basis. The workers were hard-working and well-intentioned but their thinking processes became taxed very early on, and a lot of things could go wrong. Porteño walked over to the ovens and checked the clipboard. The racket of noise and the oppressive wave of heat from the burners and boilers were withering. He saw a man sitting in a chair holding the remote control that controlled the conveyor to the oven. He screamed in Spanish at the man to make himself heard over the racket, “I don’t want you to do that today. We’re short handed. Guillermo is going to have to stop loading trays each time and move the conveyor. You got that, Guillermo? OK?” Porteño turned back to the man in the chair. “I need you to take a broom and pick up all these bagels that have fallen on the floor and throw them in the garbage. Get one of those metal rakes and see if you can pick up the dough that’s fallen between the kettle and the oven. I don’t want that idiot Frank Purdue coming up and giving me his useless shit about the flies again.


” When the worker heard the name Frank Perdue, he exclaimed with joy, “Frank Perdue The Chicken Fucker!”


El Porteño, ignited by this instantaneous flash of worker camaraderie, went along with the joke. “He fucks flies, too. Get to work.”


The guy walked away, delighted. “A chicken fucker who fucks flies too, ha-ha!”


It’s appropriate that a manager’s obsessions pervade the workplace, and to Frank Perdue the flies that invaded the bakery during the warm months represented an endless pestilence. It was a war that you couldn’t win. Since insecticides are not permitted in food processing areas, the only solution was endless cleaning and disinfection, and that had to be handled carefully too.


Frank Perdue had issued fly swatters to the workers, with specific instructions not to kill flies anywhere around the food. But the workers refused to get involved with the fly killing. Their machist egos would not let them sink so low as to chase flies around the factory with a fly swatter, particularly since the little buggers are so hard to catch, and they absolutely refused to be seen as clumsy, bumbling fools.


So it came to pass that Frank Perdue, the only educated person in the place, the Safety Manager, was reduced to being a one-man fly vigilante posse, armed with fly swatters and sticky-tubes all day long, searching for kamikaze squadrons of flies who hid and then re-emerged the moment his back was turned.


As valuable as El Porteño was to the factory, he had one large area of vulnerability to a natural predator such as La Creta, and that was his huge, all-encompassing sense of libido, a voracious monster of carnal hunger that shaped his primary attitude toward women as being, essentially, live mattresses of female flesh that you bounced on, and then you gave her shot in the ass and exploded inside her and then she thanked you. That is how Porteño saw women, as butts screaming for you to fuck them. Even in his native Argentina the women are getting tired of being handled in this fashion. They have established their own techniques for handling this, usually involving knives and poison. Nevertheless, Latin America is still pretty well oriented to the male psychology, so in that environment a male like Porteño has a good rate of survival.


In WASP culture, however, there exists disdain for the unbridled psychology behind this kind of manic cross-pollination, especially among the women, who mean to put a stop to it. And in North America, women have power.


As luck would have it, there were several factory girls bursting with estrogen who considered Porteño the answer to a working girl’s dreams. He was handsome, though not like Julio Iglesias but more like a Bruce Willis, a mug whose face had been pushed into a very charming arrangement. He was big and muscular, and attractive even in a sweaty t-shirt, the way Marlon Brando should have looked in his forties’ if he had not let himself go so early in life. Porteño was a hard worker and a good provider for his young wife and baby, and was definitely seen as a prize to be snatched away if possible. Also, like most Argentinians, he was white.


La Creta hounded him endlessly about any production mistakes she could unearth. Her most common complaint was about racks of dough that had to be thrown out due to the fact that the dough makers had added an insufficient amount of yeast to the batch. When she told this to Pato Gonzalez, Pato would call Porteño with horrible screaming and threats. “Who is supposed to be watching these dough mixers?” Pato would scream mockingly. “That’s my money you’re throwing in the garbage! How would you like it if I deducted that money from your pay? I want you to start tightening up on the amount of waste that’s coming out of my factory, or I’ll get rid of you and find somebody who can do the job!”


This kind of abuse La Creta was able to bring down upon Porteño’s head on a daily basis, but she didn’t stop there. She watched him closely for any personal interactions that might take place between him and the female help. As a result, Porteño received calls from Pato Gonzalez demanding, “What is this story about you and Licia Fernandez?”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”


“Mercedes [La Creta’s real name] says she saw you touching Licia Fernandez in the stairwell.”


“Well, she’s crazy.”


“Don’t talk that way about my factory manager. I trust her implicitly.”


“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know what she’s talking about.”


This is where Pato Gonzalez would assume his legalistic, pedagogic posture. “Let me explain you how this works. Back in your country that kind of behavior goes on all the time. BUT THIS IS AMERICA!! Here we have laws against improper touching in the workplace. You could go to jail and I could get sued. NOW do you understand?”


“Understand what? Nothing happened!”


“We have the whole thing on the camera. I could have you arrested.”


“Pato, did you look at the film?”


“I’m going to have her send the disk over, and when I see it, then I’ll be able to make a determination. In the meantime, leave the women alone and keep your eye on what’s going on over there."

One of Porteño’s most ardent female admirers was a ripe little Mexican papaya named Brenda-li, who had beautiful pear-shaped titties that she showed off like little cupcakes. She worked in retail store in the front of the building, and so was always fresh and made-up in contrast to the girls who worked in the factory, with their plain hairnets and the no-jewelry rule. [TO BE CONTINUED]


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Posted on 5/14/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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