Joe's Story

The supervisors' office for the shipfitters and welders is located in a loft over the structural fabrication shop. It's reached by a flight of wooden stairs about two stories high. Today, Bobby Lee Palmer, the assistant foreman for shipfitters, who must have been up and down thousands of times, fell down that flight of stairs. He was taken out of the shipyard in an ambulance. They say one of his legs just gave way. Nobody that I talked to knew his condition. Bobby Lee isn't a popular guy. His main responsibility is assigning manpower to our various jobs, which isn't very demanding. When he's not doing that he tends to harass people for petty stuff. He's not noted for intelligence.

It's been weeks now since I've worked with Joe. But he's working in the same area, so I see him every day. On Saturday I'd stopped in to the space where Vince is working to borrow a reciprocating saw. Joe was there, just kibitzing. Kidding with Vince, I used a few words of Spanish, which I explained to Joe. But he said he already knew them, that he'd taken three years of Spanish in high school. This really surprised me, because Joe's not the kind of guy who'd strike you as a scholar. Well, in the discussion that followed, I learned that Joe had graduated from a local university with business degree, which was even more surprising.

Later, when I ran into Joe again, I followed up on the subject of what he was doing working in the shipyard. He told me he'd been a manager for one of the big package delivery services. But a neighbor of his, a representative for a tool manufacturer, who received regular package deliveries through Joe's company, told Joe that the packages, which were left on his front porch, sometimes disappeared. He asked Joe if he could watch out for them and bring them with him when he came home from work, rather than having them delivered by the truck. Joe was happy to do this service for his neighbor. It turned out that the packages didn't contain tool samples from the neighbor's company, they were shipments of meth-amphetamines from California. The DEA, which was already on to the neighbor, had one of its agents driving the truck that made the deliveries - - that is, until the packages that Joe had intercepted were no longer showing up on the truck. Joe was arrested and charged with conspiracy to deliver drugs across state lines.

Joe's lawyer got the charged reduced to simple possession and got Joe released on parole without jail time. But then Joe got ticketed for DWI, and because that was a violation of his parole, he was sent to prison for a year and a half. He first came to our shipyard on work release, to work as a firewatch.