The F. Edward Hebert Federal Complex is located at the intersection of Royal and Poland Avenues, in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. The compound takes up about a half-mile of the East Bank of the Mississippi River, and is made up of five seven-story buildings, two of which are used as parking garages. In 1978, after losing a battle to stay in a teaching position at Fleet Combat Training Center, Pacific, I moved my small family to Slidell, LA, a sort-of suburb of New Orleans, to take a position as a "Scheduler" at the Enlisted Personnel Management and Accounting Center (EPMAC), located on the 5th floor of Building 1.
I really didn't want to leave my teaching post, my Division Officer and Chief didn't want me to leave, but someone else had orders cut, effectively nullifying any attempt, on my part, to stay. The only thing that excited me about the assignment was that I would be working with an IBM-360 computer, one of the top-of-the-line computers of the time. That computer, and it's peripheral gear took up half of the 5th floor of Building 1. I ended up working in the other half.
Supposedly, I was working with the Programming Office. They gave me books. They gave me videos. They gave me the "Weekend Scheduler" position which meant that I would sit and watch a screen from 3-11 pm Friday night, 11 am to 11 pm on Saturday night, and 11 am until the Naval Personnel Center in Washington D.C. stopped for maintenance (usually about 9pm CT) on Sunday. The rest of the week I had off, Monday through Friday at 3 pm, while learning to master FORTRAN. Basically I had too much time off, so I didn't learn much about FORTRAN programming, but I did hone my alcoholism to a really fine edge.
I worked in a bowling alley, for most of my time off, doing machine maintenance, and being a "counterman," the guy who has his finger on the pulse of any bowling center, and made enough for us to squeak-by. I'd work days, and bowl in leagues at night, and got pretty good at the sport.
In the other job, my Navy duties were very un-demanding. I watched a screen, checked the jobs running against a list, make sure they ended "normally," and called the programmer if it didn't. While I waited for progress updates to pop up on my display, I did a lot of reading. I had stages of reading, like a Stephen King Stage, where I read everything he'd written up through 1980, and a Vampire Stage, where I read Dracula, by Mary Shelley, Interview With a Vampire, by Ann Rule, and, of course, Salem's Lot, by the aforementioned Mr. King. Salem's Lot was actually the book that kicked-off my Stephen King Stage.
On my end of the 5th Floor, most of the lights were turned off, except in the office I was working in, and all of the other offices were locked-up. There were four, double-door entrances to the office I worked in, but one was blocked in as part of a cubicle for one of the Chief Petty Officers that worked in Scheduling. I was sitting in this cubicle, reading Stephen King's The Shining one normal, boring evening.
This cubicle, actually, had two desks in it, one which would, in a short period of time, become mine. It was set up so that it had an opening into an 10 X 10' area with two desks, one of which blocked one of the double-doors from opening, the other facing the fake wall that formed the fourth side of our cube. Sitting at "my" desk, I was leaned back in my chair, my head just inches from the door handles to the former entrance one evening, reading a chapter in The Shining called "Room 217". Those of you familiar with the book have probably leaped to a conclusion, but stick with me...
"Room 217" is, perhaps, one of the finest chapters Mr. King ever wrote. It draws you in, and hooks you. I knew I was being drawn into something really scary, but I couldn't put the book down. The main character goes into the room where, years before, a woman committed suicide in the bathtub. He goes into the bath room, pulls the shower curtain back, and sees the beautiful young woman, newly dead. He turns to flee, but hears the shower curtain being pulled closed, and stops to turn back. The shower curtain is closed again, and when he pulls it back, he sees a bloated corpse in black water, that starts to get up. He backs out of the bathroom, and out of Room 217, shutting the door, and flattening himself against the wall opposite the door. He hears the sound of someone rattling the door handle, and closes his eyes, because he knows that if he looks, and sees the handles are moving, he'll go insane. The suspense is built so well, that I was right there, up against the wall with the protagonist, my heart was pumping fast, my blood pressure went up...
Back in the F. Edward Hebert Federal Complex, one of our "Security Guards" (see: "Rent-A-Cop) was actually doing his job, walking around the building, checking to make sure everything was secure, so he comes by, exactly as I'm still panting from my reading, and shakes the door handle that's six inches from my head.
Owing to my desire to keep this a PG-13 blog, I cannot tell you what I screamed, nor what I screamed in the face of the Security Guard, as I told him that my office was open 24/7, and we didn't need to have some idiot jiggling the door handles, thank you very much.
He was as scared by my reaction, as I was to his action. He had his gun out (which really angered me), so I lit into him like gang-busters. The guy had been in the job for a number of years, and he didn't know that people worked in that building on weekends? A simple wall with an arch separated two sets of doors, the one in the cubicle, and the one that stood open, with lights on in the office... But noooo. This Einstein had to go and jiggle the door handle, just inches from my ear.
However long I live now, it's going to be ten years less that it could have been.
No comments:
Post a Comment