(An updated post from 2024)

I’ve been here before, or so it feels.

Maybe it’s the flickering neon sign of Pizza Palace casting its red glow across the parking lot. Maybe it’s the memory of sitting there night after night in sandals, jacket over my shoulder, two notebooks spread across the table like I was preparing for something important. I was nineteen. Too young for bars, too old to pretend I was still a kid.

No car. No license. Just pizza, coffee, notebooks, and people passing through.

One of them was a giant Finn named Don. At least I remember him as giant. He drank beer late into the night while his girlfriend, who somehow seemed even larger in personality and ambition, was putting herself through college. He talked about the cannery the way sailors talk about weather. Not dramatically. Just as something that eventually gets everyone wet.

He got me a job there.

The cannery sat near the water, surrounded by steam and the smell of cooked fruit. My first position was cleanup on the graveyard shift. Rubber suit. Rubber boots. Squeegee in hand, pushing peaches, pears, and fruit cocktail remains toward drains that eventually emptied into the bay. At nineteen, this somehow felt normal.

Mostly I remember the noise.

Machines banging lids into place.
Forklifts.
Steam.
Water hoses.
The constant movement of conveyors carrying fruit in various stages of acceptance or rejection.

And then there was Zeke.

Every industrial place has a Zeke. The man who knows where the pipes go.

When fruit clogged somewhere deep beneath the cannery floor, Zeke would appear and ask for a volunteer from cleanup crew. I say “ask” loosely. The new guy always went. Then Zeke would disappear below the floor with him into a maze of tunnels carrying rejected fruit, syrup, steam, and whatever else flowed beneath the building.

A few hours later Zeke would come back alone.

The volunteer usually quit by morning.

I quit before my turn came.

Still, the next summer a postcard arrived.

“Come back. Second year is easier.”

Apparently seniority existed even at the bottom of a cannery.

The second season really was easier. I moved to swing shift and eventually worked my way upward, if placing lids on cans can be called upward movement. Mostly I fed lids into a machine while trying not to jam the line. Occasionally an upside-down lid would make it through and stop production for a few minutes. Nobody died. The machine simply objected to disorder.

By the third season I landed on the fruit cocktail line.

That was where the rejected fruit found its final purpose.

Bruised peaches.
Odd pears.
Pieces too small for perfect halves.

Everything cut down, sorted, mixed together, and redistributed equally with grapes and maraschino cherries. I remember trying the cherries during breaks after hearing the dispenser make its cheerful little pop-pop-pop sound all shift long.

They were terrible.

Bright red, perfectly shaped, and almost completely without flavor. Even then it struck me that appearance and substance were not necessarily close relatives.

BTW, nine cherries per can.

My cannery career ended with a runaway barrel, a misplaced hand truck handle, and an appendix that apparently alarmed the hospital staff enough to become conversational. I was told it was one of the largest inflamed appendixes they had seen. Someone mentioned they might keep it in a jar.

I never verified that story.

But I sometimes imagine it still sitting somewhere in a dusty basement beside old medical slides and obsolete equipment. A small preserved artifact from a summer spent inside steam, noise, fruit syrup, and industrial rhythm.

Funny what survives in memory.

Not entire conversations.
Not dates.
Not wages.

Just the sound of cherry dispensers, steam rising off wet concrete floors, and the knowledge that somewhere beneath the cannery, Zeke still knew where the pipes went.