VITAMIN “E”

During my years as a college student, back in the Mid-Cretaceous Era, I spent two summers working in a Vitamin Factory...and it damn near killed me.

No, it wasn’t the work. Aside from the horrendous daily commute – twenty miles each way, along the infamous Southern, Cross-Island, and Belt Parkways along the south shore of Long Island – the work per se wasn’t all that difficult. Mostly, it involved pushing pallets of boxes from Point A to Point B, either with a hand truck or forklift, along with plenty of Order Picking. If things got a little slow, there was a “cool room” wherein temperature-sensitive products were stored at a pleasant 50°F. It was an easy task to make a nice little nest among the boxes there and take an extended break, far from the roving supervisorial eye...a welcome respite from the otherwise sweaty and smelly warehouse.

Did I say “smelly”? Hoo, boy, you have no idea. Take a vitamin pill – a real vitamin pill like One-a-Day brand, not those sissy Flintstones – and chew it up. Tastes like ass, doesn’t it? Now, imagine that smell permeating the very essence of your being, eight hours a day, five days a week. I would come home every day with the powerful urge to boil myself, just to make the Vitamin Pong go away.

Once in a while, I got drafted for more exotic tasks. Like “destruction detail,” for instance.

Old, expired medications, or ones that don’t pass the quality control tests, would need to be destroyed. Most of the time, the stuff that had to be 86’ed consisted of controlled substances. Leaky glass ampoules of meperidine sulfate. Huge bottles of amphetamine sulfate tablets. Phenobarbital capsules. Diet pills – that lovely combination of barbiturates and speed. All kinds of heavy-duty Uppers and Downers. I’d take pills by the thousand and throw ’em in the hopper. Glass ampoules, same thing – right into the grinder. All chopped up and flushed down the drain. On “destruction detail” days, the local Aquatic Life would be stoned out of their fishy minds, there in Jamaica Bay.

Talk about temptation! I was dumping drugs with a street value of thousands and thousands of dollars into that Hopper o’ Destruction. It took a phenomenal effort of self-discipline to keep from stuffing this crap into my shorts and smuggling it out. Some of these drugs were being disposed of simply because the requisite Federal paperwork got to be too much to handle. Medicinal cocaine – absolutely pure cocaine hydrochloride, packaged in glass vials and ampoules for use as a local ocular anesthetic. Hundreds of grams, all down the drain. Enough to pay my entire college tuition and then some...or send me to jail for a few decades.

One time, I was drafted to make a delivery. A truck had left the warehouse, leaving behind a critical rush order: diet pills for a notorious North Shore “fat doctor.” My overseer was sweating bullets, knowing that his ass would get reamed if the order wasn’t delivered. Too many questions would be asked about a missing order, given the astronomical street value of the products involved. What to do? Why, draft the Elisson Delivery Service!

We packed my car – a 1965 Chevy Malibu that was, by most standards, “marginal” – with as many boxes of pills as it would hold, leaving just enough room for me to cram myself in. And I delivered the goods on time and intact, to a surprised (and skeptical) doctor, with all of the appropriate paperwork. Fat ugly bastard he was, too. But the irony was lost on me at the time. Had I been stopped for a defective tail light or some such, I would even now be languishing in the bowels of the New York State prison system – every one of those pills was a Class III controlled substance, and having a carload of them Would Not Have Looked Kosher.

The biggest real threat to my Life and Well-Being, though, came from Ethanol. Vitamin “E” (with the E in quotation marks). Good old Drinkin’ Alcohol...as it happens, an ingredient in numerous Medical Elixirs.

One day, I was assigned to help make a thousand gallon batch of Liver Tonic. Chock full o’ Vitamins and Iron, that stuff. Also chock full of alcohol.

The way you make a thousand gallons of Liver Tonic is, you pump about 650 gallons of hot water into a huge-ass stainless steel tank. There’s a big propeller-style mixer in the bottom of the tank to keep things all swirling around – you get that started up. Then you start dumping in the solid ingredients, all preweighed and in paper sacks.

A few pounds each of Vitamin B₁, Vitamin B₂, and Vitamin B₆. A dash of B₁₂. A few fifty-pound sacks of Desiccated Liver Granules. Some saccharin to make it taste decent enough to actually swallow.

The last ingredient, of course, was the alcohol. Four 55-gallon drums of it. 190 proof grain alcohol – 95% ethanol, 5% water. Suitable for fueling rocket engines, this stuff burns with a clean, blue flame.

Each drum had a huge Tax Stamp on it, indicating that the Feds had gotten their slice of excise tax. Each one of those stamps cost about $2000, which works out to $9 per quart. [Ever wonder why your booze costs so much? That’s why.]

One at a time, I hooked up each drum to a pump and a hose, fitted with a fritted glass filter to catch any stray lumps of crap or metal that might have found their way into the drums. I stood on a catwalk near the lip of the tank and started pumping that alcohol into the tank.

And as soon as the alcohol hit the hot broth in the tank, a goodly amount of it flashed into vapor, filling the air above the tank with the Heady Funk of Vitamin-Enriched Liver-Flavored Vodka. And after breathing that stuff in for a few minutes, I started to get a little...woozy.

Wisely, I took a break and let my head clear before tackling the next drum. Holy Shit! It would have been all too easy to get completely wasted on those 190-proof fumes, and then topple off the catwalk into the tank. I could only imagine it:

“Hey, Lewis! Where the hell did Elisson go? He was just here... Say, what’s this eyeball doing floating in the Liver Tonic?”

“Aaaaggggggggghhhhhhh!”

Sometimes I wonder how I survived that place. Wotta couple of summers!