Warm Bodies

Back in the early 80′s, I was working as a security guard supervisor for a small, mid-West security company.  They had a satellite office in Phoenix, and a few security guard contracts.
As a supervisor, my job was to maintain payroll, staffing and scheduling – which meant if someone failed to show up to a guard site, if I couldn’t blackmail cajole bribe sweetly convince an off-duty guard to fill the void, then it was up to me to do it.
Many double shifts were worked, and many guards convinced to take an extra shift, because they were offered 10 cents more an hour for that shift.  Sometimes a nickel more.  Seriously.
It was the height of the recession, and finding warm bodies was often difficult.  Most security work was not rocket surgery, however.
We used to joke about trolling The Deuce for warm bodies to put guard suits on to fill the vacancies.
If you ever saw the movie Armed and Dangerous, all those characters really exist.  They worked for me.
One of my warm bodies I had worked with a few years earlier at the Legend City amusement park.  His name was Nick Teslevich and he was an old Ukrainian guy.  He had a very heavy accent, and the joke was Nick spoke 12 languages, unfortunately, none of them was English.  He didn’t have a car, so, if you wanted him to fill a spot, you had to go get him and take him to the guard post.
Another was, for lack of better description, a biker chick.  Muscles, tattoos, the whole bit.
Because she wore clogs and carried a machete (!) she was only assigned to construction sites.  At night.  Low public visability.
I certainly didn’t want to mess with her.  (Sorry, Dave, I cannot remember her name!).
One of her charms was a small cadre of friends with whom she ran.  Many would sometimes accompany her to the office to pickup her paycheck.
One was a kinda scruffy dude, skinny, dirty, uninteresting.  The rumor was he was a poor little rich boy who had been cut off from the family fortune and was slumming with the biker chick and her machete.
Later he cleaned up his act, put some weight back on and got back in the family’s good graces. He was quite an accomplished musician, and had previously done much work in Hollywood.  He also sang as part of “The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen Chorus” on Frank Zappa‘s triple album Joe’s Garage (1979)
Eventually, he owned and managed the Wrigley Mansion (and the Wrigley Mansion Club) in Phoenix.
His name was ‘Geordie Hormel’, heir to the meat-packing family fortune. He passed away in 2006.
Not everyone was just a warm body.  I never hired him, though.

Geordie Hormel