In simple terms, it is our body that has been conditioned by previous emotional experiences and still has emotional patterns locked in that we have been acting on that were programmed into us long ago. For the second time, I attempted to leave my past behind by changing my environment, thinking that I can start again clean in a new land, but our unresolved internal conflicts will always find a way to manifest in our behavior and feedback from our environment when they haven’t been addressed directly.

While I resonated with nearly 100 percent of the people I had met in Albuquerque, there was still an underlying threat of violence, which was the main condition in my life I was trying to distance myself from. What I had yet to understand was that no amount of distance was going to get me away from myself and everything I brought with me.

The Wolf seemed like another person who was trying to turn his life around but was caught up in past patterns of behavior. He had a stable job, was full of drive and ambition, had a wife and possibly children; far removed from his days as a gangster, but at the same time he was still held back by his violent past by invisible strings.

He told me about a couple of his violent encounters, but then, I started to see them for myself. One day as I was working my usual night shift, I was walking through the plant and saw the Wolf at the end of what appeared to be a heated exchange between himself and a technician. The technician, unknown to me, was walking away quickly with the Wolf right on his trail.

“You wanna **** with me, *******?! You wanna **** with ME, *******?!?!”

The production worker didn’t seem to want anything to do with the situation as he fled without even turning around, possibly after hearing about the Wolf in action previously. Any intelligent person, after hearing even one of his stories, should know either not to cross his path or prepare for a full-scale war, the least of which would involve words.

There was another man who worked in daytime production at Sara Lee who looked intimidating, much more than the Wolf at first glance. He had a thick and sturdy build, was branded by tattoos, and wore a bandanna on his head like he was ex-military, a biker, or part of some other group known for being anti-soft. As I would clean various machines of dough and oil, I would occasionally see him walk out into the main area from another area that was secluded from my view and stand with his arms crossed, appearing to observe quietly what everyone else was doing. For a couple of weeks I would see him do this, almost as though he was silently reminding everyone who the top dog was, when one day, my coworker Mark had a surprising story about him.

“You know that big guy with all the tattoos? The Wolf knocked him out by slapping him.”

I couldn’t get past the idea that someone so big and tough looking could get knocked out by slaps, even by someone who did 1,500 push-ups a day. I pictured the Wolf pinning him down on the ground and slapping him about 80 times viciously. I had to confirm this unbelievable story with the Wolf himself. Only minutes later, I caught up with the Wolf in passing and asked him how many times he slapped the guy.

“I only hit him twice,” the Wolf said sternly while raising two fingers.

Then he told me exactly what happened. He said that during an argument, the tattooed man called him Hispanic, when the Wolf identifies as Mexican. That, and probably everything that preceded it set the Wolf off. He slapped him in the face once with a forehand smack, causing the tattooed man an instant bloody nose. The tattooed man, realizing quickly what happened, raised his arm up to strike, but was immediately slapped a second time, causing his punch to cancel out as he lost consciousness and fell to the floor on his back.

“The guy was such a ***** I didn’t even want to close my fist on him,” the Wolf said.

I didn’t get any additional confirmation after I heard the story, because I didn’t know who else witnessed it, and I didn’t know the tattooed man to be able to ask him myself. I took the Wolf’s word for it, and I cataloged the story about him slapping the tattooed man out with his other stories he told me, but it wasn’t long after that when I witnessed another case of the Wolf losing his temper.

Greg from Texas, who I considered at least an acquaintance who I could joke with and share stories with, was beginning to prove himself as an unreliable worker. He missed work once because he was doing something to his car in the parking lot that I never got the full story on and ended up cutting himself. His cut was so deep that he had to go to the hospital and get it looked at immediately and he showed up the next day with a bandage around his wrist. About a week later, he drove to El Paso, Texas to visit family but was unable to make it back to work his next shift and called in. The Wolf was getting very upset by his continued absences.

“Every time he doesn’t show up I gotta do his job, but you know what? I ain’t getting paid to do two jobs!” the Wolf said to me.

I thought it would end there, but I was completely wrong. When Greg showed up for his next shift, the Wolf was burning with anger. He was stomping around the factory, cursing and complaining about Greg’s absences, until finally he turned to me, probably because he knew that Greg and I were comrades, and perhaps he looked at me as someone he could trust.

“The only way I’m going to feel better is if I go a couple of rounds with the guy. Go tell him to come and fight me,” the Wolf said.

I didn’t know what the limit of Greg’s strength or fighting capability was, but I knew that regardless he was nowhere near a match for the Wolf.

In defiance to the Wolf, not out of disrespect, but out of saving another person’s neck, I had something else to say to Greg.

“You better stay away from the Wolf! He’s mad and he’s serious!” I said.

Greg reacted as though he didn’t fully understand the situation but knew not to go looking to cause trouble, which I knew wouldn’t be enough to clear his name.

The next time the Wolf caught up with me, he asked me if I told Greg what he asked.

“No, I told him to stay away from you,” I said.

I never considered the possible consequences of going against the Wolf’s order. I never considered that he might see what I did as an act of betrayal which could put me in the same tent as Greg, or possibly worse.

“ARGHH! You told him the OPPOSITE of what I wanted you to say! If you go to him and tell him to come fight me, I’ll…I’ll go to the vending machine and buy you a Coke and a candy!” the Wolf said, pleased about his offer.

I almost burst out laughing, and the Wolf chuckled for a second as well, but I knew he was serious about fighting Greg, and I knew what he was capable of doing, but the fact that I never feared him and never sensed that he was a threat to me was being demonstrated in this situation.

For reasons I speculated on earlier, he valued me as an ally more than a rival or an enemy, possibly due to some kind of resonance he felt, and was easily willing to overlook me going against his wishes even though it was quite clear at this point that doing so could easily invoke his wrath. I decided I should lay low just to be certain that the focus didn’t shift towards me, and Greg made an attempt at an apology, which was torn into pieces when the Wolf said, “Get your hand out of my face before I chop it off!” I heard from another coworker who claimed to witness the event. It seemed that Greg was going to survive this day, since the Wolf would have torn him apart right then and there if he was still convinced that violence was the only way. Speaking to Greg like that was probably a way for the Wolf to get his point across while saving face.

Despite the harshness of his words, it was a blessing in disguise for Greg compared to what could have happened, and I was unsure why the Wolf rescinded his original demand to fight Greg. I wasn’t sure if somehow my compassion for Greg somehow rubbed off on him and he decided to make an exception just this once, or some other reason.

Surprisingly, a few days after Greg’s commutation from death row, the Wolf offered to teach me boxing during break time on one of our shifts, despite being disloyal to him. I had the strength to defend myself, but not necessarily the skill, and I was willing to learn from the Wolf because he was all I had in this place, and because he could knock a full-sized adult out with two slaps. Certainly he could teach me something about fighting.

As is probably standard hiring policy, the president of Sara Lee one evening requested to have a meeting with me personally through Larry, the night shift supervisor.

The president’s office was through a door I had never seen anyone go into or come out of before. The president invited me to have a seat and began slowly discussing the overall operations of the bread plant. To describe him physically, he looked like the serial killer version of Kevin Bacon. His speech was very slow, yet very deliberate and with moments of pause to think before speaking. He was not impolite to me at all, but I sensed a kind of coldness about him, like I was seeing only the surface of something very deep and complex. His coldness also implied that he preferred emotional distance from others and didn’t want anyone prying too hard into his inner world.

We finished our meeting after about a half hour of speaking about nothing extremely significant, and it was his presence that impacted me more than anything he said during our encounter. What was it exactly that made him seem so uniquely significant, and what was that coldness despite politeness that I sensed about him that was nearly powerful enough to alter the temperature of the room? Part of the answer didn’t take long to arrive.

After my coworkers learned that I had a meeting with the president, one of them named Donny, an older man who was still very spry despite his age and had been working at the Sara Lee bread plant for a number of years, had a short but impactful story about the president.

“One night the president took a bunch of the white stuff and chased an employee around the parking lot with a gun,” he said.

That definitely explained the cold, serial-killer-like vibe he had, but it was still difficult for me to imagine that someone so impassive and aloof would get heated enough to impulsively choose extreme violence at the possible cost of his position at the company, and his freedom. I never asked how he still managed to be president after it was well-known that he did such a thing, but more than likely money and/or connections played a major role.

It was definitely another good example of the two sides that people had here in Albuquerque- the polite and hospitable side, and the murder rampage side that both somehow coexisted within individuals here. Since I resonated so well with Albuquerquians, maybe their behavior was trying to tell me something about myself that I couldn’t see.

I remember years ago one of my cousins telling me I became a totally different person when I was angry. I had spent most of my adult life so far trying not to get angry for that reason, and because my anger was something I could not accept, though when it would erupt after I could take no more, sometimes I would scare myself after the roar that would come out of my own mouth, wondering if I really made that sound. What if I wasn’t really so much different than anyone else in this environment? What if I truly was one of them, just without a gun?

The president’s alleged drug problem wasn’t much of a surprise after hearing an announcement of heroin needles repeatedly being discovered in trash cans around the facility. There was also another time when in the break room, there was a blown up example of a name tag on a board that said, “Hello, my name is,” which they used to introduce us to company name tags. As what I presume to be a joke, someone wrote “Meth” with a marker where the name should go. The news often published stories about meth labs around the city getting shut down by police as well. The drug trafficking situation appeared to be happening, invisibly in most cases, all around me, and Sara Lee was a good example of it.

Not long after our meeting, I saw the president of Sara Lee standing out in the factory area, quietly observing everything that was going on around him. In passing, I said hello to him, despite his presence, and despite the story I was told about him with the gun. He looked in my direction and said hello back, not changing tone or emotional expression from his silent contemplative state he was in, but I didn’t sense any rudeness or callousness from him.

One thing I’ve noticed about those who live on the fringes of society is that they often seem to feel seen by me for some particular reason. It’s possible that they sense that I was not sent there to judge them, and that I don’t have any hidden motive against them despite knowing what I know about them or what I am able to see in them.

It has happened more than once that I unintentionally put people on edge, tiptoeing around me and accusing me of judging them or looking through them, despite making no such attempts. The approach of being real with other people, not wearing a mask and not judging them, can help hint at the possibility that no matter how much they may have sinned in the past, or present, that they are not beyond redemption, but on the other side, it can mean the possibility of being dragged down by someone else by over-empathizing with them. In my particular case, it’s on nobody but myself to figure out where the line is within the haze and keep to it sharply. Some people would rather trade places with you than learn to run at your pace. Despite the Wolf and the president’s behavior, I didn’t judge them or treat them as less than human, and it’s hard for me to believe that they didn’t notice. My own past experience in the world of the underground is why I couldn’t judge them, but it seems like I wasn’t as deep underground as they were.

During my trial time at Sara Lee, my foreman and the supervisor warned me several times to “get my act together,” meaning be exactly the kind of worker they wanted me to be from the start rather than find my own place at my own pace. It was interesting to me that Greg, someone who had missed work twice, never received the same warning, even though someone who works at an even pace gets more work done than someone who doesn’t show up at all. Before my trial time expired and I became part of the union, thus unfireable, my foreman fired me and walked me to the entrance of the Sara Lee factory at the start of my shift.

“This is gonna leave a bad taste in my mouth” were the last words I heard him say as he shut the door to the parking lot behind me.

I suspected that it was coming, but it still hit extremely hard, taking away all the momentum I had built up over the past couple of months living in Albuquerque. Now I was truly alone, left standing in the parking lot to think for a moment about what just happened and what this would mean for my future. It wasn’t the first time, but I was heading down into a deep and dark place fueled by my own emotional state.