[Matt]

Disgusted by Tuscan's Exploitation of their Workers, May 23, 2009
By S. J. Steimer - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
September 21, 1957:

Daddy laid in bed. Broken and debilitated, less than half the man I knew just ten years before, and probably only a fraction of the man that Mama remembered. The pain drove him sick; it ate away at his psyche. His nights were sleepless and agonizing; hallucinations brought on by both the pain and the medication haunted him. My brothers and myself were constantly awakened by his verbalized fits of rage and pain. A week ago we heard him screaming about Death, but not death as in the natural end to one's life, but as a personification of something much more, much worse, and much more complicated than any of us could possibly understand. We couldn't make out the specifics of what he was saying but he went on for twenty minutes or so, screaming and cursing until his voice gave out and usurped him into an exhausted slumber. The next morning we gave him his 500mg of Tuscan brand morphine, the only thing in the world that seemed to benefit him at all, even if their affects were not long lasting. We asked him about his terrors and he became lucid. "Death," he said tiredly, nudging his feeble head -- which was too big for his shoulders and neck to bear -- towards the corner of the room. "I can see him there, just sitting there." He went on to describe Death to us. "He's a man," he said somberly. "He's a man with no face, no emotion." He said he was draped in black, and he was there now. He described it as being omniscient, but only he, so close to the end, could now visualize it. Death didn't laugh at him nor threaten him or even speak to him. It merely existed. That was all it took to elicit such a hopeless rage. A day later Daddy would be dead.


For forty years he spent in those Tuscan milk mines, breaking his back to put food on our table and a roof over our heads. You'll never hear his name mentioned by any scholar when speaking about the great Tuscan Milk Rush of 1947 and 1948 nor will you ever read about his exploits in any dime store pulp biographies. My father was just a pawn of the system: the Rockefellars and others like them. He never became wealthy, never became famous, never inherited a yacht or became the owner of artificial flower mills all across northen California. He was just a laborer, one of thousands that was used and exploited in those Tuscan death-holes. For fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, he spent his life underground in cramped little pockets mining the veins of Earth for Grade A whole milk, droplets at a time. Some considered him lucky as he was one of the few who did not parish in those chambers, but if they knew what I know and saw what I saw of those last torturous years of his life I do not think those people would look upon him with envy.

My brothers and I would sometimes venture into town and take great gaze at Nathaniel J.W. Tuscan's mansion and pasta salad bar, which sat perched on the top of Milk Mountain, the highest pique in the city. It sat there, defying all moral ehtos, almost laughing at us. It was as if someone had erected a 700 foot tall middle finger and doused it with fluorescent paint. My father had none of this, not even a millionth of a fraction of it. He died poor and hungry and in pain. He died in the smallest room of our three bedroom toolshed, living his last years almost no different than the conditions he spent his life wallowing in.

Tuscan and the Rockefellars still live up there on Milk Mountain. They still exploit their workers, forcing them work in the most dire conditions and still pay them with Snackwell coupons while they simply get rich, selling their Tuscan Whole Milk for over $77.00 a gallon, enough to purchase a fleet of naval jets in this year we live of nineteen hundred and fifty-seven.

I'd say don't ever buy from them, don't ever touch their Tuscan whole milk, don't ever support such evils... But I can't say it, at least not fully. Their milk is the best I have ever chewed.