Johnny Got His Gun

Joe thinks about his time working in the industrial bakery in Los Angeles. Due to the amount of work to do, the bakery often took on men from the homeless shelter to help on Friday nights. Joe recalls how “the guys from the Mission came stinking of disinfectant and looking very bedraggled and embarrassed” (67). However, one night a handsome Porto Rican came from the Mission to work for them. He claimed that a rich girl from New York was in love with him and that he was going to work in the movie industry. Nobody in the bakery believed this was possible, but one day Jose revealed that he had got a job in a studio. The only problem, as Jose explained, was how to quit his existing job at the bakery without being disrespectful to their boss, Mr Simmons, whom he believed he owed so much. The men therefore tried to devise various ways that Jose could get fired without seeming ungrateful to Simmons. Jose achieved this in the end by engineering an accident in which he seemed to knock over a huge row of pies.