I ended up going to work for a generator
company in a big factory out in the middle of the country, about 20 minutes
away. There wasn’t much of an interview
process. You filled out the application;
they told you get a pair of steel toed boots and show up the next day. That was how it went. It paid $9 bucks an hour which in 1994
was a decent wage for a young person. It
was still a few bucks less than I’d have made at the riverboat, of course. And the hours sucked. They were hiring for second shift, so I
started at 4:00 PM, Monday through Friday and while we were scheduled to work
until midnight, we never got done before 1:30 or 2:00 AM. And yes there were at least two Saturdays a month
we’d have to go in. There were many
nights as I was driving home down the quiet country road where I just barely
managed to stay awake long enough to get to the driveway.
The factory, as
they often are, was hotter than hell, and it was summer. I worked on an assembly line with a bunch of
other college kids. Well, the Patriarch
of our line was a gangly guy in his early 40’s named Tom. He was actually a really nice guy who was
recently divorced and laid off, and was just trying to figure out the next
chapter of his life. We were more or
less the screw up line. It was clear they’d stuck us together for a
reason. If any one of us was thrown to
the pros on the other lines, it would have been mass chaos, and one of us (probably me) would get a power tool shoved someplace uncomfortable.
Our line assembled
portable gas generators much like many of you reading this might have in your
garage in case the power gets knocked out.
They’re strong enough to keep a couple lights on and keep your meat and
cheese from spoiling in the fridge. My
job was to put on the cradles. There was
no aptitude testing, no questions of what position we wanted on the line. I was assigned to cradles. That was it.
I had a big box of freshly painted red steel cradles behind my station
that magically reappeared right before it ran out and my job was drop one over
each engine as it rolled down to me. I
had a drill hanging from a pneumatic line in the ceiling that I’d grab, drill
four holes in each cradle after it was over the engine, then send it on
down. The next guy popped in the four
bolts. If I fucked up, it fucked him up. If I was backed up, he got backed up. I was always backed up, and I was forever
fucking up. Plus my drill used a very
specific bit, and I must have set a record for breaking the things that
summer. They didn’t even have enough in
the factory. There were many nights
where we’d have to shut down our line as our foreman went running around
looking for a new bit for my break. I
can only imagine what they said about me around that place.
I also had a habit
of losing screws, etc, often inside the machine. Each line ended up in a little room closed off
to the rest of the room by windows. It
was the testing room. Inside were a
couple guys whose duty was to pour a little gas and a little oil into each new
generator and give the chords a pull. If
it started up, they gave it the thumbs up and passed it onto another conveyor
belt that led it up to packaging. It was
possibly the simplest job in the factory.
The two guys back there had both been with the company a long time and
had earned this position. It was
something all the lifers apparently aspired to.
No more assembling. Just take the
finished product, fire it up, and pass it on.
The downside was the room was louder than fuck and they had to wear the
same headsets you see at firing ranges, and they were inhaling
gasoline all night long in a glass box with questionable air filtration. Still, the job required just a little
physical effort and barely any mental.
So I never quite understood why Pat, the guy who tested my side of the
factory was such an angry little prick all the time.
Pat looked like
half the guys I went to junior high with.
He was in his late thirties, started there right out of high
school. Had helmet hair, a little round
stud earring, a porno mustache, wore purple tank tops every day, and a
homemade India ink tattoo of a heart on his arm. He was always yelling out the window at us,
and especially at me. Apparently one
night I broke off a drill bit and it lodged somewhere inside the engine of the unit
I was working on. When Pat gave
the starter chord a manly pull and the engine fired to life, it launched the
missing drill bit like a deadly weapon straight at Pat’s face. He came charging out of the room that night
and headed straight for me like he was going to yank me off my platform. The guys on either side of me jumped down and
stood around me, which made him rethink his attack. Instead he just screamed at me for five
minutes about how I could have killed him, should be more careful, blah blah
blah. I defy you to find anyone who
worked in that factory that would have really cared if
that bit had bored through his skull and left him twitching in a pool of his
own excrement.
Our foreman,
however, a guy named Mike never said anything too abusive at all. And God knows he could have. He was actually one of the nicest guys I’ve
ever met. He was about five feet tall,
had long seventies rocker hair, bleached blonde by the sun. His face was rosy from drinking and he
sported a scraggly red beard. He
literally looked like he’d gotten lost at a Foghat concert in ’79 and never quite found his way home. Mike did
three things. He worked, he drank beer,
and he flew airplanes. He got up at
least three times a week and took a rented Cessna up at the local
airstrip. Then he came to the factory,
worked all night with us, and then went to this dive bar down the road. That was his existence. And it was a shame because he was a sweet
guy, always supportive, and really damn funny.
It seemed like he could have done so much more. But, he claimed to be happy.
Aside from Mike
and the guys on my line, I hated that place.
Hated everything else about it.
Wished every day that an explosion would level it. Yet I never considered quitting. It didn’t seem like an option. That was the kind of thing people who can
make decision for themselves do. And
that was not me. I did what my dad told
me to, which was usually what my stepmother wanted. The only thing cool about the job was that my
dad was also working second shift that year.
His company switched their shifts around every year or so just to keep
them guessing.
During the day we would
hang out, go to movies, grab lunch, just generally fart around. My stepmother was working then and wasn't around to tell us not to. I liked it.
But every afternoon I dutifully put on a tank top, a pair of cutoff
shorts, and my steel toed work boots and head out to work. I know, it sounds like a gay men’s calendar
layout but again, that fucking place was hotter than the ninth layer of Hell. And since to me, the job was Hell, the
temperature was only fitting.
One
night when I got home from work, both of my parents were uncharacteristically
awake and downstairs with lights on, and I apparently had to face a little more
heat.
That afternoon,
while I’d been at work, a letter had come to the mailbox. It was a bank statement from First Chicago
Bank that had been forwarded from my school mailbox to my next known address,
theirs. Remember that money my mom and
stepdad had given me that I did not want to tell my dad about? They suddenly knew. And, as I had feared they would be, hence the reason I hadn’t told them, they were pissed off about it and felt entitled
to take it.
First of all, had I any balls
back then I would have told them where to go for opening my mail. My dad said that my stepmother had opened it
by mistake, not even looking at the address and thinking it was just something
for them. I suppose the huge block
lettering that said FIRST CHICAGO didn’t give her any pause. That’s a common mistake when you’ve lived
your entire life in Milwaukee! But okay, I was living under their roof, and
they had co-signed my student loans so that kept me from speaking up. They gave me this sob-story about how they had
taken care of me for the last five years and how tight money was yet they were
sending me to this private school, etc.
By the end of it, I felt about two inches tall again and had agreed to
write them a check for the balance in the account.
Am I the douche
bag or what? In retrospect I should
never have given them a dime. First of
all, they’d been alternately begging me and making me feel guilty about coming
to live with them. Now they wanted me to
feel bad about being a financial burden.
And as for the expensive school.
Guess who got stuck with the lion’s share of that tab and those
loans! It took me years to pay off
student loans for a degree I would never even earn. And as I’ve mentioned before, that monthly
stipend they’d promised me from day one when I went to school never ever
materialized. And now on top of it, they
were demanding I hand them my money. And
too keep the peace, as well as please my dear father, I did. I the end I believe I wrote them a check for
$800 which they never said a word about.
It just disappeared off the kitchen counter and a few days later was no
longer in my account. I did keep
literally like $300 for books and incidentals when I moved back to the dorm in
the fall. And if you’ve gone to college
or sent a kid there, you know how far $300 bucks goes toward books and
supplies. Within the first week back at
school, I would have about $70 bucks to my name.
Lest we forget, I
was also working 50 hours a week in a factory, for which I never saw a red
cent. Every two weeks I received a pay
check and it was left on that same kitchen counter. The next morning when I got up, the check was
gone. I suppose I just shrugged it off
remembering what the J-bird himself had said.
Give to Caesar what is Caesar, and don’t fucking complain.
Two things got me
through that summer without losing my mind.
The first was the crew on my line.
We were all college kids, plus Tom who was actually going back to
college in his forties as well, so he counts.
We had similar
interests, i.e. beer and getting laid.
The guy to my right, Eric was a sophomore from the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, one of the number one party schools in
the world. While separated by the
shelves of our stations, we were positioned close enough that we could talk all
night, which we did. He had such great
tales of keg parties, tailgating (this was just after the Wisconsin Badgers
took the Rose Bowl), and most of all, hooking up with college chicks,
everything that puts a smile on a young man’s face. Eric was a high school football player and a
frat boy, things that would usually make me avoid any conversation with him,
but he turned out to be a great guy. And
he could always sense when I was on a ledge and make me laugh. We only knew each other a couple months, and
had never even socialized outside of that factory, but I really liked the guy
and from time to time wonder what happened to him. I tried running a Google search on him, but
true to form based on the type of guy he was, Eric doesn’t seem to have an
internet presence. If you’re out there
reading this one day, hit me up.
The second thing
that helped me endure the long summer was that on a few occasions I was able to
talk my parents into letting me take a car and drive back to school. Stacy had once again scored a summer job in
the area and was staying in his room.
His girlfriend at the time, Brandy was living on campus through the
summer as well, along with a few other friends.
On those weekends, I would work until the usual 2 A.M. then get up early
Saturday morning and make the 2 & 1/2 hour drive to Elgin.
We’d all hang out for a while then usually go see a movie or go out to
dinner and just stay up late, waxing poetic about life, religion, music,
movies, philosophy, and love. Everything
that came to mind. We were starting to
fancy ourselves those young Christian intellectuals we claimed to despise so
much. During those weekend visits, I
never wanted to leave. I belonged
in that little community. The campus was
so different in the summer time. Only a
handful of students stayed behind, because you had to pay rent to live on
campus during the summer. Even though it
was an eclectic mix, everyone was friendly and they’d have communal cookouts or
all gather to watch movies in the lounge.
It was a great coming together of people who wouldn’t normally socialize
during the regular school year. It was
just a fun, comfortable vibe. It was
much like what I imagine summer camp felt like, only even better because there
were no counselors around.
Speaking of summer
camp, Brandy had a friend named Leah who worked at a summer camp during the
week that summer, but would often spend weekends their on campus as well. Leah was this tall, round faced blonde
with big beautiful eyes and freckled white skin. I was as excited to see her as I was Stacy
when I’d drive down those weekends.
Nothing ever came of it, but boy I spent some summer nights pining away
for that girl. It started on one of those first weekend visits. I guess I just got the idea there might be a vibe between us. I'm told I misinterpreted, but to this day I'm not so sure. When I was back in Wisconsin, I'd fall asleep every night thinking about her, even scribbling bad poetry about her. It was a clear example of
opposites attracting, because Leah was devoutly spiritual and wanted to not
only marry a man in the ministry, she planned to be in some form of full-time
ministry herself. She could see I was
clearly not on the road to the pulpit so she showed no interest
whatsoever. In her defense, sort of, she
was really tall and did tell Brandy she wanted a man as tall as her or
taller. Leah had me by a good 2 &
½ inches or so. Didn’t bother me, I’m
always game for a climb. But it was an
issue for her.
Even though my feelings went unrequited, the idea and the fantasy of her was what kept me going that miserable summer. So in a way I should thank her.
For the record, Leah is currently still unmarried and works at Starbucks. Just
saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment