Christmas Eve

Well, that's where we really started things rolling. A hasty bang in the parking lot of S. Mike's. And then going into the service, everyone dripping wet, we heard the 1st epistle from Jeremiah and that's when I said was your name.

Yes, it was a Christmas Miracle.

And then, I went on the road again, hitching to Flagstaff and then Phoenix and then I was summoned back because Ma was booted from school.

I guess this precludes another chapter.

Frank said, first words, "I loved it." But then he had to run to the doc.

And, now I remember, Kath had called it a masterpiece.

hmm...the chapter 13 is same as chapter 12...so we jump to 14

Chapter 14

Davis Erection
Do you know what the definition of an ironworker is?
A laborer with a burr hole.
Carpenter at Cargill job site

“Hey Ron,” came the voice through the Plexiglas, “don’t be callin’ those contractors for jobs or otherwise that’s what you’ll be doin’—callin’ for jobs.”
George stood tall behind the partition, a serious look on his face.
I had to think a moment on what to say. Didn’t the guy at Davis Erection say to call after I got back from Alliance? I did but he must’ve forgot telling and called the hall on me.
“I kind of screwed up, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” George said, smiling lightly and shaking his head, “you screwed up.”
There was then a pause. It was the day after the Rankin and associate File neuro exam, another day of etherisation on the table, just another one.
And, because I still had a bad taste in my mouth from the Northwest Erection job—I just could not force myself to walk across the joists that ran between the beams upon which bundles of decking would sit—I felt a sense of futility creeping in. Not only had I not signaled the crane operator right, to stop going up with the huge I-beam as the choker—a half-inch steel cable—had some play in it, causing it to snap lose and FEWWWHIP at Ironworker Mike’s face.
“Make sure you get that on there right,” is all Mike said, looking a little suspiciously at me.
The next day, rigging another I-beam, I didn’t guide the iron correctly—it swung away from me and knocked over the beam on which the water cooler sat.
The beam didn’t go down but the water cooler crashed to the ground, spilling particles of round ice cubes over the sand. A few ironworkers looked at me and I hustled over to HyVee and got a bag of ice.
“I’m gonna lay you off,” Casey said, midway through the next day. “You’re just a little too green around the iron. If you were an apprentice, I’d have time to teach you.”
I thought, Fine, that’s all right for ironwork this summer and now into the school year, waiting to be re-assigned. I’ll just kick back and get an office job somewhere.”
However, an OD statement from the bank kept me hollerin’ loud and clear for more jobs.
It’s 6:45 a.m. and I park my Jap truck where the sheet-metals union has their parking lot. I’ve learned to keep my red Nissan out of sight of the trades people otherwise it’s time for a raft of shit.
There’s one guy in the hall. He’s leaning on the edge of the wood on the door talking to George.
“I used to be a Superintendent down there in Phoenix,” the guy’s sayin’ puttin’, his payment of assessment dues through to George. “I’m not used to packin’ bridge decks, workin’ with Blackie.”
Although I never worked with Blackie, his name is well known around the union—an Ironworker among Ironworkers.
“Oh yeah,” George says, adding up the assessment.
“Yeah,” the middle-aged man said, leaning with both elbows. “I don’t want to shit on you or nothin’ but that’s what I’d like to be doin’ if I come up this way again.”
“Ookay,” George says, pushing his journeyman card through the opening.
The phone rang.
“Ironworkers.”
“Yeah, Gary, how’re you doin’?” George inquires, motioning for me to come to the door. “Yeah, I sent you on six jobs, Gary, but you turned ‘em down.”
I watched George’s lower lip move. “Well, then, I sent you on another one.”
The response must not have been agreeable on the other end.
George yelled, “Fuck you,” and slammed the phone down.
George then walked over to me and handed me a work order.
“You’ll be going to Crete,” George said, writing, then looking up at me. “Do you know where that’s at?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, rattled by the sudden swish of anger. “Where at in Crete?”
George looked at a map of Nebraska on the wall above his desk. “Just west of Crete on Highway 36. Just go right through Crete and there’s a Farmland’s Industry two miles or so from town.”
“Oh,” I replied, “okay.”
“You’ll be there about a week.”
“Oh, okay,” I repeated dumbly.
“I’d hurry up and get there.”
“Yes, sir,” I said and hurried out the door.
But the tension from the hall evaporated as I drove down a white I-80. At the job site, I saw the man runnin’ the company was an old friend of the family, a Local 184 blast form the past. He and another ironworker’d started their own company—SulNel--and were doing structural jobs around the state.
I remember how old Lester at Cargill, a few months from retirement, had said that Bill Sullivan was one of the strongest men he’d ever worked with. Of course, the part owner of the company was Jerry Sullivan but was spittin’ image of his older brother if half an inch shorter and narrower.
Lester’s comment that day had somehow challenged me. I grabbed two buckets of bolts and carried them up the stairs and said something foolish to Lester like “I’m strong, too.”
Yet, working with some of the bigger ironworkers, George Mach, for instance, I knew I was not—like teaching—the strongest man in the building.
At first coffee, the men sitting on make shift chairs—concrete blocks and a five-gallon bucket—and pouring coffee from a steaming thermos, suddenly there came a remembrance of an ironworker who’d gone in the hole.
“Yeah, that was a sonovabitchin’ cold day,” Ironworker Pete said. “All I had on was my jacket.”
A couple of the ironworkers looked down and nodded.
It was Joe Reed’s funeral. It was particularly poignant because Joe, who built smokestacks, had licked cancer but then fell 300 feet off the iron working in Detroit.
“It had to be closed casket because he’d landed on a beam and it went through him.”
There was a moment of silence. We drank our coffee. A north wind cut through the Cyclone fence, an old piece of white paper stuck there and then fell down.
“Yeah, I think Jim Cahill was one of the pall bearers.”
I remembered that Joe was one of the contributors in the benefit softball game they had for me after I got out. A couple years later, Joe was undergoing chemotherapy. I don’t think it wasn’t too much longer after I’d gotten out of the hospital. I went to the local college to see if I could handle the course load again—I couldn’t. I then went to see Joe at the hospital where I’d wind up teaching 10 years later..
I couldn’t gain admission. Joe was in intensive care. I talked with his wife in the cafeteria where, 15 years later, I had lunch: first going through treatment then during my four-year teaching stint that had started up almost a year later.
But then one day Joe said, “Hell, I’m not getting’ any better in here. I might as well get back to work.”
I remembered the last time I saw Joe, out of the hospital and workin’ iron again, puttin’ up smokestacks. He’d said something like, “Yeah, I heard you came by to visit.” He hadn’t changed a bit—long and rangy, light brown hair he always looked like what Tom Sawyer would look like as a young man.
We were both ironworkers that went to the hospital. We both worked at Port Neal. We both went in the hole.
For me, as a farmer friend of my dad said, “It just wasn’t your day.”
Joe, however, was a journeyman. He was an ironworker’s ironworker. He was much better than I could’ve ever hoped to have been. Specialty smokestacks, risin’ with them, ever higher and higher in the air. There wasn’t a beam Joe wouldn’t walk across or a stack he couldn’t put up.
And fifteen years later, he was still remembered. No, I hadn’t heard anything about the funeral or Joe Reed for 15 years—until I started working iron again. That day in Detroit turned out to be his day.





Chapter 13



You Gothcer Teacher, You Gotcher Ironworkers: One Guys Recovery


Thank you very kindly the opportunity to consult with Mr. Hartnett. He is most interesting individual. Unfortunately, he does not appear to have been exposed to appropriate rehabilitation effort post recover. Many persons at this patient’s level of disability are unable to sustain themselves in any competitive employment situations.
Respectfully submitted,
Thom A. Korn, Ph.D., C.R.C.

Rodney said, at day’s end, “You comin’ tomorrow?”
“Oh yeah.”
But, bein’ the gumshoe detective that I was, I also noted that writing on the shithouse walls began to appear shortly after the cute as a button gal came on the job with her bright yellow Peter Kiewitt hardhat—that everybody wore—accept the ironworkers who had their own color and style of hardhat..
Julie her put up hair—she kind of looked like a farm lady with her hair done up—pullin’ the tractor and wagon load of corn down the lane like Mom did through the fields of praise—a lit filter cigarette dangling from her mouth as she lugged the vibrator around..
Julie had a pleasant face; her voice was a little deeper than I’d expected.
At any rate, the gist of the shithouse salvo was something like, “You guys with short penises stand closer so you won’t piss on your shoes.”
This, no doubt, was to impress the lady—who also used the same shithouse. Contractor Peter Kiewitt, in all their corporate billions and infinite wisdom and all their safety blah blah—the carpenters worked in the pouring rain, low visibility—don’t kid yourselves, it’s not about safety—didn’t have the foresight to provide one for her.
I remembered the next summer, working on a job in Lincoln, Hell’s Angel Rick had enough respect for women to tell the general contractor they’d better get one on the job for their female laborer.
“You don’t need to be usin’ ours,” Rick said to Jane in the shack during coffee break. “You can have one of your own.”
A laborer, the young gal had lunch and coffee with the ironworkers in their shack. A look of relief stole across her face. Jane was surprised. “I can?”
“Sure you can,” Rick said, leaning forward, his hands on the make-shift bench. “Don’t let those contractors get away with it.”
And sure enough, the next day, a female shithouse was parked wall-to-wall with the male one, a female figure head in the middle of the door to designate the difference.
At any rate, with Kiewitt as the general, the shithouse message arrived just after Julie’d come on the job. As mentioned, she used the same shithouse as we did, just like everyone else, albeit the only female tinkle into the brown mass below who, it was reasoned, might want to know that there were, of the 50 or so men on the job, those who possessed an organ that, it was further reasoned, would satisfy the only lady on the job more than say, a man with an organ that would fall shorter by comparison.
A shot came zinging across the bow a couple days later. It was query: “How would you know?” It was signed Shorty.
The original provocateur, the answer was amazingly simplistic. It ran as further advice: “Look down and see if there’s piss on your shoes. If there is, you haven’t stood close enough.”
The afternoon shithouse visit was immediately coming forthwith. I saw that the reply ,with a thick black marker, was heralded like a trumpet of swans. The debate was taken to a new level:
“Let me fuck your old lady and we’ll see who she calls. Shortly.”
This seemed to be the end of it all. Shorty had thrown down the gauntlet. That is, until one day there was a reprimand:
“Why don’t you two grow up?”
I also noted that on the uppermost corner of the shithouse wall where you could look out through the chicken-wire partition to look at a white wall that was not there a few weeks ago.
But, pondering the prospective authors, scanning hardhats that sat like domes on noble heads presented no immediate clues. Quite possibly, I think, watching the huge Manitowoc lowering a load of iron from a flatbed semi, it wasn’t two rival—if you will—penises vying for a lady’s affections but it could well have been two guys that did it for a joke.
They did it on every job they went on together.
Unemployed sociologists improving their cash flow. A research project, a dissertation. Who knows, it’s hard to say.
Or, it might have been the same guy, trying to be ironic as hell.
And the guy who wrote the reprimand, why, he too, might have been the same person. Double ironic. He might have been like the modern-day Hamlet who just so happened to be working construction in the Midwest just as his ancestors were practicing sword-fighting in Norway and hanging out with Fortinbras. Or Laertes.
Or, the new lady how ran the vibrator with such aplomb, such authority, sticking it into mounds of wet dark gray concrete. Was her real ancestor Ophelia?
All communiqués—save one—were written in pencil.
And, moreover—because they only appeared after she’d arrived—was it the pretty Kiewitt Ophelia scribing them?
The last diatribe to grace the shithouse walls was an angry salvo against Swain construction. They took the unkindest cut of all: the Swain company was described as “rat motherfuckers.”
And the words of wisdom from twenty years ago when I was working at the Powerhouse—the stalls covered with words of wisdom before the Manitowoc crane boom came crashing down in a gust of wind off the river, or so the story went, ironworkers pulling their pants up, rushing out of the shitthouses:
“He who writes these words of wit on shithouse walls/Wraps his shit in little balls.” Of course, while this repartee had stuck with me for all these years, I kept thinking something was missing. The Nucor turnaround job I usually started doing right after school go out supplied the missing rhyme: “He who reads these words of wit/Eats those lil balls of shit.”
Not only did one large piece of my missing life-puzzle fall into place, I knew who Shortly was.