It didn't matter one bit. It was time to get back to work.
This book, we revisit, we could never completely get away from construction. And that's how I ended my working days. As an apprentice electrician, just one week or so into my second tier. (The year is divided equally into two sections. I don't if it's tiers or not but you get a 6% raise. You start off getting paid 60% of scale and then goes up from there.)
Workin' with the rodeo clown--younger than me, my I'd say close to 20 years. So, even though it wasn't terribly new info, he was about my size but stronger than me.
Chapter 10 Casino Royale
Except this time, it’s truer than ever—I just get out of people’s way. Nor is it funny; I'm no longer a ft teacher with ironwork as a fairly dangerous side gig. Now, apprentice electrician, inside wireman, ersatz Sparky. I had to make this gig a go go.
I mean, I really was getting out of the way. I was—The Shack Man: sweep up, tool runner, ladder locater, eye ever and always on the look out for the missing Hilti gun, fire-caulking where no man had fire-caulked before.
One morning, Pig Palace Kill Floor Guide Doug said, looking over at me, as we readied ourselves for the day, “I heard you’re pretty good with the caulk.”
I turned to him. “No,” I said. “Caulking.”
“Oh,” Doug said.
I thought about my last few weeks post procedure + four weeks of rehab; I’m partnered up with Hunter at Harrah’s Casino. The second floor addition, on deadline, men working 24/7 is like a huge bar-stocked, game-stoked electronic deck, reportedly going to be called Stir. For equestrian view, Stir will feature scantily clad chicks serving food and beverages while old men like me gamble and ogle, ogle and gamble.
And, while I didn’t know it, the Hiller 1st year apprenticeship romance was on its last legs. I didn’t get sent back to Pig Palace with Tony and the boys. What a relief—no more days when every pig would die, the commute cut in half. I just had to track down my toolbox, grab my hardhat.
“They brought your tools down,” I was told over the phone. “You can come by and pick them up.”
I said I would. Then, getting to Hiller’s relatively small office, company headquarters, sitting on maybe five acres in South O, I guess I was expecting some sort of gee, I’m glad you made it. Instead it was Your tools are in the shop. She turned a coiffured head backwards towards a closed metal door.
And sure enough, there it was, small metal toolbox with the IBEW sticker I proudly emblazoned there months ago. My Craftsman toolbox, however, looked hopelessly small midst an impressive array of power tool and small engines; huge shelves were filled deep with materials; they stood side by side hand tools that filled a well-swept shop.
Hmmm. Okay. Now where’s my hardhat? Not there. I don’t see it. Didn’t that come down? Actually, it wasn’t my hardhat, it was Zack’s. For some gust out of nowhere reason, stepping between building proper and onto the buckhoist a few weeks back at Union Pacific, near the top floor of the 20-story building, a blast of north wind caught my hardhat and sent it airborne. I watched, as did a few men clambering onto the elevator, the gray hardhat set sail, carried more than 30 feet away, falling midst construction equipment, dumps, material and traffic. Going down (impatient; of course we had to stop at about every floor), trying to gauge where it might’ve landed was no use. Of course, nobody saw anything. And it was silly to ask, “Did you see a gray hardhat fly by?” My first-year apprentice first Hiller hardhat was gone.
Now what am I ‘sposed to do? Eerily, without hardhat, I felt almost naked. I wondered if Zack had his still around; it was worth a look.
Young, thin, with a long arms that looked like they could reach up and easily screw in a fixture, Zack was a third-year apprentice who didn’t like working for Hiller. I could hear him arguing with journeyman Doug, resident Palace Guide, with an almost give-you-shit-right-back attitude. And so I heard how Apprentice Training Director Jim Paladino sent Zack somewhere else. His hardhat, however, remained. I noticed it lying face down along the back wall when I began to track down the box of curved 2” conduit that I would put on a work cart and ship via buckhoist to the desired floor. Thus, hardhat-less, aware that Head Safety Inspector Julio would write me up, I raced to the shack and, sure enough, young Zack’s crown was still there, untouched, in the corner. Wouldn’t it be a suitable replacement? Zack had no intention of ever coming back.
And, as no one said how I should go about getting another one, after I tried to explain my Mary-Poppinish story to Paul and Tim in the shack, I grabbed Zack’s. I stuck it on my head and off I went, caught up in the frenzy of proper fire-caulking duties, ladder locating, tool carrying.
It was a hardhat I wore at Pig Palace. Would it be a hardhat that stayed at The Palace with the dying pork?
“I don’t know,” the lady said, looking up at me from a sheet of number-filled paper in almost visible annoyance. “That’s all they brought down.”
So, there I was, ready to go to Casino Royale sans hardhat. Well, I still had one from carpenter days. I guess I could use that. So I pulled it out of the garage; it’d have to do. Thinking back, Hiller not issuing me a new one, nor mentioning same, just another sign that IBEW apprentice electrician days were shorting out? Aside from the fact that first journeyman Bob Jensen would never talk to me, would not look me square in the eye anymore, the other was the fact that my fellow 14 apprentices all had to be certified CPR. I begged off. I’d already blown air chest-pressed the dummie when I was with the carpenters. So, too, did Apprentice Brother Kaleb Faber—he said his was still current. I was excused but not Kaleb. Now that I think about, I was probably out the door anyway, especially after stint placement, angio plast insertion.
The heart is a lonely hunter.
At any rate, Hunter was Local 22’s Operation Iraqi Freedom soldier who had returned. He’d done his tour. Now he was back to work. I heard him mention, but briefly, how he had started at the war’s very beginning when the task was fairly simple, objectives quickly met: Saddam’s statue was yanked from the pedestal, Baghdad in an era of good feeling. He said the real fighting started later.
Hunter, tall, good-looking, walking about the job site with a soldier’s bearing, possessed the quick ability to come rolling into the shack with an armload of 30 or so breakfast burritos he and his wife had prepped the night before. They’d be gone quickly—first, amongst our 20 or so electricians, some buying, some not (me always off in the corner between two wooden temp shelves of different-sized screws and nuts sitting on my square red and blue lunch pail, listening to the pleasant drift of the morning conversation, the plans for the day, always opting out of the torpedo-shaped sandwich offer), the buyers pulling a couple greenbacks from out of their pocket and buying breakfast.
Hunter would reach in his dull green army bag and pull out a wrapped burrito and hand it to one of the electricians. He then’d take off and go fill a couple more orders from trades’ folk in the adjacent shacks—which included ironworkers, carpenters, steamfitters—and round out his morning culinary journey.
At any rate, I thought of this last electrician gambit with Hiller, driving across the river to the casino. A fancy addition to Harrah’s (that used to be Harvey’s) was being built and Foreman Ed was there, urging me on (he’s got the heart of nine-year-old, he’d say to partner Matt, after the initial period of aloofness had suddenly vanished and we could banter back and forth). Another of the apprentices, Jason, who often said, for no apparent reason, bam! (In the bathroom mobile latrine between the carpenters and electricians was written “No Bam.” One of the electrician’s who later came on the job and said that his daughter was a star basketball player for Ft. Calhoun, my relating my daughter’s heretofore untapped prowess, said to no one in particular “some people just needed to grow up.” The scrolls on the shithouse walls, meanwhile, continued apace) would talk about the special initiation party the crew’d have for me, to truly break me into the union. Jason was ever making gestures—that were a mixture of ribald and obscene. Laughing, we all were, having a gay ole time. And, while there might’ve been a touch of Charley Gordon, I was not a walking comatose; unlike Jerry Watkins, who sometimes was poked fun at and teased, lumbering the streets stiff-legged through the small farm town, I was aware that I was aware.
And then, near honeymoon’s end, at Casino Royale, I was assigned to Hunter. “Just lead him by the hand,” I heard Matt say. As usual, I really didn’t know how to take it. As usual, I tried to ignore it. While it did make me slightly mad, my old oh-yeah-I’ll-show-you kicked in. But, post-procedure, I had trouble stirring up any of the old moxie.
The head injured heart is a lonely hunter.
I remember Hunter, turning and looking down at me, saying, “Sometimes you gotta take a chance.” I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about; how I, in previous hours working as apprentice electrician, had had any opportunity to take any chance. But I’m sure the comment was addressed to me, comprising a summary of my present mien. After rolls of conduit were moved so wire could be run—along with all the tools and gang box and shelves of screws, my pack mule motif—I could help Hunter. Yet, really, when you get right down to it, how much help was I?
The Hiller Recycling Gambit at Casino Royale, meanwhile, was going full bore. After flagging down and moving conduit, I jumped in to help Hunter pull coated foam from out of the long silver ducts that had been beer conduit, keg to tap, and now channel millions of electrons running wild to light Stir’s bells and whistles 24/7.
Yet after thousands upon thousands of drafts of what I guessed was a dark ale, dark solution, the foam was now a black syrupy concoction—it refused to budge. It came out in small dark tufts, like plucking a wet chicken.
But Hunter, devising a pole that we could stick in to pry off dark foam, finally freed up enough of it to use.
And then I thought of how Hunter, who’d walked the Iraqi desert one minute, is now, a few months removed, staring up at a 15-foot ceiling. He’s envisioning how the beer tubes formerly tapped for thousands of gamblers should be run through the entire room. Meanwhile, I worked on cutting and pushing and pulling as best I could, foam insulation virtually glued to the metal.
I finally decided there was no way I could do it myself—it was a two-man show. Then Hunter returned; working together, we finished. I then went back to playing The Sweep Man, holding up the dummy end on the job, my third in a row for Hiller. See, when Hunter measured while I held, it’s known as holding “the dummy end of the tape.”
Maybe Charlie Gordon is on this job.
The only thing that lifted my spirits were the two steamfitters trolling their JLG about, laying ducts, crisscrossing the ceiling. One of them would always say, “Why did you do that, Bill?” “You know that’s not fair Bill.” “Bill, how come my JLG doesn’t have a horn, Bill?” And on and on. His partner went about his business, whose name I presume was Bill, both of them on the lift, ignoring all the questions. Yet, you could tell if the questions stopped, something was wrong.
Somehow, Hunter’s measurements were nearly perfect, the tubes running the length of the ceiling, forty feet or so with a swoop of 90% bend here, a 45% offset there. Done holding the dummy end of the booze tube that became an electrical conduit, I went back to sorting and sweeping, moving materials—and stacking and sorting and arranging.
I thought about material arrangement at The Palace. How, a few days pre-procedure, I’d looked for a place I might sit—a chair, for instance, and stared at the dull orange metal gang box pushed into the wall. Tony knew I’d seen the doc. I told him they’d scheduled an appointment with the cardiologist. It’s no big deal, I said. I’ll be done in the morning and come by in the afternoon.
Tony looked at the Hog calendar, March’s pinup a sexy girl in leather, straddling a Harley Fat Boy. Sure, he said. Find something you can sit down on if you need to.
The gang box lid for the Hiller electricians I remember was always raised up like the hood of a car. It was raised up as my brothers had already reached in and grabbed what tools they needed for the day. Looking around, I didn’t see anything I could comfortably sit down on per Tony’s advice and still do my task of sticking outlets on wire I’d cut in 4, 6, and 8-foot chunks.
The small damp room, beneath the bowels of the packinghouse, was really not the most comfortable place in the world. Tony, however, a fellow lifter, and with whom I’d shared some stories about time in the gym, crowded and sweaty men and women holding onto their own interpretation of life continuance, stories which, in their own right, were rather meaningless and unimportant yet gave us some kind of Sparky connection. This afforded me, I think, in those late days of my work as apprentice electrician, a semblance of security. That my brothers and sisters, above and beyond, were behind me; they were “at my back.”
So I remember how I stayed and worked attaching electrical outlets to wire, standing and shivering in the cold concrete basement, on the concrete floor, hearing what I imagined were hog’s heads rolling on the floor above, sounding like bowling pins, thumping down a blood-stained ally. Disquieting at first, it was nonetheless not unlike the light plant smell you are immediately and instinctually offended by but yet, in a short time, hardly notice.
The fart is a lonely hunter.
But then once past that—like an invisible sheen—you are in the mix of men and women and animal and carcass and death and food—pretty soon you don’t even notice it, don’t even realize it’s there; it becomes as much a part of you as a strong cologne or makeup except this instance your make-up, your smell is the same as that of the live animals, the dead animals, the pork; you’re all one and part of it, this life/death, death/life cycle.
And it got so I could almost handle watching Tony in the cafeteria during morning break, the tall Clint Eastwood-looking foreman helping himself to a steady diet of sausage and eggs. It well could have been from one of the animals that had spirited it’s un-merry way down the chute to be cut in half and skinned alive earlier that morning. I know that’s probably not exactly what happens on the kill floor but I remember Bob Jensen told me how journeyman brother Doug had given him a kill floor tour. Bob, intelligent and quick with a lucid memory, when describing the kill floor procedure, his shoulders shuddered. Doug, of course, The Palace tour guide, a bit of bedevilment in his eyes, offered to take me.
I demurred, citing conflict of interest.
That was the day my pickup truck conked out on the roadway. Almost to work, exit off the four-lane highway and onto the service road, steam suddenly shot out of the radiator like a small geyser. I think I’m just a few miles from town; can I make the nearest gas station? The engine light glows red. I pull over and shut it off. I get out, stepping into the silence of nature, wondering if it’s the radiator that’s leaking. Everything is quiet and gray; I look over at the silent cornfields, covered with tufts of snow, through which poke bent over cornstalks…a serenity prayer jumps to my lips.
Now what the hell am I gonna do, I think, feeling more, as I usually have these last few months, a quiet resignation instead of a loud desperation. As usual, I’m early: the days are getting longer and now this early March, I see how the trees are lightening near the riverbank in the far distance. I look at my truck and see steam still emanating from the hood which I go over to and proceed to raise; a dollop of pain jumps in my chest—breakfast residue. A few cars hurry by on the original road that winds through small farms and towns and is now a phony hill lower than the four-lane highway that runs parallel to it for this last stretch to town, aiding and abetting motorists who have important business to tend to.
But, like a sudden stoppage of say, a mass transit halfway en route, an elevator stuck between floors, it was a time to look and think carefully at this sudden stop, this sudden moment in time when you’re forced to change direction, to alter the state of affairs—a moment both cleansing and existential. Actually, the state of affairs is now altered without your approval of consent. You just have to deal with it.
It was time, then, for reflection, a time to put one’s affairs in order. So what if I’m late? Who really cares? It’s not like that suddenly it’s a day when no pigs would die. No, now it’ s time to sit and wait patiently by the silent roadside. Maybe something will come up.
And something did. Earlier, I thought Should I start walking, hitch a ride? Now getting closer to a few minutes before 7 am I’d be late, but that didn’t matter. Meanwhile, I looked over at the hills in the far distance, the snow on the stalks and knew that in just a few weeks, the temps would be warmer, the snow would melt, the frost come out of the ground and then the first tentative tractor, like a horse stepping over into a field, measuring, before the front hooves made the plunge, would nose into the corner of the field with a disc behind it to begin to break the ground and ready it for the planting season. It was a comforting thought; the pain dropped a notch. I told myself This spring I’m going to watch a farmer disc a field.
The cars and a few trucks continued to zoom by, paying me no mind, a few more now than before. Would bud Bob be idlin’ buy with his little white two-door? Bob probably didn’t bring the black Mustang. The shiny machine with detailed wheels was his prize possession. Seeing Bob at Hormel, couldn’t they share rides? No, Bob said he took a different route, starting from the confines of North O. I wondered who else that worked up there in Fremont would be coming by but, realizing that there weren’t really that many, I thought Is it time for Charley Gordon to do a Jerry Watkins and stick my thumb? Suddenly a white van rolled by; drawing closer, I saw that it was the Hiller company van.
Yes, of late, a few more electricians had come on board. The parts to configure the room for cooling had arrived and now there was an urgency to get the job done so Hormel could speed up pork kill, pork cooling, bowing to anticipated consumer demand.
Instinctively, I waved at the new white van as it flew past. I thought Shit, they didn’t see me. Suddenly, it stopped; it’s red brake lights glowed bright through the morning’s gentle haze. I watched near gleeful as it backed furiously towards me.
Two of the electricians got out of the van and walked quickly toward me, ready to solve this immediate problem before them. Workin’ fast. Ready to go. Like the NYC ironworkers that swooped down from halls when the Twin Towers were knocked down, the question posed by a reporter sticking his mike at one of the hard hatted men descending, asking “What are you going to do?” The world suddenly transfixed and stopped for a moment in time as carnage continued, a melee of humanity, turning and looking everywhere, scared, helpless, flames shooting skyward, fears leaping wild.
“Whatever it takes,” the reverse-hatted ironworker said, descending with a few of his hard hatted brothers into the inferno.
The older man known as Sheldon asked, “Havin’ car problems?”
“Yeah,” I said, coming out of my daze, taking my eyes off the snow that covered the fields, both relieved and sad that my secret mental state had been discovered, “it started steaming so I just pulled over.”
Sheldon and fifth-year apprentice Tim were right to the quick.
“Well, pop the hood; let’s take a look.”
I opened up the hood again.
“Start it up once.”
This I did. The truck spit steam.
“Yeah,” he said, “looks like you got a leak in your water hose.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “really?”
“Yeah. You got any water anywhere? We can fill up the radiator and you should be able to make it to town.”
It was the day after no pigs would die and I almost did. Tim and Shelby had made a quick assessment. “We’ll be a little late,” Shelby said. “But Tony won’t care.”
For some reason, I’d begun to carry a gallon of filtered water in the back of my pickup. That way, I could simply fill a small water bottle and then take it to the gym with me. It cut down on all the hassle of stopping and buying the containers then tossing them all away. I had a full one. So water was readily available. I went to the truck box and grabbed the gallon of water. I handed it to Sheldon, still looking over the radiator which was still kicking out steam.
“Here.”
He dumped the contents into the radiator.
Sheldon said, “Start ‘er up.” The thermostat dropped from the red zone.
“I think you’ll be able to make it to town,” Stan, Local 22’s union president said. “After work you can go to a filling station and they’ll patch that up for ya.”
Shaken from my morning reverie, my silent commune with nature, I responded. “Yeah. Great.”
It was a day the pigs would continue to die; but I didn’t.
I thought how Tony’d pretty much put up with me, happy that this old man first-year apprentice at least could hold a broom in his hands, clean out the confines of the small office in the basement, take out the trash, collect all the metal shavings from the machine that cut and trimmed rigid conduit, put all the different-colored small rolls of wire, scattered everywhere in various locations in the shack, onto one bottom file of the shelf. If the job required a mule—pulling wire from a reel, for instance, as it did on a Sunday when no pigs would die—the old man apprentice could be summoned, his mule back put to use. No doubt, Tony basically was scratching his head, wondering what the hell he could have this no-longer-kid apprentice do.
I pointed my truck to outskirts of town; I took a left at the light, a block from the strip joint on the other side of the street Tad was always wanting me to visit, all electricians in unison wanting me, if I showed up, to “do a lap dance.” Until night, the lot was empty, the small square building looking forlorn and slightly sad.
The day now light, I moved past a set of unused railroad tracks then on past a huge pile of scrap metal, past where the workers in the plant had their cars all parked and silent, owners now staring at the pork before them, ready to quickly and automatically perform a delicate operation throughout the day.
I pulled into the gravel and drove a few hundred yards to the small guard shack. I cranked my window down, seeing empty train cars across the fence and said to the old man with a new blue cap “Hiller.” And the guard waved me through.
It had seemed like it was a good day to die.
*******,
Well, that was Chapter 10 but it went all the way to heart attack so therefore it jumped around.
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