Future Ship

The Value of Work

32 TheValue ofWork i worked all summer in a factory, one of those converted mills scattered about the countryside in towns all over New England, remnants of the days when manufacture was the surest way to happiness and wealth. i was 18 years old, set to go to college that fall, unskilled but ready to fulfill my parents’ wishes that i “learn the value of work,” and eager myself to earn enough each week to blow on movies, gasoline and beer. ~ ~ ~ At first i worked a lathe, a massive metal contraption replete with wheels and sliding tongues, grooved and cooled with water—a vile, milky substance that spilled over hot parts and lubricated the plastic panels of slide rules—that’s what we made: slide rules—molded to fit, to lock together and move smoothly like a single ski through a narrow channel of snow. i loved to snap these parts together and feel the velvety, irresistible signature of perfection. ~ ~ ~ it was a mystery to me how that clunky apparatus could produce such a marvel of precision, and the sordid water—as if our machines were drooling—a kind of industrial slobber that stained clothes and made the walkways between each lathe slippery. We had to swab them from time to time, wielding mops in gloved hands like sailors on a voyage, though we were going nowhere, each worker moored to his machine for eight hours like a crippled ship. ~ ~ ~ 33 We’d break for lunch and straggle out to the pond on one side of the building, the original raceway built to grind whatever foodstuff was produced there in the past, cornmeal probably, or flour, some New England staple that dried up at the end of the eighteenth century. i’d stretch out with the rest on a threadbare carpet of grass and toss bits of baloney and cheese into the murky depths, gobbled up by greedy mouths that sometimes flashed near the surface, then vanished. ~ ~ ~ They put me in the paint room for awhile. Everybody had to work the paint room, a concrete box at the rear of the factory filled with templates, vices and nozzles for spraying paint— a burst of red, a burst of black—laying strips of color on each rule, already etched with lines minutely measured and of various lengths, so when the color on the face was milled away these marks remained, elfin calibrations of a science we might expedite but never master. ~ ~ ~ i’d work all day in a mask, goggles, rubber gloves and smock, the kind of get-up someone wears in hostile environments—and this was hostile: lung-coating miasmas of lacquer and oil, cell-killing vapors of octane, petroleum, turpentine—who knew what? No matter how i dressed, my hair clogged with paint, my eyes burned, my skin shriveled and turned red, a clownish figure of corrosion and bright pigment, stumbling from a locked room. ~ ~ ~ 34 Then i was off to school just as leaves began to redden and drop, off to a future of classwork and leisure, though i worked hard, too, beating my brains out each night in my room against a refractory pile of books. But not before i swung by the factory a last time to see them sprawled there, relaxed, enjoying the fleeting minutes of an ordinary lunch by the pond, not like sailors, now, but animals tethered to a stake, circling their only chance. ...