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howardpaulanderson · 8 years ago

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Here’s to Labor; An American Beehive

Homer is short and wiry, proud, you can see it in the way he punches his time card, and at fifty-five his job is to push and pull eight hundred sixty pounds of yarn, crucifixion style, a buggy of steel in each hand, three hundred feet up the concrete hall of the plant. He does this sixty times in eight hours. Sometimes he dreads coming to work. But he says the workday passes fast for him and I believe him. He walks down to fetch the first pair, shoulders drooped, arms barely swinging, as if they’re accustomed only to having weights attached to them. Over the years scores of persons a third his age have turned down the job.

As Homer sweats his way down an aisle he passes Louie, also short but overweight. Louie is sitting on a bench and wiping his brow, for it’s hot down here in Continuous Spinning, what with the double deck being so confining and the heat coming off the drums to the yarn dryers. Like Homer, Louie has been around a long time, thirty-three years seniority. He’ll get up in a little while and putter for fifteen minutes with his broom and dust pan, then he’ll be back on the bench. He has all the accouterments of a subordinate, but an attitude of nonchalance washes over what is material. “It’s taken me a long time,” he says, as he watches Homer scurry back with two empties, ready to grab another haul, “to get to where I am.”

Every time I see Louie I get reminded of the song, “Louie, Louie.” I think part of the lyrics are, ‘why dontcha sit yourself down now...’ Homer doesn’t remind me of any song. Homer is like a grand old relative one remembers from childhood, greatly admired, probably single, fondly thought of every once in a while.

A person must haunch over while walking down the aisles or between the machines of the bottom deck if he or she is more than five foot eleven since pipes and conduits and structural members hang or protrude everywhere. Every so often, when someone’s new, when a trainee, they forget. The machines here run silently, effortlessly. The intercom speakers above crack to life; “C14, Ethel, coming down the hole.” Ethel, on her way to aisle C, fourteenth machine row, smiles as she passes. There are massive tanks on the upper deck. The cellulose xanthate is formed to a solid and a spinning jet carries it below, where the filament is washed with a finish and wound about the heat drum by an operator, and after a few minutes this end is snipped off and wasted, and the regular yarn, flat in its youth, is laced onto tubes or cones.

Continuous Spinning is the procreator of rayon industrial and tire yarns. The machines never stop, except for the once a month washdown maintenance or during production curtailment. A doff is made every eight hours, three times a day, seven days a week. When it runs full blast, fifty-six machines spin, eighty-six ten pound cakes to a machine.

The lead truck is rolling freely, but the rear one is fouled with lint and stray ends and it drags. “Click,” goes the electrical box, the lead truck having been turned from the hall, the light beam between eye and reflector broken, and the doors to Warping begin to swing open. A roar from sixteen twisters, seven to one side and nine from the other, and dead center ahead is a spray booth through which the buggies are shoved, what it sprays most of us don’t know except that it’s yellow; the protective hoods are lifted off the buggies, a red spot on the yarn indicates acid. The buggy is put aside if acid shows. One of the uses for the defective yarn is the stuffing put in coffins.

In Warping the flat double deck yarn is given a ‘Z’ twist, 2.3 turns to the inch, or 2.0 or 3.4; it could be put right on beams, the creels on the far side of the shop in lazy motion compared to the crazy, buzzing twisters. Or it could be hauled another three point six four minutes worth, the figure is from a man with a clipboard and stopwatch who charts such things, farther up the hall to Twisting, ring twisting as opposed to Warping’s up-twist; different machines but with the same noise, there to be plied or re-coned or twisted as in Warping, then possibly to be processed with adhesive dip, and packed, weighed, and shipped out. Thousands of pounds an hour, millions of pounds a month.

The primitive sound of metal rapping metal is continuous too. The very space overhead drones and at regular intervals throbs with the thudded drumbeat of a multitude of pipes pressurized from afar. Running their own course are row upon row of fluorescence, obscuring the time of day, while above all of it is steel or concrete.

Hundreds are tucked away where the chemical process begins in Viscose and other hundreds labor in Waste Treatment and Water Softeners and Acid Reclamation and the power plant, hundreds more in Staple or Coning or the Box Shop and scores of others from Engineering sashay through the halls behind their tool push carts. Very slowly fork trucks vie for the right of way and pedestrians always win by default, usually because they step aside. Every so often one passes a soul that is straining, eyes bugged and glazed and face a frozen daze. Hurrying executives in ties and button down collars weave through the traffic on bicycles while ringing their bells. In its heyday the plant employed eight thousand people.

Each has a part, isolated but synchronized, vital, compromised by the sheer weight of the place. Sixty-two acres are under roof, more mill than all the mills in New England during the time of John Stuart Mill. No one truly comprehends this creature of mass production. Homer’s vision is one of sweat, Mr. Kittel in .861 deals with it in pounds, the plant manager issues directives. The plant doc conducts ten physicals a week as he welcomes and examines newcomers. Accountants do their thing, the girls in shipping track cases and pallets on their computer screens. Each is obsessed by his own little function. And so it is with the good folk in Industrial Relations entrusted with image stewardship, and Research and Development enmeshed in routines of inspection, and Human Resources weeding out bad apples, and the nurse in the Dispensary doing her nails so pretty, and the guard force doing spot checks for pilferage, and Mr. Duke, the Plant Safety Director, spearheading the drive toward renewed safety awareness with a plant wide bingo contest, each space carrying a message on how to be safer.

I have to push two trucks of .056 twisted yarn which is always on the small solid green tubes through the spray booth and up to the .861 finishing area and while I’ve been doing it for a while I still don’t know what .861 means, and as I weave through Warping one of the girls careens out from between the twisters on the little one cubic foot box with wheels on the bottom that she’s sitting on, and I have to dig the heels to my safety shoes against the concrete to stop the first buggy from colliding with her. She’s cute and soft looking and it reminds me of baby fat yet remaining and she looks up at me in a dreamlike way and all of a sudden I’m thinking of Mr. Willis the Department Head’s favorite saying, “The longer you wait the harder it gets,” and I make my beeline for that gray area of safety, the one that shows preoccupation with business at hand, and now “Taking Care of Business” by BTO pops into my head, and then I’m hustling my buggies out of Warping with an exaggerated determination.

It’s the graveyard shift, midnight to seven, usually the quietest one, but the foreman’s been breathing down my neck all week. My job is authorized to make the adhesive dip and this shift is the one scheduled to do that, though lately that’s become more of a retreat than a chore for me. The dip room is a cubbyhole adjacent shipping, which is outside the main part of the plant. A pair of double doors snap open as their light beam is broken by the fork truck I’m operating. You don’t drive it or ride it or run it, you operate it. The doors snap shut after a time delay switch somewhere is activated, jaws snapping shut on the mechanical monster that is within.

Up in the dip room, alone, out of the way, I am doing my thing making dip. Sometimes I feel like Homer, sometimes like what’s his name, Louie. Sometimes I wonder what other factories are like, if things are different or the same further up and down the chain.

Water, liquid latex, resin, water dispersion (which sounds like soap), formaldehyde (which definitely does not), soda and ammonia get dumped together by the drums and by the buckets full to create a batch. A single large vat, one smaller that’s higher and off to the side, both elevated on a steel platform so that gravity drains the batch into the two hundred fifty gallon tank that is carried by fork truck out to the floor where the women can fill their five gallon pails for the dip pans located in front of their spindles. Some of the ingredients are mixed in the large tank, some in the small, the formaldehyde is added as a catalyst, a valve is opened, and for thirty minutes everything is mixed together. When it’s done it has a froth on top and looks like a giant strawberry milkshake. There’s noise from the overhead exhaust and hardened dip slung all over, even on the walls, testimony to the labor of decades of dip making by us dip makers, and the bright light from the spots casts weird effects on everything. Sometimes I can all but see ghosts flit by, so loosely does this place fire my imagination. But the eerie sense of working among dwelling spirits is somehow uplifting.

I only have four years seniority. Last week a man retired from Continuous Spinning.

“Everything okay? Good.”

Those were the last words he said to me. Three cakes, I mean the real kind, homemade were baked for him. Everybody in the shop signed the card. And in Warping, another cake was brought in for a lady who is to retire at the end of the month.

It’s a unique achievement, this synthetic, creating a fiber out of chemicals. It seems almost like getting something for nothing. This dip that I’m making tonight, it could be the coating that goes over the yarn that’ll go into the tire that will go on a jet plane. Maybe Air Force One, for all I know. Sometimes I haul the carbonized yarn which is patented, the heat resistant fiber that has made the space shuttle possible.

So what is success, anyway? A means or an end? Independence or acceptance of responsibility? Subjective? Objective? Is it conditional and varied, or in compliance to permanent moral standards? Is it found in the tangibles of life, like mazuma, or is it intangible? Does it lie in a reputation, or in selfish satisfaction, or in helping others? Is expediency, advantage and privilege more worthwhile than trust and honesty? Is the long run the sum of all short runs, or more? The very word conjures enigmas in my mind.

I don’t believe it necessarily has to be a regimental tie around one’s neck, or being the leader of a regiment, or regimenting one’s life to a bank account.

Hey! Last Wednesday night, I had to vote, down at the Union Hall, and the sensation of waiting and standing in that line I would be hard put to define. But it definitely had a lot to do with being with brothers and sisters.

But those snapping doors scare me. Makes a person wonder.

(1982. Avtex Fibers, Front Royal, Virginia.) Last production run completed, July 9, 1989.

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howardpaulanderson · 8 years ago

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SEX SPINNING

She was very pretty. I later learned her name was Diane.

She was walking down a curve swept-staircase cradling some books. Someone upset a chair and when I glanced up I saw her.

I was captivated. The way she looked, what she wore that mid-May morning. Silken fabric, pastel colored, cut just above the knee. A springtime dress. You know the kind...

Great balls-a-fire! I almost shouted.

Her breathtakingly slender waist, her perky breasts made me randier than a Rocky Mountain harem bull-elk rutting. So I ravished her body with my eyes for some very long seconds; then I focused on her face. I was enraptured. I wanted to know that face for the rest of my life. She is the one! my throbbing heart told me.

I saw myself married to her. I saw the new split-level, the cute picket fence, the little white puppy named Fifi, the diapers on the line in the back yard. I saw myself at the top of the corporate ladder while turning over investment in my spare time, a millionaire by thirty-five, the first in my family to do it, a retired multi-millionaire by fifty, all the result of easy money in the good life with Diane hand-in-hand.

She disappeared into the college library stacks and I returned to ponder the gene traits fruit flies carry during their brief two week life cycle. She was in and out of my mind, at times in plain sight as my use of the library intensified, all the way up to Friday night at ten p.m. when I headed for the Someplace Else.

I’m superb at connecting at bars. You can say anything to a girl as long as it’s sensible, gracious and cheerful. ‘You have pretty eyes’ works nicely for me. All of them do. The bottom line to a singles bar is that it’s a pick-up affair, like the glasses of alcohol resting on it.

‘Pick me up!’ says the glass, waiting, filled with brew or spirits. And so one does, one takes a sip. Or as the night progresses, a swig. And as it lingers longer, a swill. I’d just entered the swig stage when I saw Diane at a table by herself about to light a cigarette, her girlfriend getting drinks. Ever notice how girls just hate to go to bars alone?

I flicked open my Ronson and twisted the setting to high. I ran across the dance floor, the flame trailing behind. I was hot.

“You have pretty eyes,” I sputtered as she exhaled. My spiel ended fast, I didn’t even get to ‘Do you have a pet?’ Forgive the cliche, but things went magic and we took the ride together. She introduced me as Al to her friend, but when alone kept calling me Albert. She told me she worked in the library, that this was her first time in a bar. I asked to see her again, a date the following night, and she agreed. The band launched into “Heroes,” David Bowie, their last song, but our dance was together and private, like stealing off to the beach in moonlight.

The date we arranged went bust. I took her to another bar.

From the outside it seemed a nice quiet place. I’d passed it dozens of times but never had stopped in. Tall pines bordered the parking area. I could picture votive candles on each table, a solo guitarist in the background playing softly. You know what I mean, rustic, inviting, a romantic place. But it was an old man’s bar. I guided Diane to a table. I had my pick, they were all unoccupied. Curious eyes glided with us.

The bartender whispered from the gloom. Snickers rose, sly and subtle, sometimes chased by a bronchial laugh. One shadow at the bar’s far end began to sob. All the while I didn’t notice; I was busy trying to make an impression. I came across to myself as being totally suave.

Diane was preoccupied with her daiquiri, playing the straw amidst the foam like a little girl. Eleven Peeping Toms sitting at the bar, and one other lonely withered spirit tending it had undressed her in forty minutes, in their separate yet unified wildest dreams.

“Take me home,” Diane said. Demanded. And then I saw.

We made another date, on her doorstep, and she kissed me on the cheek. Then she was gone. And I realized right then our second date would not be. Sometimes in life you just know things, beforehand.

Diane quit a week later. Found something better I suppose, and never showed up again in the Someplace Else. Crazy, she had deprived me the chance for my ardor to ripen. She never should have told me to take her home. She should have said, ‘Take me to another bar.’ Girl like that with no dedication will always hold a real man back. We talked just once. She said she’d waited two hours for me, her grandmother coming to sit with her, which struck me as strange.

But that night, after we had dated, it was early yet, you see; so I headed for another bar. After all there was still time to spin around for an unexpected quickie. And as I drove, I promised myself I’d never wind up on a barstool in a place like that, called The Pines, when I become old.

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