Shaky
At 7 am we get herded into the machine shop and guided through the pledge of allegiance followed by toe touching and arm circles. But today I am off work. Certainly in last night’s dream I thought differently. I was searching for blueprints I needed for today’s job. Today has no job though. I’m awake and listening. Outside my little blue office I hear an American flag thrashing wildly in the wind like god is shaking water out of the county’s laundry for the line.
I go back Monday. Then I’ll be there Tuesday. Wednesday too it seems. It gets shaky after that. It used to be steady. Then it got shaky. Then it got shakier. Then it got a little steady again. But now it’s the shakiest it’s ever been. I’ll be there Monday.
My co-worker claimed he’d been a good person his whole life to avoid going to Hell. This claim was made while we killed time driving slow through that petrochemical plant. Vapor spooled endlessly up. I was driving. I said I believed in a more Buddhist way of thinking because that at least had some scientists backing it up. “Like what? Like who?” I explained the law of conservation of energy and how when he dies maybe that energy, his energy, will just go back into the universe (no afterlife). The result? He said, “Niiiice. Now I can be a bad person.”
Deer somehow get into our petrochemical plant. They wander the roads. I shouldn’t say somehow. I can tell you exactly how they do it. They walk through a neighboring cemetery and wade across a sliver of river and get underneath the chainlink fence that is supposed to keep terrorists out. The deer like the cemetery and the deer like the oil refinery because they do not get shot in either. There are signs telling us we can’t bring guns or drugs or alcohol to work. And you can’t even so much as have a bow and arrow in that burial ground. If for some reason I forgot my security badge and I needed to get into my shaky workplace, life or death situation, I could walk through the cemetery and wade across the little river. I could get to work that way. I work a job that is slowly going away. We are needed less and less and I am pursuing other things. It could be any day now that the deer begin to go to the control houses and begin to pull permits and begin to run welding leads and begin to repair the broken things I used to prepare. I’m not saying we should shoot the deer.
This same co-worker was telling me there actually is a part of his day he enjoys. When he first goes home he goes into the bathroom and stays in there for half an hour. He’s got these two beautiful little girls he is raising. They are terrified of Joe Biden because their father made them that way. They think Joe Biden is going to show up and sniff them because my coworker showed his daughters some Facebook videos with ominous music and Biden hugging kids and smelling their hair or something. Yesterday the coworker was long relaxing in the bathroom when he heard a terrible crash and then a child’s wild wailing. He went out. One of the kids had flipped the other over and bloodied their head a bit. They were doing combat training to prepare for when Joe Biden finally comes to sniff them. Me? I don’t have any children.
After work I have some students. I tell them what I know about telling stories. I do this online. I stare into my computer and talk. Sometimes they look back at me with the same expression that deer have when they are stranded on the other side of the chainlink fence inside the cemetery. All the time I feel dumb as shit and just have to laugh at myself and what I am trying to say and how it may or may not be coming across how I want. I never had any college courses on writing and sometimes I find myself on the phone just desperately asking more experienced friends, hey what did your professors even say? The students I have are brilliant though. They’ll be fine. They take this class and then go finish their novels or short story collections.
I’m forever amazed by people who study what they want to study. When I was twenty three the job called me on the phone and sent me to an old abandoned movie theatre where a grizzled old man taught me and ten other guys how to tie knots. He held a piece of rope and talked about the lay of the rope and the turns of the rope. A cigarette hung out of his mouth. His hair was slicked back. He’d been in the navy. His name was Jack but everybody called him Whip. Or really they called him The Whip. That weekend The Whip barked orders at me in disgust until I knew how to tie a bowline and a running bowline and a clove hitch and he said that was all we would ever fucking need to know about rope and if anybody else told us different they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. I’m a teacher now because the construction business is slowly being overtaken by deer. Or something. I can teach you a few other knots too, if that’s what you’d like. I learned them anyway.
I just sent along a letter of recommendation for one of my students. Graduate school. When letters of rec want to know my institution, haha, that part is funny. Hi my name is Bud, I burn garbage and other fun stuff to generate electricity and also I help the wizards wizard plastic and gasoline out of dinosaur dung.
It’s two minutes till noon.
There’s a car chase I’m supposed to be writing this afternoon. This part of the novel I’m making got real slow and the editor sent me back some notes on that part and he said the tension was too low. There was too much idling about. Well, he’s right. I thought about what I could do. I settled on a car chase. I’ll have the two people hear the siren coming after they commit their robbery. They’ll get in the car and race away and then the sirens get lower because the cop has pulled into the lot of the place they just robbed. So the criminals are relieved for a moment. They’re driving a pretty shitty car, shaky and smoking a bit. They’re driving down this long country road and there’s nothing and nowhere to go for many miles. Farmlands on both side flaked by irrigation ditches. But then they hear the siren growing in volume of course and the cop is on their tail. So the criminals will pull over and before the cop gets close enough to see there’s two of them, the passenger runs around and gets into the irrigation ditch on the other side of the road. The cop pulls up and the driver has the hazards on and the cop isn’t sure if this is even the car he is chasing down. He is old and wheezy and looks like Santa Claus. The driver says she needs help, something is wrong with her car. And yes the car is smoking a little. The cop gets out and walks around to the driver side of her car with his hand on his gun and the other criminal climbs out of the irrigation ditch and jumps up into the cop car and speeds off and then the car with the hazards on speeds off and the old cop is stranded there with more than an hour walk back into the teeny tiny town and no phone or radio because it’s in his long gone cop car. That’s what I’ll do. That’s how they’ll get away. For a little longer.
My apartment is fumy with coconut oil because I am seasoning a griddle I almost ruined. It’s giving me a terrible headache. Rae is out of town for the weekend so I have this thing in the oven at 500 degrees. Polymerization occurring. See my problem is that my coworker started talking about how bad teflon is for you. Teflon on non-stick pans. He’s always going on about conspiracy theories that I’ll quickly debunk by showing him the fact checking on Snopes but he’ll then say that maybe Snopes is in on it. Anyways. So he’s right about the teflon thing and I thought, well yeah, I’m getting all kinds of cancer at the construction site but maybe I can at least get rid of my teflon pans so I get less cancer at home. I bought a cast iron skillet. It’s great. Then I got drunk and ordered a cast iron griddle. Because I was drunk I tried to save some money and I bought a brand that I knew wasn’t as good as the one who made the skillet I liked. The griddle showed up with metal bee bees on it underneath the canola oil seasoning they’d done at their factory. No good. My pancakes would suffer. Every time I went to flip the eggs I’d hit one of these three little bee bees. Don’t you understand, I want a glasslike finish. So I put the griddle in the sink and I trickled the water and I sanded the griddle down till I saw shiny metal. But now I’ve got to reason this thing from base metal. What a pain in the ass. I’ve seasoned this thing in the oven four times now, covered in coconut oil, one hour at five hundred degrees and then let it cool inside the oven for an hour. Cowboys on YouTube showed me how. We are getting somewhere. I am getting somewhere. The griddle is slowly turning black and slick but I know I’ll have to do this process another three times or so. And also I’ve got to write that car chase. What a jampacked day. It’s no joke.
Oh wait. It is. Today is December 4th or 5th. A quick search reveals that I thought this too, cast iron, was all a joke. On the 21st of October I was quoted as saying, “got a cast iron pan to 1) cook food 2) put under my poncho as a makeshift bullet proof vest so when i face Ramón, I can mutter: “aim for the heart" till he exhausts his rifle, then I’ll shoot his rifle from his hands and kill Don Miguel, Rubio and the other Rojo men standing by”. This is of course, a reference to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Nice try, Bud. So I must have ordered it then. It came shortly after. I see that on November 9th, I also had some stupid wisecrack about it: “looked up how to season a cast iron pan and saw what was involved so now that cast iron pan will only be used to brain burglars”.
But it’s not a joke, Bud. This is your life. This who you are. You are a man with a hangover and a headache who is seasoning a griddle in your oven and all the windows are open in your apartment and it is very cold in here. The rain is drizzling down and the American flag is still cracking against the brick.
Last night my friend Michael Mungiello sent me a vinyl copy of Tonight’s the Night by Neil Young. I went down into the basement where the mail is kept and forgot that I had even had a birthday until I saw the package. I listened to the record a few times, by myself, by candlelight. I was drinking bourbon and Neil Young sure did sound good. I’m realizing now, here right at the end that I should call this thing “Shaky”. In the beginning I had titled it “Pledge of Allegiance” but I’d done that kind of arbitrarily. I’ve said the word shaky a bunch of times in this piece and that must have leeched into my mind because Neil Young sings, “Bruce Berry was a working man. He used to load that Econoline—van. A sparkle was in his eye but his life was in his hands. Well, late at night when the people were gone he used to pick up my guitar and sing a song in a shaky voice that was real as the day was long”. The shaky voice of a dead man. RIP Bruce. And Neil, they call him Shaky, yes they do. Let me think of all the nicknames of the people I’ve worked my shaky job with, let’s see how many I can name in thirty seconds. The Whip. The Secret Weapon. The Secret Weapon Jr. Weasel. Spike. Another Spike. I’m out of time.
My co-worker I wrote about earlier in this piece has the nickname TKO because when he first came to our job he was talking too much. He said there was some guy he’d heard about who had recently gone to jail for going around and knocking dude’s unconscious and then performing fellacio on them. What did you do? Holy shit. “No not me.” Okay, TKO, we said. That’s who he’s been ever since. Going on eight years now.