A Sacrifice to the Gods of Industry
I did not help usher my son into this world so that he could give his life over to Hydra Hydraulics, slaving through twelve-hour shifts in stifling heat for shitheel managers. However, I didn’t intend to have him sit around the house playing video games all fucking day, either. So, I pulled a few strings and got him a job with me in the chrome shop.
Not surprisingly, my boss resisted the idea at first.
“Why the hell would I want another one of you running around the shop floor, howling about poetry, polishing hammers and octopus cities in the ocean, or whatever the fuck you’ve been jabbering about here lately.”
“All right, I’m just telling you what my father-in-law told me. Apparently, scientists found, if not an octopus city, at least an octopus neighborhood off the coast of Australia. Supposedly, they got property boundaries, social gatherings, and not one fucking factory in the whole lot. It seems like news worth relaying, though I didn’t necessarily want to hear it from my father-in-law.
“That’s fine. I just don’t need you to go from machine to machine for forty-five minutes hollering about how the octopuses are about to take over the world.”
“Octopi.”
“My blood pressure can’t handle two Koweskis.”
“My mom raised four, and she didn’t drink half as much as you. Look, man, will you hire my boy if I promise not to warn my fellow co-workers about the rise of the octopus empire?”
“And you seriously gotta stop asking people to buy your poetry books. Modern free verse makes the boys uncomfortable.”
“Oh c’mon. You let Cam sell cucumbers out of his garden.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it’s not. Poems are just cukes from the garden of my mind.”
“You see why I’m hesitant.”
“To hire my son or invest in a collection of my poetry?”
“Fucking both.”
His recalcitrance lasted the better part of a week. What changed his mind was the utter lack of suitable applicants. Hydra had long harbored a toxic reputation among area machinists. I know I did my part in doing irreparable harm to the factory’s good name. I couldn’t eat an MVP breakfast at the Huddle House without telling the waitress about Hydra’s many offenses against my humanity.
Just yesterday, I’d slipped in for my biscuit and gravy fix and asked the purple-haired lesbian waitress “Hey, you hear about Hydra Hydraulics latest bullshit?”
“No, what’s that?”
“It’s… what? It’s that factory by the park. It’s literally five minutes down the road.”
“I don’t get out that way. What about it?”
“Well, it’s a goddam cesspool only interested in crushing the spirits and breaking the will of its depleted workforce with endless twelve-hour shifts. The jackass management team sashays through the office corridors doing as little as possible while the workers on the floor are ground into a quivering paste.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I’m thinking about getting my son a job there.”
“Bless his heart.”
“Could you bless my cup with some more coffee?”
“You ordered orange juice, hun.”
So, it happened that my boy was hired into Hydra Hydraulics following the termination of Fernando the Guatemalan failure.
It wasn’t lost on me that my son, at twenty-two years of age, is the same age I was when I first stepped through the bay doors of Hydra back in 1997. Twenty-two hit differently almost thirty years ago. I was married at the time; my wife was pregnant with our first child. I’d travelled seven hundred miles away from the city of my birth to try a different sort of life. Twenty-two years old, today, my son just now set his video game controller down for the first time.
Having just been fired from his job flinging pizzas at Little Caesars two months ago, I wasn’t entirely sure the boy was ready to just jump back into the rat race. He showed his commitment by cutting his long hair and trimming his beard down into a mustache and chin hair combo that would make Johnny Depp proud.
“You sure you’re ready for this?”
My son shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly.
“That’s not inspiring confidence, buddy.”
I figured, best case scenario, he’d walk onto the floor and within a few hours of soul-crushing labor, come to an understanding as to what his dad had to endure year after year to keep a roof over his head, chicken nuggets in his belly, and the latest Steam games on his laptop, and still have money left over to amass the most most impressive collection of signed first editions to be found in all of Northern Alabama. Even if he ran screaming out the door, I’d still have that.
That first day, I left half an hour early, four am, thinking I’d probably have to drag him off the mattress, knock the headphones off his dome and fireman carry his lazy ass to the Jeep, but when I got there, he was not only fully awake, but also fully dressed and ready to go. That morning, in keeping with Hydra tradition, he got the bare minimum amount of training and still managed to knock out a decent amount of production of a tolerable quality from the G&P. At the end of twelve hours he was still standing, in rotten cheer, no different than the rest of us.
Dare I hope he could persevere?
The next day passed as painfully slow as the first. We worked, drank thirty bottles of water, bitched about work, ducked into the bathroom as much as possible, bitched about the heat, and got through it.
On the third day, my son showed his true colors.
Jason, the lone black man employed by Hydra was placed on the machine next to the G&P. The first thing you learn about Jason–.
“I got bodies on me back from my time in Florida. Had to kill one motherfucker. Served thirteen years for that. Shot another, but that bitch didn’t die. Ain’t bragging or nothing. Just saying I got some bodies on me.”
Those may not have been the first words he spoke to me, but he definitely worked them into our initial conversation.
“Oh yeah,” I remember replying. “I published two books of poetry. Sold six copies. I ain’t bragging, neither.”
Jason immediately found his way into the hearts of the Hydra oppressed by feuding with the plant safety guy, Gerald. Gerald was the sort of pompous ass who referred to himself as an ESH specialist, and made sure the title was listed prominently on his Facebook page. It was embroidered on his white work shirts. Gerald’s beef with Jason began with Jason’s refusal to shave every day in order to provide an adequate seal for his N95 mask, a sentence so ridiculous I hesitate writing it for fear of sabotaging the suspension of disbelief. Jason’s argument, of course, was that constant shaving caused his skin to bump up, and a little bit of facial hair meant little when wearing a fucking paper mask while primer painting.
During the third day of my son’s employment, Gerald decided to give Jason grief about a puddle of coolant forming beside his machine. It was just picking for the sake of picking, and Jason had about all he was going to take of it.
He went to my son to seethe and vent. “He best not be fucking with me. I don’t care if I am on probation. It’ll just be another body to add to the pile, motherfucker.”
My son considered this, weighed his words. “Yeah, I don’t like him much either. A group of us went to a Judas Priest concert last year and he was part of that group.”
“Oh yeah,” Jason said, “was he a little bitch back then, too.”
“I don’t know, I didn’t talk to him much, but I did overhear him talking a lot about what he called ‘the black problem’.”
“What? I knew that motherfucker’s racist.”
“I thought that, too. Especially when he said he had the power of the clan behind him.”
“I’ll fucking take care of that piece of shit.”
“Yeah, talk to my dad. I think he knows where he lives. He can tell you his address so you could maybe ambush him or something.”
Later, I ask my son about what all he heard Gerald talking about. I don’t doubt his harassment is at least partially racially motivated, but I never heard Gerald speak so plainly on the subject.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I never heard him say anything like that. I just figured Jason needed a little push to take action.”
“I’m proud of you, son.”
And I was. And I still am. And I will always be.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
