The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner
Just Another Casualty of the Industrial Revolution
I didn’t set out to be a factory worker. Near as I can remember, I didn’t set out to be much of anything. I knew I was poor. I knew most every path would entail working for a living, likely existing paycheck to paycheck, forever on the brink of catastrophic financial collapse. Hoping to at least postpone the inevitability of a life given over to manual labor, I enrolled in community college and very quickly discovered that I was a fucking idiot, not because I found the curriculum difficult. I think mostly my choices of courses, at least on the surface of things, appeared counterintuitive for a person intent on finding gainful employment.
Even my counsellor expressed confusion concerning my educational choices.
“You’re refusing to even consider Spanish 101?”
“Yeah. I ain’t trying to learn another language, amigo. This is America. I expect to be talked to American.”
“Polish Hammer, I got to ask, what are you hoping to gain by taking electives in Latino studies?”
“I just really dig Mexican chicks, man. Something about that blood red lipstick and those Georgetown Hoya jackets get my heart racing. Course, those girls won’t give me the time of day back on the street. They’re all about those Latin Kings. I’m hoping things are different in college. These girls hold nothing but disdain for the Polish Mafia.”
“Polish Mafia? There ain’t no such thing…”
“You tell that to the Hungarian Viscounts, my friend. They can figure some other reason why their boys keep getting dropped outside the 7-11.”
“Okay. Okay. But then I see here you’re down for History of Witchcraft 1400-1700.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a mistake. I may drop that.”
“I also see you got political science as your major…”
“Yeah, but that’s likely to change, too, though, depending on what jumps out at me next, which way is best to catch hold of that lavish lifestyle, know what I’m saying? That witchcraft class is not what I was expecting, at all. I blame myself. Too much Dungeons and Dragons in my youth. Apparently, that witch’s grimoire doesn’t even have a magic missile equivalent. Mostly, It’s just an angry woman ranting about how all guys throughout history have been murderous jackasses, working up a classroom of middle-aged women so they don’t want to eat at Chi Chis with me after class.”
“I have no idea what you’re fucking talking about?” The counsellor admitted.
“Did you graduate from here?”
It would explain a lot.
So, I didn’t last a semester at Indiana University Northwest. I wasn’t there long enough to buy a T-shirt. Fortunately, when you live in The Region, you can’t throw a lawn dart in the air without hitting a factory in the eye.
The first factory I worked at manufactured turbine hubs for transmissions. During the fifteen months I worked there, three co-workers killed themselves. Their deaths were sporadically spaced far enough I couldn’t justify calling this a rash of suicides, but it definitely left an impression. I took note that hanging yourself in the basement of your parent’s house could be considered a side effect of prolonged factory work. Apparently, broken marriages factored highly in their decisions to take advantage of early checkout times as well. No problem, I thought. I’ll just avoid marriage. I enjoyed my own company enough. I cherished my quiet time spent reading. I felt no desire to give this up for constant companionship and the possibility of financial security.
Six months later, I got married and moved down to Alabama. Down south, I figured I could become anything. In the rural south, there was only one factory within a fifty-mile radius of my house trailer, and it seemed easily avoidable. I still lacked any clear indication of what I wanted to do with this life, but my options appeared limitless. I was young, healthy, and in possession of far more common sense than my Polish heritage warranted. So, I hired in at the factory manufacturing hydraulic cylinders.
I worked there sixteen years. I committed every conceivable vice on company time in the hopes of being invited to pursue my dreams of a lavish lifestyle elsewhere. But management time and again proved to be fantastically lenient.
Also, sixteen years, not one suicide. Broken marriages all over the place, not one looped belt found purchase on any factory throat. So, maybe it was those northern winters…
Then my first wife died. Our marriage was shattered beyond repair by that time, and while I was always conscious of the proximity of my belt, there were no basement rafters I found appealing enough to give it a go. Her death proved to be the motivation I needed to change the trajectory of my life.
I was fast approaching forty, what better time to escape the clutches of that thought siphoning, hope alleviating, lavish lifestyle dodging drudgery that was the daily factory grind. Luckily, there was a satellite school for the local community college within a minivan’s throw from my house.
I sat in the counsellor’s office and asked him “do you have any courses on nineteenth century Russian literature?”
“No.”
“Studies on the crime films from the seventies?”
“What? Classes? On film?” Again, no. Finally, he asked what exactly did I intend to major in.
Teaching high school English seemed like just the thing. Everybody else was doing it. I figured I already spoke the language, and reading remained one of the few pleasures left to me that didn’t require the expenditure of energy.
“Well,” he said. “If you want to get a degree in secondary education with an English major, you’re going to have to take English classes.”
And, inexplicably, biology.
This also seemed counterintuitive, but I went with it.
I also signed on to substitute teach at the local high school.
Come to find out, I can’t fucking stand kids. At all. I have no tolerance for their utter lack of intellectual curiosity, their freakish devotion to technology and their unnecessarily sullen demeanors. Fuck them. Also, telling them to sit down and shut the fuck up is generally frowned upon by the school administration. Why? Telling kids you’ll see them soon enough at the Wal-Mart in town where you’re going to sort them out permanently and, maybe, whup the hell out of the rest of their family for good measure, likewise, is frowned upon. They were intent on tying my hands. And I found them to be not quite as lenient drinking on the job as other places I have worked.
Around the time my name was being boldly inked into the “Do Not Hire Under Any Circumstances” book in the Alabama school system, I got a call from my old job at the hydraulic factory. Turns out, they had shortsightedly fired every single employee who possessed even the least bit of knowledge pertaining to their chrome plating system, and would I consider coming back with the understanding they were no longer amiable to my drinking, drugging, mischief making, management undermining, and hiding under the catwalk most shifts reading novels.
Let me tell you, I suffered a dark night of the soul deciding whether I should return to that fucking cesspool. In the end, the need to pay bills won out.
I’m four months away from celebrating the seventh anniversary of my return. It feels like I never left in the first place.
What’s the point of all this you might be asking. Eh, I don’t know. I guess I don’t like being considered a factory poet. I prefer, perhaps, to be known as a failed Latino studies poet. You may even be convinced to call me a restricted from earning a living teaching jackass high school students poet.
Anything except the goddam factories…
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.
