Slave Labor
We’re into the second day of chrome shop training with Fernando, and I’m still not entirely sure he understands a fucking word I’m saying. I continue speaking what passes for English in Alabama accompanied by frenetic hand gestures, pantomime that becomes increasingly agitated with his every expression of surprise and disbelieving shake of the head. Trump would have had this kid throttled and drowned in a shallow puddle, but my liberal tendencies will not allow this fate to befall this jackass.
“I’m trying, Fernando. I’m on my seventeenth Duolingo lesson and all I got is ‘mucho gusto.’ Maybe, ‘lo siento.’”
He expresses his gratitude with a momentary widening of the eyes.
Fernando stands on the opposite side of the table where we prepare metal cylinders for the chroming process. He wears a shirt I recognize from the occasional trip to Ross dress for less. You’ve probably seen them, too. There’s usually twenty of them clogging the men’s section, all of them invariably small. Black fabric festooned with vaguely shiny fleur de lis. He’s deliberately flaunting our Hawaiian shirt or go the fuck home dress code. A thin gold chain circles his pencil neck. His hairline starts a half inch above his eyebrows. God could not have molded a more perfect instrument of Polish Hammer annoyance.
I’m in the process of showing him how to duct tape the areas we wish to keep blessedly chrome-free, but he’s having none of it.
“Is heavy.”
“What? Why are you talking?”
“This…” He motions at the six inch sleeves, roughly forty inches long, a middling size, metal we usually sling around like an afterthought.
“Heavy,” he sighs. “Too heavy.”
“It’s not heavy, you goofy bastard. That’s just gravity fucking with you. It’s like the crushing inevitability of your eventual death. Easy to ignore. For me, anyway. Now, quit your bitching.”
Being a leader of men is a taxing endeavor and training a kid to shoulder the majority of the workload allowing me to take a relaxing reprieve is a challenge of which I am only barely equal to.
Fernando remains unconvinced. He struggles to find the English words needed to continue his argument.
Finally, he points at the GnP machine where he worked his initial two weeks. It’s a machine ordinarily reserved for whoever trudges into work the drunkest on any given shift. It is not a viable option.
“I like this. I good here.”
“I bet you are, you lazy little bastard,” I laugh. “But Dingler couldn’t drop the bourbon bottle last night so he’s running it. Besides, that’s not what you hired in for. This ain’t Guatemala, you can’t just run around here doing whatever the fuck you want. You’re in America, now. Twelve hours a day, compadre. Work, work, work. That’s your life, now.”
He understands enough to appear crestfallen. Even his gold chain seems to dull beneath the anticipatory weight of an endless stream of twelve-hour shifts. He needs the sort of quick morale boost only the Polish Hammer can provide. But since I quit selling Fentanyl-laced coke, he’s going to have to settle for a few kind words.
“Look, Spanky, I know you ain’t feeling it, now, but after a month of twelve hour shifts, you’ll be picking these parts up one handed and spinning them around on your middle finger.”
“No… No…”
“You’ll have so many muscles on those noodle arms, you might stand a chance of fucking a real live woman, instead of stump fucking chickens in your backyard.”
“Well…”
“None of the ladies who work here, though. I have it on good authority they despise Guatemalans. I chalk that up to the Trump effect, but what can you do? Maybe you can console yourself with the knowledge that you’ll always have a place in the chrome shop, even if it’s at the bottom of the tank when I get tired of your bellyaching.”
“Okay.”
“Now, tape that fucking part, you’re wasting my motherfucking time.”
His eyebrows like leaping caterpillars do an emotional interpretive dance. He looks at the roll of duct tape in his hand as though it were the entire English language incarnate. Utter incomprehension. He tentatively applies the end of the tape to the piston and begins slowly rotating the cylinder as though it were a malformed baby impaled on a rotisserie.
“What the hell you doing? You gotta move fast with that shit, Fernando. Ain’t you ever kidnapped a six-year-old before? Jesus Christ. You gotta move faster than that. You’d never make it outta K-Mart with the kid going that goddam slow.”
So fucking slow. I take this opportunity to crack open my second energy drink of the morning. Another 200mg of caffeine allegedly flavored to resemble a cherry icee. It’s a dubious claim. It’s closer in consistency to cough syrup. Which is fine if my chronic exhaustion had a bronchial infection. But it is sugar free, so I’m doing my part to live forever. I rip open a bag of Hot Fries which has been a breakfast staple for as long as I’ve been posing as a working man.
Fernando stops what he’s doing long enough to point an accusatory finger. Though he doesn’t have the right words to immediately express his dismay, I intuit that he wishes to remind me that Hydra Hydraulics enforces a strict policy criminalizing open beverages and food on the work floor. Fuck all that. I do what I want.
“Don’t worry about me, Spanky. I’m garbed in a dazzling array of plot armor protecting me from fate’s afflictions. They wouldn’t even know where to begin reprimanding me. Better not let me catch you with a bag of chips in your hand, though, or it’ll be back on a slow boat to Guatemala for you. Understand?”
His eyebrows shoot up into his bushy black hair and he returns to taping vehemently. It’s like a spider monkey fucking a wiffle ball, really. Tragically.
“Yeah, he understands me. I think he understands me.”
He looks up at me. He’s taped everything except the piston area I told him to tape.
“Fuck.”
Austin asks if my son’s still available to work. My son hangs around my neck like the laziest fucking albatross that’s ever refused to fly across the goddam ocean.
“Yeah, Valvoline opted not to hire him, if you believe that.”
“The oil change place?”
“It sure ain’t Valvoline the short order diner.”
“Shit, man, Valvoline, they’ll hire just about anybody with a pulse.”
“They asked him if he worked on cars any, and he said ‘shit, I don’t even know where the oil goes.’”
“At least he’s honest.”
“He’s not honest, he’s just fucking stupid. I showed him where the oil goes! Countless times.”
“Oh.”
Is it me? I wonder. After all this time, is there something being lost in translation? Not just Polish Hammer speaking to Guatemalan. Or trying to reason with my dipshit son. I’ve seemed to have lost the ability to communicate to the people of the world in general. How is it so many have successfully refused to have my will imposed upon them? I fear I’ll never know…
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.
