A Legacy of Rabbit Chasing
I’ve always been fond of telling my co-workers “If you stand by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float on by.” Apparently, it’s an unattributable idiom. I suppose you could point to Sun Tzu or Confucius if you absolutely must take your crackerjack philosophy from the Orientals. I suppose I could tell the boys it comes from the lips of Nick Saban, and they would take it as Gospel fact. No matter. My co-workers are usually quick to point out that we’re not standing next to a river. We’re mostly suffering within the confines of a factory. And that’s a fair observation. Who needs metaphor when you have Artificial Intelligence spoon-feeding whatever reality you could desire. I don’t know. Maybe the adage is a bit too passive for my tastes, anyway, but I just can’t go assassinating every motherfucker that brings me angst.
Anyway, I mention this because I happened to be standing by the river last week when, guess what, the body of one of my enemies conveniently floated right past me on a current of sudden consequences and just desserts. For the sake of anonymity, we’ll just call him the Dumb Bastard, former CEO of Hydra Hydraulics and, perhaps, the most willfully ignorant son of a bitch I’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing run a thriving business right into the goddam ground.
The Dumb Bastard managed to retain his position for an unprecedented ten years, helped along by an ownership based in Germany, a block of years strangely suspended by the CoVid virus, and a cadre of cronies overpaid just enough to accept his verbal drivel for pearls of wisdom. The Dumb Bastard, I’m sure, would tell you his longevity could only be attributed to his reputation as a stable genius.
And like that other stable genius who’s clown make-up color is known in the halls of Maybelline as “corrupt tangerine,” The Dumb Bastard was one of the very few people who could convey a sense of smugness and utter dumb founded vapidity with the exact same expression. I worked directly under him as assembly supervisor for five years and had to glance dubiously at that face making that expression damn near every day. I learned a lot about the inherent incompetence that comes with fools grasping at absolute authority.
He spoke in the cliches of the day gleaned from books the width of a fingernail paring that he’d treat with the same literary profundity one might imbue in the works of Dostoyevsky or Proust. Most of these books The Dumb Bastard quoted from revolved around a solitary, overworked metaphor meant to illuminate the points of constraint within a manufacturing facility or how to deal with unruly employees who would quit jabbering about how great the company useta be before all the bonuses and rewards for hard work were withdrawn.
“Rabbits will only run as fast as you chase them,” The Dumb Bastard was fond of saying.
Now, I have an English degree. I’ve also read Richard Adam’s “Watership Down.” These two facts are mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t have needed either the degree or the book to realize Hydra employees are not fucking rabbits. And if they were, well, Huntsville is riddled with warrens, and they are all looking for machine operating rabbits who can help manufacture bombs on whoever the Orange Tyrant deems worthy of an attitude adjustment today.
I’d always derail The Dumb Bastard by asking to be the white rabbit. He’d always say I wasn’t a rabbit since I was promoted into supervision. But I knew it wouldn’t last. I wanted to be the white rabbit because I think drugs are nice. Olga in HR thought that was not a beneficial way of thinking, but I always asked her if it was better to just be a harried jackrabbit forever hounded by management.
“People on the floor are like buffalo. You shoot the biggest one and the rest will fall in line.” This was another jackassy line The Dumb Bastard was fond of saying when having to deal with employees who had the audacity to ask for better working conditions or a modicum of respect.
Eh. People ain’t buffalo, either. Firing an employee with lots of seniority just to show the shop floor who’s in charge might have had the desired effect before the advent of CoVid. Nowadays, the terminated employee can find a better job at the arsenal or at Blue Origins making widgets for rockets owned by the billionaire boy’s clubs who like to shoot phalluses into space when they’re not on islands diddling children.
“I want to be the white buffalo.” I always retort. Nothing to do with my enthusiasm for drugs. I’m just not like everybody else, as the song goes. I want to be the ghost buffalo, haunting those idiots with my absence as I pursue a better course of life.
Still, these idiots hang on to me as if I’m their last draw four from the Uno deck.
“You never allow the tail to wag the dog.” He’d say often, always after someone on the floor showed flashes of common sense when confronted with some moronic edict from management.
I’ve seen plenty of dogs. And I’ve seen plenty of dogs when excited and their tails go to swishing all over the place, it does indeed look like the tail is wagging the dog. And without exception, it’s always the dumbest fucking dog that can’t control their tails. The Dumb Bastard could never control his tails.
And now he’s gone. Like a thief in the night. He always talked about what sort of legacy he was going to leave behind for Hydra. Well, we’re on the verge of shuttering the doors forever. He ran off all our best customers with his witless buffoonery. I don’t have to look far to see the hundred, twenty-thousand-dollar laser inscriber we can’t use and no customer asked for. The dry ice cleaner the company dropped forty-five grand for that’s never been used. There’s the eighty-thousand-dollar Tahoe that only the CEO is allowed to drive. Meanwhile, I’m hanging cylinders from meat hooks, every time I suspend cylinders into the chrome tanks, it’s a gamble between whether we get fucked on safety, quality, or production. That’s his legacy. A factory scuttled by a decade’s worth of stupid decisions. He didn’t even stick around for the cake and ice cream bon voyage.
I suppose, if any lesson is to be taken away from this, it’s that every leader regardless of how banally evil, never holds power forever.
Of course, the new guy can be every bit as connivingly dunderheaded. The new guy in the case of Hydra goes by the name of Lorien.
“Lorien? Christ, what a horrible name. What is that, Tolkien?”
Bippy, my boss, looks at me with that special blend of consternation and exasperation. “Canadian, I believe. I’m not familiar with Tolkien. What is that, European?”
“Eh. In a manner of speaking.”
I was introduced to Lorien the next day.
“So, you’re the resident chrome expert.” He says, first thing.
“I’m mostly the expert expert. They say chrome expert cause I once chromed a penny just by looking at it.”
“Wow, I’d like to see that.”
“Once is the operative word there, buddy. Anyway, there’s people around here that’ll look you dead in the eye and tell you it never happened. I don’t dwell on such things. Jesus turning water into wine was a party trick he never thought to revisit. Why not? Seemed like a pretty practical talent, yet there’s no mention in the Bible that Jesus took this talent on the road and made a career of it. Why should I be any different than the Christian savior? Anyway, no use focusing on the science of things. Best to just embrace the myth. That’s how I see it.”
“Okay… Is there any improvements you’d like to see in the chrome shop?”
“Nope. Just leave me be, and I’ll keep working miracles with the absolute least amount of fixtures and tooling available.”
“Okay… We’ll certainly take that under advisement…”
Fucking idiot. Still, there’s nothing left for me to do except go back to the edge of the river, and wait some more…
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.
