I can`t remember the exact year, but it was sometime in the mid-`60s. I was either home from college, or it was the last summer before I went away. I had a job at the truck factory. I was living with my dad, near the lake, and the truck factory was out near Cicero. I got there and back by riding with a couple of Swedish guys. I think I paid them a dollar a day, or it might have been a dollar a trip. In any case, halfway through the summer they decided to up the ante on me, and I remember the close and rather vicious expression on their faces when they informed me of the fare increase.
I started out my day around 5 a.m. It was still something other than unbearably hot on the street, and I remember running into the same paperboy every morning around Broadway and Addison and thinking, as I nodded to him, what a beautiful place the world was. I smoked a cigarette at the bus stop on Addison and waited for the bus.
The bus took me way the hell and gone out west, and I waited on the corner for my ride.
The two Swedish guys, picturesque and improbable as this seems, referred to me throughout the summer as ”The Rider.” I was The Rider. And I rode in the back. The car was a `55 Chevy, in mint condition. They picked me up on Madison, and we rode at about 30 miles an hour, out west to the factory. The ride burned me up every day, out and back. If they would have driven at the speed limit, I could have slept another half-hour in the morning; I could have been home half-an-hour earlier and had a shower and a beer. The slowness of the ride seemed to me to be an expression of their hatred for the world.
We had to punch in before 7:30. It wasn`t hard to do, because we were always early. Another of the great moments in the day was one that came after punching in and before work. There was time for another cigarette and a cup of coffee from a vending truck. To this day I love those vending trucks with the quilted silver sides. I think everyone does.
I worked in the maintenance department, which meant that I went where they sent me and did what they told me to do when I got there. My favorite job of the summer was testing torque rods. I am not sure what torque rods do, but I know that these torque rods were around 2 1/2 feet long and had a weld at each end, and that this batch had been welded incorrectly.
So I was placed in a corner of the factory with barrels of torque rods. I took them, one by one, out of their barrel, placed first one and then the next weld on an anvil, and whacked the welds with a light sledge, in an effort to get the welds to part. I did that for several days, and there was something about the rhythm of the job-flipping the torque rod in the air to get to the weld on the other side, whanging the thing-that was completely satisfying.
I also spent a month about 20 feet above a concrete floor, ripping out an asbestos ceiling.
A hangarlike part of the truck factory was being renovated, and a few of us from the maintenance department were commissioned to get the ceiling down. We spent each day duckwalking on two-by-six joists, up in the air, as I have said, ripping the old ceiling out with prybars. For many years I had less than strong lungs and fairly raspy breath, and I would like to attribute those conditions to the month spent with the asbestos, which seems to me a more dramatic story than 25 years of tobacco.
There was another month spent with weed killer and a backpack spray canister. I roamed the outskirts of the factory spraying that which passed for grass. At one point I lost the nozzle for the apparatus. I can`t remember how or why, except that it was an act of negligence on my part. I remember being bored, and thinking, ”Oh, hell, I know I should do `A` with this nozzle, and it would be just as easy to do `A` as to do otherwise, but I will do `B`
because I am bored, and, perhaps, this will make someone pay.”
Soon after being transferred out of the weed job, I was called before a tribunal of my superiors and asked what had become of the nozzle. I, of course, lied and told them I had no idea. I remember that the tribunal went on for a godlessly long time, at the end of which one of the senior men in the maintenance department said, ”Well, I believe him. I believe him, and that`s that.” And I thought: ”You dumb S.O.B., of course I lost the nozzle. Everyone here knows that except you.”
Why was the nozzle that important to them? I don`t know. Why did they not just dock me whatever dollar or two it cost and be done with it? I don`t know. I remember getting docked for various other things.
Lunch, I remember was 20 minutes, whistle-to-whistle. When the whistle blew, I was sodden with sweat, and exhausted. Many days I would climb into the bunk of a sleeper cab and fall asleep. I remember them as the deepest sleeps of my life. I loved those sleeper cabs. I remember one of the factory hands gesturing to a matched pair of ready-to-roll tractors and telling me, ”Son, inside of a year, one of them is going to pay for the both. . .” And when he told me, I wanted to be picking up those tractors, to be putting them out on the highway and having one pay for the both inside of a year. I wanted to be sleeping in the back of the cab as they rolled down the highway. I can`t imagine anyone who wouldn`t.
One day they were digging a trench outside the main factory building, and a couple of guys (I would like to say that they were from the maintenance department, but I don`t know if that`s true) were down in the trench. Just before lunchtime, the trench fell in on them, and they died. I think I found out about it after lunch. I was most probably napping. What else happened that summer? I put a nail through the sole of my workshoe and had to get a tetanus shot, and I limped for a week or so and learned about steel-soled shoes.
I argued one long week with myself about taking a Friday off. The Monday was a holiday of some sort, and you were paid for it if you worked the two adjoining workdays. I had some important appointment and, of course, I didn`t go in on Friday and so lost the holiday pay and am still upset about it 25 years later, and still do not know whether to be mad at myself for my weakness or at the factory for coming up with such a good plan for ensuring attendance. I had a very hot date one weekday night, and took her to what may have been the Surf, but which, I think, by that time was the Playboy Movie Theatre on Dearborn, and she couldn`t get free until a late show, and it was a movie that she wanted to see, and it was the middle of the summer, and the middle of the week, and I was flat-out exhausted, and all I could think about, through the whole evening with this woman I`d been trying to get next to for weeks was, ”Man, it is almost 5 o`clock, and you have had no sleep.”
The trucks were made-to-order, and had a reputation for being top-of-the- line.
I`d seen them on the road in the Midwest or, infrequently, in the East, and would-and do-invariably say to anybody in the car, ”You see that truck? I used to work there.”
