PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE
RETICULATED DAYS IN THE LIVES OF A REGULAR MAN
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 CHAPTER 1
I rub under Charlie's chin with the ball of my palm, scratching his throat with finger-nailed anemone fingers. "Charlie-doggy," I whisper sing. He surely believes he is the most content & comfortable creature of Earth on an over-stuffed blue chair in the living-room, he's curled like a delicious white & brown caramel with two big root-beer barrel candy eyes full of comfort & condescending love looking up at me. I bend to nuzzle my face against his snout. "You're a good dog, Charlie."
The upstairs light is on & the portable phone is gone from its recharging unit on the end-table, so I know Rachel is indeed awake & already bathed for school, waiting for Heather's call to make sure she's up & ready to meet at 32nd & Cascade for the walk to Central High School just a few blocks away. Rachel has a clock-radio alarm that screams like a burst-open Hell microphoned & wall-shaking, but she can sleep right thru that alarm sometimes. It is a disturbing time in the morning when I come home sweaty & itchy covered to my molecules in fiberglass dust & Rachel is not awake & has not taken her bath, because there are times it is necessary I shower as fast as I can to reduce the itching & general poisoning & Goddamn it, Rachel! Get up! I sit in my shorts on the couch with a beer or a bottle of Kessler's, or both, anxious & pissed off. Now that her friend Heather is phoning each day it's rarer she sleeps longer than 7:10.
I shower the shit off. One of Life's pleasures is guzzling on a cold beer while showering, standing in hot spray guzzling. I digress. Diane wakes & pees on the other side of the tub-curtain. Then my son Doug comes in & pisses like a pony. Diane I can barely hear, but Doug is 9 years old realizing pissing can be musical, at least for a boy. I yell out to him "Good morning Doogle-Doogle!", & he mutters back. It's a school day.
The factory is a crazy place, if I can sound so cliche, & the clangs & hisses & smells of poisons & resins & things my fellow-workers say resound in my head a good hour while Diane lets Charlie out to pee & everybody eats breakfast & brushes their teeth & gets dressed & gets their lunches & Rachel leaves at 7:30, Diane & Doug about 8:10. Maybe I'll have a few more beers or shots, maybe I'll venture upstairs to my room to suck some smoke & read things, think about things in this crazy underground art world to escape the clang of factory insanity production. Morning television, Arts & Entertainment Network, carries "In Search Of" for an hour, & I find it relaxing viewing in most cases. Strange occurrences & events make Life more textured & dreamy than what Reality is, & it's so enjoyable to declare FUCK REALITY & mean such & act upon such. It is Humanist declaration, at times, to immerse one's brain & thinkings into television. Passing out on the couch for a few hours, & then generally stumbling into bed until middle afternoon when the family returns & the home-from-school & Diane-home-from-work chaos begins. Drinking a few cups of instant coffee, a joint or a pipe at my word-processor in my room with a low radio or cassette, energizes my mind, gets my blood to pump up consciousness & jesus fuck hopefully some poems or something worthwhile, something with a future & echo. I mind Reality less when inter-connections develop particular passions of words capturing what's immediate via mind & senses. Unfortunately I've discovered more & more it's ok to let shit pass, it's ok to not write the mirrors; nor is the process of purging important thru Art, hell, what do the rest of the species do to let angst out. Or really, what is this angst shit anyhow? So I toss football with Doug in the backyard, or I paint the goddamn bathroom, or I watch "Wheel of Fortune", & into it. All too soon I'll be stabbing my card into the time-clock.
I suspect I'm ritualistic. 10:30 a minute or three either way seems consistent when i feel that snap in my hand, walk by around the corner into the locker-room. Number 87, motherfuckers, I find my little silver key on my key-chain & open the lock. First work-boots, then tool-box, then gloves & safety-glasses. I change my shoes. I carry my tool-box out to set somewhere around the Savage #4 machine by the time-clock, & fish for 30 cents in my pocket, step into the lunch-room to buy a coffee from the machine.
Difficult, fucking impossible, to describe Judy, sitting at a table I think WAITING for me. I talk to her near every night before the shift in the lunch-room. She tells me many personal thoughts. She's 55 & has lived a hard life, & she's nuts & crazy & very odd-looking & physically damaged & a farm-girl & divorced since '75 raising 3 boys on her own, etc..., doubtful she's EVER been caricatured in any sort of Literature before & I am not Chaucer. Judy is my friend. I feel for her, & am amazed she can do the work, suffer with so much ignorance from the company. The company is about 10,000 eons from ergonomics & compassion. & Judy works all the over-time. She's at top-rate at $14.05 an hour so her 6 day pay-check week after week is substantial to anything I know. I'm at 80% rate on a 3-year tier. The union is a motherfuck too. No, no over-time. Money, or an opportunity to write, or vegetate, or drink too much, & the money can rot in Hell. I hate money, it's always been problems big-time, the lack. Over-time makes me crazy, meaner than I usually am, more brutal with Diane (she doesn't understand). There's Judy so near Death her face hangs like a yawning walrus from her skull bleached by acetone & ravaged by ignorant production numbers, she's hump-backed, arthritic, knees giving out although she stands at her machines 48 hours a week year after year, she's heroic; so when Diane whines about petty bullshit, I have a hard time feeling especially sympathetic. Judy is the brunt of many sexual factory jokes -- I can't IMAGINE her naked, or the image is sheared off fast like a natural repression instinct else my head explodes & my cock implodes, bombed-out genital region resembling day-old Hiroshima. The guys are creative with their metaphors for Judy's pussy. Judy's oblivious & wld doubtfully care, or wld privately cry. She tells me she survives on just 2 hours of sleep a day. I like to bring a smile to her face, to see her glassed eyes light up like a young girl's. She talks a lot about her father who died a dozen years ago, memories & pain.
Diane is nuts too but hasn't earned as much pain as Judy, has less reasons to complain & fly back into girlhood. "Elgin Electronics is hiring 60 people by year's end, Diane, starting at 5.85 an hour, assembly-line work..."
"I HATE assembly work, I HATE it, I HATED it when I worked at the luggage factory when I first got out of high-school," she explains at my suggestion.
"But it's better than one hundred dollars a week!"
"I HATE assembly-lines," she repeats scattering her hands thru the kitchen like wild nervous wrens.
"Why don't you get a full-time job?"
"I HAVE a full-time job, two of them, 20 hours at the office & running the kids all over Creation every day of every week!"
Diane wins. I wish she brought in more than one hundred a week, which like buys food & makes it as if I worked top-rate comparative but not quite to Judy's check. Money is a sickening fuckface asshole. Diane wins. She gets money out of me all the time, & yes, we're always broke, savings depleted a long time ago, savings acquired when she worked as a Supervisor for a telemarketing office & brought in good weekly pay. That's the one time we had money about 5 years ago. In January I go to 90% rate, about another 40 bucks clear a week. Maybe I can save up, but let's not count on it.