DAIRY FAIRY part one//
Watching the clock at the end of my shift, third shift. Seven minutes left. Not supposed to go lurk by the punch clock in case there is some last minute emergency or a truck comes in right at the end of the shift because itâs that shiftâs responsibility even if they have to stay an extra half hour although the old woman will get mad if you get overtime before her. But itâs like what can you do when that truck comes in just before shift change.
Killing seven minutes, with six bullets. Means two minutes must be killed all at once, together. Maybe Iâll let the last one live. When I do get to the punch clock by the door I say to one of the guys from the factory floor, âYou know that movie Gone in 60 Seconds?â He nods and I say as I punch the card, âThatâs me.â And I go out the door into the parking lot which is full of exact copies of the Plant Engineerâs pick up truck, all come in for first shift. Itâs the same truck because a map-system of influence can be drawn from a single point outward to all the other trucks, men wanting to replicate the Plant Engineer. Waiting at the outer gate in a line of revving cars to leave is one of the most dangerous moments of the workday because workers are so eager to get the fuck out of there and so tired they may misjudge the space and speed of oncoming traffic on the 50 mph road and have an accident. When itâs my turn to go, I go.
I defy, challenge, dare you to be the same person at work and then remain him once you come home. A coherent identity splintered apart by two-way commutes. The wish I made during working hours was miraculously granted when I made it home. But by then I wasnât the same person. One person canât make a wish for another, the desire must come from a single, strong, steady point, a homing beacon to guide the wish in for its final landing. By the time the wish arrived in my vicinity, hours later, the signal had died within me, had been jammed or broken up by an internal indecision about who to be. Nothing but emptiness for the stray wish to track, only a few filaments of the bright inner majesty I formerly knew still clinging together, readying for their forecasted disintegration. I have no example of a wish in this case because the wish either was granted and thus disappeared, or wasnât granted and forgotten.
I donât always go straight home. I sometimes go to the diner for breakfast with the other power elites at 7:30 or 8 in the morning. Still in white dairy plant clothes, white cotton pants and white cotton short sleeve shirt over black tee shirt. Steel-toed boots they had us all fitted for. No hairnet outside the plant although I have forgotten. Beheading hostages on the tv screen, on the news, how do you behead a bald infidel, canât display the head to the camera. Nothing to grab. Are you ready to face the consequences of caring?
At the diner, in the bathroom on the second floor above the diner, next to the urinal, a shadow-shaped outline of paint scoured away by decades worth of uric vapor. Later I go down and eat eggs and bacon and read a few pages of a smarty pants book and when I go to pay a wiry mountain man in a brown sweat-stained baseball cap sitting there at the counter watches me close up as I stand at the register paying the waitress, he scrutinizes me looking for possible sparks of affection. Not his own, not hers (maybe), but mine. A defense against me? My presence disturbs him, and his complicated his routine of love from afar. He loves the waitress with the body. If I had to describe her body I would say it was packed in to her tight clothes. What great half of hot is that. And the guy in the brown hat is mad whenever thereâs a young man around in the diner where she can see. Itâs chivalry. Slight antagonism of the small talk. His eyes told me I wasnât allowed to talk to her. The measure of all yikes. I am not enough sponge-like. The perfect uniformity of the ripples the morning breeze shuttled down the 100 foot awning outside the diner when I leave and the brown-hatted guy can relax into his unrequited love quicksand.
I sometimes buy a paper at the diner. Itâs the Iraq invasion every day.
My wife when I get home is pregnant. Sheâs sitting on the floor top of the heating grate from the furnace in this old poorly heated house we bought as newlyweds. Donât get me started on this house. One wall of the dining room is her books and on the opposite side of the house near the grate in the floor where my wife sits are my bookshelves. The triangular gaps created by leaning books falling into nearby spaces on the shelf will make little spots where I hide drugs, after I leave that encircled fortress of employment where they do drug tests for the larger wilderness of other jobs. You see the fruits of too much spare time. A man at work, idleness has fed my lust, has led me down in pursuit of phantasy. Leaving enough room to call this a mistake. On the hinges of the family. Does the word âwarmâ fit? My wife most days will take a bath and there is a time when Iâm invited to watch and then a time when Iâm not, and the boundary between these two periods of time went by unnoticed by me in my distraction. But the pregnancy was in the first interval. My wife will complete a memoir in the time it takes for the bathtub to fill up. Her body shifts down so that her knees rise up out of the warm water in complementary simultaneity to her head plunging below it. An occasion when a male friend had shown up at the outer door of her apartment years ago, and she had invited him in, and had eventually closed up the evening by demonstrating to him how she could swallow even while upside down. A handstand next to a glass of water, with a straw at the ready which I held to give to her. From a costly honeymoon lanai I could see hexagonal extruded lava-chunks caressed by millennia of tides, coconut trees slanted outward against a worldâs age worth of winds, the drifting tortoise-pods luring the snorkelers out to sea. And curving tire tracks in snow couldnât be further from my mind. The outdoor restaurants on Kauai were designed to catch the sunset for optimal photography. As if weâd never seen a sunset. But there was peer pressure to snap away. A third figureâs influence defining the honeymoon, leaving fingerprints on the marriage.
I go to bed after my third shift at the dairy processing plant and if it becomes my day off weâll have dinner after my sleep and watch a movie. The main character in the movie will wait until my wife comes back from the bathroom to kick the crap out of the other character. Or weâll watch a documentary. The jump cut in the interview style documentary, that my wife hates so much, is a marker that all that was said isnât being presented to the viewer. A selection of footage of the war criminal interviewee has attempted to sneak by my wife. Better to make the cut conspicuous and âclearly a cutâ than to try to smoothly edit through the cut. Is seamlessness better than roughness in propaganda. A foothold for skepticism in this war year. At least they offered one.
Iâd been married once before. At a music festival in western New York. I was married for a short time to a crunchy belly dancer and her dog when I leaped over the leash that was pulled tight between them, she walked one way, the dog darted the other and I cleared the leash and our five second marriage began. Short term marriages were the norm at music festivals. In the dark around bonfires, youâd twirl a glow-in-the-dark ring around your finger and try to pass it to a girl moving her finger in circles like yours and if you passed the spinning ring successfully you were married. It was the division of imaginative labor amongst playing children. Women as enzymes acted on me. Four of them preparing for the final bond, my wife. Or is it an ongoing reaction? I suppose it has to do with feelings, when love is breathing down your neck and has you in its grip, and you still have some hope left, then it is easy to feel inspired. Or itâs not love breathing down your neck, itâs infatuation breathing, with a love-flavored mint in its mouth.
The wife leaves me each night while she stands still and I go to work at the dairy plant, I expect the good terms to be fixed and stick around for a while. But when we say goodbye for the night the terms always go her way, follow her into the dream world, and sleep is when the decoding happens, that or the deciding, and if they start going sour with her, when we say hello again these sour terms leap back out at me and itâs up to me to sweeten them again. A wobbling, a staggering that began years ago but went unregarded, passed off as a pas de deux.
Sometimes I canât sleep after work and I spend my time cleaning up in a parallel dimension where Iâm not me. Books of blank checks I canât shred. I wonder how the quadruped escapes the backache. Like a tarantula I crawl behind things, clean behind bookshelves and find old pictures, dusty love notes from other men from before she met me where the ex-boyfriend talks about how he looks forward to when they can fuck like demented ferrets.
I try to sleep but when you work third shift youâre sleeping at the same time all your retired or unemployed neighbors are motivated by middle class American anxieties to mow their lawns or chainsaw brush. Earplugs are feeble barriers against the noise of American suburban (sub-rural?) neighborhoods doing their insectile mindless activities. I went into other planes of exhaustion and flopped around in our bed like a kid in need of exorcism, unable to sleep, curtains drawn. My pregnant wife was on maternity leave and drank a lot of tea in other rooms, reading magazines like the Atlantic or the New Yorker, articles about the modern woman, how she didnât need a man to financially support her. We were married and normal and making our stake in a USA at war with Saddam Hussein.
***
First I worked as a temp at the calendar factory putting together wire display racks for calendars that you see in malls. Calendars of ducks and kittens and puppies. Or girls in bikinis. The calendars teaching you month by month how to use Latin phrases do not sell. Anyway the factory managers timed us putting together the racks and filling them with calendars and then the manager who would walk around hitting the lump of change in his pants pocket with the clipboard said we had to do it faster. Clipping the wire racks together repetitively over hours and hours hurts the fingers but me and the other temps get into this groove and get faster. Factory life. Later I read about how in Japan at Toyota factories they would gradually speed up the assembly line without telling the workers, they were looking for stress points, places where the work flow breaks down, in order to study the process and make things better. But keeping the worker in the dark as to the big picture is essential.
Then I left that job and got temp work at the dairy processing plant. I was trying to get the job in QC, quality control big bucks but at first my duties were just getting rid of the backlog of rancid quarts and gallons on milk that theyâd used for microbiology. I spent days and days cutting open cartons of milk and heavy cream that had been sitting in the hot tiled room in the sun for weeks. And dumping the contents into these big plastic totes the size of a jacuzzi that would then be sold to pig farmers to feed hogs. Some of this milk youâd have to see to believe. It had whole civilizations of mold in it. Or it was just like a solid cube of rancid stuff. The smell was something not of this world. Iâd take the empty cartons and put them in large plastic garbage bags and carry them on a long winding pathway through all the cavernous rooms in the plant, the wet tile and brickwork, to the loading bay out the bay doors to the dumpsters outside. The plant had looming massive tanks on the outside that you knew were full of milk, enough milk to drown a kindergarten class, milk getting ready for production.
Sometimes my garbage bags would leak on my way through the plant and Iâd get verbally assaulted by the shift manager who was trying to keep the plant interior, where they packaged the product, cleaner than Howard Hughesâ operating room. So youâd have to go back through your whole path like you were following breadcrumbs, except it wasnât breadcrumbs, what youâd leaked was like cottage cheese, drips and puddles of rancid milk. And youâd mop it up with soapy hot water.
The noise in both factories was dense and full of long echoes. Chambers full of complex stainless steel pipes and brushed tanks and conveyor belts marching ever onward pursuing holographic dollar signs for the company. Industrial sound environments shattered by the booming voices on the PA speakers. The hand phone calling out to you to answer. Some of these guys on the factory floor wouldnât answer. They were hot shit. In the calendar factory it was the printer technicians who all wore sunglasses inside and acted like they were in Top Gun. They walked around chewing tobacco and people moved out of their way. In the dairy processing plant it was the guys in the control room or down in the packaging room. Heroes. Men.
After weeks and weeks of terrible paychecks they eventually started training me to work in the lab. I had an English degree but I guess because I was college educated I had potential to learn all the science of the QC lab. The backlog of rancid milk that had turned to cheese in the heat had shrunk, Iâd gotten it under control. So I started learning on first shift what happens in the lab.
You have to take a complicated array of samples from all points along the production line, from incoming milk trucks to be accepted or rejected according to allowed parameters of bacteria levels, absence of antibiotics which if they got into milk put on shelves at the supermarket could kill people with allergies, fats and solids content of the milk (this was most important as it allows the processing plant to control for skim, 2%, whole milkâyou canât put a label on a product if it doesnât have the right characteristics that the customer wants). Then samples from batches from the milk tanks before mixing and âflashing,â or bringing up to a high enough temperature to kill all the bacteria and pasteurize it, the âkill step.â Then you took samples from the packaged milk, whipped cream, ice cream, half and half, as it was spit out of the packaging room: one sample every half hour and you had to keep close records of every interval of production because they wanted to know if there was some contamination in the product down to the half hour. Those samples got run through all kinds of sophisticated equipment to detect microbiological activity as well as pipetted into huge stacks and stacks of Petrifilm which then went into a heated oven for I think it was two days or so, the ovenâs heat recreated the conditions that mold or bacteria could grow in the milk or ice cream so the lab would know it before it got released to the market. Recalls are a nightmare for the corporation. Bad publicity and trust with consumers that it takes Herculean efforts to rebuild. Food manufacturers had learned the hard way how to put measures in place to ensure that nothing contaminated with harmful bacteria or other hazardous substances would ever make it to your supermarket shelves.
Working in the dairy processing plant, each worker was allowed to take home two items free every day: quarts or half-gallons of milk, chocolate milk, 1/2 and 1/2, usually. Iâd leave work and on my forty minute drive home Iâd kill a quart of chocolate milk like I was a drunk driver getting gassed off the divine nectar of cows. Pastoral Greek poetry, Theocritus writing the idylls and odes to fats and solids and cocoa powder in the milk. Lactose intolerance of the bovine goddesses.