Working Years
I got my first factory job when I was nineteen years old.
I’d dropped out of college and was sleeping on a couch
in my oldest brother’s apartment in Springdale, Arkansas.
It was 1989. I was debt-free, driving an old VW Bug, paying
my brother a hundred dollars a month for rent. I’d worked
a few fast food jobs and washed dishes at the Red Lobster
for $3.45 an hour, so the seven bucks an hour a factory position
offered sounded like more money than I could spend.
The job was at the recently opened Newly Weds Food plant, a production and distribution center for the breading, seasonings and batter Newly Weds Foods made for frozen food companies and fast-food giants like KFC and Long-John Silver’s.
While I was in the lobby of the plant office filling out an
application I met Ben, a future coworker. He was a big guy,
close to my age, with red hair and a full beard. He had a
thick, freckled nose and wore a black Van Halen T-Shirt cut
off at the sleeves. In my buttoned-up dress shirt, I felt
like a boy on his way to Sunday school.
The plant supervisor who interviewed me wore white coveralls
and a hair net. He glanced at my application, then looked
me over and asked if I lifted weights. I lied and told him
I did. He tossed the application on his desk. “Well
you won’t need to, anymore.”
The plant itself was a big open warehouse, rows and rows of pallets, maybe a hundred yards back, all stacked ten layers high with fifty-pound bags of breading and batter mix. Along one side an iron catwalk rose up against huge bins and mixers, with hoses, tubes and wires snaking down to machines fastened beside a wide conveyor belt. Even with earplugs I could hear the constant rattle of the belt and the whine of blowers and electric motors. And the smell of the place was rich and exotic, cayenne pepper and turmeric and other spices hanging in the air, stinging my eyes.
My first night at work I stood in one place, lifting bags
of mixed breading from the conveyor and stacking them on wood
pallets, five sacks to a layer, ten layers high. Every thirty
seconds another fifty-pound sack would jostle over on the
conveyer belt. Once the pallet was full, the forklift driver
would come take it off to the warehouse, and I’d start
on a new pallet.
It turned out I had the second hardest job. Ben stood over at the hopper filling up the sacks, tucking in the opening and tossing them to the conveyer belt. Filling sacks at the hopper required one hand to hold down a release valve, and that left only the other hand to grip the sack as it filled, getting heavier and harder to hold until it was full and sliding out of your grasp. At break time Ben showed me the blister the slipping bags had worn on his right thumb. He said he tried wearing a glove on that hand but couldn’t grip the bags. By around eight that night, I noticed a brown thumb print on each sack rolling up the conveyor. It was blood. I looked over and Ben had a frown on his face but he wasn’t stopping. It was our first night, and we both knew we had to prove ourselves if we wanted to get off the line.
I’m a teacher and writer, now, and most of my friends and colleagues are as over-educated and out of shape as I am. I have to go out of my way to raise a callus or break a sweat, so it’s hard to imagine doing that kind of back-breaking labor anymore, putting in those long hours of repetitive motion and numbing boredom. But it was the path my father and brothers had taken. I suppose it was where I expected to end up all along.
Ben offered me crystal meth once, but I turned him down.
He didn’t make a big deal about it. A lot of the guys
I met working factory jobs took cheap speed—everything
from homemade crank to trucker pills. Anybody who doesn’t
understand why meth is a problem hasn’t worked a ten-hour
shift lifting fifty-pound bags of breading. A shift just like
the last one and the last six hundred before that and just
like all the countless ones still to come.
I worked at the Newly Weds plant for three months, then quit
because my best friend was coming home from the Army and we
were driving to New Orleans. My supervisor wouldn’t
let me off, but I went anyway. I later ended up working factory
jobs for five years, unloading trucks, operating a boiler,
driving a forklift. I went back to college and worked until
eleven and stayed up finishing homework. I quit factory work
for good the week of my 25th birthday, the week I started
graduate school and started teaching.
Thinking about those working years now, I have to struggle
to remember how hard it was. Looking back, it begins to appear
almost peaceful, almost relaxing. It’s true there was
a meditative quality to the job; most jobs required no thinking,
which left my mind free for hours at a time. I do remember
lots of conversation. In all my factory jobs, there were hours
and hours of talking, every night. Having your hands busy
makes you want to talk, to listen, to share. Like sorting
beans with your grandma or helping your father wash a car.
In our talks, I learned a lot about Ben. He had been in trouble
with the law, spent a couple six-week stints in jail. He claimed
that two Sheriff’s deputies from Madison County once
handcuffed him, kicked him around on the road and rolled him
into a ditch. He hadn’t finished high school. He told
me he couldn’t swim and was afraid of driving over bridges.
He said he had a baby girl for a while but she died. We also
talked about music and God and women and money and about how
tired we were, how we would do just about anything to have
a sit-down job.
But that was a long time ago. I’m older, now. My hands are soft. These days, the hardest work I do is stare at a blank computer screen and try to remember how it felt to be that tired.