Navvy
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Working as a day laborer was a good way to learn
the city.
You got sent all over town and had to find your own way back.
The people you worked with were full of information about the character of different
neighborhoods. Or transportation shortcuts.
The jobs were interesting, to
a writer.
They were like the jobs George Orwell held in Down and Out in
Paris and London, or Barbara Ehrenreich held in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America. Only more disagreeable, scary, and downright dangerous.
Temps were hired to do jobs employers couldn't get their regular help to do.
The worst one was the refinery where sulfuric acid was piped overhead, and there
were freshwater showers to jump under if a pipe burst and the acid was eating your
flesh.
The pipes leaked, and you would be walking along and walk into an
invisible vapor which made you cough, and imagine a pink mist of lung tissue coming
up.
Also, the showers weren't tested, and probably didn't work.
Another
fun job was sorting metal at a scrap metal recycler.
A crane with a magnet
picked up iron, and loaded it into a box car, and the pieces of metal that weren't
iron had to be disentangled from the load, or fell off, and the metal was jagged,
sharp, there were dropping pieces, swinging booms, there was debris to slip on underfoot,
broken glass, that ground into your shoe soles, and ruined them.
Heap fed
4' x 8' sheets of sheetrock into a press break and sheared them into smaller pieces,
then loaded the smaller pieces onto a fork-lift pallet. All day long. Then overtime.
Two two-man teams. One man was always awkward, uncoordinated, lacked rhythm, or
didn't give a shit about the other guy.
There was dust, choking dust. There
was noise, there were odors, the floor shook, sparks flew, molten lava rolled down
an active volcano somewhere.
Heap went on Hurricane Camille clean-up, to
Buras, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, down Bayou Lafourche. Dead livestock,
ruined houses, ruined boats, dead people. Chain saws, axes, pitchforks, and shovels.
Once in a while a Mason jar of potted shrimp, out in the sun for several days, if
you broke one of those, you would regret it.
Heap was issued a chain saw,
early in the day, and pulled on it so that the blade snapped off. They gave him
a shovel instead, and he had to wait for the next dump truck, or end-loader, I don't
remember. But using that chainsaw all day long would have killed him, even though
he was in good physical shape from shoveling dirt all summer the summer just past.
Heap leaning on the shovel like a navigator, or navvy.
On the ride back
to New Orleans, one of the other navvies had a bottle, which was passed around.
Heap drank, and listened to the men talk philosophically, fatalistically, and with
a rueful gallows humor, about the joys of being a drunk. A borracho. Yee-haw.
Cantina music. The light, coming through the dirty window. As Malcolm Lowry says.