At the end of the day on Monday, she made us all keep our seats and she announced that Todd Muhlberg was going to sing a hymn the right way for us and we were all going to listen to the right way before we went home. She kept the class after, because I didn’t know the words. This made me even more popular.
She made me go up to the front of the room. She picked a different song and she didn’t let me use the Missalette. I don’t know why she picked a different song. Maybe she figured I might have practiced the other one.
Then, when she had me up there, she made me wait until there was perfect silence.
I remember standing there with my hands folded, everybody looking at me, everybody ready to go. Their schoolbags were all on their desks.
She made me sing the whole thing. She made me repeat one part of it, because I messed it up. And the whole time I was singing I was looking at her, and here’s what I was thinking: I was thinking, You’re not making me a better person; you’re making me a worse person. I felt better, thinking that. What she made me sing still goes through my head at weird times:
For the sheep the Lamb has bled,
sinless, in the sinner’s stead.
Christ the Lord is risen on high.
Now He lives, no more to die.
BRUNO
Here’sa kinda jobs I had when I was a kid, these other guys were out with their seven iron at Fairchild-Wheeler: Laying asphalt. Spreading asphalt. Humping dirt for road crews, that whole Route 8 extension. Passivating. You want to see a shit job: this is a job people don’t even do anymore. Now they got machines, and they gotta replace those every few years. I was however old, twenty-two, I finally got hooked on at Vadnais Metals over on East Main Street, the first day I’m there the guy I’m supposed to report to doesn’t know what to do with me. Big, red-faced Polack; always looked like whatever you asked him was funny. Mr. Kuntz, I gotta take a leak. That’s funny? Mr. Kuntz, where do I punch out? That’s funny? I’m there bright and early Monday morning, got on new wool pants ’cause my uncle says, Light work. Mr. Kuntz is baffled. Mr. Kuntz has never heard of me. He says to the guy he’s with, We could put him on the passivator, and they give each other these looks, and I go, Oh, shit.
They take me down like seven levels of cellars. I’m thinking, Oh, this is lovely. We come to this concrete room, I can’t describe it. For light, there’s one bulb, handmade, Thomas Edison. Nothing on the walls. It’s a huge holding area where all these hollow metal cabinets are piling up. The size of small refrigerators, hollow, soldered together. One side of the room is this big stainless-steel pit, like a giant sink. Two feet deep, ten or twelve feet around. Drain in the middle. There’s a Puerto Rican in rubber hip boots and rubber gloves in the pit. He’s got this wand in his hand, wired to a portable generator. There are these big plastic tubs with screw-on tops next to him. One says WATER. One says HYDROCHLORIC ACID.
The Puerto Rican is introduced to me. The voices in there with the metal and the concrete, you can’t hear anything. Hector’s wearing safety glasses and his clothes are dotted with yellow, like somebody exploded a mustard bottle in front of him. There’s a little vent fan in the ceiling.
Here’s the drilclass="underline" Vadnais Metals is making its own metal cabinets, for who knows what. They solder the things together, the solder discolors the metal. They show me, with one of the cabinets waiting to be done. Even in the bad light I can see it: the little rainbow patterns around the joint, like the sun on oily water. That has to come off. Since it’s stainless steel, nobody’s sanding anything. What you do is you find some guys on the bottom of the food chain, Puerto Ricans from Father Panik Village or guineas from Kissuth Street who don’t know any better, and you show them how it’s done. How it’s done is these guys take a wand that’s charged with juice from the portable generators and they wrap the wands with gauze and rubber bands. Then they dip them into the hydrochloric acid. Then they swab the discoloration. Then the discoloration goes away, magic. Then they rinse off the cabinet with water. Then they do it again.
Except the electricity breaks down the gauze. So you gotta keep rewrapping the wand. And to do that you gotta take off your rubber gloves. And you rinse your hands afterwards but the acid doesn’t feel like anything until a minute goes by, and then it feels slick, and then it burns. And the acid eats through the rubber. And stuff gets sprayed around. And the fumes are a solid thing pressing into your face.
Just standing there, I was leaning back from the fumes. I said, Hey, turn on the vent, and Hector said, the first thing he said to me, It’s on.
I’m looking at this and I go to Mr. Kuntz, When do I start? and he goes, Start now. I go, In these? and put my hands on both sides of these new wool pants. Pathetic.
The headaches. The burns, when the shit got down into your gloves between your fingers. You’d go to rub your eye and you’d think, Oh. Very nice. That wasn’t close, was it?
They left me there, that first day. I heard the door shut and heard them go all the way up the stairs. They were metal stairs. Near the top, Mr. Kuntz said something and the other guy roared. Laughed so hard he had to stop on the stairs to get his breath. Hector went on without me for a little while. The first thing I did was fold up the cuffs on my pants. I remember realizing this Puerto Rican felt sorry for me.
He showed me how to get into the clammy rubber waders, how to check the gloves for prior damage. Everything that was wet, I thought, Acid. It was nine-twenty-five. I already had a headache from the fumes. I pulled over my first cabinet. It flexed and boomed with that sheet-metal sound. There was nowhere for the sound to go. Hector hit the light cord tipping his cabinet over, and it circled our heads, swinging shadows around like we were in a mad scientist’s lab.
Those wool pants that first day had the ass eaten out of them. My shorts underneath were yellow and mealy, like wet Kleenex. You could roll pieces off them with your fingers. I punched out that day with a hole in my pants, like somebody in a vaudeville show. I stood there and punched out. My ass was cold. It was funny to Mr. Kuntz and funny to everyone else. Get a load of this, you gotta see this. Standing there at the time clock looking for his card, a wop with his ass hanging out.
Hector got moved out after three weeks, complaining of headaches. The day Hector left, I went upstairs and said, Hey, I got headaches, too. Mr. Kuntz said, Hey, kid, I got prostate. Sally’s got a drinking problem. Hermie’s got a stutter. What do you want from me? Two weeks after that I had to stay out a day, I got acid in my eye, the son of a bitch fired me, no questions asked. I had nothing, twenty-two years old, I’m holding my hand on my ass.
I run into a lotta women attracted to me, it’s the same story: Bruno, there’s something different about you, I don’t know why I’m so interested. Bruno, I’m thirty-five years old, unmarried. I live with my mother, she’s a burden on me, I’m not unattractive, I still have my looks. Bruno, I never know what you’re thinking. Meanwhile, their eyes: they’d hate me if they could.
Love. Everybody’s thinking about love.
Two years after that job, I drove up to the University of Hartford and found the dorm where Mr. Kuntz’s daughter was a college coed. Eighteen years old, small ass, bobbed hair, in her room she did stretching exercises, legs out to here. They locked the dorms at eleven o’clock, but that was a joke. Her room was on the fourth floor. She left her fire-escape windows open.