The job sounded more appealing when I heard it was three days on and two days off. In actuality, I was so exhausted on my days off that all I could do was catch up on sleep and maybe do laundry and food shopping. I didn’t know how people with kids managed this job. We only had one ten-minute break before our half-hour lunch and one ten-minute break after. We got cheated in those twelve-hour shifts because there should have been another ten-minute break in there, but the union didn’t enforce it. To leave our stations for the restroom we had to wave down a relief man who was often being used for other work in the warehouse, so it was easier just to wait until break.
Night after night I stood on the slatted platform. Groups of 278 can lids on three separate tracks, one above the other, jiggled and jangled their way in front of me. Using my forefinger and middle finger, I shoved them into long paper bags with, then flipped the top of the bag over and swung it onto a neatly stacked pallet, a row of sixteen alternating with a row of seventeen so they wouldn’t fall off. Each pallet held 247 bags—68,666 lids. Boring beyond belief, the work was also backbreaking. And the noise was not only deafening but it shook your entire body. I often lost all sense of myself as a person in that place. Shakespeare, poetry, and the thought of beautiful music saved me. I clung to Auden’s “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.” I longed to sleep in someone’s arms and be soothed and loved for who I was: “Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful.”
Cackle, cackle, cackle, changle, changle, changle—a high-pitched unreproducible rattle that wouldn’t stop and made you want to throw things. Imagine doing the shoving with the fingers, flipping the bag onto the pallet and as quickly as possible because you’d have to deal with the next row sooner than you could finish. For twelve hours you drove your body like a big truck to keep up with the machine. If your line stopped, a big red flashing light went off at your station, and the foreman and everyone else knew you had messed up and shut the machine down.
I was drawn to Karen from the first moment I saw her in that thunderous plant. I felt an intense rush inside, close to my heart, with the world crashing down around me. Or at least I wished it would crash and crush all those cans. Her deep green eyes pulled me across the piled pallets, a lifeline to love and affection, like a sniff of that white powder. Despite her silky long hair and her soft, almost babyish face, she looked so butch, so tough and strong. I wanted to lean against her big body whenever I saw her on the plant floor, to bring my hands up to her shoulders and nuzzle my face against hers.
I learned a lot about Karen from the start, and I wondered how I could want someone like her. We’d sit in the restroom, lingering, relishing, avoiding going back to work. “I really love pot,” she’d tell me, “and coke just blows my mind. I wish I could have it more often.” I sat there not knowing what to say because I never did drugs and didn’t like being around them.
“Did you ever freebase?” she asked. I barely knew what that meant.
“No,” I said. “I don’t do drugs. It’s just too scary if you get caught. And they can easily frame you up too. I don’t mess with the stuff.” Back in my teenage years, this guy I went out with kept trying to get me to smoke dope. After a few drags, I was either afraid of losing control or overcome by an intense feeling of paranoia.
The crazy atmosphere in the plant was conducive to drugs—the noise, the time pressure, the night work, the repetition. There were a couple of techs and a new young white woman, Pat, who did cocaine. She got thinner and thinner the longer she worked there. What a waste! I guess I got high by thinking about sex, fantasizing about Karen or someone else I couldn’t have, that unattainable pleasure. Was that the same as a drug?
Those 6:00 a.m. mornings in Edison were cold and incredibly lonely. To work all night and drive home to Newark, then sleep through the day gives you a true understanding of the word zombie.
When we went out for breakfast to the Edison Diner one morning after work, the waitress was pale and drawn, shadows under her eyes. “I’ve been up all night,” she said.
“So have we,” I told her. There was an instant bond between us. She touched my shoulder and smiled weakly. That camaraderie was better than a perfect breakfast. Only other night workers can truly get it.
Did Shakespeare ever have it? That feeling of blood pumping up from your legs to keep you going, your breath getting shorter, your heart beating faster and closer to your chest. You see the world all glimmery, you want strange things. You get a certain adrenaline rush after conquering the night like that, but meanwhile you’ve given away so much. You spend your off days recovering, sleeping, getting your life together for the next two nights. You can’t really socialize because everyone else is on a different time schedule, a different plane of existence.
I could see why people did coke. You had to do something to get through the insane hours and grueling work, and you might as well do something that gave you a push to keep going. Me, I alternated my sex fantasies with Shakespeare.
Before work I’d write out one of my favorite sonnets that I wanted to memorize on a tiny piece of paper. I wouldn’t want my ever-vigilant boss to notice. I’d tuck it into my jeans, reach for it whenever I had a hand free, and bask in the next line. Sometimes I would lay the paper in a strategic position at my station; while I worked I could see it on the shelf above my rows of can lids or near the pile of paper bags stamped with numbers.
“When my love swears she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies…” I’d say the lines over and over till Will’s rhythms overpowered the clamoring machines.
Before the romance started, Karen and I would sometimes maneuver our way off our machines simultaneously for a break in the ladies’ room. It wasn’t easy because there were only two relief men and one was a jerk, a real company man. He would tell the supervisor if the relief break was too long. In the quiet of the pukey green room, we sat on the couch, sometimes complaining about the techs or about Andy, our foreman, who looked like Gomer Pyle with a stick up his ass.
One day I confided to Karen that I memorized Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and other poets on the line to keep from going insane.
“That’s pretty cool,” she said with a laugh. “You know, I write songs.”
“Really, what kind?” I was thrilled. I had always felt attracted to musicians.
“Well, they’re kind of like folk songs, but they’re not like anyone’s I know.”
“That’s really great!”
“You know Tony’s a jazz musician?” Tony was one of the few male operators.
“All right! I’m in good company—I write poetry.”
“God, isn’t it awful that artists have to work in this pit?” Karen grimaced.
“Yes.” I grew sad thinking of the machines stamping out those endless lids and people being forced to follow the machine rhythms. “No one should have to do this work.”