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Blood
by Squid
19 December 2003
"That God became man indicates only this: that man should not
seek his salvation in eternity, but rather establish his heaven on earth."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Working every day, we end up asking ourselves what it can all be for. We
lug, we tug, we strain and grope, pouring our sweat and blood into the
limitless and grinding labor that always seems to produce such substantial
things, but with no appreciation. The question is almost always rhetorical,
though. We know why we do it. We know that over time, our work begins to
define us. It turns us into men, capable of all that comes our way. It
changes us into an enviable form of life that is free from the standard
constraints of the workforce. Nine to five means nothing to us. We work
the hours that we demand, and in the conditions that we require. We know
that there are few people who have what it takes to succeed in a field where
long hours and blistered hands are the only companions that you have, and we
know that of the few jobs out there that a require the same toughness as
brainpower, we measure up. Still, after a time, the question of why you do
it begins to linger in your head. It begins to gnaw at your reason, and
bothers you wherever you go.
After all, people pity you for who you are. They look at you with disgust,
when they even look at you at all. They make you walk through the side
door, even when your shoes are cleaner than their floor is. They say, "Oh .
. . how nice!" when they hear what you do, and think of how depressing it is
that people have to do such things in order to survive. You try to give
them a sensible reason why you're involved in the trades, but for some
reason, their stare that is laced with such phony approval always seems to
make you falter, and your rationale always seems so false, even to yourself.
You give yourself the reasons, you've memorized them in fact, and no one
can ever convince you that you are not part of a skilled workforce, or that
your services are not essential to American life. Still, there comes that
cold winter day when the frost clings to your face, when the warmest thing
around to provide you with comfort is the water flowing from your broken
main. Huddled, angry, and with your hands submersed in freezing water to
avoid frostbite, your reason fails; you begin to wonder.
People sometimes ask me why I do what I do. The answer depends entirely on
who asks. I usually just tell them what they want to hear, which is some
sappy nonsense about skilled labor. I don't tell them the truth, though –
not ever. In fact, I've never told anyone how I really feel about working.
Never.
This one time we got a call to go to some Section-Eight shithole in
Washington Heights so that we could replace about a hundred feet of
baseboard in a crack apartment. The job had to be done that day, because
Housing had somehow gotten involved, and cared very much about the fact that
these people had no heat. Just looking at the building told you of what to
expect inside it. Broken windows, garbage and dog shit on the sidewalk, and
a front door half hanging off of its hinges all added to the first
impression. Carrying our tools up to floor five of this place, we knocked
on the door and were let in. That smell? You get so used to it that it
doesn't even phase you. The place was an absolute wreck. From underneath
an overturned couch, a kitten with a face that was half covered in scabs ran
over and wanted to play, but a hidden kick sent it flying out of the room
and back into the darkness. I walked into the kitchen and saw a few hundred
cockroaches in one corner, but only a dozen or so on the baseboard that I
had to change. Like I said, you learn how to deal with it. So I took the
cover off and smacked it hard against the floor to get the few cockroaches
off of it and out of my way. With that, a pile of rust came flying off the
cover and hit the ground, and when it landed, it squirmed, spread, and
started jumping all over the place.
In my first encounter with fleas, they ambushed and got the best of me.
We had to come back after a few minutes with duct tape around our sleeves
and ankles and necks, and I ended up shaving my head that night. We called
the foreman, but got the usual "just deal with it" attitude from him, so we
ended up going into each corner, and we used bug spray to try to clean the
floors. The spray was too slow, so we ended up using the acetylene torch
with a wide head to clear the vermin away from where we had to work. The
itch on my neck didn't die down for three days.
The first few years, I wondered how men did some things without complaining.
Every time I saw a man clean a grease trap with a screwdriver, or use a
jackhammer for twelve hours straight, or jump out a 440 line with his bare
hands, I wondered how he could be so strong, and so resilient. No amount of
sludge, glop, or goo will cause him to waver from his goal, and if his job
takes all night, he will not stop until it is done. The prospect of injury
and death is laughable, because his years in the field have made him strong
and have tamed his stomach. He now looks at life with a crooked eye, one
that allows him to whimsically and sarcastically confront any challenge that
may approach him. The physical strength to carry out a project, and the
mental fortitude required to see something to its finish have become a part
of his being. He seems simply to belong.
Their abilities are amazing, but the sorrow! Such sorrow exists past their
expressions of vigor. You can see it in the corners of their mouths, and
under their eyes. You can see in the way that they walk, with that little
shuffle as they pack up to go home for the night, or with the groan that
they utter at age thirty as they rise from their seat. They feel so
pathetic as they work for a person who doesn't know any of their names, and
as they each collect a paycheck that seems to shrink from week to week.
They know that in a time of crisis, they will use their heads and save the
boss a million dollars, and they will always receive their just compensation
-- one day's pay. Raises? Once they begin to appreciate what the boss gives
them already, then they'll be ready for a raise. Until then, they are
resigned to the fact that they will never be recognized for their work other
than in a curt and insincere "Thank you" from their foreman at the end of a
job. If they're really lucky, they might even get lunch bought for them.
Through it all, the anger dwells, and slowly builds, eventually becoming in
itself the genuine question of why they bother to deal it, day in and day
out.
We were doing a gas job in Alphabet City in the middle of July when the
super kicked in the door of one of the last apartments that we couldn't get
into. On those jobs, you have to get into each apartment to do some work on
the piping behind the stove. The super was greeted by mail that was six
weeks old and a stench that could have melted lead.
I heard that the guy was dead for over a month, so when the lead mechanic
asked who would go in with him, I naturally volunteered. After the minimum
wage morgue guys flung the body onto their van, we went in, armed with Lysol
cans and with plastic wrapped around our boots. The guy died right in from
of the stove, and had melted into the linoleum tile, because there was a
slippery layer of heat-rendered fat that had drained towards the middle of
the floor, and a spot of blackened fluid on the cabinet where his exploding
intestines had left their mark. Maggots were sprinkled into his residue,
adding that special touch to the already vile display.
Of all the things I've ever dealt with, this one brought me closest to
losing it. The smell and the heat mixed to create a hammer of nausea that
became embedded in my stomach. It stopped me from even offering to do the
work.
The two of us had to both grab the stove to move it, and we had a hard time
because the tile was messed up from the morgue guys having to rip it up
along with the body. After the stove was put back, I just wanted to get the
hell out of there. The guy was a packrat, with forty year old garbage all
over the place, and in my haste to leave I tripped over some old pots and
pans and landed on my knees, right in the leftover gore that was all over
the place.
Those pants got thrown out.
There are times when it seems as if you've become nothing but a washed-up
high school dropout. There are times when the simple frustrations of life
will build up to convince you that your life is meaningless. That feeling
can go on for weeks, months even, but then something will always happen that
lets you realize that what you do has so much more meaning than do the
things that caused you to doubt yourself in the first place. Imagine, being
on a fishing trawler for six weeks on the high seas. Imagine the constant
work, the five hours of sleep every night, the frozen extremities, and the
hopelessness of being surrounded by the stink of fish and of sweaty men.
Imagine that your entire world has been co-opted by this existence, this
monotonous and repetitive droning of tortuous and exhausting labor. Then,
imagine that single morning when you awake from your sleep to find your
fatigue completely at rest, and a curious longing in your brain. Envision
that time when you rise to the deck, inhaling the air as nature intended it
to exist, and with a vision of eternity that lies all around, uninterrupted
by the contraptions of man and the ugliness of his presence. At that moment
you would have experienced the world as few have ever before you. Perhaps
it was the feeling of Cortez as he gazed upon America, or of Philippides as
he proclaimed his people's victory with his dying breath. You would have
worked for your reward, which was made never more sweet than in the wake of
such a trying time.
It is no vacation snapshot or sorry and contrived memory of forced
appreciation! It is whole life full of the genuine article! It is a life
of constant and meaningful observation, of discovery, of wonderment! It is
done for so much more than can ever be described. All the nights of anger,
numbness, and pain give you a gratitude towards life that you never knew you
had. It turns you into a man -- it is that simple.
Those who know nothing about such things would dismiss them as being the
feeble rationalization of a person who knows that his path is worthless, but
the pure existential sense of feeling your life blood pumping through your
veins in the most primordial of instinct, that element that is survival,
transcends psychology. The sheer will to construct, to build, to survive --
these forgotten aspects of life all add together to create a drive in our
beings that so few can possess. These are the things which will lead to
salvation, they are the things that allow us to truly realize who we are,
and why we are here.
We do it because it is healthy, because it makes us strong. Beyond all of
that, though, we know in the depths of our beings what the true reason is.
There is no selfishness in it, nor is there any scrap of self-sacrifice or
pompous aggrandizement. Our deepest instincts tell us why it is to be done.
Without it, we would be dead, in every way.
We do it because it is the right thing to do.
SQUID
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