PART ONE

I began to fit in at the factory. At first, when I smelled that metal smell, I didn't know if I would. But the smell crept into my clothes and I accepted it. I put my nose down and started grinding steel. "Making sparks" was what they called it. I was what Henry Miller called an automaton. I did my work and drove home and slept.

Oil and metal. That was my existence. Men and women all around me in their different races and ethnicities and sexualities working that oil and metal. The place welcomed failed musicians and all those others that failed and had to go to the factory as a necessity. The oil and metal crawled up in them and made them slavish. Anyone who threatened to leave would be looked upon, by the other employees, as traitors. The braver ones told us new hires to get the hell out before it was too late.

A year went by and coworkers would come tell me that they believed that I couldn't talk when I was hired. I was so quiet. And their talk of pussy and fucking and drinking wasn't anything that I could understand.

They would try to get me to go to the bar, to the strip club. One man wanted me to screw his ex-wife. One wanted me to go along with him and his wife to a swinger's bar. At a New Year's Eve party I got so drunk that I woke in the back of my Durango and just got the door opened before I vomited relentlessly. My head ached and throbbed. I walked back inside the house and saw naked humanity all around me and my head felt a pain that quickly became so severe, so perfect that I saw a light and fell and dozed on a pillow that some gray-haired swinger had vomited on.

People began seeking me out back in the inventory room. They ranged in character, but all were characters like those in a Dickens' book.

One was my boss, lanky like Ichabod Crane, who talked to me about books and music. A metallurgist and probably one of the most intelligent individuals that I've known. One day he just disappeared after the company built him a new lab and office. A week before he had shown me pictures of a woman he'd met in Thailand and encouraged me to fly there with him.

Many of my coworkers bought their brides from Vietnam. The Vietnamese men sat in their circles at lunch drinking their grass jelly. One confessed to having a homosexual affair which he blamed on Budweiser. We had a nice assortment of Vietnamese workers and they had family wanting to come over to the states so they worked the older guys who had a hard time getting women. "American women aren't worth a damn, P___," the old boys would tell me after they received their new wife. I would notice they replaced their daily Fritos and bologna sandwiches with containers of rice and pho.