Work and self worth

Monday I got the call from the Business Agent.

"Have you worked in a while?" He said.

"No," I responded.

"Have you done much rebar?" He said. "The guy said he didn't want anyone green."

I squared with him. "Well John, the last rebar job I had sent me packing after about three weeks."

"I'm a firm believer if you can keep the pace then you can do the work." He said, coaching me through the basics. "Just put a snap tie on and move on."

"You're green as fuck!" said the foreman at the job site. He was an employee of Rebar Specialists, reinforcing steel operation out of Missouri with ironworkers employed out of the Saint Louis local.

He told me this on my second day at the job site. I was welcoming the cold breeze and the pellets of icy rain hitting my face. It took my mind of a circular rip on my finger where the raised skin of a blister had peeled and ripped off from continuous friction from twisting wire to hold rebar together. My right forearm, which held the pliers for holding, pulling and twisting the wire felt like a swollen balloon from use. My right leg was sore at the femur, the muscle ached from carrying the load of reinforcing bars and bending over continuously to tie the rebar laid out at my feet. I walked with a slight limp. I was tight, sore, a little broken, and doing my best to hold back my hesitance to begin a second day. I knew that through the rest of this week and into the next I would slowly grind down into a ball of muscle soreness and torn skin, physical exhaustion and mental agitation. The drinking would pick up and the sleep would follow soon after.

I'm not made for this. At the least, I'm not in shape for it. Within a few hours of the first day tying wall mats my legs and arms were shaking under the loads of several 20 foot bars as I walked on to a tall mesh-work of finished walls, each laid out according to the foreman's plan.

"Pick it up. You're 90-dollars an hour labor." The foreman said within a few minutes of us beginning our day. This much was true, and 90 dollars an hour is a king's ransom in today's wages. It was a privilege to earn this much, and it's a privilege to get into the union that grants access to this work and these wages.

I can't contest that fact. I cower before the privilege and the duty to that kind of money. As a little man, showing his age, sometimes leaking his education through his speech I am ill-equipped to appreciate the historical forces that bring me here, to this muddy hole, the future site of a hospital. I am ill-equipped to use my education to find a magically better job with more secure rights and working conditions. As hard as the work is, we work by the clock almost exclusively, and we always are in the presence of a union representative, a steward. He was coaching me through the first few minutes at the job.

"Just stay busy." He said.

I stood before a lattice-work of wall mats up to my thighs. My co-worker, a younger, more experienced guy with probably five relatives in the same union as mine, was carrying rods with the foreman. I froze before the mats, looking for something to tie, a bar to grab. And virtually everything I grabbed was the wrong thing. The foreman kept barking orders, I replied simply, "Yes. Okay. Thanks for the advice."

But I was doing everything wrong, from how to feed the wire through the back side of two intersecting bars, to the amount I should break down on the overlap and twist to hold the bars together, to my posture and positioning over the connection I was making.

I was green as fuck.

I'm not an ironworker. This job was handed to me given my family connections to the union. My father is a retired member and an instructor in the apprenticeship program. My brother is acting vice president of the union. I catch a lot of flak for this from the other ironworkers. I also garner a lot of unwarranted respect. Because when it comes to ironwork I rarely--and when I do, barely--pass muster.

Work entails doing an activity that produces an effect, a proverbial widget of productivity, that visibly indicates the presence of your effort, your labor. Personally, work is an engaged interaction with the world and the acceptance of feedback from it. Steel bars are heavy and stubborn, which makes them good for building strong edifices. Work sites are treacherous, hilly, cloddy, muddy, loud, and messy. That muddy hole, carved into so much foundation and wall space, would result in a clean, high tech medical building, the site for medical practice, and doctors.

Ah yes, doctors. I wanted to be one once. I was simply parroting the intents of my parents, who drilled me from an early age that I should use my intelligence to be one. I wasn't good at math, but I loved science, and I excelled at 'language arts.' After one year at the university I dropped out. When I was scheduled to meet with my first-year advisor I told her, a nun in civilian clothing, that I was no longer interested in pre-medicine. I had some writing ideas, story ideas that came to me after watching an episode of Star Trek:Voyager. I was a little high, had an epiphany, and sat in bed emboldened to do well through the rest of the semester and stew on my big ideas about space and fill that empty, black hole with stories. Fitting metaphor.

My parents, my grandparents, and my grandparents' sister all got involved in my intervention. They produced a meager sum of money in check form to ensure that I did return, and I did. My mother talked with an advisor at the school who recommended 'communication' as a field of study. I was late enrolling, so I had a rather odd schedule built around 4 classes Tuesday and Thursday and one class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was too busy staring at the girls in class and weighed down by the fear of asking them out. I did end up asking a girl out who came through the check-out line at work through a circuitous effort at a Valentine. Spurned by no return call that Friday I ended up drinking at a co-workers house that night and wrecking my truck on the way home early Saturday morning.

Another tragic moment. I had hoped that she'd see the connection. Fat chance. Years later a friend of hers told me that what I did was the nicest thing that she's ever gotten. Alas, she had a boyfriend at the time. In high-school, nobody wears rings to indicate their relationship status. I wasn't looking at her fingers anyway. I wrote a song about her. I was 19. She was between 16 and 17. The relationship seemed kosher from an abstract, legal sense. That's all that came of it: a note tucked into a card, tucked into the hands of a stuffed bear, nestled into a modest flower arrangement, connected to some balloons, sent to her door.

That moment of reaching out would mirror future efforts at reaching out to women/girls. I would close my eyes and grope about with a hand to touch that person, terrified. In the process I would terrify the person to whom I was reaching. When a woman tells you she loves you and she says she knew it was inevitable, and for you to sit down next to her with your leg touching her and see her horrified reaction, who do you blame? I blamed me for not reading that nonverbal cue correctly and attempting another drunken pass at her, which ultimately culminated in losing a friend to some awkward situation where she told me I objectified her.

Well, we're all objects in the world with a sense of a self that exists in the interstitial moments when we're not merely engaged in serial object relations with work and world through rote and repetition. Those heavy objects, out there in that muddy hole, they bore their imprint upon my body in so many sore muscles and agitated contact burns and blisters, a pinky finger buzzing asleep while I lay in bed, not drunk enough to be able to simply sleep.

I hate my life in moments like this, and my recourse is to poetry. To write out what I see into a string of significance for no other reason than to give it some semblance. And in doing so I conjure it into a thing that didn't exist but as so much rote, repetition, labor, objects before self, other, and world, a time spent filled with activity so as to not think oneself to death, a spiral of self doubt.

I am worth more than 90 dollars and hour, but I cannot seem to sell that idea past the 20-dollar-an-hour gate keepers and their 0-dollar an hour resume parsing software. I simply am not there. Any worth I have goes unnoticed by a world in need of smart, critical thinking, healthy, moral individuals. And any 'true' worth, that is, worth that can be presented meaningfully to others goes unnoticed by me. I stare at the prospect of suicide only to pity a self that was created out of a smarting ego long, long ago by a mother in need of a fix, walking to the basement to hit on a roach, cussing under her breath at a kid who wouldn't leave her alone.

"Motherfucker" She'd say. In her most motherly moments, she'd simply say "You're a five o'clock shadow." So many times I'd make that transit down into the basement, following her, looking at the fading gray paint that led to one of several landings into the basement. I'd sit on the final one, Oreo cookie in hand, being berated by a woman who's mother she never really knew because she was in too much pain from a growing brain tumor to handle voice or touch, resting under 1950s pain medication in the dark.

There is an imprint, a shape, a contour to our lives like that of a tree's trunk that grows around and through a wire fence or other such obstacle. Ours is one shaped by dos and don'ts, wire mommies, and physical barriers. And so, whether I like it or not, I inherited that abject loneliness, that dessicated inner space that should be filled with supportive growth and love. It emerges from me in observable behavior that is slow, plodding, unsure, shaking, nervous a person doubting his place in that muddy hole, on this earth, in the embrace of others. The recalcitrant features of this earth are a motherly "motherfucker" directed squarely at my existence, the shape of a vehement "don't" the intent of which is to automate the response: avoid, avert gaze, keep quiet, hide if necessary--a preemptive strike at opportunity.

I sit here, aching throat, watery eyes, going through the mental motions of tendering my resignation from the ironworkers, one year from graduating to journeyman--an eternity. I am afraid to signal operators. I'm afraid to walk on high beams. I'm afraid to greet some of the freakish monsters that work in the trade. I'm afraid to piss in public, let alone into a cup. I'm afraid to be in this world before others. A part of me is dying, a future in a building trade. I am hesitant to politick, to make friends and alliances, to find work through familiars. So many dead, so many dying, so many pushed from an occupation by powerful forces that scoff at 90 dollars an hour. I'm afraid to be me.

This line of work doesn't make me happy, nor does it offer much other than some comfortable income. I sit and I write and for this I get paid nothing, no mind, no recognition. And the flipside of me "pimping" my authorship through link promotion seems disingenuous. I recoil at this image of me, a babe lost in the woods, with no family, no home, found by someone generous enough to give it a life, love, meaning. I'm so far past that, yet here I am, at nearly 37 still courting a vague outline of it, still, reaching out blindly, groping for acceptance, love, just consideration. There is no soft-reset to this mentation. I need to stop thinking like this. I need to make this wishful invisibility invisible, to negate this self-negation.