by Ed Pavlić
But the dead aren’t dead. There is no death. The closest thing to death is the living who refuse to live. To allow the dead to live in one’s life has to be the end of grief; grief is the price the living pay for the presence of the dead in their lives. Despair is the failure to accept that price. That’s why despair is a living death. Shame knew none of this. For him it was an invisible maze. But everything he did and didn’t do was measured by something that moved quite on its own in this maze, in the world. Though there were no words in the maze, something down there spoke nonetheless. It told Shame that the only way to reach the end of grief was to swallow all of it, to bring the dead back to living. And the dead have no names; that’s why there’s no word to mark the boundary in grief. Pulled under by the death of someone they love, the grieving mark the line when—if?—they struggle back to the world of the living. One learns the location of a border, a line, any line, only by crossing it. Borders are never where they appear to be and they don’t stay where they are. We could almost say that they don’t stay what they are. In a way that had no name, Shame had measured everything he did as a course through this invisible maze.
Shame woke up at exactly five thirty no matter what happened the night or morning before. He never drank coffee before work. It was not that kind of job. The body kept the brain alert. Juices of all kinds and, no matter what, he had to eat. He forced himself to eat. It was the most difficult part of the job, really. He was never hungry before work. But if he didn’t eat, he’d be starving after the first few loads of brick or a few glassy black pours of tar. It nearly made him sick to think of food this early and he was chronically cold in the mornings even in the summer. He ate anyway, to avoid struggling, empty and dizzy, the whole morning. At times, syrup and fruit and sweet rolls did the trick. At others, hot salsa and fried eggs on toast. He built a four-foot-by-four-foot closet, floor to ceiling, for work clothes, boots, and the few tools he needed. It was next to the front door in his apartment.
By five thirty, the clothes were already awake. Work clothes waited for him with the distinct smell of whatever job was going on at the moment. The graphite powder and resin in the acid-proof mortar he mixed combined with the smell of whatever plant: sour malt from the breweries, burnt hair and flesh from the slaughterhouses, boiled sugar from Tootsie Roll, vinegar from Peer Foods. His bricklayer father’s mantra was: “Smells like money to me.” All the old men on the job agreed. These were men who argued, when the big boss showed up driving a Honda, “The man used to drive a Jaguar. Some of you bastards must not be working hard enough. Speak for yourself!” Shame watched this. He’d think about it later. The smells that summer were sweet acid and matte dust from Joycelan Steel, a wire mill on Thirty-Eighth and Morgan Streets. Summertime, and the living was twenty minutes on the cycle to the job.
He woke up and got out of bed. Half the apartment in Junior’s building wasn’t Shame’s in the morning. He walked to the kitchen as if it was a torture chamber. Opened the old, round-edge fridge. He squinted against the glow. If he felt the cold fall onto the feet on the floor, they were someone else’s feet. The half-open table was his in the morning. Before work, none of the books he left stacked around the place were his. He’d come back to them later. He didn’t open the piano before work. He didn’t see it, knew no one who played it. He treated it like the rest of his non-working life in the morning; it wasn’t there or, at least, it wasn’t his. He didn’t always do this. At first, as a teenager, he wondered about how “he” could do this work and then go off into the rest of his life afterward. He wondered about borders. He asked one of his fellow laborers, Jay Brown, about it. Jay Brown told him not to worry, the rest of his life would disappear before too long. Now almost twenty years ago, Jay Brown had said,
–Boy, one of these soon days you’re gone wake up and be what they call weaned. You’ll be what they call a man. Grown. Questions like that will burn away like fog in the morning.
Jay Brown’s big hands. His high-pitched laugh.
Shame used to stand on the loading dock watching the world outside go by. One image still hurt like the missing limb war vets talk about. He was working in LA on a new Kraft plant. The place was spotless. They were pouring the bed of tar for the floor. Ninety-six degrees in the shade. Three hundred fifty degrees in the tar. His body was a hollow needle somewhere in between. At lunch he stood there in long sleeves, sweat running down his arms. He could taste the tar smoke caught in the sweat on his face.
He heard a fast bike, a Ninja or a Hurricane, pulling through the sport gears on the boulevard outside the fence. He looked up to see the rider with a woman crouched behind him on the bike. They swooped into view, signaled. He saw the helmet move, a quick jog into the blind spot, down and to the left at the entrance to the 405 and then the heel twitch and the engine whirred up and out of Shame’s hearing. He watched the woman’s black braids, the Y-shaped lines of her brown back against the tight, white muscle shirt. He closed his eyes as the sound trailed off and then—he could still see this with his eyes closed—another heel twitch, and the sound trailed off again. He knew they were gone. It felt like it always felt to watch the world from inside the job. It felt like his guts had been tied to the bike, like he’d been broken by horses running in different directions. Like “he” was impossible. He was right. So was Jay Brown.
When that lucky couple on the bike disappeared, Shame noticed that he’d bitten through his lip. He could taste the salt and the blood mix with the smoke-taste of the tar. All at once, he felt it in his boots and his stance. “Here I am,” he said. He could taste it in the blood-smoke in this mouth: “You can’t miss them, man, they were never here. This is where you are. They ain’t you. This is you: boots, sweat, that full feeling in your shoulders, this vibration in your hands, these gloves in your pocket, and, most of all, those pallets of brick and material out back behind that loading dock. You exist in the money that trades places as you work, putting those materials where they need to go. They need to go exactly where you’re paid to put them. Labor: you’re it. That’s the real you, the historical you. What happens to that person really happens. Accept it.” And he did. And, then, he worked with it, in it. That was my friend. Couldn’t fuck with him.
Six years after that I died and the roof fell in.
More than a decade after that, after knowing Ms. Nasty, Shame had begun to understand what all that was all about. It was poise: tangent instant on the inside skin of grief, a stance in the wind of one’s own history, a still shot of experience, a sip of poison.
Shame’s before-work place was stripped down to bed, fridge, the first forced meal of the day, the painted pine closet full of worksmell, bodysmell, chemical-scented clothes hanging in there. The feel of worn cotton. Cotton was his one working extravagance. It was expensive and it wore out fast. But he wouldn’t wear the polyester work clothes that the old men wore. Wouldn’t do it. When he put his work clothes on, it was as if they already knew what to do. He felt like he hovered around in the dim morning light. His hands, the ones that existed, stayed in the gloves he hung on a nail in the closet. He didn’t have feet. His real feet waited for him in the boots. He never wore them in the place; the last thing he did on his way out was lace up the feet. Morning light on his face. “I’ll try sweet today,” he thought, “thick biscuits and jelly. Four of them should hold till lunch.”
There were four loose boards in the floor. Three made creaks. The one at the foot of his bed squawked into the hollow shaft beneath the plywood of the subfloor. One in the bedroom, one in the short hall on the way to the bathroom, one in the middle of the living room and one attached to the threshold of the kitchen. He knew he was ready for work and everything had been done right if he hit three of those boards twice and one of them once. That meant a squawk and six creaks. No need to think. It was the morning song. He laced up his work feet. If he left by six twenty, and he always did, he knew he was good. That part always was. He’d arrive to that place where being on time meant you were twenty mi
nutes early. Where not being ready to work meant you didn’t really exist at all.
■
With a few months here and there as exceptions, Shame Luther worked on jobs like this since he was seventeen. He was never late to work. No one was. Most of the men were there by six thirty; the jobs started at seven. Shame never missed a day. He never left early. It was like clockwork, though: during weeks here and there when the company didn’t have a job lined up, he got sick then. He turned his ankle on a brick in the alley. The flu. Knocked his head on a limb, hit sand over an oil patch in a corner and put his bike down. He thought to himself, “If I didn’t have to work, I’d be dead by now!” At the job, everything but work went behind his brain and he aimed himself at the next immediate thing. Was that himself? It didn’t matter; at work he was the thing he aimed at the next task at hand. The whole world collapsed into a few physical tasks. Everything plunged through and bottlenecked into the present-tense weight and balance in that body. Most of it came in through his hands.
It wasn’t like that for everyone. He knew that. He’d seen distracted men injured on jobs. He’d seen fingers lost, ankles broken, spines ruined. Men stepped off scaffolds as if they were hopping a curb and broke ribs. They were elsewhere when it happened, until it happened. He’d been on jobs where lives had ended. At least by the chance of their endings, those lives were exactly like his. But not Shame. Others moved precisely and vividly through their other lives while they worked. Wives floated in the air, politicians burned, children’s futures pulsed in the rhythms of the job. Not Shame. At work, his mind went perfectly blank. He became brick, wax, leverage, scrape, mortar, breath, tar, mix, carry, sweat, heat, stance, sweat, heat, heat.
It wasn’t thought. He knew that much. Wherever the brain was, it lived in objects. Work made things appear in the rhythm of connections between objects. Beyond that needs took care of themselves. He could watch the job, the plant, even the world, even the motorcycle with the girl. It all disappeared into his body through his hands. Work made him a mirror to what happened, to what he did. Objects concentrated; he never forced himself to pay attention. It surprised and frightened him, at first, the way things he thought were important vanished when he stepped across the line into the work area. It was just like Jay Brown had said, or almost; people vanished too. He learned to let them go, to relax, to expect it, the way the pain and sweat of a job enclosed him and, exactly then, he sensed a place of peace almost within reach. Never here, always just off beyond his reach, there. Shame heard about the loss of jobs, vanishing work. The old men talked about it. He knew it meant exile from poise. What would he do without poison? Maybe if one knew it well enough, it could be found elsewhere? He didn’t know about that.
Four bricklayers worked on the job repairing tanks at Joycelan Steel. The mill made wire of various gauges, the whole process: forge, pull, wash, wrap, ship. The job was in the acid-wash part of the plant: open tanks filled with different kinds of acid for use as finishing cleansers. There were six tanks, fifty feet long, twenty feet wide, twelve feet deep. The tanks were placed horizontally across the main area. A crane rode rails at the ceiling. Wire was dropped off at one end after being wrapped into coils ten feet in diameter. About three to six tons, depending, Shame was told. The crane picked each coil up, soaked it in a series of tanks, and placed it at the open, opposite end of the space on a pallet for the forklifts to deal with.
The job was to reline each tank with new brick while the plant kept the others full and the crane in operation. The tanks were made of concrete and lined with sixteen-pound block. Not concrete block, now. These are four-by-four-by-eight-inch ceramic brick. Each would fit in your hand, sixteen pounds apiece. For the laborers, that meant a workout and a new pair of leather gloves every week. Hands numb by 9:00 a.m. During the first few weeks of a tank job, his body ached, morning stiffness felt like a cast on the limbs. It wore off during the first hour on the clock as if the minutes kept track of the body coming back to life. Putting brick in was the easy part, at least for the laborers. The hard part was getting the old ones out. And there were no electric hammers on this job. No power tools were allowed into the acid-wash wing of the plant. That meant a six-foot, eighty-pound iron post sharpened into a wedge at the end, brick hammers, shovels, and five buckets with rope tied to the handles. Shame saved almost all the empty resin cans from each job. He kept them in the supply yard down on Ninety-Ninth street.
■
I first knew Shame in the summer of 1989. I called him AS at the time. It was his initials, plus it was our all-time favorite song. I never could call him Allen. When we met he was on a job like the one I’m telling you about now. He’d say it was nothing like this. He spent his days busting out a floor in the Tootsie Roll factory out near Midway Airport. Look, all those jobs were the same to me. It was another summer. I was new money, still had a year to go in college. I usually ran “errands” for my old man in the mornings and then played volleyball at the beach. I remember Shame wanted to put the cycle he had at that time in the shop and he wondered if I’d pick him up after work.
–Man, that’s Cicero!
–Can I get a ride or not?
I remember getting my hair cut on Oak Street. Ernest was an artist with his portfolio of combs and his alphabet of tiny scissors. Ernest hated clippers. “Child, this ain’t the Marines,” he’d say. He insisted on the intimacy of scissors and straight razors. So, hair laid, fresh lined, I left the beach at three and went to get AS in my old man’s 928. Much as I’d have preferred to go incognito, I had to take it. My grandmama said I wasn’t taking her Benz anywhere near Cicero. So I drove up and there was my man AS. Looked like he was singing Swing low … on the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street with his boots wrapped up and an old bedsheet to put over the seat. He looked like a coal miner or something.
–Thought you might not think to bring something to cover the seat with.
–Think? Damn, look at you, don’t they air-condition those steel mills?
Shame looked at me like I just said some shit to him in Swedish.
–It’s a candy factory. And no, they don’t air-condition them.
–Whatever. Get in. I’ll push and you can tell me all about the value of a hard-earned dollar. We’re going to Rocky’s, I’m buying “the endangered American worker” a pound of fried shrimp and a cerveza mas fina.
Look, a little background. As I’ve mentioned, I came from the kind of family that dealt in cash. Call it unregistered money; your grandmama gives you a thousand dollars to fill her car with gas. That kind of thing. Straight face, a clip of hundreds and:
–Here, baby, make sure you fill it up all the way.
I have to admit, I loved to see the look on those old men’s faces when they watched me pick AS up in my daddy’s new black Porsche. He dug it too. Don’t let him fool you with his whole “man of the people” routine. We were young. And, hell, that money we spent was the people. Anyway, Shame started this job as the youngest person in the company. By the summer we’re looking at, he was still the youngest person working there. No one got replaced. The old bricklayers hung it up and then died and the old laborers died and then hung it up. The company shrank. But there it was back then. Shame worked with some real avant-garde types: Duffy, Big Jock, and Shame’s pops who had long given up on his only son and tried in any way he could to pretend he was not working on the job. When Shame’s old man couldn’t deny Shame was on the job altogether, he’d fall back on denying that he was his son. He just couldn’t forgive him for leaving college after six weeks. I understood that much. Shame didn’t care.
I met Shame’s pops just once after work on some job. I think it was at Oscar Mayer right across from Cabrini. I remember I smiled. I remember he didn’t.
–How’s it going there, Mr. Sardonovic?
And he didn’t even look up from putting his tools away behind the cab of his pickup truck:
–Gotta go.
I laughed. He didn’t. Instead, he got in the truck, hiked up hi
s work pants so his calves and the tops of his boots showed, and slammed the door. Then, still without ever looking up at us, he said,
–So long.
And he drove off. Just like that. Man, I could feel the wind playing in and out of my wide-open mouth. Look, I knew about the “Chicago worker.” I read The Jungle at the Latin School, thank you very much. But I’d never seen one up close, like in the wild.
–Damn.
–Yeah, that’s him.
–You all working in there together? I mean, you’re filthy and his work clothes look like they just came from the cleaners?
–Yeah—well, I wouldn’t say we work together. The laborers work for, not with, the bricklayers. And then there’s him, he pretty much works all by himself no matter where he is. If he says something, it’s usually something like, “We’re not here to homestead this fucking slab of concrete,” or, “How about we keep our goddamned mouths shut and our joints even for a change?” That kind of thing.
–Joints?
–It’s the space between the brick.
–Oh, OK. What’s he all mad at?
And Shame, brows all down. Actually, for once, he sounded a little like his old man:
–Man, how the hell would I know?
After that I’d call Shame’s pops Gotta Go and laugh. Shame didn’t laugh.
■
August at Joycelan Steel was hotter than July. By mid-month they were about a third of the way through the job, working on the second of six tanks. It would have been one thing to break all the brick out, line each tank with tar, fabric, more tar, and then put in the brick one tank after another. Hard and hot, but it would have been simple. That, however, would have required shutting down the plant. The only time they got a shot at that kind of systematic work was when they built a new factory. That didn’t happen anymore in Chicago. If they did, they avoided acid-proof brick altogether. It was impossible to pack up on flatbeds overnight and ship to the Philippines. So they repaired working operations. It had been like that for years.
