part 2 of the story
It Ain’t Necessarily So (After(1)“You’ll Be Sorry”)
Charles Hayes
(Enjoy the first half of this story in the previous issue of cc&d magazine...)
(3)Mandy Black was a 20 year old art student and I was kind of like an Appalachian artifact to her. One that she was interested in. She plainly made this known in a way that captured my heart right off. She was intelligent, talented, and beautiful. After two years of a boring, loveless life I was prime for her arrival. I suppose I owe her a lot. She was between homes, as well as loves, and moved in with me immediately. She taught me how to love again. For a young woman just out of her teens it was fascinating to experience her expertise at doing this. She was a native Bostonian and all of New England was her turf. She enjoyed giving me a close-up view of New England and I learned a lot about the people and their own brand of resourcefulness. From camping in the Green Mountains of Vermont to sailing the waters off the coast of Portland Maine we moved as an intimate pair. No doubt I was in love with her but artifacts lack the ability to appropriately bond with most people. And a Vietnam Veteran artifact is at an even greater deficit. Seems I failed to wholly grasp her youth by putting her on a pedestal built for someone older. In the end I squeezed too hard and she was gone.
My developing bond with New England was shattered and my work no longer seemed as it had been. Try as hard as I might, I could only limp by. No doubt, I was broken. I simply put in my time, drank even more, and slogged through a depression that had me again looking to far pastures for any kind of resolution.
An old college friend referred me to a vacant job position at a hospital for miners where he worked. It was in my old hometown and right in the loveless middle of coal country. Wounded, weary, and alone again, I flew down, interviewed, and signed up. I had a few weeks to get back to Boston and wrap things up. One of the last things I did before leaving was to call Julie and more or less let her know that I still couldn’t hold a love. The funny thing about that last time I ever spoke with her was that for the first time ever she sounded like a stranger. All the fire was absent. I guess she was fully assimilated. Not me. I was backslidden and again ready for Appalachia. I ended the conversation angrily. Pity.
Ironically, since I was such a mess, this job of doing research and reporting for the alcoholism and drug abuse unit of the hospital was a professional fully funded position. The work was quite broad in that I also spent hours in the E.R. with crisis patients and their doctors. The environment was completely different from up north. Being in the middle of coal country where hard drinking had a certain history, some of the staff, including me, were as hard drinking as our clients. Many times I felt that I was an imposter or an actor on the TV show, Dr. Kildare. That feeling developed a cutting edge with me. I resented it when the director told me to stop wearing my farm boots, an old worn pair from the Corps, and use shoes instead. The boots had been my only declaration that I was not really a part of Dr. Kildare. However, I obliged and that snag was quickly forgotten.— “Action!”
I suppose that most of my idiosyncrasies were forgiven, in part, because I anchored the softball team, made most of the parties, and held my liquor as good as any miner.... or those that treated them. The main difference for me was that I had experienced and worked in another medical culture in New England. But that was hardly visible other than on my resume. Having come from West Virginia, I fit in effortlessly.
In a couple of years, however, my demons of the coal fields began to get the better of me. One of the things about my work that appealed to me was that with research, better ways of treatment might be found. And I just happened to presently head the office that could do that. Normally I was supposed to assist someone but that position had been empty almost since I arrived. So I stopped waiting and pulled out the records. I gathered all the data we had on a certain behavior and how that responded to outpatient treatment. Controlling the best I could for different variables, I found a behavior that seemed to respond better. Whether it was significant or not I didn’t know. Only that it correlated. I knew correlation was not causation but at least some data had been worked. Research had actually happened. Not just reported data. I had not been doing much of anything. Plus, the counselors that had to file the outpatient reports had been complaining about the paperwork. I thought that it was at least something to show for their efforts. The head psychiatrist of the whole four county area, a young import from the Caribbean, thought so too. He had me present it at a combined meeting of the programs.
The counselors completely disrespected it, sloughed it off, and labeled the whole thing too unrealistic for those that did the real work. I didn’t mind that much but it increased my suspicion that we were just a bunch of people milking federal monies and fluffing around in our importance. The scene reminded me of the older woman at Julie’s house in Boston. Her, the Billie Jean King of tennis. I just went back to marking time and looking to the hills and streams of my country crib for relevance. That was ok until the person I was supposed to assist got hired and became my boss.
I didn’t like him. I had trouble with authority to start with. But not always. The captain of our sloop off the coast of Maine, though he probably thought of me as a hillbilly, I liked. He was gruff and no bull shit. This new guy over my office struck me as more plastic than most. A bull-shiter. Many of us drank too much but we were clean when we worked. My new middle aged boss arrived one day smelling of alcohol and intimated to me how the drive-in girl at the local Wendys had asked him to wait for her after closing. He commented on her youth and enthusiasm while smilingly telling me he was a bit tired that morning.
I stayed away from him and since he did nothing but talk about what he had done he didn’t need me. I was able to do my reports and slid. However, my attitude was becoming known which wasn’t all that bad as long as the behavior didn’t match. But I knew that my work didn’t cut it in the medical field at large. That I did little to hide and knowing I was on the way out my behavior began to match. I broke rules. First there were reprimands. I survived.
One day my boss, the supposed research specialist, entered my office and told me to review a stack of questionnaires that he had come with when he was hired the year before. He had been talking about them ever since. I knew that he just wanted to use me to validate his time there. That there was no real purpose for the review. I also knew it was time for me to go. Like Julie had said to me, except I didn’t raise my voice or get carried away, I told him that I was not his slave, to review them himself.
I was fired.
For the most part that was the end of my time in the field that the government had educated me for. I shrugged it off and got a blue collar job in a machine shop that built and repaired mine pumps. I operated technical machines that I had learned while making prototype hardware for research at Eunice Kennedy Shriver. There were no boss problems. I did my work well. The switch to blue collar was easy. And fluffing did not exist.
After more than a couple of years, it was not a boss problem. It was a self-respect/union/management problem. And I was longer in the tooth with more appreciation for actualization experiences.
It was a union workshop but I was hired outside the union. Since I was a non union worker I was able to do other non union work when my main more skilled work was completed. Union workers couldn’t. Being good and fast, my work load climbed. But even so, I maintained a speed that increased production while at the same time saved the customer money. So much so that I was, with permission, able to clock out and go to the nearby fields and streams for recreation. Thoreau’s “Let not thy life be thy work but thy sport” was important to me. Everyone seemed ok with this even though it was an unusual practice. Sport paid nothing, consequently it cost management nothing. However, its value had to come from places that were not common. There, in part, was some of its value to me. The path of the loner I suppose. The problem came when a union worker quit. A lot of my finished work preceded directly to his radial drill press and I guess management saw a way to increase profits and stiff the union. Instead of hiring another worker to replace the union guy they just gave it to me and hired another non union worker for some of the “outside” work. Immediately the time for the work on that machine dove and I still was able to use the nearby fields and streams. However, they couldn’t keep anybody for the “outside” work so one day the manager stopped by my area.
“Charlie.” he said. “I got a large unbalanced impeller. How about you grind it down and get it balanced?”
I knew the piece was taking too long on the huge computer operated lathe but it wasn’t like I didn’t have skilled work processing. There was more to it than that as well. I also knew that the machine where the work was being processed was specifically designed for that kind of work to protect workers from the health hazards of doing it the old way. I resisted and my body language made it clear that I was unwilling.
“Is there something wrong with the lathe?” I said.
The boss just shook his head and said, “I can’t tie that machine up for the time needed to do it. Is there a reason you don’t want to do it.”
For two years on and off I had done it. Enough that the heavy red metal mist that had coated any mask and all my exposed skin had brought me to feel like those kinds of dues were amply paid already.
“I don’t want to breathe that stuff,” I said.
“I can give you a respirator.”
I slowly shook my head.
Sadly it seemed, the boss also slowly shook his head and studied the floor for a moment.
“Then you can walk,” he said.
I packed the few tools I had—I always borrowed the company’s— and dropped out.
