27th Street

I left town on a road-trip just to get away, see the country, figure things out and I came back when the money ran out. I had an idea that I wanted to devote my energy to making paintings. I was starting from scratch, finding a studio, and finding a job to pay the rent and put groceries in the fridge. The studio was the easy part; the job was something else. A good job was out of the question. “I know you artist types. You won’t stay. I’m not going to train you if you aren’t going to stay.” That left the crap jobs. “Look, you’re overqualified for this. You’ve got a degree. You can do better than this.”

I finally signed on doing breakout cutting at a waterbed factory. We made bookcase headboards with photo masonite backs and we made frames with drawers built in. My job was to pull in lifts of third grade Ponderosa Pine from Mount St. Helens and from Susanville California, and turn it into rough-cut boards for processing. I smelled like a pine tree all the time. You couldn’t wash out that smell. I wore an apron with safety pins stuck in the front, for digging out the slivers. Better to dig them out right away. I didn’t wear gloves because I wanted to keep track of the ends of my fingers.

The chop saw was big and mean. I’d line up the wood and depress the pedal, causing the guard to slam down with a bang and the blade to rise up and saw the board clean in an instant.

The guys in the spray booth didn’t wear masks, just breathed in the fumes all day. Harry, though, he was my favourite. He was a biker in better days, with love and hate tattooed on his fingers like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. He needed 3 beers just to stop the shaking and get through the shift. Over at assembly, the guys taped the triggers down on the nail guns so they could work faster. One day a guy named Dave managed to nail two of his fingers together and I had to take him to the hospital. I was luckier. The worst thing that happened to me was an inch long splinter that broke off in my thumb.

My paintings at the time were bleak industrial landscapes with titles like The Bad Inventor and The Listening Machine and The New Murphy Power Plant. I was painting with a furious energy and with the confidence of youth.

One day Harry got liquored up after work and showed up at home staggering drunk. Legend had it his wife beat him with a cast iron pan to within an inch of his life. I don’t know the truth of it. I just know one day he disappeared and the story about the fry pan spread around fast. Me, I stuck it out as long as I could just to prove I was no quitter. Then one day I raised two lifts of lumber instead of one with the fork. The top lift was wrapped but not banded, and half the lift came crashing down on top of me. I was saved by the roll bars on the forklift but it left me shaking, feeling like jello. I stayed on a little longer, until I found something else, but I knew that day I’d had enough.