Plastics

I was fated to work in a factory. I was born in a Belgian textile-factory town, and my ancestors had worked in the mills for at least two or three centuries before I came along. Almost all of them were employed by Simonis, once the most prominent of many local makers of worsted cloth, now the world’s leading manufacturer of billiard-table baize. It is very nearly the last survivor of a once-crowded industrial hub. My father managed to avoid working in the textile plants, but he couldn’t help being employed by ancillary businesses; there wasn’t anything else. When I was born he had been working for about five years in an iron foundry that made equipment for the plants. When the industry collapsed a few years later the foundry, like so many other local businesses, fell with it. We emigrated to the United States, where the initial promise of new and fulfilling employment soon gave way to uncertainty, then near-despair. Eventually my father was hired by yet another factory, which manufactured pipes and rods from a hard, resilient, slippery synthetic that for household applications is trademarked Teflon. He worked there until his retirement at the age of sixty-five. Immediately thereafter he began displaying symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, unprovably but almost certainly the result of twenty-seven years’ daily exposure to ambient powdered fluorocarbons. Dementia followed a decade later. His death at eighty came as a consequence of his refusing food and drink for a week, a mode of death known in nursing-home jargon as ‘Alzheimer’s suicide’.

My father did not want me to follow in his footsteps. He never pushed me in any particular direction, but he let me know from an early age that mental labour was far preferable to the physical sort, and he often regretted his lack of formal education—he had quit school at fourteen, as was then the norm, to contribute to the family purse. I didn’t disagree; I had vague artistic leanings, and I knew from a few visits to his factory that I would never want to work in such a place. When at sixteen I got an after-school job it was at a five-and-dime, a Woolworth’s clone, where I worked as a stock-boy. My duties consisted of unloading boxes, stocking shelves, vacuuming and buffing floors, and, every night, transferring the trash from the loading-dock area to the large wheeled-bin outside.

Reporting for duty one afternoon, after I had worked there for about a year, I was met at the door by the manager and the assistant manager. I had clashed with them many times before. Junior-college graduates, probably not over thirty, they were a skilled Mutt-and-Jeff torture team. Jenkins, the manager, was tidy, distant, thin-lipped, and narrow-shouldered; his assistant, called Mr Z, might have passed for a good-natured slob to anyone but his underlings. ‘Come with us,’ said Jenkins, briskly turning on his heel, while Mr Z favoured me with one of his shit-eating grins. They brought me outside to the bin, from which Mr Z retrieved two large cardboard boxes. He scooped out some crumpled newspaper from each, triumphantly revealing a layer of small boxes labelled TIMEX. ‘We won’t call the police as long as you leave now,’ said Jenkins. I was too flabbergasted to reply. What was going on? I knew it couldn’t have been an accident, since there were two such boxes, and yet I doubted my colleagues would have known any more than I did how to fence a gross of cheap watches. Were Jenkins and Mr Z covering up some plot of their own? Was that why they refrained from calling the cops? I remain baffled to this day.

Fortunately my parents were away, so I was spared having to explain, having my father arrange a meeting with Jenkins and Mr Z, possibly even having him believe them rather than me. But I needed a job, and fast. I was in my last year of high school, and even though I had been awarded a scholarship to college, the costs of room and board stretched my parents’ finances to the limit. Spending money would be entirely my responsibility, as it was already. Friends told me about a plastics factory in a nearby New Jersey town where anybody could get a job. ‘Just tell them you’re eighteen’—that was the minimum legal age for factory work. I needed no further urging. The reason anyone at all could get a job there was because the turnover was constant, and the reasons for the constant turnover were themselves an inducement to me. The place was strictly for hard cases, and I very much wanted to qualify as a hard case. The pay was low, the conditions were brutal, the work was relentless and the workforce was possibly dangerous—a few months earlier a friend of a friend had been stabbed in the leg during an argument with the foreman, a recently released convict.

It was doubly fortunate that my parents were away, since my father would have insisted on visiting the place beforehand—if indeed he’d even have considered allowing me to work there—and none of the stories were exaggerated. It was a small factory, with just four machines, three of them deafeningly packed into a space the size of a two-car garage and the one behemoth allotted its own separate shed. Nobody worked there if they could get a better job elsewhere. The employees—twelve machine operators over three shifts, plus one foreman per shift—were ex-cons, former mental patients, drunks, acid casualties, illegal immigrants and the illegally underage. The company was run by a father-and-son team: ancient, silent, diminutive father and huge, loud, hairy son. I filled out some perfunctory paperwork in which I claimed to be eighteen; they promised to pay me two dollars per hour and sent me off to my machine.

I was on the number three machine, by the north wall. Had I been able to see through the tiny, smeared window over my head and to the left, I could have gazed upon the Passaic River. Number three was medium-sized and middle-aged, a good beginner’s machine. Tiny number one, in the middle, looked like a nineteenth-century relic. It was operated by Esmeralda, from Honduras, who was relieved at midnight by her daughter. Number two, on the south wall, was larger and newer, but unpredictable. Working her that day was a man in a watch cap who quit a week later. In the shed, on number four, was Frank, a man of around sixty who came every day with red jug wine decanted into a juice bottle that fooled no one. He was so clearly a person of substance that rumours of a former life on Wall Street did not seem implausible, although he was known to wander off or fall asleep next to his machine. It was said that one night, when only Frank had shown up for the night shift, he had ambled down the road and nodded off in an abandoned car. His machine, running highly volatile silicon, exploded, sending the hopper magnets clear through the roof.

The routine at first looked impossible. On the average job the cycles ran four times a minute. Each cycle required me to open the machine door, remove the extruded item, strip it of its excess (its tree), put the tree into the grinder, and pack the item in a box, all in the space of fifteen seconds. There were many variations: cycles ran faster or slower; the tree was easier or harder to remove. The items ranged in size from four-foot-square Parsons tables down to toothpicks, which came a hundred to the tree and were sliced off with a razor into a forty-gallon drum (at the end of a week, three daily shifts had barely managed to fill a quarter of the drum). Some kinds of plastics were forgiving, but most required that the door be opened as soon as the light went on and closed the instant the product was removed. Otherwise the plastic would ‘freeze’—would clog the mould, requiring you and the foreman to lengthily chip away at the gunk with screwdrivers and ice picks, and if the freeze lasted too long your pay would be docked.

Anxiety attended every part of the manufacturing process, nearly all of it focused on the foreman. The foreman had to supply plastic granules to the machines’ hoppers, empty the container of the grinder, haul away the boxes of product, supply boxes to be filled, and relieve workers when they needed to go to the toilet and during their legally mandated but unpaid half-hour lunch breaks. If the foreman failed to fulfill any of these requirements with regard to you, you had no recourse. If you had no boxes, for example, you could not leave your machine to procure some from the storeroom, but would have to find creative ways of stacking finished pieces on your tray-sized table or somewhere in your available few bits of space without clogging the aisle or blocking access to the machine door.

Foremen came in two flavours: choleric and slack. The former, frequently ex-convicts, tended to act as if they owned the factory, and would harass workers for such things as not maintaining the quota. How anyone could work faster than anyone else was a mystery to me, since the tempo was entirely dictated by the machine and its protocols as determined by the type of plastic and the size of the mould. Slack foremen were the norm, however. They were slack because they were stoned, and they would disappear for long intervals during which they presumably either read comic books or threw stones into the river, there being few other distractions available on the desolate stretch of road that was home to the factory as well as an auto-body shop and a pair of shuttered cinder block edifices. As annoying as the choleric foremen could be, the slack foremen were a menace, requiring one to attempt improbable feats, such as climbing up the side of the machine to dump the contents of the overflowing grinder box into the hopper, while simultaneously opening the mould door with one foot.

The products manufactured by the plant were the sort of junk that isn’t much made in America any more. It is left to China, Mexico, and a few Third World countries to supply the globe with playing-card boxes, audio-cassette boxes, toy boats, toy sand-shovels, ice-cube trays, novelty picture-frames, dildos (rumoured but unseen by me), and hundreds of unidentifiable widget components. The owners could not have grossed more than a fraction of a cent per unit of any of these. Accordingly they had to run the place with the lowest overhead the law would permit—if indeed the law played much of a role in their calculations. The two dollars an hour they lavished upon me was the minimum wage of the time; the result was something like seventy-five dollars after taxes for a full week’s labour. I seldom reached even that amount, since I was always being docked, either for freeze episodes that were seldom my fault or for coming in late, since the factory was in a town seven miles from mine and I had to hitch-hike to work immediately after school. The punch-clock at the door was set to record only fifteen-minute intervals, so that a minute’s delay would result in a loss of fifty cents. I never asked how much the illegal aliens were paid.

After a day or two I had absorbed the machine’s rhythm. As I fell asleep every night in my bed I could feel each muscle group involved in the cycle going through its paces in sequence, again and again.