The View From Scranton

Capping Caulk for The Man

For those of you who don't know -- and I hope it's every single one of you -- halfway house living is but a half life. Forget what you did or what you know or where you did it or who you knew, when a con gets halfway sprung, he's in for a world not his own.

The big thing is a job. Not work, mind you, and definitely not The Work. But a job. A con gets halfway out and it's off to the temps. No, these aren't the kinda temps that send a fella to desk duty; these are solid, soiled, blue collar temps. If you're like me, you hit a town and try to ply your trade. But even if you get a hit, as I did, if it's not a full-time hit, you're temping. Or else. If your freedom's dependent on a job, any job, you land a job.

So this morn I hit the hills for the half-hour walk to United Gilsonite Laboratories. They make paint, spackle, the odd solvent or three, and caulk. They've been making it since '32. And they make quite a lot of it.

I arrived with four other temps: a mullet-headed slouch who's just gaga over Disturbed, a small-town version of a Brooklyn bad boy with Cali cred and Gurnsey dreams (really), a mild-mannered old man about I don't know what, and me. I wasn't the only ex-con, but I was the only one with a curfew. Anyway we get assigned, and I get the caulk line. Specifically, running the caps. This entailed my standing atop an electric scaffold and feeding thousands upon thousands of white plastic caps into a Dickensian machine and watching it spit out fours of finished tubes. Imagine having to load a gatlin gun one bullet at a time for eight hours and you kinda get the idea. And I wasn't the only one ammo'd up: three different workers took their place beside me, and three different workers didn't last. Funny how much you can tell about a man when he works. The first took slow, stuttered footlong swipes to load each and every cap and nearly keeled from the effort; the second piled 'em in fives and pummeled 'em through like an impatient with other things to do; the third kept his swipes to a minimum, but they were erratic and off-target, as if his mind lived somewhere else. I call 'em stupid, shrewd, and sensitive. Me? I applied Burroughs' time-tested Disciple of Doing Easy. Economy of movement; economy of energy. And the job gets done. No sweat.

I take that back. Much sweat. The sweat of a man clocking time. I felt like Morton Spurlock would feel if he had to do it for real. Let's hope I too get an FX cushion to land on, and let's hope too it doesn't last more than thirty days.

posted by John Hood. @ 9:42 PM