Red Meat and the Factory of Convicts

I am sitting in a suite in Amarillo right now. It reminds me of when I worked in a roller mill. It is quite a machine. A roller mill produces the food the cattle feed on in some of the largest feedlots in the world.

I had only one goal and that was to work my ass off for a year and travel on that money. It wasn't hard to do I only had to work 12 hours a day. This type of shift is weird and puts you on a strange schedule. It was a roller mill factory. Monstrous machines they were. They also made steamers. If you are a vegan don't read any further. You are warned.

I thought working in a roller mill factory would be worth it until one day. Let me explain.

To fatten cattle in the feed lots of the Texas Panhandle you must feed them grain and lots of it. Cattle cannot digest whole grains by default. A basic roller mill is two rollers (like rolling pins) that are positioned on roller bearings that are so huge to clean failed roller bearings I had to lift them with a hoist. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Zap Yourself and You Die...
Being a fuck off the first two weeks on the job, three of us punks were sent to paint a huge factory 30 miles away from the main factory. What a hoot, we were unsupervised. What we didn't know at the time was that the union contract specified that they had to maintain a certain number of workers at all times. They hired three of us jerk offs and consequently stuck us in Siberia doing an unsupervised, unskilled job. We had to paint the complete interior twice and we had two weeks to do it.

It didn't take us long to figure out how fucked up we could get while doing that. Smoking pot in an unventilated and empty factory can work on your mind and you don't even know it. I am sure I lost quite a number of brain cells that first week.

The second week got outrageous. The previous week we thought we had some really killer weed that we smoked at lunch because it lasted the rest of the day. What we didn't realize was the paint fumes was a cocktail after lunch. By the second week we could barely stay on the scaffolding.

We painted with highly pressurized nozzles filled with white lead paint connected to compressors that (no matter what we did to them) maintained an even 100 lbs of pressure. The nozzles didn't mist the paint out it shot it out with a three foot spread pattern at around five feet. That way we could reach hard places from some distance. It also meant if you fucked around too much your ass was worse than grass...and that is exactly what happened to one of us.

We were up on the roof having lunch and smoking up a storm. That day we got so blasted we could hardly walk. We were celebrating by finishing the first coat that morning. When we went back to work the other two guys started fucking around with the paint guns spraying each other. They were a mess covered in paint.

One of the guys says, "Watch this you fucker!" and pointed the gun at the palm of his left hand and pulled the trigger. The spray guns looks innocent enough, benign even. The second he pulled the trigger was the second he realized what a fucking rich kid dumbass he was. As me and the other guy screamed at him to not do it it was too late.

Fuck Dees Shit...Wanna Hit of Paint?
It was one of those moments that forever plays in your mind IN SLOW MOTION. A pound or so of compressed, highly pressurized paint ejected from the gun six inches from his palm and entered it ripping flesh, tendons and muscles while splintering a couple of bones. Next I saw the mess exiting the back of his hand. First gobs of blood and then bits of bone and flesh and the whole mess splattered against the wall like a popped watermelon filled with ketchup and gore.

We both stood there shocked for a moment and time had frozen. Had it just been water he would have been crippled for life in that hand. As it was however, he had just injected himself with lead based paint.

For the next 10 years or so that law suit followed me around. Each time I talked with his lawyer they had chopped of more of his arm. Finally, when they cut off his left arm his life was no longer in jeopardy. Finally I quit hearing from his lawyer. I never knew what happened to him.

She Came In Through the Bathroom Window...
Needless to say we quit painting. They moved us over to the main factory. This was a more dangerous place. They had steel forming tools, sheers that sliced 1/4 inch steel like it was butter, huge drill presses and any number of ways to get maimed and killed.

The worst threat were other workers.

Winter approached and we came to work in the dark and left work in the dark. Lunch was the only time I saw the sun for months. The other guy that was hired when I was and I were each given a broom and were told that we only had two jobs until another position opened, sweep the factory floor and clean the bathrooms twice a day.

FUCKIN' A! what an easy job. Well, let it be known that pushing a broom for 12 hours is so menial it is hard. Machinists and welders get real picky and cranky about their work areas. A couple of them were downright nasty about it and constantly bitched to the foreman.

We both got written up a couple of times and after a month of eating shit over it my buddy and I decided to get even.

People have bathroom habits like clockwork. The machinist that kept ratting on us was no exception. Every day a certain time in the morning he would head for the head to dump some foul smelling shit that would clear out the bathroom. We clocked his ass every day for a week and timed his entrance, his exit and position of the foreman. One day we were ready for him.

We had innocently positioned a couple of gallons of ammonia, a sign that said the head was out of order, two buckets, some mops and a two charcoal activated masks by the bathroom entrance and waited.

Like a factory clock and right on time, here he comes dump his nasty load and we followed about 10 feet behind. We heard him slam the stall door and went into action by putting on the masks and filling the gallon buckets full of bleach.

"OK now, on the count of three."

I counted off with my fingers and from the doorway we both hurled the buckets of ammonia on the bathroom floor me covering one side and my buddy covering the other. I was thankful that ammmonia is not exactly flammable.

He started coughing and choking and came running out of the bathroom with his pants around his knees and shit hanging off his ass. We almost got fired and would have had the bosses liked him. We were written up.

Bang Bang Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head...
But the weirdest thing was yet to come. The company had a policy of giving convicts a second chance. If you got out of the penitentiary with a trade they would hire you regardless of what you were convicted of. If you paid your debt and had a decent trade you got a job.

I took up with one of them...a machinest. He had served 10 years for manslaughter at the state pen at McAllister. At lunch he and I would go to the parking lot, eat lunch in his car, listen to blaring rock and smoke a joint each of righteousness. He did all the talking I did all the nodding of either yes or no and all he talked about was prison and the shit that happened there. We'd laugh, get toked up and try to make it through next six hours. Me and my broom, him and his micrometers and metal lathe. Each man had to supply his own tools and The Machinist carried own. One of the tools was a two pound shop hammer; blunt on one side and wedge shaped on the other. It is a wicked tool.

I noticed over a couple of weeks that him and another fellow machinist would have words at each other during the day. Not only did it continue but became more and more frequent as the weeks went on. I also noticed that the ex-con friend of mine was starting to clock and measure the other machinist.

One day at lunch I asked, "You and him gonna fight it out sometime soon?"

"No way dude," he said, "That is a sure way to get fired around here. No fighting on the property. I am just fuckin' wiff 'im."

But words between the two continued and at times they would get so loud the foreman had shut them both up.

One day though it would all end.

At 6:00 sharp the bell went off and it was time to leave. I watched the ex-con clocking his nemesis like he always did but today it was different. He followed his nemesis to the line to punch out on the clock and got right behind him. We were towards the back. He reached down into his toolbox and pulled out the shop hammer. He turned around and looked at me.

"Would you move back a bit?" he asked, "I don't want this here shop hammer to hit ya."

I stepped back and before I could say a word he tapped the machinist in front of him on the shoulder.

"Hey man I think you dropped this on the floor." he told him.

In one fluid motion, like tai-chi, the machinist turned around and as he did so the ex-con's shop hammer had reached the height of its arc and began plummeting towards the machinist's forehead. Before the machinist knew what happened, the ex-con had firmly planted it into his forehead and buried the head halfway. the shop hammer hit with such force it cracked his head open like an egg shell and hurled the machinist's brains and gore all over the next guy standing in line.

The machinist dropped dead like a steer on the killing floor.