In the late sixties, in my sixteenth and seventeenth years, I underwent a basic meltdown, and put my parents through a harrowing ordeal which they did not deserve, and which they did nothing to cause. I ran away repeatedly, on one occasion to the island of Bimini in the Caribbean, where, stepping out of a bar, I was greeted by Adam Clayton Powell as we passed on the terrace, and some months later, to Haight Ashbury, where, had the fates willed it, I might have encountered the woman I would marry twenty years later, Marian Hollinger, who was spending her days in Golden Gate Park and her nights in the Avalon.
My days as a runaway were followed by a brief stint in a locked mental ward, where I began writing poetry in earnest. Not surprisingly I was immersed in the literature of the Beats, particularly Ginsburg’s Howl, which affected me profoundly. It was not the sensational aspects of the poem — the profanity and eroticism — which attracted me. I rather skirted around those sections. What attracted me was the generosity and inclusivness of the poem, the celebration of wretched lost souls like myself, the refusal to condemn or blame, the insistence on finding the stubborn lovely ember in every burnt-out ash of humanity. It is a quality I would soon find in Whitman as well, but in Ginsberg it was especially genuine and vital. This impression of Ginsberg would be reinforced the following year when, in Grant Park during the Democratic Convention in 1968, I sat in the audience amid the turmoil of the day, and watched and listened as he sat cross-legged on stage, chanting and ringing his little bells. Long after Ginsberg would cease to exert any sort of aesthetic influence over me, I would continue to hold him in high regard, and to believe that his work, especially Howl, penetrated more deeply into the marrow of the American character than any poem since WWII.
Following my release from the asylum, I quit school and went to work in a hardware factory in Rockford, Illinois, working the night shift as a barrel plater — Orpheus entering the underworld. I may have been no Orpheus, but the night shift in that factory was an underworld by any definition: chaotic, cacaphonous, inhabited by zombies, into whose lost legion I was immediately swallowed up.
I worked next to a huge bear of a man, an eastern European who had been in this country for a number of years but could speak no English. His shift began each morning at seven, but he might arrive at anytime after about 3 a.m. According to those who had worked with him the longest, his invariable routine was to punch out, go straight home, eat a great supper, drain a bottle and fall into a deep sleep. When he awoke, whatever the hour, he would return to the factory and begin work. Since he was the only worker to man his particular station, this worked out fine. Being unable to read a clock got him into no difficulty, and the company got hours of free labor from him. Everyone was happy. On the whole factory floor he was my closest neighbor, but he never gave me one direct look in all the months I worked there. Being unable to read English got him into serious trouble on one occasion. I don’t recall now what his job was, although it involved working next to a large furnace and involved the use of several chemicals. On one occasion, before my time, he had erred when mixing two chemicals choosing one different chemical by mistake. No sooner had he mixed them than he was immediately knocked unconscious, as were a number of other workers in his vicinity. Fortunately the accident was quickly discovered, the proper steps promptly taken, and no one died.
My job was to plate great loads of hinges, bolts, screws, etc, with zinc, copper or bronze. The parts came to me in big pans like oversized breadpans on skids, and I would empty one pan into each barrel on a long rack, which I would then immerse in a chemical bath while an electrical charge was run through it. Then I would raise the rack, empty each barrel back into a pan, dump each pan in turn into a big revolving drier, pour the dried parts back into the pan and stack the pans back onto the skids. I was paid by the skid. We were permitted to load only one pan into each barrel, but all of us double- or triple-loaded our barrels all the time, so as to be able to exceed our quota each night. In the morning, when the supervisor came on duty, he would inspect each of our outlays and credit us for however much we had plated. When we consistently exceeded our quotas, he knew of course that we were overloading our barrels, but we were never reprimmanded for doing so. We might be violating regulations, but production was up, and that was what mattered.
We wore no safety equipment of any kind. I tried to be careful, but by the end of each night’s shift my arms and hands would be covered in red welts and cuts from the chemicals, which splashed on us every time the barrels were lowered into or raised from the baths. It was unavoidable. I got used to the welts and the burning and didn’t pay it much mind.
After about half a year I quit the factory. I had located a small college in central Illinois which had a reputation for working with difficult students and they had agreed to let me enroll for the summer even without a high school diploma. I attended classes for one summer and one semester, then dropped out again. Based on my grades from the college, I was accepted into one of the state universities in Illinois, promptly failed all my classes, got into another small college in St. Paul, failed all those classes as well, then found myself back in Rockford again.
For several years, much to the continued dismay of my parents, I took up a shiftless existence, renting out attic corners in cheap apartments with several friends and taking a succession of factory jobs. I was back in the Satanic Mills. I worked in a furniture factory for a number of months, on various of their assembly lines, and I remember very little of my time there. Chiefly the men, many of whom were WWII vets who had grown up in the Depression, treated me with either hostility or contempt. My hair was long, at a time when no one else’s was, and it was immediately assumed that I was a hippie and a protestor, which was basically the truth. I did nothing to try and fit in, and I found the labor impossibly tedious. Still, I showed up on time each morning (or evening) and put in a full eight or ten hours work. Once I had proven my basic reliability, I was largely left alone. Most of the men treated me curtly or with indifference. Most of the women, who were present in significant numbers in all the factories, treated me with kindness. Needless to say they made all the difference.
There was one bad incident at the furniture factory, which occured on a day when I was loading boxcars with heavy crates in the factory yard. For no particular reason, a young thug took exception to my appearance and began punching me in the face. I had recently converted to pacificsm, and saw this occasion as a test of my convictions. Accordingly I did nothing to defend myself and the thug beat me to a pulp. A ring of young black men gathered around to watch the fun, and were incredulous when I refused to lift a hand. At one point the thug threw a wild punch, missed me, and fell on his face. The crowd whooped in anticipation that I would seize the opportunity and kick my assailant while he was down, but I did nothing of the kind. The thug got to his feet and continued to beat me. At a certain point he quit in disgust and the crowd dispersed. I walked out to my car and drove home. When the management discovered what had happened, they fired the thug, and moved me to another section of the factory. I resumed work almost immediately, though it took two or three weeks for the swelling and discoloration to go away. I remained a pacifist for some time, but my faith in pacificism was never quite as strong after the beating, and in time I would abandon it altogether, though to this day I admire those who are able to live by it all their lives, such as the Amish and the Quakers.
Over the next year or two I worked in several other smaller factories, once as a punch press operatior, and in other capacities that I can no longer recall. I even worked for a time in an auto factory, the Chrysler plant in Belvidere, but I so hated the experience that I left after only several weeks. The pay was terrific, but the assembly line was like some totalitarian nightmare out of Orwell. I had worked assembly lines before, but this one was much more mechanized and ruthless in its pace, and I simply couldn’t muster the necessary psychological adjustment.
These years of factory work left a lifelong stamp on my political and social views. In literature I would ever after feel an instinctive affinity for Charles Dickens, Alfred Williams, William Morris, George Orwell, James Farrell, Thomas McGrath, Carl Sandburg and Woody Guthrie.
I hated the factories and made no lasting friends there. When I entered the labor force in 1967 the country was at the height of the culture wars of the sixties, and this unbridgeable schism so permeated the factory world that going to work each day was like walking into a war zone. Eventually I would have my fill of it, leave the factory door for the last time, and never look back.
For all that I hated it, life in a factory was preferable to working in a shopping center clothing store, which is what I had done while in high school, and was decidedly preferable to high school itself. Both store and school were like something out of the twilight zone, cut off from any reality that I could recognize and circling off in their own wierd solipsistic orbit. In the factories, at least, I felt my feet were on the ground and that I was connected to the older history of my region, and my psyche. I would have preferred farmwork, but the farms I had known growing up no longer existed; they had become mechanized factories in their own right. At least with some of the factories the connections to the past were still in evidence: the furniture factory I worked in for a number of months was built in the nineteenth-century and with little effort I could see myself following in the footsteps of James Farrell or Jack London. I conceived the idea that occupations requiring dress shoes or loafers instead of workboots were less rooted in reality, less dignified. During my high school years, for a whole constellation of reasons, I had gradually lost all track of who or what I was, to the extent that I ended up briefly as an inmate of a psychiatric ward, an experience which did nothing for me. It was only when I broke away from school and suburban life and hit the hard, merciless reality of the factory floor, with its deep connections to the national literature and mythology, that I was able to begin orienting myself and finding my footing.
