I worked one night in a golfball factory, in northern Ohio. In Elyria. It was snowing. I parked in the slushy early evening gloom, walked up the concrete sidewalk leaving the only footprints in the new snow, entered, produced referral paperwork from the Job Center, and was introduced to some circle of purgatory Dante left out. My job was to take these little core things from one treatment to the next: first, they had to be sand-blasted. Bucketloads of the buggers went into some rotating hopper thing, after which I was to verify a certain volume of sand, and then push the green button and set the timer for 12 minutes. Not 15. Not 10. Twelve. Oh, by the way, there's a dustmask...if you really want to bother. Problem being, it hung on the wall inside the door, and one might possibly inhale more from putting it on than not. I pushed the button, and was immediately met with a powdery, lung-rending blast owing to leaks in the overall containment capabilities of this decades old device. I noticed that my footsteps, which were registered on the floor in the dust, had soon disappeared in a new caking of white soot by the time I left the 'containment' (ha!) room. Next, these blasted balls had to be taken to the acid wash. Similar, except this time the hydrochloric fumes almost knocked me out, and as I was gagging outside the door, some of the other workers found this amusing, and told me where the water fountain was, if I wanted to wash my eyes out. A pitiful stream came from the spout, sputum and some sort of fungal growth in its basin.
My father golfs, and I cursed him, and Arnold Palmer, and everyone with too much leisure time and nothing better to do than whack off a Titleist. A combination of fine powder and hydrochloric fumes...I'm thinking lawsuit. My girlfriend back in some comfy dorm-room giggling with her friends over the sexual innuendoes in a Nabokov book. Why did I drop out of school? Oh, that's right. Because I hated it. But this is even worse than having to sit there while some academe tries to impart his alleged wisdom, meanwhile said wanker ogling the freshly scrubbed nubile in the front row, she gnawing her pencil. Make it all go away. And finally, on this little trip through a mundane amusement ride of demeaning production, we have the rubberband girls. OK, there were these skeletal finger things that looked like a spider on its back, which rotated the cores in a random (?) vibratory fashion, while the RBGs (that's rubberband girls, again) assisted the process, sitting there at their stools and station, by helping the core to reach spherical fruition by feeding the rubberband thread and coaxing the core to reach its mark. God knows what volumetric determiner meant a full ball. They had ragged and bloody bandages on their fingers from where the machine had bitten them. Bloody ball strokers, mummy finger wage slaves. I needed sleep, and a pharmaceutical. As for the women and their wounds, perhaps they spaced out from the low rumble of the machines, or fell asleep and were awoken with a mechanical spider's bite, on the Nightshift from hell that belonged in the 3rd world. Leaving at dawn, I noticed no footsteps on the sidewalk. Just like inside the sand-blaster room. I forget if I ever picked up my check.
