SURVIVING ARRAKIS
An Essay About A Summer Job and Young Love : "The steel mill paid way more than all the other jobs in the area and I needed the loot bad — without it I wasn’t getting back to college or to her"
That summer I had a gig at the local steel mill, Raritan River Steel. It wasn’t one of those Carnegie mega-mill infernos, not one of Blake’s dark satanic mills, but at one hundred acres Raritan River was definitely fuego enough for me. I worked in a department called Mobile Maintenance whose mechanics were charged with keeping the mill vehicles up and running — no easy task given the heat, the dust, and all the attrition from being around molten metal and having to haul its cooled tonnage. Mobile Maintenance almost always fixed shit on site, in whatever part of the mill the vehicle was stationed or died in: in the melt shop, the roll mill, or where the ships loaded with scraps pulled up. Mechanics even had to scramble up the massive fucking Komatsu crane, a climb that used to give me the puckers just looking at it.
As a summer temp with no mechanical training whatsoever, my job was to clean parts in the garage and run errands throughout the mill, delivering tools and other bullshit to the mechanics when they needed them. I didn’t have to deal with actual steel, hot or cold, for any real length of time. Mine was an easy job as far as these things go, but it was still harder than delivering pool tables, or any other employment I’d had. The heat alone had motherfuckers quitting on day one. Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated, nursing a hangover-level headache.
Not easy at all.
Didn’t help that we all had to wear stiff flame retardant ‘greens’ and metatarsal boots that easily raised your core temperature by 20 degrees and left your feet swimming. Or that the white boys I worked with were racist as hell. Or that even if you had a so-called easy job, you could still get smashed by a forklift or pinned under a couple tons of steel rods. And god forbid you got some article of clothing caught in a machine or were anywhere near the rolling yard when the steel started to cobble.
But it wasn’t like I had a lot of options. The mill paid way more than all the other jobs in the area and I needed the extra loot bad — without that cash I wasn’t getting back to Rutgers, I wasn’t going to be able to pay for my next semester. Yes, I was one of those students who between work and some small loans was putting his damn self through school and I was really about it. If I wanted anything in the world in those days it was college, it was Rutgers. It would take a million words for me to explain what Rutgers represented to me — a kid who read, who was curious, who adored art and history and film but who grew up in a neighborhood and a family where all that was looked upon with a suspicion bordering on hostility.
Rutgers was everything that my life up to that point wasn’t.
But also and more urgently: Rutgers was a young woman I’d met the year before on campus. My first novia. She was at Douglass, the women’s college, and had hair that eddied about her like spools of night, and even though we had nothing in common I really thought I was in love with her. When you’re a virgin and no one has ever really loved you, not your parents, not your siblings, a first love often feels like destiny.
Did she love me?