Learnt how to lacerate my arms while manipulating razor edged metal onto a lathe, then move it to the vaporous scourge of the acid bath, while the skinny kid with fresh callouses was rejected immediately on sight in the pre dawn in the railways work gang lineup, his soft skin would soon help to fertilize the northern country farms and get blistered while bagging packham pears in the heat.
I would share the mess with seasonal workers, intermingle with fly by nights many escaping psychological heat from their crimes in their own downtime for a while from a separated life much as I was. There in the pub in the centre of town reading the paper while I ate, companion and roommate with the prodigious appetite sat at my elbow silently, in the bar later he would start to wag about the magnum in his kit at our room. I had to have my wits but was a quick learner, matched them with outrageous bluff, needed it so found it. Felt neither above nor beneath these men, who rammed at life daily with their bodies as manual labourers , whose strength and fitness were the only check between them and destitution.
Previously lived on a predestined boulevard toward a degree and professional life, now I was on Booze Boulevard where the old bloke out to it on the weekend unleashed his drunken sensibility among the rest of our room’s shambles which included myself, and which reverberated with his perturbed and irritated tones. Then at daybreak he would restore and align himself and his few accoutrements under the fledgling day, prepare like Buddha for the week that awaited of excruciating efforts with his broken back. I argued over cards then in bitter vainglory packed up and stormed off the property for good.
The storming off was the making of me, I slept that night in a forest turned the bike off and pushed it roughly some way through the grey veils of belah at dusk. Then at midnight suddenly an unhinged inconsolable screaming in the treetops, a slow drawn out murdering. Even when I was viscerally frozen at the agonised pleas I was still aware of an inordinate excitement at what I was encountering. That night a symbolic surreal unanchoring of my soul, my young ears primed for just this waiting moment that was now joined. On the bike in full load no one could hitch a ride I hid it in the bush again and walked down though abandoned mining towns breaking the snagging regrowth with my ungainly airman boots.
For the rest of that year found a job in a regional town assembly line. My burning spot welds hissed as I spun the harness there may still be an appliance with my pimpled spot weld preventing it from debouching its contents. It was possible in that factory to arrive and enact perfectly a specialized task, without ever knowing what the final product would look like or even what it was. Is there unwitting purpose in our human situation, possible as a species to perform an ordained task with courage and skill, and only later view in amazement the final product further along the line which ski
Sometimes I felt more sometimes less than anyone else never the same. I had no acquaintances but that was OK with me I was on a journey of discovery, I had imaginary friends that followed me from the library where I read books about the underbelly of human experience where once-trusted powers had become obliterating forces whatever side you were on, raging characters whose explicit voices and dramas filled my caravan; I burnt my steak with a book propped against my helmet while the steaming veg hissed, a single bar radiator between my feet to get me through the tableland night.