During winter breaks in college, I sometimes signed on with the local temp agency to pick up some extra cash for school. I hoped with all my powers that the temp agency would place me in a cool, creative job, something in line with drawing cartoons or designing moustache combs. Then the next day, I’d learn that they had assigned me to the frontlines of an assembly line at one of the dozen warehouses in town.

Most of the time, I worked first shift, which was ideal. Sometimes, though, the only openings available were second-shifts. Second shift isn’t too bad. Yeah, the hours are odd: you work through dinner and get off right when most people are considering brushing their teeth for bed. And scheduling a time to hang out with friends can be a hassle. But these cons are largely offset by the fact that you get to sleep in every morning. Plus, there’s little traffic to contend with coming home.

But twice, I got stuck with third shift. My friends were always gearing up for a fun night just as I was grabbing my steel-toed boots to take to the deserted, dark streets toward my gloomy destination. I drove through the cold nights listening to odd late-night-radio talk shows and thinking about how sleepy I already was until the flat, smoky tops of the warehouse buildings, Nos. 1 through 12, emerged in the distance. Often at this moment, I was overcome by an eerie sensation that if I released the steering wheel and let off the gas, a tractor beam would continue to pull me along to my parking space. I never tried it, though, for fear it might actually happen.

A dim, jaundiced light lit every warehouse I’ve ever worked in. It always took a minute for my eyes to adjust before I could clock in and hide the snack I had brought behind the expired creamer and Tupperware of mystery meat in the back of the break room fridge. Once inside the belly of the building, I walked with caution, for fear I might get struck by a fast-moving forklift or a skid of shrink wrap.  However, there were no known defenses against the dry warehouse air. By the end of the week, my lips would be chapped so badly they’d look as though I’d kissed a cactus. 

For this particular job, I worked as a package sorter on an assembly line. From my perch, I could see people being busy throughout the building. Interestingly, I was even able to uncover a few guys in my old high school class who I thought had been missing since my junior year. Occasionally, one would break free from his work, come up, open his wallet, and show me a mini photo of his baby.

But, overall, the racket of the machines and conveyor belts made it difficult to hear yourself think, much less talk to anyone. Some conversation would have been nice, too, but after I’d learned the gist of the job, they had banished me to a platform all alone.

Occasionally, my supervisor would tap me on the shoulder and tell me to take 15. Break time at 3 a.m., amounted to little more than my sitting in the break room with perhaps one or two other lone souls fighting to keep my eyes open until it was time to clock back in. Sometimes I’d stare at the plastic ashtray on my table until everything turned blurry. Other times, I’d pick up an ancient issue of Sports Illustrated that someone had left behind and read about the controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Dodgers’ decision to move to the West Coast.

I was put in charge of sorting little packages; that is, packages weighing less than 10 lbs (?). These packages held a variety of things, but most were green-tinted transparent bags containing biopsies being sent from hospitals to labs for testing. Each biopsy bag contained a sealed stubby cup of liquid, a vile of blood, or another transparent pouch containing a hunk of something, and they bumped down a conveyor belt from an unseen source. 

I can’t remember the exact details of the job. But whatever I did required my handling and separating these packages with latex gloves that waterlogged the skin on my hands so badly that it took nearly a half hour for my fingers to regain color and feeling. When it was finally time to go home, I’d pop the gloves off and wonder if my hands were ever going to turn back to normal.

Then I’d drive home just as the morning sun was poking through the trees. As I faded in and out of consciousness behind the wheel from lack of sleep, I’d wonder if any of those biopsies I’d sorted belonged to someone who draws cartoons for a living.

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I worked on a hog farm for a summer, so you can say I know some stuff about hogs.

For one, they produce a stink more toxic than a napalmed skunk. It shocks the nostrils and coats the whole mouth with an invisible paste. I’ve never heard of a child going blind from the stink, but I’d be surprised if it has never happened.

Another thing is that sows — the big, mean momma hogs — hate when you castrate their young. They literally want to chew the nape off your neck. Luckily, they’re penned up and can’t maul you. They sure try, though. They try with all their hoggish might. They snort and spit and tear with their pig teeth at the flimsy iron rods of their pens, all the while trying to laser you dead with their murderous, red eyes. 

This behavior does add a dash of thrill to the job. But, in general, I took no pleasure in this dirty work. I naturally felt sadistic, not to mention squeamish. Because I’m a male myself, the very thought of castration makes me want to triple up on undies and wear granite pants. I’m still not sure how I ever did the job without hyperventilating. I must have compartmentalized the trauma of the task in my mind somehow, maybe the same way soldiers sometimes do with their fears during battle. 

To the pig farmer’s defense, castrating pigs is a necessary evil. I know that much. Should the practice ever be banned, everyone’s bacon would taste tough and rubbery like deflated balloons. Testosterone simply ruins pig meat, much as how the word slacks ruins people’s concept of pants. Furthermore, if left alone, these male piglets would ultimately turn into boars – ugly, vicious animals that would first overrun the farm and, eventually, the world.       

For the record, I did none of the actual castrating myself. I have neither the stomach nor the surgical hands for it. Instead, my job was to pluck the piglets from their pen, one by one, away from their 300-lb, snorting-mean mommas, with the principal rule being — steer clear of the sow’s bite.  

Then, I’d pass the piglets to my friend Shawn, who’d promptly clamp each one of their heads between his knees and grip their legs like handlebars for Uncle Wes, who performed the surgery with a razor and his best Freudian accent:”Yah goin’ ta feelu slight presha.” The procedure itself lasted less than 10 seconds; the mental images, a lifetime.

Wes would then douse the newly initiated eunuch with Bactine. Then it was onto the next piglet. Naturally, the female piglets were spared the rite of castration. However, they did get their curly tails lopped off. Pig tails, I learned, in their natural curly state, are prone to infection.

When we weren’t castrating pigs, we were either shoveling their manure in the heat or chasing one that had escaped back into its pen. So I learned a lot from working on a hog farm; for example, I learned that I would never want to own a pig for a pet, not even Wilbur from Charolette’s Web.

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One high-school summer break, my buddy Shawn and I worked as farmhands on his Uncle’s farm. He grew tobacco and raised hogs, and we figured all the hard labor would make for good Rocky-style conditioning for the upcoming football season.

Before that summer, I was often guilty of entertaining the occasional romantic notion of doing strong, mean man labor on rustic landscapes under a setting sun. I imagined a tough but fairly painless work environment, where I almost always looked like Tristan (Brad Pitt) in the movie Legend of the Fall. It was typical for me to roam the countryside by horse – a horse that I had broke. Sometimes, I might free an entangled lamb from a thicket, rescue a bawling calf caught in the middle of a rushing stream, or scoop up the earth and smell the fragrance of my toil.  

Never did my hands turn into two hunks of bleeding blisters, or my lower back feel as though it’d been struck by lightening after operating the hay escalator for four hours. Nor did I ever imagine myself white-eyeing, which is, I learned, the name of the condition for when the victim’s eyes go goofy from the onset of heat exhaustion. But this was more the reality. Add to this: farm hours start insanely early.  

Every predawn for three months, Shawn would pick me up. I’d finish the rest of my previous night’s sleep in the passenger seat on the ride there, while Shawn drove, manned the radio, and got on me about being a poor conversation partner. Once at the farm, I’d stumble out of the car to a low-slung sun poking just over the trees. Then we’d go find Uncle Wes to receive our orders for the day.

For our first assignment, we were banished to the tobacco fields. When we started, the tobacco was already in the ground and blooming nicely. So, the main thing at this point was the vigorous task of weed maintenance. Wes, therefore, introduced us to the gas-powered tiller.  

There was just one tiller, so Shawn and I took turns guiding it through the lanes of the tobacco field. The tiller moved about an inch an hour, giving you considerable time to think. I usually just zoned out on one of the churning blades or something and let the muffled roar of the engine carry me away to a distant daydream. 

Yes, it was a fairly peaceful process, that is, until your forearms started to heat up from gripping the strong, metal levers that propelled the tiller forward. The pain would typically set in midway through, when Shawn or I, whoever was left behind to kick dirt clods, was just a speck on the horizon. It’d begin with a slight tingle, which deceived you into thinking you could take it. Then, suddenly, the deep, burning hurt would bite down. It was probably equivalent to injecting lava into your arms. Daydreams turned into prayers for strength and deliverance. And any screams were drowned out by the roar of the tiller engine and the heavy sense of isolation.           

Sometimes, while letting our forearms cool, we’d try to come up with ways to entertain ourselves. We’d wing dirt clods at a stationary target or swim in the pond with the pigs. Once we got so desperate, we shoved a bright green tobacco leaf into our mouth, to see if it tasted like the store kind. It did not, of course. It tasted like chemicals or a bad salad soaked in insecticide dressing. But we were glad we did it anyway.

When we weren’t in the fields, we were either baling hay or chasing pigs, which I will talk about next time.

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College summers, I worked for the county of my hometown. Overall, it was a decent job, but my rookie year there they placed me on the weed-eating crew.

From 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday, in the white heat of the day, we’d rove the deserted county roads in a dusty white utility van in search of weed-covered guardrails. The van resembled an ice-cream truck stripped of all its fun. It had commercial-airplane passenger seats in back and a good-for-nothing stick shift that’d slip into neutral in mid drive. Our foreman behind the wheel, who I’ll call Gil, would call that stick shift all sorts of names until he wrestled it back into place.

Only a select few made up the weed-eating crew: three college punks — Pat, Lucas and me — and Gil, a retiree who worked summers, wore a purple polka-dot hat with a tiny brim, and suffered daily back spasms. The first few weeks on the job didn’t seem so bad. We got to sport safety face shields that resembled college-campus riot gear and wield gas-powered weed-eaters that roared like chainsaws. On breaks, we’d wrestle each other in the ditch, crack jokes, or listen to Gil under a shade tree go on about the world of antique collecting.

Our job mainly involved Gil pulling up to a guardrail, lighting a Camel No-filter and turning us loose. We’d massacre every weed in sight. Then we’d return to the van, weed guts and bugs plastered to our face shields. We’d climb into our respective airplane seats and doze off while Gil drove us to our next weedy destination, only the wayward stick shift or Gil’s growling through another back attack interrupting our dreams.

After about a week of this, I woke up one morning scratching my forearms to the dermis. My arms pulsated. They were bumpy, red and swollen, like Popeye’s, and had the texture of a gourd. Poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac – I had all the poisons. To combat this, I wore long sleeves to work. Nights, I soaked my body to the neck in Calamine Lotion and wore knee socks over my hands to bed, to keep from scratching in my sleep.

Just as my forearms started returning to normal, what looked like inflamed anthills started dotting my ankles. I scratched the tops off until they bled and scabbed over. Then these tiny anthills started moving north. I found one behind my knee. Then behind my other knee. Then along every square inch of my inseams. Then in places I was too embarrassed to tell the doctor about.

Later I found out that these were chigger bites. Chiggers are these mean grass mites that live in tall grass and burrow into the skin, where they live for about a week before they move on. Although they sound lethal, they are generally harmless and go away, but not before they become your most-hated insect.

At summer’s end, we all desperately wanted off the weed-eating crew. We were so sick of weeds. So sick. The chiggers were relentless. And the blinding August heat just kept getting hotter. The van had no air condition, so we had to settle for whatever hot breath the wind blew through the windows and doors. We wondered why the tires on our ice-cream truck hadn’t yet melted into black pools of rubber and watched in disbelief as Gil lit up one hot cigarette after another.

Naturally, our van became a mobile insane asylum. I grew agitated and constantly swatted at imaginary ticks crawling up my legs. It wasn’t unusual for Pat, before disappearing into the weeds, to raise his weed-eater over his head, give it gas, and laugh like a lunatic. Lucas, rather reserved anyway, grew even more disturbingly quiet. We eyed him cautiously. And poor Gil let our sophomoric antics get to him. This became most apparent on the day he chased Pat around the van.

When it was all finally over, and my post-traumatic-stress-disorder symptoms had subsided, I was able to strike one more thing off my list of possible college majors: weed-eating.

My next article will be about my experience on a tobacco/pig farm.

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Dear fellow readers,

I realize I haven’t submitted a blog post in a long while. Whatever small following I had has surely moved on. But like Joaquin Phoenix, I’m still here.

I’ve no excuses for my behavior, really. I’ve just been, well, lazy, I guess. Or, perhaps, exhausted is a better word. Fatherhood, although ineffably rewarding and fun, sometimes just straight wears me out. And when nighttime falls and the little one is tucked away safely in her crib, instead of blogging I choose to do other things, like sleep or pet the dog.

To my credit, though, my hiatus hasn’t been entirely unproductive. I was able to amass a small collection of crummy, half-written, unpublished posts that never made the cut (and could perhaps even incriminate me in some countries should Wikileaks get ahold of them). They’re lying about in the Land of Misfit Posts waiting for me to either edit or delete them into oblivion. It’s kind of sad. I never set out to destroy the things I write. It just comes with the territory of being a blogger, I guess.

Anyway, to make up for my long absence, I’ve decided to post an exciting series on the odd jobs I’ve held during my lifetime. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked at a pig/tobacco farm and on a warehouse assembly line. I worked a paper route, waited tables and paved county roads. I’ve battled weeds along guardrails a mile long. I’ve almost died from heat exhaustion while baling hay. I worked as a bricklayer’s assistant and as a flagger on a deserted country road. I’ve spent a summer scraping and painting the side of my parent’s house. And I’ve held the trouble light for my dad during important home-improvement projects.

So stay tuned.

Sincerely,

Yofis

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