Estelle

Gary, Indiana 

     During the last great spasm of the American steel industry, a thousand of us worked under one roof in Gary, Indiana, turning sheet metal into refueling lines for the Strategic Air Command and prototypes for America's infant space program.
     Five days a week I fought sunrise traffic from a flat in southside Chicago to the parking lot outside Door South #l6, where I inserted a card in the time clock then faced a mountain of long, thin wall steel tubing. By fitting sizing dies onto twenty-foot hydraulic rams I pulled one tube inside another until the mountain dwindled to four tubes. Those were left for the next day, as a reminder to the time-study finks in neckties that the union was running the job.
     Repetitive tasks are a machinist's yoga. While the machinery whirls the mind cruises. Instances when attention to the job disappeared entirely are chronicled by circular scars on my palms. Spinning steel tubes snagged them while I was lost in fantasy about Estelle. 
     Estelle drove the maggot wagon, a quilted stainless steel canteen truck that arrived outside Door South #16 at ten, noon, and two-thirty. She was long and lean with caramel apple skin. She wore brown coveralls, a coin dispenser slung around one hip and a chain on her wallet. She was alive, friendly, and female. I pictured her breasts balanced on wine glasses. To her I was just another honky millhead who breakfasted on chilidogs and studied her shape, but I lived for those three breaks a day.
     The mill closed for three days over New Years. We came back to work to find that Central Catering Company's contract expired and that Youngstown Sheet and Tube had installed refrigerated banks of vending machines filled with food in cellophane. Next to each of these refrigerated units were perched six magic boxes called microwave ovens, capable of transforming cardboard cinnamon rolls into gooey glops in thirty seconds, of scalding hot chocolate in sixty. The welders suspected that we were witnessing a new era in electron-flow arc welding. I missed Estelle.
     It was Pogey Nielson, the shop steward, who discovered the entertainment value of the new contraptions when he tried to warm his stainless Stanley thermos of coffee in one. Poof! lightning, smoke, the stink of fried plastic, then silence.
     A general microwave meltdown ensued. In February, management posted rules and regulations governing the use of the ovens. In the bathrooms they taped signs listing the penalties for willful destruction of company property. In March both the Steel Workers and the Boilermakers' Unions began to question the safety of the things. By April it began to sink into the cost-analysis guys that a factory filled with lathe shavings might not be the best proving grounds for a machine that was allergic to tinfoil.
     A new contract was negotiated with Central Catering. At the ten-o'clock buzzer on the first Monday of July I hustled out of Door South #l6 to find that Estelle had been replaced by a chunky man from Tennessee named Walter, with warty hands and teeth the color of Cheetos. The thrill was gone from building two-ply tubing. Two weeks later I bought a brand new 1966 Ford pickup for two thousand dollars and pointed it toward California.