We don't piece here

 We don't piece here

    We used to berate ourselves and say we were pussy suburban privileged white kids but that was only partially true. It certainly is a better description of my work history than Greg's who sometimes joined the working men in parts yard or factory. The problem with many of us in the Boomer generation was we wanted to be hippies because that was where the fun and chicks were but we also wantd to have some money to pay for fun and take those hippy chicks out for beer and pizza pie. In my case I lasted exactly one day in the glass bottle factory of Owens-Illinois over on Fruitland in Vernon. It was a BC involved hire and I assumed I would be in an office taking orders over the phone but instead I reported at 6;30 am to the factory where I moved cases of empty milk bottles off a box car and onto a conveyor belt at a speed that kept you sweating. The noise was absolutely deafening as the embossing machine was just feet away and each bottle stamped caused an ear-splitting expolosion. I was a broken man by lunch but stayed heroically until 3:30 when I went to my car stone deaf and drove over to the Sheehy's since I knew I could not go home and let my father know I was going to quit. But, this story is about another working class hero named Greg who had finished his junior year at Frisco State but had many months until he could begin his Senior year at UCLA. In those days the newspapers had an entire "help wanted" section and this cat needed some dough so he scanned the pages with a desire to take anything that paid money. One of the jobs was on an assembly line at Thermador Industries where they made hot water heaters, refrigerators  and other appliances He had survived a Summer at Familiam Pipe and Supply so he figured he could handle Thermador. While it was pure drudgery he refused to quit and after some weeks he figured out a kind of rhtyhm to the repetitive movements placing insulation material into fridges. He was cutting the material from large sections and during this procedure he figured out how to insulate 3 fridge doors with just 2 raw sheets by using the leftover materials. At one point his supervisor came by and noticed the young go-getter fitting scraps into the doors perfectly when he glared at the grinning Greg who expected a compliment and maybe credit for a new factory method to speed up the  fabrication. Instead the boss man shouted "WE DON'T PIECE HERE!" The chastened cog in the manufacturing wheel went back to the old way and  recalled John Lennon's "Working Class Hero " while happily anticipating classes in Westwood with E. Bradford Burns.

"Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see"