THE BRICKS

SO EVERYDAY DOWN a the brickworks you’d walk around in a haze of cement and lime dust with these big headphones and earplugs in underneath them to block out all the noise of the big silos mixing cement, machinery cutting cement, conveyor belts, and people hitting things with rusty pieces of iron and what have you. You couldn’t really hear the people hitting things but you could see them furiously hitting something to look like they were working at something or other to justify the pay.

Johnny was the foreman, everybody respected Johnny and he wore these really tight shorts. Like, he had great ass I gotta say. Anyways, this place was a bag of shit. Most of the people were out on parole or bail or some such. You didn’t need a reference to get a job at the brickworks you just needed to turn up on your first day after somebody said they had a mate who needed work, and then if you turned up the next day things went on like that and so on. There was no job security or anything but some guys had managed to be there for years and years. Other guys had been there a few years, had run away, and then come back and spent a few more years there wondering how to run away again.

Nobody spoke while the work hours were on. You could, but nobody could hear speech. None of the blokes had learned sign language very much above giving each other the finger. And really, in this place that was the only language one needed to understand – when you were giving someone else the shits for some reason.

The lunch shifts were timed to the clock though. That was sacrosanct. That clock meant everything. People looked at that clock out the side of their eye at every tick of the minute hand. And when I say some people I mean every damn down and out fucker in there. But we all chose this slavery. So what of it – a man’s gotta have something to be angry about to keep himself sane I suppose.

At lunch breaks Sean would see how many scoops of free coffee he could put in his cup and then boast about it like a badge of honour. I love COFFEE! He’d say! I don’t think he did, there just wasn’t much else to measure yourself on. I mean, you could stack two pallets of bricks off the conveyor belt in record time but it didn’t matter because the forklift driver still picked them up when he got around to it and by then there were more bricks coming down the conveyor belt and nobody had noticed what you’d achieved in half the TIME because they were busy looking at the CLOCK.

Paul was another guy, he used to always talk about the same thing at lunch. It was threesomes. He may or may not have had a threesome but he sure did talk about it a lot and he claimed it was much easier to finish up if someone else was licking his balls. I guess I paid attention because I still remember him saying it, although I’ve never experienced it. It might be the truth, who knows; we go off the recommendations of others so to speak.

Carl, the other guy, quiet, but not so mysterious, used to roll cigarettes before work and during the two breaks – little lunch and big lunch, just like at school – it made sense here. He had it down to an art. He was in charge of the chopping machine (I never learned the real name of it) but basically he hit a button when a brick came down a conveyor belt and then BAM it was two bricks for someone else to lift onto a pallet. And then when the pallet was full up it was to be driven away by the forklift driver to somewhere else if there was an order for them, or way out the back if there were no orders. You see, the brick works kept producing bricks whether people wanted them or not.

But I gotta clarify, Carl, the way he would roll these cigarettes. It was beautiful. Always perfect. Straight, nice balance between the paper and the tobacco. When he was pushing that button for seven and a half hours a day he was never without a smoke in his mouth and as soon as those smokes ran out and the buzzer rang and the clock was pointing to lunch time; everybody just walked off to the lunch area. Sean was always just putting out the last smoke he’d rolled in anticipation of that buzzer. He had his lungs timed to the clock.

Lindsay was another guy, sad little guy who always appeared happy. He always ate a pie at lunch. Lindsay was always early to work so after twelve years of being early someone had given him a key to the front gate and it was his honorary job to open the gates so anyone else who wanted to arrive early could get into the plant. I think Lindsay felt a pride in this and it asserted him some respect with the others guys. He looked like a rat the way some people do, teeth out and a nose like a triangle and such, but nobody had anything against old Lindsay; he’d earned his place. He died two months later because of a limestone deposit in his lungs.

Anyways, this particular day the bosses were arriving and Sean was all excited about it. He’d had his coffee and was jumping around talking about the watch one of the bosses wore. It was a big gold watch and Sean talked about it all the time. While we were waiting for the bosses to come I was at one point of the conveyor belts with a turn in it. Some kind of axis. You had to physically turn the brick so it could then go down the conveyor belt in a different direction. At this point in time they hadn’t invented a machine for this particular duty, and it kept a man paying his rent from time to time.

I looked over to Sean. He was buzzing on his coffee, I was at this axis, it was a circle shape, I held my headphones and acted like I was scratching a vinyl record and DJaying some kind of morose tone of brickwork for the masses to never hear or appreciate. He thought it was so funny he started trying the same gesture on every conveyor belt available while gaining the eye contact of whoever would give him the time.

All he got back in return was the finger. Sign language, what a thing. What he really lacked was a circular part, all the other belts were just straight lines.

The bosses turned up and men with beards and dirty cement laden jackets up above the cement mixers starting banging things harder and swearing and walking off. It was assumed they’d been there so long they had some kind of unspoken agreement with the bosses, although I doubt any of them had ever talked face to face. But, and angry man in this place was a busy man, and that meant more bricks.

Johnny tight pants (although nobody ever called him that) would jump up near a conveyor belt as if it was the mast of a ship and look out over the warehouse. He’d make it apparent he’d seen something and walk off. The bosses walked in. Some headphones and such on. I saw the watch, Sean kept pointing to it. Johnny came back and gave the bosses a big handshake with both hands and then stood up straight admiring the functionality of the brickworks. The bosses nodded with satisfaction and then walked off into the office room. Which from the one time I’d seen it contained one book that looked like it could be used for accounting, some invoices, and a calendar of a naked lady nailed to an asbestos wall.

We never saw the bosses after that when they visited on those odd occasions. But at the end of the day the clock would hit FIVE, and EVERYTHING would shut down. Sean and I grabbed brooms and started sweeping the floors hoping we’d be asked to come back the next day. When we swept them then usually we’d be asked back, but it was not always so.