6000 RPM

After two years of living here, he still hasn’t gotten used to the smell of the air. The stench of burning garbage from the incinerator blows into his trailer at night and he wakes up feeling sick.

Inside his 1978 white Plymouth station wagon, Bob thinks briefly about when he used to live in the country, and when he used to wake up to crowing, and when there weren’t so many people around, and he could do what he wanted to, look like he wanted to, and act like he wanted to.

5:30 A.M.

He drives away from the trailer park, and through the nearly empty streets, as he does every morning. The windows are still frosted over, and he turns on the windshield wipers to clear the windshield. His frozen hands grip the steering wheel as he gets on I-94. He turns the heat on high, and after a few minutes warm air comes out of the vents.

At Central, Bob gets off the freeway and turns left. Central isn’t really the center of anything. It’s just an old two-lane road in a shabby industrial area on the west side of the city. Bob stops for the light at Michigan Avenue. When he gets stopped at this light in the evening, a toothless old man always rubs newspapers all over his windshield. Bob tries to avoid stopping on his way home. On the way to work no one is on the street begging, and he is in no hurry to get to work early. Bob arrives at the machine shop at 5:50, and parks in the back lot. The wall in the alley behind the shop is covered with countless layers of painted-over graffiti. Bob enters through the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only”.

The shop smells like grease. Except for the fans and the sleepy workers putting on their uniforms, everything is still. Bob opens his locker and puts on his blue work shirt and pants, then he walks to the burr bench. Bob grinds off the sharp edges, polishes the parts, and checks all the holes to make sure they’re tapped to the right depth. Bob would like a better paying job, but he doesn’t have the training.

Suddenly the buzzer sounds and the peace of the morning is overcome by the sounds of the machines cutting metal, and cranes carrying parts between machines.

Bob’s first job of the morning is to polish a box of one hundred and forty-eight bolts that have just been cut for a machine that has to be assembled and delivered next week. He grinds the end of each bolt, then polishes the threads with the wire wheel. His mind drifts.

He thinks about the past weekend. He went to his parents’ farm on Sunday afternoon. The air smelled like pine trees. The snow was white. When he turned off his car and got out, nothing was moving, everything was stopped. He just stood listening for a minute, then he lay down in the snow. The snow was very cold. He almost fell asleep, but his mother came outside and shook him.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

Startled, Bob opened his eyes quickly. When he saw it was his mother, he smiled and stood up.

“What are you doing? You’ll catch your death of cold. Come inside and have some hot cocoa.”

The hot cocoa tasted good, and the roast his mother made was the first home-cooked dinner he’d eaten in months. When it got dark, Bob sat on the porch and stared up at the stars.

“That job is hot, Jones. Stop dragging your feet.” This is the second time his supervisor has warned Bob this month.

“Why do I put myself through this?” Bob thinks, as he picks up the pace. “Why don’t I just quit? Why don’t I just walk out right now?” Out of spite, Bob explodes into a frenzy, making as much noise as he works as he can. His hand slips while he’s grinding the end of a bolt, and the grinding wheel makes a howling noise as both the bolt and Bob’s fingers get stuck between the wheel and the safety guard. Bob slams his other fist against the emergency stop button, and the wheel slows down from 6000 rpm. Bob’s legs collapse underneath him, and he falls onto the concrete floor. The supervisor runs over and quickly wraps up Bob’s hand, which is missing the tips of his first two fingers and is spouting blood. Bob has to look away to keep from fainting. Another worker takes apart the machine, looking for the first sections of Bob’s fingers, but finds only blood, metal dust, and pieces of bone.

Bob is taken in the supervisor’s car to the clinic where on-the-job injuries are handled. He sits in the waiting room with his hand wrapped in shop towels. After five very long and painful minutes, Bob is seen by a doctor who sends Bob to the hospital. The fingers are stitched and bandaged, and Bob is told that he can return to work in a few days as long as he doesn’t use his left hand much for a couple weeks.

Outside the hospital, Bob’s supervisor asks him if he wants a ride to his car, or a ride home. Bob replies that he isn’t feeling well and would like to go to sleep.

Bob is worried about leaving his car in that neighborhood overnight and thinks for a moment about asking to be driven back to the shop. He is much too tired from the anesthetic, and he passes out in the supervisor’s car. Upon arriving home, Bob wakes up, stumbles inside, falls onto his bed, and falls asleep.

When he wakes up, it’s nearly 6:00. If he were at work now, he would be trying to finish what he was doing before the buzzer sounded and thinking about eating dinner. Instead, he’s in bed, with his hand wrapped in bandages, and worried about his car.

6:00 P.M.

Bob calls his parents. His mom answers and says “Bob! We were just talking about you. Why are you home early?”

“Can you and dad come over?”

“Why, is there something wrong? Are you ok?”

“I’m fine. Please come over. I’ll explain when you get here.”

“We’ll be there in an hour. Don’t go anywhere.”

Bob hangs up the phone. He realizes he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and he goes to the kitchen to make some food. He takes out a few pieces of pizza and a Stroh’s and sits at the table. He has trouble at first trying to eat with his left hand bandaged. He opens the beer and feels around the hole with his finger. It feels sharp, and he wants to file it smooth.

As much as he hates his job, it upsets Bob when he thinks about the lost money this injury will cause. The doctor said he could return to work in three days. Bob thinks he could probably start working again in two days, but that’s still twenty-two work hours missed, plus the hours he missed while he was in the hospital today. He won’t get any overtime this week.

When Bob’s parents arrive, he answers the door of his trailer, and his mother, seeing his hand, asks what happened.

Bob replies, “I was at work, grinding something...and I guess my fingers must have gotten pulled into the wheel. Strange, I really don’t remember it that well. I must have fainted.”

Bob’s mother wraps her arms around him to comfort him.

“My supervisor gave me a ride here from the hospital. My car is still there, and I don’t want to leave it there overnight. It could get stolen or something down there.”

Bob’s father puts his hand on Bob’s shoulder and says, “We can pick it up for you, Bob. Don’t worry. Just lie down and relax.”

“Thanks. I’ll try not to worry.”

After his parents leave, Bob thinks about what his dad said, and decides that there really isn’t anything he can do that would make his hand get better faster. He goes to sleep early, thinking that this is the closest thing to a vacation that he’ll get.

Bob begins to dream. He dreams that he’s at work, and that his supervisor is yelling at him.

“That job is hot, Jones. Stop dragging your feet.” Suddenly, the machines all start making horrible howling noises. Bob is surrounded by angry, powerful, loud machines. They close in on him and get louder and more frightening as they get closer. Right before they attack, Bob is frightened out of his sleep, and sits up in his bed with a jolt, sweating and breathing heavy.

After he clears his head and calms down, Bob walks into the kitchen. He turns on the TV, takes a beer out of the refrigerator, and drinks it to help him relax. The clock on the TV says 3:30. He remembers his car and looks out the window to see if his parents brought it back. They did. He smiles, finishes his beer, and lies back down in his bed. After a short time, he falls asleep.

At 4:30, his alarm clock blares in his ear. He falls out of bed, goes into the bathroom, and starts to turn on the shower. As he is reaching to turn on the hot water, he sees the bandages and remembers that he isn’t going to work today. Relieved, he goes back to bed. He lies in bed for an hour, but cannot fall back asleep, so he goes into the kitchen and makes some eggs.

While he is sitting at the table eating his eggs and watching TV, he happens to look at the clock on top of the TV. It says 6:00. If it weren’t for this accident, he thinks, he’d be at work now making money.

6:00 A.M.

Bob puts his head in his hands and rests his elbows on the table. He stares at his eggs for a minute. His head throbs, and he closes his eyes. When he opens them and looks at his eggs, he decides they need more ketchup.

Seven years later, Bob is still working at the machine shop. The buzzer sounds, and the shop suddenly comes alive, as it does every morning. Bob assembles the machines now. He’s making more money. Not much has changed. He works at the same shop. He lives in the same trailer park. Bob still hates his job, but he’s moving up. It wouldn’t be hard for him to get a better-paying job somewhere else as a grinder, but he’s been afraid of grinding machines since the accident.

Bob shows his shortened fingers to every new guy who comes into the shop. He enjoys telling them the story of his accident. He’s practically a legend.

While tightening a bolt, Bob’s hand starts to hurt. His hand gets tired quickly, and he has to rest it and rub the ends of his fingers.

Jim at the drill press starts whistling again. Jim has been at this shop for fifteen years. Today he’s whistling “Jingle Bells”. Bob has gotten used to Jim’s whistling, and sometimes he even joins in. Seven years ago, when he returned after the accident, Bob was much less tolerant. He has learned since then to not let things bother him. Now he doesn’t waste time worrying about things he can’t change. Bob can’t imagine today how he could have hated Jim and his whistling so much. Maybe it was just his youth.

5:30 A.M.

Bob’s hand is far from healed, but he needs to get back to work. It’s been a week since the accident. His hand is still bandaged up. It still bleeds some, and he has to change the bandages a couple times a day.

Bob shows up at the shop a half hour early to talk to his supervisor. He walks through the familiar smelling shop to the office with the large windows looking over the shop floor. The supervisor shows up after Bob has been waiting outside the office for five minutes.

“Bob, how’s the hand?”

“Fine, I want to get back to work today.”

“Well, all right, we’ll see how ya do.”

At the lockers, everyone asks him about his hand, and he replies that it’s all right. Bob has trouble putting on his work clothes with only one hand, but finally he manages. He laces his boots with great difficulty. It seems like much longer than a week since he’s been at work. As he walks to the burr bench he wishes he would have relaxed more during his week away.

At 6:00 the buzzer sounds. Bob puts on his safety glasses, picks up a blueprint, and unfolds it. Jim is whistling the theme from “Welcome Back, Kotter”. Bob looks up from the print and smiles to acknowledge that he understands, and to stop the whistling. Jim stops whistling and yells over the howl of the drill press, “How’s the hand, Bob?”

Bob doesn’t want to answer that question ever again. “It’s fine as frogs’ hair, Jim!” he says through clenched teeth.

Jim starts whistling again. Bob picks up a bolt and puts it in the vise. He starts to file the edges off by holding the handle of the file with his good hand and resting the bandaged hand on the file to guide it. After filing a few bolts, blood starts to seep through the bandages.

Bob goes into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. He removes the blood and grease-stained bandages and rinses the blood off his hand. His good hand is covered with grease. He starts to wash his hands with the gritty hand soap from the dispenser above the sink. It stings in his unhealed wounds, and he makes a fist and holds his hand to stop the pain. He kicks the wall, leans against the sink, and stares at the ceiling.

6:10 A.M.

He talks to himself in the small bathroom. “Why am I here? What am I doing? Why do things have to be like this? Why is it so hard?” Everything builds up until he feels like screaming. He can’t, though. He hasn’t screamed since he was twelve.

His parents used to wake up to him screaming almost every morning. that time in his life is the only time that Bob knows that he screamed. He can’t even remember it.

Bob’s mother told the doctor that Bob would sit up in bed and start screaming wildly. She told him about how she would stay with him and after a while he would calm down and fall asleep. The doctor said that it was night terrors. Bob doesn’t remember any of them. He just knows from his parents that he used to scream every morning.

He remembers going to the hospital one day and sitting in a chair while a doctor glued wires to his head. The wires were connected to a machine behind a window that was scribbling his brain waves on paper. He could see two men looking at the machine and talking, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. After a few minutes they asked him to try to fall asleep.

Bob does remember a nightmare that he used to have at about the same age, but it never made him scream. There was the skeleton of a very tall building. Bob would be in an elevator that would slowly start rising. A large voice would scream out numbers as the elevator rose. The numbers kept getting bigger and bigger, and Bob would get more and more frightened. When the numbers got into the millions, Bob would wake up crying. He would go into his parents’ bedroom and wake them up. He’d fall asleep on their bed and the nightmare wouldn’t come back.

He remembers one morning as being special. After having the elevator dream, he went into his parents’ room and woke up his mom. She stroked his hair and comforted him while he cried. Then she said that she had to get up, but that if he wanted, she would make him breakfast. They got out of bed, and his mom wrapped a robe around herself.

At 4:30 in the morning Bob and his mom went into the kitchen and she made him pancakes. He stood there in his pajamas and watched her in her robe mixing the batter.

Someone pounds on the door of the bathroom. “Are you ok in there?”

“I’m fine.”, Bob responds.

“You sure?”

Bob crouches his heavy body down near the cold floor of the dirty bathroom. He leans against the wall, puts his head into his hands, and cries.