(3)

Although the town I live in is fairly small, and much of the surrounding countryside is given over to farming, a substantial portion of the local economy is based on manufacturing.  There are half a dozen factories located in and around my town.  They involve the production of a wide range of goods, including high-precision machine parts, baby furniture, bottled soft drinks, and dog food.  I myself work at one of these factories.  I take bags of dog food off of a conveyor belt and put them into crates for shipping.  It's boring work, and physically taxing, but I was willing to take this job, as I have been willing to take many others like it through the years, because once upon a time when I was young and naïve I made the decision to forgo the money and prestige a professional career offered for the freedom, both intellectual and social, which I believed could be found in a working-class environment.  The tedium of the work itself I was willing to accept in exchange for these freedoms.  What I failed to understand is that any form of work entails an obligation to the status quo:  there is no escape.

Most of my coworkers at the factory are nice enough people.  All they want is to make enough money to pay their bills and live their lives in peace.  I get along with most of them well enough.  My boss however can be a difficult man to work for.  Physically imposing, he's both very tall and very muscular.  His love of discipline, hardened by a stint in the marines into something approaching dogma, informs his every act.  He still carries himself with a soldier's upright bearing, still maintains the soldier's love for precision.  In fact, he seems to approach each workday as if he were readying himself for battle:  he of course is the commander and we, his motley crew, are the troops he's maneuvering in a war levied against work quotas and machines.  We form an uneasy alliance.  Try as he might, he never quite succeeds in whipping us into shape.  Try as we might, we're never quite able to take him as seriously as he'd like.  Our subservience to him is willing enough but problematic:  we doubt the depth of his ability for control.  Rumor has it that he's been trying to overcome an addiction to drugs and alcohol for years.  Rumor has it that he has in the past been physically abusive towards women.  Certainly I've seen plenty of evidence of a potential for violence:  when angry for instance with one of his workers for having made what he perceives to have been a stupid mistake, or with the machinery, which often breaks down, he is at times overcome by fits of temper so severe that they can only be described as tantrums.  He shouts and curses, throws empty boxes against the wall and piles of papers across the room.  Although he appears at such times to have lost all capacity for self-restraint, it's my opinion that he himself views these tantrums as part of a larger methodology for control.  I've sometimes watched him slam his fist down on a piece of machinery, for instance, and thought that it was one of us, one of his underlings, that he would've liked to have been pounding; by unleashing his anger against inert objects I think he means to demonstrate, both to us and to himself, a not inconsiderable capacity for keeping his impulse towards a greater degree of violence in check.  What he'd like most, it seems to me, is to impose by force a rigid order upon all the elements of his environment – and perhaps, by these means, upon himself as well.  But this of course he can never really do:  life's an irascible devil; it won't so easily be brought to heel.

I suspect him of having been subject to abuse as a child.  His father was also a marine and – so one imagines – a strict disciplinarian.  Too strict perhaps?  Yet I have never heard him speak of his father except in terms of respect so complete, so unremitting as to the admission of any flaws, as to border on a form of adulation.  His father serves, naturally enough I suppose, as his masculine ideal; and my boss loves above all else that which is masculine:  courage and bravery against all enemies (even idiot factory workers, even obstinate machines), the disciplining of mind and body for the sake of achieving this courage, and the glad pitting of oneself against adversity in order to test one's own strength.  Spine held rigid, muscles bulging, veins popping, red of face, my boss cultivates both the attitude and the appearance of nothing more nor less than a gigantic hard-on – imperious, demanding, and always ready for action.

I do not think that he likes me much.  Or, more likely still, I think he feels nothing in particular towards me at all.  I would guess that he is too egocentric to feel much of anything for anybody.  Still, there exists between the two of us little of that masculine camaraderie which marks his relations with some of the other men at the factory.  This too I suppose is natural enough:  I am homosexual; he is not.  We approach male companionship from, shall we say, different quarters.  Yet I too love all that is masculine and often struggle, as does my boss, to find a way in which to cohere my fragmented idea of the masculine ideal, the pursuit of which we share in common.  I sometimes wonder if, were we to seek it, or if chance happened to lead us that way, he and I might not discover some common territory held between us, some war zone of manhood, upon which the battle for its achievement might take place.  In such battle, success might be found.

SELF-DESTRUCTION