(3)

Although the town I live in is fairly small, and much of the surrounding countryside is given over to agriculture, a substantial part of the local income is provided by various manufacturing concerns.  There are quite a number of factories to be found in my town.  They turn out everything from high-precision machine parts to baby furniture to bottled soft drinks to dry dog food.  I myself work at a factory.  I take bags of dog food off of a conveyor belt and put them into crates for shipping.  That's all.  It's boring work, but relatively easy; and the tedium allows me plenty of time to think and to daydream.  And that's all I want really, is time enough to think and daydream.  It doesn't seem too much to ask.

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.  I get along with most of them well enough.  My boss, however, can be a difficult man to work for.  Physically imposing, he is both very tall and very muscular.  By nature an exacting person, his conservative, rather formulaic attitude towards life was intensified by a stint in the marines.  He carries himself to this day with a soldier's upright bearing, and still maintains the soldier's love for precision.  In fact, he acts each workday as if he were readying himself for battle, only now he is the commander and we, his motley crew, are the platoon being maneuvered in an offensive carried out against work quotas and machines.  Try as he might though, he never quite succeeds in whipping us into shape.  Try as we might, we are never quite able to take him as seriously as he wants us to.  Our subservience to him is willing, but problematic:  we doubt the depth of his ability for control.  Rumor has it that he's had to check himself into clinics several times to cure himself of drug addiction.  Rumor has it that, when married, he physically abused his wife.  And certainly I've seen plenty of evidence of a potential for physical violence.  When angry, for instance, with one of his workers for having made what he perceives to be 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 personal opinion that he himself views these tantrums as part of a larger methodology of control.  I have sometimes watched him slam his fist down on a piece of machinery, for instance, and thought that it was one of us, his underlings, 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 darker impulses in check.  What he wants most, it seems to me, is to impose by force a rigid order upon all the elements of his environment, as if hoping to negotiate by this means release from some inner turmoil.  But that, 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 heard him speak of his father any number of times 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 (the occasional temper tantrum being nothing more, in his view, than a means of keeping his anger under the appropriate restraint); and the glad pitting of oneself against adversity in order to test one's own strength.  Spine held rigid, muscles bulging, veins popping, 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 my boss likes me much.  Or, more likely still, I suspect that 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 highlights relations between him and 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.  And I sometimes have to wonder:  if we were to seek it, or if chance happened to lead us that way, might not he and I discover some common territory held between us, some war zone of manhood, upon which the battle for sexual supremacy might take place?

SELF-DESTRUCTION