Today the temperatures where I live will hit 107°. Reminds me of when I worked at a shipyard…

I’m not sure what the temperature of hell is; it’s bound to be hotter than 107 degrees. But in June of 2013 I was sure I was in it, or at least as close to the edge of the pit as you can get without falling in forever. In the summer of 2013 I was a welder’s assistant aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, where we were installing the piping for an air condition system.

When you approach the aircraft carrier Enterprise your first impression is one of size. This vessel is 1,123 feet long, 250 feet tall, 132.8 feet wide at the waterline and 257.2 feet wide on the flight deck. To give you some perspective: the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall at the 102 floor and 1,453 feet tall at the pinnacle – the place where King Kong held off the biplanes in his bid for Fay Wray’s affections. It’s a big damn ship.

One day, when we boarding the ship Waddy pointed to a red flag flying from the bow. “Red flag, Magic Mike!” he shouted. Waddy is one of the welders that I worked with. He’s about five four, probably thirty pounds overweight, and has the dejected look of a basset hound. When he’s working he constantly, but at odd intervals, let’s off a stream of short disjointed sentences, heavily laced with profanity. Sometimes he would just belt out his nickname, “Waddy!” If you worked around him after a while you just accepted these outbursts as part of the landscape; like when you’re camping and you hear a bull frog croaking by a pond.

I’m not sure why he called himself Waddy, his given name was Richard. But at this job I discovered that everyone ended up with a nickname. Mine was “Magic Mike” and was given to me by a Jamaican pipefitter named Osbourne whose nickname was Pompeii. I have no idea what he meant by it or why he gave me that nickname – I think it was the name of a character in a porn movie. That alone made me hesitant to pursue finding out why Pompeii had christened me with the name. That and the fact that most of the time I could barely understand him because of his accent.

“What’s red flag mean?” I asked.

“Means it’s gonna be hotter than hell today,” Waddy replied. “Red flag means OSHA says it’s gonna be ninety degrees outside, so workers are supposed to work twenty minutes and then take a ten minute break. If’n you see a black flag, that means it’s gonna get around a hundred, and you work ten and take twenty. Course that got nuthin’ to do with where we’re working, Mike. When we get these torches a goin’, welding and brazing, it’s gonna be a hundred and ten in those rooms. A hundred and God damn ten I tell ya.”

“And if it’s a black flag with a skull and crossbones in it?” I jokingly asked.

“Then you can kiss your ass goodbye, ‘cause you gonna die,” Waddy laughed. “But that don’t mean nuthin’ to us, Mike. Ain’t no supervisor gonna give us no time off no matter how fucking hot it is.”

That was true. One day we watched as ambulances and fire trucks parked on the pier, and paramedics hastily worked their way up the gangway. A work crew had carried a middle aged pipe fitter out to the elevator after he had collapsed in the hold. The paramedics strapped him onto a gurney and carried him down to the pier and loaded him into the ambulance.

The next day I happened to watch this pipefitter return to the hanger bay. Several of the men on his crew were kidding him about faking a stroke just to get out of work when his supervisor walked up to him and said, “You back? You gonna work? You ain’t gonna pull that shit agin’ today is ya? You dun wanna work, you pull a full day or yer ass is gone? You understan’?”

The Navy could post all the black flags it wanted, the message was clear – work or go home. Mother Nature could do what she wanted; we had a deadline to meet.

We’d board the ship via the elevator that was used to move aircraft from the hanger decks to the flight decks. It was cool there, always a breeze coming off the water and only ninety degrees. I’d never realized how cool ninety degrees could feel. When you have spent an hour in a closed room where the temperature is over a hundred degrees, walking into an open area, with a breeze, that’s ninety degrees…it’s like air conditioning.

If you wanted to get some water that’s where you went – the hanger bay elevators. They had water fountains there, because the Navy didn’t want people passing out from dehydration. Besides, ambulances and paramedics just took up space on the pier and time away from the job. When we’d take a break to get some water, we would fill our hard hats with cold water, and then dump it over our heads. For ten minutes you felt like a human being; that’s about all it would last – when you went back into the work area the wet shirt would evaporate, the heat sucking the cool out of it, and you’d just be as hot as you were before. 

As you went down the hallway, across the bay threshold, it felt like the temperature would rise a degree or two for every foot you walked. When you went into the room where the pipes were being welded and braised the temperature would settle at 106, 107 degrees. We’d wrap wet rags that we’d soaked in ice water around our necks and heads. Fans were an important commodity, they were the first things pulled out of the storage locker and set up in the morning. Men would argue about what fan they got, nobody wanted a fan that didn’t blow hard or was small. It didn’t matter that much though; at those temperatures the fans just moved the heat around, like a convection oven, and we were the meat.

 I remember walking down the hallway and looking into a room where two men were arc welding the lead paint off the walls to get to the steel underneath, and two more were waiting for their turn at the torches. They all wore leather helmets with welding goggles and respirators. As I surveyed the room, full of acrid smoke, and the men looking like insects in their apparel, I wondered if Dante had a vision like this for one of the levels of his inferno. All it lacked was a placard reading, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here").

It’s hard working in that kind of heat. It saps your strength and drains you emotionally and spiritually. When a welder was working someone had to stand fire watch, you just stand, no one sits – ever. You watch to make sure the welder doesn’t set himself or the vessel on fire. Getting trapped in a closed off room and choking on fumes and smoke, or being burned to death is a horrible way to die, so fire watch is pretty important; and pretty boring. Between the boredom and the heat, men will fall asleep standing on their feet, just nod off. It’s when you start to fall over that you catch yourself and wake up. Everyone laughs, and kids you mercilessly about it, but everyone’s done just that. The heat does that to you. The job does that to you – burns you up, and burns you out.

Today I was fire watching for Waddy. He really was a nice guy; he simply had the most profane vocabulary I’d ever heard from a church going man. And I didn’t realize that he was, or had been, a church going man until the day we got talking about reading glasses.

Waddy had pulled down his welder’s shield to protect his eyes from flash burn but he didn’t start his flame, he just kept looking at the pipe for a moment, then he took his hard hat off, took his reading glasses off, and surveyed them at arm’s length.

“Something wrong?” I asked. Then when he pulled a little semitransparent sticker off the glasses I started to laugh. “You get your reading glasses at the dollar store?”

“Yeah,” he snickered. “I ain’t gonna buy no fucking thirty dollar glasses to bring to this hell hole. Fuck that shit.”

“Yeah, I do the same thing. I buy those dollar reading glasses, forget to take the translucent sticker off them, start to read and then wonder if I’m having a stroke because of the blurry vision.”

He rubbed his eyes and looked at me, serious now, and said, “When you start doing this shit they tell you that you got twenty years maybe before the arc’ll burn your eyes out. I been doing this shit for twenty eight, don’t know body tell you what the fuck to do when your eyes are so bad you can’t work no more.”

He sat down and rubbed his eyes. We had just started the day, and we had ten hours ahead of us, but after weeks of this you’re exhausted. The job stops being about getting something done and more about making it to the end of the day. You show up tired, work to lunch and try to find someplace you can take a twenty minute nap, then work to quitting time and drag yourself a half mile to the parking lot and go home. There’d be days that, when I got home, it was all I could do to get out of the car, I’d be so drained.

“You don’t wanna do this shit, Magic Mike,” Waddy said.

“I don’t intend to, Waddy. I got a plan, I’m getting out.”

“Good, good for you. Fucking A but I wish I could say that.”

“You can, Waddy,” I replied trying to be encouraging. “What would you like to do? Surely you have something more than this?”

Waddy lowered his voice and said, “Mike, years ago I was on fire, I mean on fire! I was on a ministry team, I played flute…I’m real good at playing flute. Man, I loved doing that. We even went to India once, went all over the fucking country telling people about Jesus. Mike, they’d come for miles to hear us and me play that flute…I loved playing that flute.” For the next fifteen minutes Waddy went on and on about how he had loved going to church, and his participation in the ministry. The more he talked the more excited he got; it was like watching Rocky Balboa come back to life in the ring in the seventh round of the fight.

But Waddy finally stopped, he ran out of energy… and we stood thinking about what he had just said. He’d never been this open before, I’d never known he’d ever been to church, much less part of a traveling ministry team. Being a church going man just wasn’t something most people would ever accuse Waddy of. Ever. I think Waddy realized that was exactly what I was thinking – that what he had just said was “out of character” for him.

“So, what happened, Waddy?”

“It’s this God damn shit fucking job, Mike. I hate it. I hate being this way. I hate talking this way. Little by little…you know how the Bible says for us not to love the things of this here world? I need the job, I need the money, I need this hell hole…I love the things of this world. I God damn fucking hate it.” Waddy had wound down, beaten and defeated by the recognition that everything he had shared with me had been spoken of in the past tense. That was then, this moment in a room that was as hot and stifling as an oven, this was now; this was his present and all he could see for his future. The realization and the disappointment was like when you buy a cold soda and set it to the side while you’re burning, only to turn around a few minutes later and see that an ember hit and melted the plastic, and all that cold drink has ebbed out onto the floor. It’s gone and there’s no point in complaining about the injustice of it. It’s done, it’s past, and you just move on.

Still I wanted to say something that would give him some hope that would help him see he could “return to the fold.” I wanted to fix him with some witty or profound insight. I needed to be theologically eloquent and point out that having a job and loving the things of this world could be two totally unrelated things. I sought for an answer, but at that moment I was as empty as he was, or at least decent enough to not insult him with some glib piece of Christian pop psychology that usually ends up as a bumper sticker, or a wall plaque in the kitchen. I just put my hand up to his shoulder and gave him a squeeze.

With that he flipped his face shield back on and said, “Watch your eyes,” and fired up the welder torch. We stood there in the fumes of the welding, sweat rolling down our backs soaking our dirty clothing, watching the flame burn, and cut, and shape the steel.  We stood there; we had nine hours left to go.