One day, in the large log mill lunchroom —a place which no longer exists since the mill was closed and subsequently torn down— the various machine operators and millwrights decided to hold a contest. Really, it was just my dad and the mill plumber getting into an argument, but everyone else went along with it as though it was a contest out of pure spite.
You see, the mill plumber had been regaling the lunchroom crowd with stories of his masterful love-making, his many sexual conquests, all enabled of course by his absurdly massive penis. This speech had interrupted other important lunchroom conversations like what the fucking Republicans were up to —this was before union workers could be anti-Democrat— and probably stories about someone’s worthless city-slicker brother-in-law who was so fucking stupid he had a Husqvarna chainsaw. As opposed to a Stihl chainsaw, which even as a child I knew was the only chainsaw worth buying unless you were a total degenerate man-child without even aspirations of masculinity.
My father, generally angry and always looking to call people out for being fake, laid his hand flat out on the table and splayed his thumb and pinky as far apart as possible.
“This distance is nine inches on every adult man. Nine inches is a huge cock to me.”
It should be noted that one of the peculiarities of people who have worked for a long time in a sawmill is the uncanny ability to precisely know the length of anything under about a foot and a half. It comes from working long hours grading lumber in the planer facility, and if you’ve stared at enough two-by-whatevers eventually you start to notice even very small deviations. Every man in the lunchroom looked at my dad’s splayed fingers and knew for true that they were nine inches apart.
The mill plumber was taken aback by this direct challenge, but my father persisted.
“Lay your cock out on the table and for every quarter inch you’re over the nine inches, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars. But, for every quarter inch you’re under the nine inches you’ll owe me a hundred dollars.”
Then my dad, having won a bet on a football game, laid out a few hundred dollars on the lunchroom table to show he was serious.
Everyone rallied. Millwrights, machine operators, and filers joined forces. Even the electricians lowered their noses from out of the air long enough to demand the mill plumber lay his penis out alongside my father’s hand. Eventually, embarrassed, the mill plumber fled the lunchroom and my father was declared the moral victor even though he had not gained anything financially.
A few minutes later, my father’s friend Big John —not to be confused with Big George, Little George, Little Jack, or Big Mike— sat down next to him and in a yodeling West Virginian accent said, “Gary, if that’d been me you woulda lost some money.”
To which my dad replied.
“If that’d been you, I wouldn’t have made the bet.”
Everyone knew Big John had a big john.
What is the point of this story? It has no point. I mean, I could pretend that it’s about reputation and community, but mostly it makes me lonesome for a culture that I kind of hated while I was actively growing up in it. This somehow captures the entirety of a culture in a single story, like how part of a fractal still contains a mathematical infinity.
There was no end to the faults I could find with this culture while I judged it from my bedroom and read books to spite my father. He would have strongly preferred I spend my teen years getting drunk around pallet fires in the woods and hooking up with hot chicks, so I responded by reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and any other pretentious tome I could lay my hands on just out of spite. He retaliated by setting up a roofing company and working me every weekend in an attempt to crush what he saw as the nascent French Lord that was growing within his son. If I had been homosexual and had a boyfriend, he would have considered it less gay than when I won a scholarship from a Nobel Laureate upon graduation. To this day, whenever we meet, it is like those nature videos where two moose happen across one another in the wild and quickly have to engage in some dominance battle to determine who is the better moose.
This too makes me sad because while I am aware that I should be at peace with my father and that all those past battles are long over —that I am now a father and I should find a deeper sene of mercy for his shortcomings— I find I can’t help but let my frustration take over when he does something like critique the way I built my fireplace mantle because I used a piece of crown moulding I hadn’t made myself. I am deeply worried about how this may inform my relationship with my own son because I don’t think anything would hurt me as much as knowing he looks upon me as his adversary.
I used to get so annoyed when the community tried to turn Arbor Day into an actual holiday you were supposed to celebrate. I remember so many grade school trips, sloshing around in rubber boots and planting trees in the middle of some barren field, determined to be absolutely miserable. Or every year, when Logger’s Play Day came around and I had to go out and look at a bunch of wood-working projects my dad’s friends had put up for sale. I still have a small cedar box from those days which has lasted more than thirty years at this point. I believe it might endure for centuries.
Now, my older and hopefully wiser mind thinks there’s just something fun about people with names like Nick at Night, Red Eye, or the Lyin’ Hawaiin. Nick at Night worked in the middle of the night and was crazy, Red Eye had narcolepsy, and the Lyin’ Hawaiin had once lived in Hawaii and he lied all the time. Do you know what would happen if I named a guy the Lyin’ Hawaiin in Corporate America? I can’t even imagine. The utility of this, however, was endless. It was all right there in the name. You knew who you were and you knew it immediately. My sawmill name is too close to my real name to disclose, but when I worked on a drilling rig for a summer my name was Shrek. Why? Because I look like Shrek. Simple. Even if you’d never seen me before if someone told you to look for Shrek you would have been able to find me.
To somewhat steal something I heard on a podcast recently, if Thomas Chatteron Williams had walked into the sawmill for any period of time his name would have instantly become Tommy Williams. If Michael Buble had ever worked there his name would have been Mike Bubble. The bare-bones unpretentiousness of it is what I miss most. There was this constant pressure against not only anything false —to be clear, I don’t think Michael Buble or Thomas Chatterton William are false— but also against anything that was not vital. Perfection existed not only when there was nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away, to quote a book a read when I was an aspiring French Lord. You had to be only what you were when too stressed to aspire to be more than you were at your most fundamental levels. Anything else was ostentatious. There was a man who worked there who was one of the last survivors of his entire company after the rest had been killed in the Vietnam War. He walked with the kind of gravitas that comes only from walking over the memories of a hundred dead friends to get to work every morning. He was so greatly respected and feared that people called him Charlie, which was his actual given name.
I think there’s something good about people who fight for what they believe in even if I still sometimes groan at some of the particulars. Sure, that trait sometimes gets people to fight in the Arby’s parking lot over something that could have been resolved in a two minute conversation, but it also makes people stand up and be counted when the mill superintendent has the brilliant idea to save money by not caring about worker safety, mostly because he’s some college kid and doesn’t particularly know how things work. It’s what made my dad hold up all the traffic on the bridge because the town prostitute, Crazy Mary —who was crazy and named Mary. See? Simple— was stuck out in the rain without an umbrella. It’s why he drove across traffic to intervene in a fight where five boys were beating on one kid. You don’t get to attend a cultural buffet and only choose the parts you like.
So, yeah, that culture said, there might be a God who could intervene in all of these tragedies but just maybe you were the help that God sent so that means you should stop being such a coward and kick some ass. Maybe you’re not supposed to live your life inside thinking about things and never risking anything.
There is a call in all of us to be not only a person but a people. I miss being part of a people.
The mill is closed now. There are other cultures who spend their whole lives trying to stop anyone from cutting down a tree. They’ll even spike trees in order to maim some poor logger unlucky enough to hit one with his chainsaw. If you suggest maybe, just maybe, the culture could actually build things someone stands up quickly to say that’s the past and it has nothing to do with the future. The future is everyone sitting around eating lotus blossoms thinking about other people doing things.
Building things kept us honest, though. The constant push and pull with the universe made you set aside your delusions. Forced you to wake up. If the debarker isn’t taking the bark off the timber then how will it ever become lumber? If the log stacker can’t lift anything to the transfer deck then how is anyone supposed to make money? You’d get stressed but the stress was the key to truth. Are you unreliable? Are you short-tempered? Are you arrogant?
You might be thinking you alone are perfect, but maybe you’ve just buried your faults under the chemical mouth-feel of too many hot pockets.
We need to build a better world. It will require a lot of brutal honesty, shit-eating, and sweat. We will all have to bare ourselves open to know our every flaw.
So ask yourself, how big is your penis?
Adults who face a world or culture they don’t understand rarely know how to send new signals. Normally they feel this is unnecessary. The bitching and complaining might be the closest to showing pride.
It’s natural for bright children to rebel strongly against a parent trying just as hard to enforce a behavior pattern.
Please don’t end up as the moose with the decapitated head of another moose locked into its antlers.
This came into email just as I was stopping for the day and looking to take a mental break. I'm so happy! Thanks for this bit of human manly history. I don't have a penis. I don't know how big my vagina is! I didn't work with measurements either.
But baring every flaw!? Ok. I have them. I can be a real ass, and a dick, and sometimes too linear. I'm obsessed with what is happening in the world and find it difficult to not want to keep reading. The list is much longer but I'll stop here. I don't want to work right now. I needed a break!!
Thanks again.