THE NEW DEAL
I would fire up my motorcycle at 6:30 every morning.
it was a quick ride
to one of the last working sawmills in Los Angeles
where I would run rough lumber
through a ten-ton planer for nine hours a day.
the machine was an Industrial Age survivor
once painted green, now weathered but still solid,
with the year 1907
cast into the framework in large numerals
by the long-shuttered LA foundry that had created it.
sticking to surface streets,
I would glide through the morning air
lucky to leave the hell of the choked freeways to others.
my route took me past a bar called
The New Deal Saloon,
ramshackle, sun-bleached
and open for business at 5am.
the front door was always open
and I could usually make out three or four
dark outlines
seated at the bar, lit by a juke in the back of the room.
I felt bad for them,
slumped, broken and smoking discount cigarettes,
still young enough to assume
that they were different than me.
I’d tell myself that they were regular guys
just off a swing shift at one of the South Bay refineries,
except the refineries were miles away
and my route was mostly past
shut-down defense plants
and boarded-up machine shops.
every morning I’d approach the New Deal and
slow down a little bit to get a look inside,
telling myself that I would never be one of them.
it was obvious that inside that dank room
The New Deal was always the old deal.
at the mill I’d pour a cup of coffee
and start pushing trees.
no one wore work gloves at the saws,
they could catch on a blade
and pull your hand in with it.
the old men at the mill would hold up their hands
as they shuffled by
and with a kind of salute
they’d show off
their missing fingers and disfigurements.
no one had to open their mouth and say
“Be careful, kid.”
The New Deal was finally bulldozed into
splinters and sticks.
the gravel parking lot
with its 50 year saturation of piss and puke
is now jammed tight with cheaply built condos.
soon after, I split from my job at the mill,
with all my fingers intact.
I began drifting from one thing to the next,
working hard,
still hanging on to the great lie
and unaware that the graveyard shifts
and the early morning drinking
were waiting for me
only a few years down the road.
____________
Curtis Hayes has worked as a grip, gaffer, and camera assistant in film production. He’s been a truck driver, a boat rigger, a print journalist and a screenwriter. He is the author of the non-fiction top-ten NYT bestseller, I Am Jesse James, and his first poetry collection, Bottleneck Slide, has recently been published by Vainglory Press.
Rusty Truck 