second person narratives from milwaukee.

you wake up at 4:52 am every morning. fall off the bed landing on the required supplies for the day: rubber gloves, cotton gloves, earplugs, goggles, a flask of gin, cell phone, a couple novels that wont get read anytime soon, keys, wallet, LUNCH. you're set. you start to peddle your bike at 5am to the temp agency pimp named jose jimenez. here Pimp Jimenez gives you 'ticketes' (said in spanglish) for the JNA(temp agency) van. here you join six latinos like you and a built black dude. they all check the early morning 'nenas' (girls) and use adjectives like: stacked, thick, and cute, to describe these 'bitches' and 'nenas'. you speak with the black guy and he talks about his phone line woes, how he lives in a two storey duplex where his calls come in downstairs and vice versa. you say, shit man, that sucks, sbc is a shitty phone company. you are not one of them. they do and have done this shit forever. they are not forced to read kafka over the summer and are not participants of the ivy league, like your pussy ass is. you smile and rub your biceps, exposing the hump of the tricep and yesterday's bruises like a fucking tough guy. you are not a tough guy. you have not lived this but three days. you are tired and sick and aching. their stone grimace is a temporary agent; a partial mark on your clean cubanwhitemexican face. you think about the things you hate when piling tires and wheels from the crate to the washer to the other crate. bus leaves at 5:30am but the tire and wheel factory you work in is in Slinger, an hour from milwaukee's south side. you punch in at 6:30am. you have two fifteen minute breaks, at nine and at noon. you know that noon break feels like some summer orgasm, butterflies digging their way out of snow drafts, like beautiful daughters running up to you in their school uniforms and hugging you and yelling 'primo'!(cousin), like spitting on stalin and calling him a dirty fucking bastard, like falling off a handsome cliff milllions of blue moons from sea level. you are being exploited but you concede because cornell costs loom on the big red horizon and you are more than willing to sacrifice your body for your mind, this time at least. you know lust better now, as a factory lad who passes metal through his hands like some pass sand through their toes. you are on the other side. words like ‘proletariat’ and ‘working class’ are un-popped vivid cherries to you now. you seek your copy on the top of your bed of marx's communist manifesto because you are related to him not only on the pervasive human thread but now through the exploited worker steal chain, you find your soulmight in this work, and you mustn't be phased. you are doing $16/hr work for $8.50/hr and you know your position is better than those earning a tenth of what you earn for twice the work. you are not as exploited as others, remember your loss is temporary, your gain is at the very least a few constellations and a hymnal and at the most a world in a box labeled 'fragile', ‘handle with care’. and you know the latter and former are virtually the same in size but not in sensitivity. you would bullfight taurus if given the chance, you would sport a red celestial wave, a sword sunlit and raw, and sink the starred bull to its eventual abyss. you do not know of these labyrinths as well as you'd like but you manage to speak and climb over walls in effervescent evasion. you punch out at 2:30pm and get back to the worker's brothel at 3:30pm. here you say goodbye to the guys and ride home a greasy and dirty mexican. today, you made 68 dollars before taxes. today you saw men and women in the loud ambiance of that factory, playing with steel, and yielding the throbbing product: wheels. lots of them. you now have given yourself a 10pm bedtime to make the first deadline of the morning, four fifty two ayy emm, sounds like amen.