Winter Session With The Union Men

By David Lillard

One January during winter break my father got me on with the union for a job at a refinery on the Delaware River. The union was the Heat and Frost Insulators & Asbestos Workers, Local 42. Pipe coverers. I was a helper — an official union designation. It was part gopher, part odd jobs, part man servant to pipe coverers replacing insulation on miles of pipes. These were not household pipes; they ranged in diameter from about ten inches to upwards of three feet.

The building was bigger than a football field. The ceiling seemed to disappear into clouds. The building was a labyrinth of pipes moving from one end to the other then curving back, the sameness broken only by giant metal chambers resembling walk-in freezers stacked two or three high. Large pipes went into the chambers; smaller ones came out.

No one offered me information about pipes or what the chambers were for. All I knew was that in a few weeks I’d make enough to pay my tuition and rent. College and rent were cheaper then.

The refinery had been turning crude oil into fuel for decades, which meant that everyone on the job — electricians, painters, fitters, pipe coverers, laborers, plumbers — were there to maintain it in working order. All were members of locals representing their trades. There were also a few engineers who were continuously looking at blueprints, rolling them and unrolling them with a practiced flourish.

 Everyone in the union had a nickname. There was Inky, Porky, Shorty, Pretty, Twiggy, Reds, and others. On my first day, I was given a nickname: College Guy. I didn’t like the name, but once given, it stuck. “Hey College Guy, get me a box of six inch. Hey College Guy, I need Number 10 bands.” Stuff like that.

My father, who’d accepted the responsibility of keeping me alive, introduced me to the storage trailer outside, a 53-foot model containing a well organized array of pipe covering things. He showed me where to find the six-inch (a diameter of insulation) and the bands. “Take these to Bruno and the bands to Porky.” 

Porky I knew from union picnics. Porky was friendly, smiled a lot, and had a way of announcing the phases of the day. “Coffee time,” at 10:15. “Lunch!” And my favorite, “Quittin’ time!” Not that anyone needed reminders; Porky just gave it added enthusiasm. So Bruno must be the other guy. 

Bruno was a traveler from Baltimore, a pipe coverer from another local who was either laid off or whose local was on strike. When you’re on strike, you can go work with another local as long as it’s not with the same company you’re striking against. Bruno was named for his physique. He resembled world champion professional wrestler Bruno Sammartini. He stood six feet four, and had the look of someone who could reach into your chest and yank out your heart. Sammartini, by then retired, had a winning smile on TV. This Bruno, the pipe coverer, seemed to lack the ability to smile, as if the rest of him was so muscular his body simply couldn’t spare the energy to smile. He wore a Van Dyke beard — dyed black — that gave him a mean look. Bruno was the one who named me College Guy.

He wore a bomber jacket, cut short, coated with marine wax so that it was waterproof. It was an old coat, but kept in mint condition. He wore it like a Brooks Brothers suit. By late morning, when the building temperature rose from the body heat of a hundred tradesmen, he would hang it on a spigot wherever he was working.

The work pipe coverers did was brutal. Imagine standing in a tight space between two sets of pipes or a boiler, your face looking up — beyond straight up, more like behind you. Your arms are outstretched to a pipe 12 inches in diameter. You’re fitting the specified insulation around a pipe, then adhering it with glue. The smell of the glue is enough to get you high. Then you secure the covering with a metal band, tightening it like a screw. You could spend a day or longer in one spot. 

Or you’re in a space that’s too low to stand, so you’re working all day in a crouched stance. And all the while you’re stretching and contorting. You ache. Your hands hurt. In winter, you never get warm. You come home beat up.

The work was dangerous, too. At one time, they used asbestos. This would take the lives of many of Dad’s workmates. Since the ‘60s, they used fiberglass weave, which also turned out to be harmful to the lungs. Or they used a rubber collar adhered to the pipe with noxious glue and coated with an hallucinogenic paint — the paint that would almost kill me.

Each day the same

The monotony of the day was painful. Each day was like all others. Arrive at 7:30am. Sit in the trailer with a dozen guys sipping coffee and trying to warm up. There would be chatter and joking, a bit of buzz in the hive. Just before the 8am whistle, they rose and walked the short distance from the trailer to the building chattering in groups of two or three, the light step of morning in their strides.

They worked either alone or in pairs until the 10:30 coffee break in the trailer. At lunchtime, the conversation was more serious, weighted by the prospect of the long afternoon. In the trailer, Bruno didn’t say much. He had no history with the other guys, no stories to retell. He could go all day without saying a word, except to direct me to fetch supplies. He had a particular nod for “good morning,” and another for quitting time. He was an agelastic sort, never smiling except the day I thought he would kill me.

I didn’t say much either. It was long before mobile phones, so I couldn’t sit scrolling the Web. I’d pick up a trade rag, like Heat and Frost Workers Journal, and skim it while listening to the guys complain that environmentalists were shutting down the world.

I look around that trailer and I remember old men. But they weren’t. My father was was just shy of 50. A couple guys were midway to 60, the age where a guy at a desk job is coming into his own, doing his best work. These guys, though, looked old. They were hoping to live long enough to retire on a decent pension.

One morning my father gave me an assignment: Apply a thick white paint that smelled of glue mixed with artificial pancake syrup on the pipes that were newly covered in rubber insulation.

“You paint this on the pipes, starting up top,” Dad said, pointing to the stratosphere. “Put it on as thick as you can without dripping. You don’t want it running around the pipe and dripping from the bottom. Put it on evenly.”

Looking up toward into the clouds, I could see the catwalks following the lines. Some pipes would be above my head, others down knee level or below the grate. I’d be on all fours a lot. “Try not to breathe this stuff,” Dad said.

“What about those gaps in the catwalk,” I asked. There were several short sections where a catwalk ended and the next one was several feet away — too far to reach the middle of the pipe.

“Shimmy across”, he said. “You paint as you go, shimmy back.” I looked up again and wondered why I hadn’t tried to pick up more hours stocking shelves and cleaning the floors at Woolworth’s. This was insane; a violation of some OSHA regulation. I could have filed a complaint with the shop steward, except my dad was the shop steward.

“You’ll need five cans for the first run at the top,” he said. “Get all your supplies up before you start.”

So I made several trips up the steps, which were more like a ladders with handrails — that steep. 

The work was tedious, but appealing on levels. The artist in me appreciated the layering of the paint that was as thick as potter’s clay. There was a meditative rhythm in the brush strokes, a satisfaction in seeing progress. From down on the floor I could see the shiny, crisp whiteness spreading in a slow march across the indoor sky. 

I learned to time trips down the ladder for breaks. It took five minutes to make it down, a third of the 15-minute morning and afternoon breaks. So I’d head down to re-supply early, and position my wares at the base of the ladders just as Porky called out, “Coffee time!”

Like all jobs onsite, this one involved constant up-and-downs. You work on your knees, then lying on your side reaching, bending, stretching, working overhead. Move the paint, stand up, kneel down, descend the ladders, go up the ladders. At my age, it was manageable, like an all-day workout. For the others, it was a world of hurt.

The fumes from the finish paint got me dizzy. By coffee break, I was feeling like a ghost; I wasn’t connected to my body. We didn’t have digital music then, but if we did, by 10am it would have been Pink Floyd. Hello, Is there anybody in there? Yeah, that paint was strong. Some mornings I didn’t go to the trailer for coffee time; I stood outside tripping in the cold winter breathing the relative purity of whatever came out of the smoke stacks. 

The pipe shimmy was a challenge. Straddling a pipe, painting what’s in front of me, a brush in one hand and a 12-pound can in the other, bending forward to paint the bottom of the pipe — all the while the floor looks more distant. I learned to paint the bottom of the pipe first, so I wasn’t leaning into fresh paint. It took some athleticism, which did not go unnoticed by the men. They’d started when younger than I. They remembered.

The fumes, though. I’d catch myself leaning too far to one side to the point of losing my balance, then abruptly I’d jolt upright to correct it. And I had to switch from hand to hand, brush and bucket, to hit both sides.

By lunchtime, I had a serious buzz on. I’d stare into my lunch box a long time before a voice in my head said, “That’s food. You eat it” I do? How do I eat? “You unwrap the sandwich and you bite it.” Like this?

“Yes, careful though, don’t bite your . . .” I bit my tongue. I bit my cheek. Then I went back up the ladder. “Is anybody in there?”

I had been managing okay, with just a few more straddle stretches until I could enjoy the safety of the catwalks for the remainder of the job. Then things fell apart. I was high as a weather balloon over the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I was hallucinating, in an altered state.

Near Death Experience

I had finished a section and was ready to get back on the catwalk when I stumbled. The paint sloshed out of my bucket. It seem to hang in the air like a cartoon coyote, waiting for me put the pail beneath it and catch it before it dropped. Or I could fly to it.

The paint, a solid quart of it, sloshed onto a grated catwalk below, where it splintered into a dozen smaller streams, splattering on and over pipes. Shouts came from below. “Incoming!” “Watch out!” The engineer and a few electricians pouring over schematics scurried away. It was like a tray of glasses hitting the floor in a restaurant — for a moment everything stopped, then everyone went about their business.

I regained consciousness, shimmied to the catwalk, and high-tailed down the ladders. My father handed me a box of shop rags — a big box. I started wiping up the worst of it just as the lunch whistle blew. A minute later Bruno appeared, holding his bomber jacket; it was streaked with white paint. “He doesn’t look happy,” my father said.

Bruno walked past without stopping. He looked at me shaking his head. “Sorry about the jacket,” I said to the back of his head. He paused, turned to me and looked at me. The expression said nothing, not “hey, no worries,” not, “I could kill you right here,” not, “You’re an idiot, College Guy.”

I spent much of lunchtime mopping up paint. I went to the trailer to grab my lunch, entering a room of a dozen guys shaking in fits of laughter. “ . . .  and Inky put his coffee down on the shelf and it’s glued by the Tough Bond to the shelf, and he ends up pulling the shelf down so he can drink his coffee. . . “ and the guy demonstrates holding a shelf in two hands to tip a coffee mug. More laughter. Then they see me standing at the door. 

“There he is!” 

“I thought the engineer would piss his pants!”

Then, “Remember when Twiggy took a leak into an empty bucket on the high walk at Haskell, then ended up kicking it over?” More laughing. Even my father was laughing. It’s one of my few memories of him laughing.

Here, I’d been walking around with my tail between my legs, but to the guys it was relief from the monotony of every day. It was comforting to hear how many of them had blundered like me — worse than me. Everyone laughed to the point of tears. Everyone but Bruno. He sat there expressionless as if in deep meditation. Then, as if by some internal clock that rouses the swallows to fly to Capistrano, they all rose and laughed their way out the door. As Bruno passed me, I mumbled feebly, “I’ll pay for a new jacket.”

In the truck on the way home, my father said, “You’re lucky you didn’t get killed.”

“By falling off the pipe or by Bruno,” I asked.

He laughed again, and he laughed again when he told the story to my mom. Dad wasn’t really a laugher, at least not as I remember.

The next morning we were in the trailer having coffee. In walked Bruno in a black canvas bomber jacket that looked tailor-made for him. Whistles and “whoas” all around.

Bruno spun around like on a runway. “What do think, College Guy,” he asked as friendly as a favorite uncle. I was frozen. Was he really talking to me?

“It looks like it was made while you were wearing it; perfect fit,” I said, and I’m pretty sure my voice was crackling in fear. Was this the point where he decked me? “How much do I owe you?”

Bruno looked me, shaking his head. “You owe me nothing. It was a 20-year-old coat. You know who you owe?” I waited.

“That guy,” he says, pointing to my father. “Finish school so you don’t have to do this your whole life.” I couldn’t look at my dad and he couldn’t look at me.

“You know why I call you College Guy?” Bruno asked.

I didn’t. I’d figured it was some kind of insult. “To remind you,” he said. “Remind you. Don’t mess up,” but he didn’t say mess.

“Know why I was wearing a 20-year-old coat?”

College Guy was taking a philosophy course, and Bruno was illustrating the Socratic method of teaching by asking questions. He waited for an answer. He leaned in. The silence in the trailer was like a Quaker meeting. “To save money?” I asked.

“For?” Bruno was encouraged by my question.

“To put your kid through college?”

Bruno smiled for the first time and took a slight bow. Some of the guys were like, “Yay,” as if I were a toddler that had taken a ride on a bike without training wheels. Bruno said, “I was in Korea and Nam. I don’t piss my pants coming to work like I did in the jungle, but my body hurts more. I’m 45 and I’m old. I’m an old man doing this.”

The whistle blew and we all filed out to work.

Friday was Bruno’s last day. He was heading back to his home local. I don’t remember anything about the morning. Lunch in the trailer was like others. Bruno was quiet except when responding to questions: Where was he headed (he was going to a maintenance job at Sparrow’s Point); what were the O’s prospects this spring (he followed boxing, not baseball).

As is tradition for travelers, Bruno would pack out after lunch. When the whistle blew, as the guys filed out of the trailer there were brotherly handshakes. I was last.

“Pleasure to work with you, David,” Bruno said pumping my hand.

“You, as well, sir.”

Later, I was cleaning up bits of insulation by the supply trailer. A soft honk drew my attention to Bruno’s truck as he turned toward the gate. He nodded to me with an almost imperceptible smile. Had I not known his stoned face so well I would have missed it. I waved, a bit awkwardly, as I do to this day. It’s me.

The next week, my last on the job, was different without Bruno. I appreciate people who don’t talk much. The guys continued without a beat. It’s what you do. People you don’t know come into your life, and then they leave. People you know do the same. They leave. You continue.

We have to forget nearly everything so we can remember. Life is a journey of continuous forgetting. That’s how we survive. We have to save space for things we want to remember, to make room for things like my last day on the job. We got home, and Dad reached into the fridge and pulled out two 16-ounce bottles of Reading. That was a first. We went into the living room — another first; that was a room where my parents sat with friends and family. We sipped silently.

Feeling the soothing effect of alcohol, I asked, “How did you do it?”

It took him a beat to get my drift. “It’s what we did. Get a job, hope to keep it until you get a pension.”

“I couldn’t do it. Not that kind of work. I learned that.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s why your mother and I are helping with college. Some of the guys brought their sons on; I never wanted that.”

My father retired a year later and lived blissfully on a union pension another three decades. I don’t remember us ever talking about my stint with the union, except when he’d tell me one of the guys had died. Sometimes, though, when he’d help paint a room at my house or a sibling’s, and someone would spill a little paint, he’d cry out, “Bruno’s coat!”