CRAZY AL

(part 2)

CRAZY AL (PT 2)

When I write about the mill, I look at the blank page in front of me and usually don’t know what I’m going to write about. It’s not a matter of writer’s block, or anything like that, but a matter of where am I going to go with this? Everything that was said, or done, was inappropriate and do I really want to go there? It was beyond the realm of political correctness. Production was slow, because the mill was old and outdated long before I started working there; the crew was young, and the age averaged out to something like 28, so there was a lot of time to play.

Let me just give you a little background. There were two “stackers”—the Rough Stacker in the back of the mill, and the Finished Stacker for the planer. The Rough Stacker was one single set of chains that took all the lumber the mill produced, and packaged it so that the forklift could either feed it into the planer, or else it was “tied” and the driver put in the yard. The yard was unpaved, and the forklift driver had to stack up 4x4 pieces of dunnage on the ground so he could lay the packages down. The one thing you wanted to make sure was that they were level. When it rained, the back yard flooded and the dunnage would float away before the driver even got back on his machine.

The mill usually produced about 45 packages a shift; the planer, 60.

The Finished Stacker on the planer side had four trays, each with a different grade—everything else went to the Green Chain. You weren’t supposed to mix the grades up, but you could slip in a higher grade piece (say Clear) in with a lower grade, (like Standard & Better). You couldn’t do it the other way around, but we usually did when we got behind. From the Finished Stacker the packages went on a set of rollers to the Semi-Automatic Package Press. The Press operator spent most of his time in the lunch room—usually with the forklift driver—and he’d wait until there were six packages before he went out and ran them through the Press. It would take him about a minute a package.

The forklift driver doubled them up and brought them to the paint shack where the Painter—usually sitting on a chair in the sun, tanning—would put stencils on them and paint the company’s logo on both sides. Then he’d wash the stencils in a solution of paint thinner. By the end of the shift, he was often stoned from the fumes because he didn’t want to wear the mask they provided. If he wanted to sit around and tan, he’d start painting the packages from back to front. If he was in a hurry, he’d go from front to back. The forklift driver would have to wait until the front packages were stencilled before he could start to take them away.

It was slow and tedious. There was a single foreman who ran both the mill and the planer. And then the mill was sold, and everything changed. It was Gregory Manufacturing when I first started there. Around five years later, it became Primex, short for Pacific RIm EXports. Somehow, they couldn’t get the crew to accept the name change. We still called ourselves Acorn. It may have had something to do with the Tee-shirts the company had printed up: ACORN STUDS, because it was basically a stud mill. We made stud 2x4s for housing.

You’d think, the fact that they made 2x4s, that the Green Chain would be an easy job. But no one wanted to be there, and we spent most of our time talking and fucking the dog. We’d go out to someone’s car at coffees and lunch, smoke pot, hash, Thai weed, whatever was around. Later, it was lines of coke. We’d do lines off the back of the toilet, off the control console of machines, in that little gap on your hand behind your thumb, (if you did coke, you know what that is) and even on the lumber.

There were two shifts on the Planer in those days, and three in the mill.

*

I gave you all that info so you’d have an idea of what a small place it was. We were all young, most of us in our 20s, or early 30s, and everyone just a little bit fucked up—some as a result of mental illness, but most of us basically stoned.

And that brings me back to Crazy Al. I told you that Al was my girlfriend’s uncle. A year or two younger than me, he was always fighting, and always high. He loved acid, speed, MDA, pot, hash and drinking. We used to get high together. He said he liked to hang out with me because I was a calming influence on him. (He also said he used to go home and look up words in the dictionary that I’d used, because he never understood what I said half the time.) Whatever.

We got high on acid one time and spent the night in, at his mother’s, watching a movie: I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about if my life depended on it. We couldn’t stop giggling though, and his mother probably thought we were on our way to becoming serial killers. That’s because the movie was violent, and had nudity. It didn’t make a lot of sense. His grandmother even sat down and tried to watch it with us, but she gave up. (She was a sweet little lady of about 90, who had literally come to Vancouver from Saskatchewan in a covered wagon when she was a young girl.)

For the most part though, we went out. I was trying to distance myself from him because by this time, I’d broken up with my girlfriend, (his niece), and felt uncomfortable sitting in her grandmother’s house waiting for Al to get ready. It was just strange.

The reason why I’m telling you this story is that we were watching FRIENDS last night, and in it, Chandler got handcuffed to a chair by a woman. It reminded me of something. Can you guess where this is going?