Gravel Grinder

One summer during college, my friend Tenny and I got jobs with the city (Springfield, Mass). When we were filling out the applications, we didn't think we'd get hired. (And we didn't even really want the jobs. $5.50 an hour? To stand outside under a broiler, our skin reddening, our brains liquefying?) We looked at the whole thing like a joke, but how we saw any humor in it, I can't remember.

We thought we'd be working together, I guess, holding signs that said "SLOW" and rolling our eyes at the locals with no better prospects. But the first morning we showed up, we got different assignments. Tenny went to a "trim crew," the poor, benighted souls who cut the grass on median strips, traffic islands, and embankments.

I got sent to Maintenance as a Maintenance-3. My partner was a squat machine shaped like a giant coffee cup. Officially, it was the "surfacing refiner," but what it really was was Gravel Grinder, and this was a machine. No, this was a force of nature. Someone else on the crew would load the hopper that sat above the Grinder's gaping mouth—imagine an insatiable, hellish baby bird, all open beak and waiting gullet—and then trip the hopper lever.

"Number Four Raw" (rocks about as big as pumpkins) would cascade into the Grinder, and for a moment, the Grinder would choke on them. And then, as the blades got purchase, the cavities in my teeth would rattle as the Grinder screamed back to life. A noise like garbage trucks exploding sizzled through my bones, turning them inside-out. (I had city-issued earphones at least.) A fog of furious dust boiled from its mouth. The world was cracked in half. My blood lapped inside my heart. My fingers knotted into fists.

After about a minute, the chaos was over. Grinder had spoken. I remembered to breathe again and tilted the newborn gravel into a trough. Then I waited for Miguel to haul it away and John to load the hopper again.

It's hard for me to believe now, but I loved that thing. It had the power of a black hole. It was a Zeus flinging thunderbolts at its enemies. It was retribution and vengeance and biblical truth. And I always stayed on its good side. I never once rolled my eyes.