American poet, editor, activist, fiction writer Ron Kolm, born 1947
"Ron Kolm's Night Shift stands alongside other wage-slave masterpieces like Charles Bukowski's Factotum and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Winking and grinning in the face of punch-clock death, Kolm finds a way to somehow stay alive and even to eventually triumph."
The above Alan Kaufman quote hits the blue-collar bullseye - in a mere 90 pages Night Shift offers 13 searing chapter snapshots of what it means for a poet to begin adulthood in the slog of hardscrabble factory work world.
Additionally, Ron offers slices of his life both before and after the factory - taken together, one penetrating portrait. Here are several slivers along with my comments:
Boyhood Blues - "I had a problem relating to other kids almost from the very beginning.. . . . I became a self-loathing non-Jew, sitting in my bedroom, stewing in all the sad juices of my loneliness and despair." In his isolation, Ron devoured books on war. Thinking it a another war story, his mom picked him up a copy of Catch 22. Whoa, baby! Eye-opener. Heller's novel with its humor and humanity completely changed Ron's outlook on life. Ron was scared stiff, recognizing just how far removed he was from your usual kid talk and kid stuff, but the new transformed Ron pressed on, even turning to the Beats - Howl, On the Road, Coney Island of the Mind.
Bookstore in the Boonies - "I worked in a bookstore in Reading, Pennsylvania, when I was in college. It was quite different from a New York City bookstore; we sold furniture, school supplies and an interesting assortment of snacks." Ron did his best to push quality authors like Joyce, Beckett and Updike but the owner hated him for it. Damn, boy! Just let our customers buy the latest best sellers.
Decisive Discovery - "Reading was not a reading city; so I would flip through the art books and look at the color plates to get through the long afternoons. I discovered the Surrealists, and that's when my life changed." Ah, for a sensitive young man to connect to mind-expanding art - and at age 19, prime time for radical transformation. Ron's love of Duchamp took him to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where on one cold, rainy afternoon he beheld a controversial work created by the great French artist, an artwork not only extraordinary but also funny. Ron started laughing hysterically. A museum guard, all serious, approached, wanting to know what's up. Ron told him, "I've just seen God."
Freezing in the Hillbilly Hills - No wanting to be drafted and go to Vietnam (understatement), Ron along with his wife volunteered for VISTA and were sent to Appalachia to help the poor folk. But, dang, them thar hills in the dead of winter were sub-zero ice cold! The young couples' hilarious escapades include trying to have sex under an electric blanket. "Moving around under the electric blanket created a storm of static electricity that snapped and crackled and gave us a continuous series of painful shocks -it was like trying to couple on a bed of hot coals." Solution? Drive their heated pickup truck to a parking lot and go at it.
The Plastic Factory - "The factory itself is modern architecture as its most functional and banal; the one-storied rectangular box." As a man in his twenties, Ron had to not only read great literature and poetry but also make some good money. Thus factory work. "My shift runs from three o'clock in the afternoon to midnight, with an hour break for lunch, which is really dinner." The plastic factory might look banal from the outside; inside was another story: "Styrene is possessed of strange properties. It eats away the rubber soles of our shoes. It gobbles at bare skin. It devours eyeballs."
Ron's detailed description of the plastics factory reads like scenes from Dante's Inferno. Little did Ron know all the dire consequences of being a plastics man. "My wife and I have become enemies, of a sort. She can't stand the smell of plastic I drag around with me like a shroud." A grim chapter of Ron's life - many factory workers survive by numbing themselves by booze, drugs or just turning off their emotions but what of a poet? For me, reading this section of Night Shift was nothing less than heart-wrenching.
Sidebar: I have an experience of factory work one step removed. My dad was a factory worker for 35 years at the infamous Toms River Chemical. When the plant was processing red, he'd come home with red on his hands and face. I overheard my dad saying there were days when he even pissed red.
More and More Factory Work - Ron's blue-collar saga continues. "I hate the damn job - night-shift on an assembly-line - which seems to be killing me in some ways or another, but I need the money so I keep showing up and punching in, waiting for something to happen, an accident, anything - looking for a sign that I should quit and move on, but not finding any." However, Ron peppers in humor along the way. There was that time when driving to work: "But I've made a mistake; the pill I've taken is not mescaline - it turns out to be acid, or so I guess as my world goes somewhere else. I see hideous angles outside the windows, banging on the glass, trying to get in. Everything is moving and breathing."
Upbeat Second Half - Ron's 7 brief chapters at the end of his book highlight his move to New York City - working at bookstores, meeting other authors like Alan Ginsberg, all the while embarking more directly on the life of a writer. "After dinner I'd sit down at the ancient blue portable typewriter that had gotten me through college. It was mostly plastic, with no heft, but I could bang the shit out of it. I used corrasable paper and, as I was constantly rewriting as I went along, my tiny, much-abused typer was filling with eraser shavings."
Night Shift is a slam dunk, a damn good little book. Pick up a copy and see for yourself how Ron became Ron Kolm, one of the leading lights in downtown's fringe literary scene.
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