Alan Buczynski
Iron Bonding

I just don't get it.” We were up on the iron, about 120 feet, waiting for the gang below to swing up another beam. Sweat from under Ron's hard hat dripped on the 'beam we were sitting on and evaporated immediately, like water thrown on a saW1a stove. We were talking about the "men's movement" and "wildman weekends." "I mean," he continued, "if they want to get dirty and sweat and cuss and pOW1d on things, why don't they just get real jobs and get paid for it?" Below, the crane growled, the next piece lifting skyward. I replied: "Nah, Ron, that isn't the point. They don't want to sweat every day, just sometimes." He said: "Man, if you only sweat when you want to, I don't call that real sweatin." Although my degree is in English, I am an ironworker by trade; my girlfriend, Patti, is a graduate student in English literature. Like a tennis ball volleyed by two players with distinctly different styles, I am bounced between blue-collar maulers and precise academicians. My conversations range from fishing to Foucault, derricks to deconstruction. There is very little overlap, but when it does occur it is generally the academics who are curious about the working life. Patti and I were at a dinner party. The question of communication between men had arisen. Becky, the host, is a persistent interrogator: "What do you and Ron talk about?" I said, “Well, we talk about work, drinking, ah, women.” Becky asked, "Do you guys ever say, 'I love you' to each other?"
This smelled mightily of Robert Bly and the men's movement. I replied: "Certainly. All the time." I am still dissatisfied with this answer. Not because it was a lie, but because it was perceived as one. The notion prevails that men's emotional communication skills are less advanced than that of chimpanzees, that we can no more communicate with one another than can earthworms. Ironworkers as a group may well validate this theory. We are not a very articulate bunch. Most of us have' only a basic education. Construction sites are extremely noisy, and much of our communication takes place via hand signals. There is little premium placed on words that don't stem from our own jargon. Conversations can be blunt. Bly's approach, of adapting a fable for instruction, may instinctively mimic the way men communicate. Ironworkers are otherwise very direct, yet when emotional issues arise we speak to one another in allegory arid parable. One of my co-workers, Cliff, is a good storyteller, with an W1derstated delivery: "The old man got home one night, drunk, real :messed up and got to roughhousing with the cat. Old Smoke, well she laid into him, scratched him good. Out comes the shotgun. The old man loads up, chases Smoke into the front yard and blam! Off goes the gun. My Mom and my sisters and me we're all screamin'. Smoke comes walkin' in the side door. Seems the old man blew away the wrong cat, the neighbor's Siamese. Red lights were flashin' against the house, fur was splattered all over the lawn, the cops cuffed my old man and he's hollerin' and man, I'll tell you, I was cryin'." Now, we didn't all get up from our beers and go over and hug 14 him. This was a story, not therapy. Cliff is amiable, but tough, more inclined to, solving any perceived injustices with his fists than verbal banter, but I don't need to see him cry to know that he can. He has before, and he can tell a story about it without shame, without any disclaimers about being "just a kid," and that's enough for me.
Ron and I have worked together for nine years and are as close as 29 is to 30. We have worked through heat and cold and seen each other injured in the stupidest of accidents. One February we were working inside a plant, erecting steel with a little crane; it was near the end of the day, and I was tired. I hooked onto a piece and, while still holding the load cable, signaled the operator "up." My thumb was promptly sucked into the sheave of the crane. I screamed, and the operator came down on the load, releasing my thumb. It hurt. A lot. Water started leaking from my eyes. The gang gathered around while Ron tugged gently at my work glove, everyone curious whether my thumb would come off with the glove or stay on my hand. "O.K., man, relax, just relax," Ron said. "See if you can move it." Ron held my hand. The thumb had a neat crease right down the center, lengthwise. All the capillaries on one side had burst and were turning remarkable colors. My new thumbnail was on back order and would arrive in about five months. I wiggled the thumb, an eighth of an inch, a quarter, a half. "You're O.K., man, it's still yours and it ain't broke. Let's go back to work." Afterwards, in the bar, while I wrapped my hand around a cold beer to keep the swelling and pain down, Ron hoisted his bottle in a toast: "That," he said, "was the best scream I ever heard, real authentic, like you were in actual pain, like you were really scared." If this wasn't exactly Wind in His Hair howling eternal friendship for Dances With Wolves, I still understood what Ron was saying. It's more like a 7-year-old boy putting a frog down the back of a little girl's dress because he has a crush on her. It's a backward way of showing affection, of saying "I love you," but it's the only way we know. We should have outgrown it, and hordes of men are now paying thousands of dollars to sweat and stink and pound and grieve together to try and do just that. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But no matter how cryptic, how Byzantine, how weird and weary the way it travels, the message still manages to get through.