“Okay Jorge, pop your thumb out of your ass, get this shit off of my bench and help Mike unload the truck!” Ralph said, rudely shoving my tools and the project I had been working on out of the way to make a place on the bench for the toolbox he was packing, sending my new pair of snips and some of my other hand tools crashing to the floor. I hadn’t been working with Ralph that day and he actually didn’t have any call to boss me around, but he was a journeyman and I was just a lowly apprentice so I hurried out to help the other apprentice unload Ralph’s truck. “Fucking Mexican.” I heard him say softly as I went out the door. I paused for a minute, and just about turned around to make an issue of what he’d just said but swallowed my bile and went on with the job, wondering if ‘Fucking Mexican’ was a promotion from last week’s ‘God Damned Beaner’ or last month’s ‘Greaser Bastard’.

My name is George Lopez, and just to fuck with me Ralph pronounces it as the traditional Spanish ‘Horgay’. Although I have Hispanic roots I was born in Santa Fe, where my Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandfather, and unknown ancestors way back before them had also been born and raised. I can speak Spanish, of course, but English is my primary language and I speak it without any discernable accent.

“One of these days, Mike, one of these days,” I said’ knowing that the other apprentice was aware of Ralph’s bigotry.

“Hang in there George and don’t let him get to you. He’s the same way with everyone at first. Just keep doing your job and he’ll back off after a while.” He was right, of course, but it still pissed me off. I was twenty-two back then and a Viet Nam vet and the asshole had no right to treat me like scum. Nowadays he couldn’t have gotten away with it, but in 1971 nobody cared about EEO or harassment, and it you couldn’t stand the heat you got out of the kitchen, so as to speak.

I liked Mike and he was one of the reasons that I was in Eastern Washington. My fiancé had Dear Johned me while I still overseas, and my parents were both killed in a car wreck just after I got out of the Army. I buried them and stayed around Santa Fe for a year and tried to work with my brother in the family owned tire store, but the whole place now held nothing but bad memories so I hit the road looking for somewhere else to settle. I knew Mike from the Army and that he was in Spokane, and I looked him up when I got to the area.

Mike’s dad was a sheetmetal worker and since Mike had spent summers and Saturdays during high school sweeping the shop floor he was a shoe-in for an apprenticeship position, and had been on the job a little over two years by then. He informed me that the shop was expanding and needed another apprentice and encouraged me to go to the Bureau Of Labor and apply. I scored okay on the placement tests, and being as how I was a veteran I got accepted and was immediately hired by the same shop where Mike worked.

To a person who isn’t afraid of work an apprenticeship in a union shop is like winning the lottery. The starting pay is okay, about double the minimum wage, and increases every six months for four years, and I also got a monthly GI Bill payment that was like icing on the cake. There is decent medical coverage for the worker and his family, and a retirement plan that allows a comfortable early retirement. The work is pretty physical, with lots of climbing on ladders and some heavy lifting, but there is also a mental challenge in learning the complex layout procedures for the items that we built in the shop, and the apprentices go to school a few hours every week to learn these skills. It is an ideal job for a guy that likes to work with his hands, or it would be if not for assholes like Ralph.

He was opinionated about every thing and everybody and every fourth word out of his mouth was an obscenity. There weren’t any women in the shop back then, but nowadays he’d get sued or coldcocked inside a week. He was an equal opportunity racist; Spics, Wops, Niggers, Blanket Asses, Sand Niggers, Slopes, Gooks, Frogs, Japs, Chinks, Limeys, and Krauts all received equal consideration. The only ethnic group that was immune seemed to be Eastern Europeans and he never told Pollock jokes. His only redeeming quality was his ability, and although some of the other journeymen badmouthed some of his methods, he was still the quickest and most efficient journeyman in the shop.

“Fucking Gooks and Spics are just like Niggers,” Ralph said one day while we were eating lunch. “Every one of them should be castrated at puberty.” He was looking right at me when he delivered this pearl of wisdom. “String them up in the town square, pull down their pants, and take a couple of bricks to their balls before they can spawn another generation of welfare leeching bastards.”

A few weeks later we were working on a rooftop downtown installing ducting when a black guy and blonde gal walked by holding hands. “Where I came from that jungle bunny would be singing soprano,” Ralph said as the couple paused at the crosswalk. “Any black bastard that even looked a white girl would have got his nuts cut off.”

“Where did you come from anyway?” I asked, somewhat curious about how a guy could get so screwed up.

“You can bet your ass it wasn’t fucking Mexico, I’ll tell you that much.”

“I’ve never even been to Mexico,” I said, starting to get a little bit steamed.

“Don’t matter where the fuck you been,” he expanded. “If you’re a fucking Mexican, then go back to fucking Mexico. If you’re a fucking nigger, go back to Africa or have your nuts cut off. Simple as that.”

“ Maybe there are some people that should nutted at puberty.” I was standing up to face him now, and although he was several inches taller than me a quite a bit heavier, I figured I could still take him if we came right down to blows. “Say, to start with, anyone who’s great-grand-dad wasn’t born in this country. How about that.” I was pissed off now, and reached down and picked up my new pair of bulldog snips. “Maybe we could start right now and do a few retroactively.” I pointed the snips towards his crotch and opened and closed the blades a few times. “My family was farming and ranching in this country when yours’ was still chasing their sisters across Poland.”

“Get back to work, asshole,” He said, now pissed off. He finally understood that he’d just been made the butt of a Pollock joke. We got back to the shop right at quitting time and he left me to unload the truck while he went up front to the office.

“I’d like a word with you, George,” The owner of the company said, leading me into his office and closing the door. Ralph had come back from the office a few minutes earlier with a shit-eating grin on his face, so I suspected that I was in for a reaming. “I like you, you’re a hard worker and seem to have a knack for the work,” the owner started in. “I know that Ralph has been hassling you, and he just now came up and said that you’d said something threatening to him, and that if you didn’t get your shit together he’d walk. Like I said, I like you, but if it comes to a choice between losing an experienced journeyman or a raw apprentice I’ll have to let you go. Do you remember the stuff about the probation period?” I did. All apprentices are on probation for the first six months, during which period of time the employer can discharge the apprentice for any reason and without explanation to the apprentice or the apprenticeship committee. “Yes,” I answered.

“Ralph wants you gone so he can get his new son-in-law in, and I don’t want to see that happen, so I’m going to have you work with Dick for the next six or eight months. He’ll be doing the college job down in Pullman and you can stay down there. You don’t have a house or apartment yet, do you?”

“No. I’ve been staying with Mike, but that’s starting to get old, if you know what I mean.” Mike wanted me out and his girlfriend in and since I was making enough for my own apartment. I was already looking around for another place to live. “What about the classroom stuff? ” We attended a related training class at the community college every Tuesday night.

“There’s a local apprenticeship training committee down there and you can get set up with them for however long you’re there.”

The next seven months were the best I’d ever spent. The job paid subsistence, which was designed to offset out of town living expenses and wasn’t taxable, so Dick and I pooled ours and rented a cheap two bedroom furnished apartment and still had money left over. Dick was a delight to work for; he’d been in the trade for fifteen years and knew his way around and was also an extremely good and patient teacher. He had a wife and teenage kids so we worked four ten-hour days and took Friday off. He went home every weekend and returned Monday with the metal fittings and stuff that we needed for the next week’s work. I usually spent Friday and Saturday chasing the town’s many college girls, and unlike most of the other kids my age I had lots of money to entertain them.

My six-month probation period passed, and by then I knew that sheetmetal work was what I wanted to do and that Eastern Washington was where I wanted to live. My brother and I settled our parents’ estate and we decided to sell off some of the property, and as a result I had a pretty good hunk of money to sink into a house, in addition to the nearly new pickup truck that Dad had bought right before he died. I went back to Spokane a couple of times to look around and talk to realtors, and on the last rip I connected with the other apprentice, Mike.

“Did you hear about the new apprentice?” He asked, over the noise of the tavern.

“”No,” I answered, uneasily. Was I going to be replaced? Had I fucked up somehow?

“They hired two more journeyman for the new hospital job, so that made room for another apprentice,” Mike said, then explained how the ratio between journeymen and apprentices worked. “There are now eight journeymen, so we can have three apprentices. Ralph’s son-in-law was still on the list and Ralph threatened to walk unless the boss hired the kid.”

“What’s he like?” I asked.

“He’s a fat jerk that flunked his draft physical,” Ralph answered with the typical disdain that veterans have for anyone who was classified 4-F, or unfit for military service. “He can’t hardly even bend over to pick up something off of the floor and is scared to death of ladders. None of the other guys will work with him so he sticks pretty close to Ralph. I don’t see any way that he’ll make it more than three or four months before he either quits or gets fired.”

I moved back to Spokane when the job in Pullman was done and paid cash for a small house close to the edge of town, figuring to live there for a few years then maybe sell and build a new house out of town somewhere.

They liked to rotate us around so we could get a broad base of experience and I’d been in the field for the last seven months and was now due to work in the shop for a while under a different journeyman.

Ralph was still a pain in the ass, and although his new apprentice/son-in-law caught most of his shit there was still some left over for me. “Hey Taco Bender,” he called out one day. “Climb up there and hold the dumb end of the pipe for me.” He and Andy, his son-in-law, were assembling a long duct fitting that was to ship out to a crew working at the Hanford Nuclear reservation, and I was the only other guy in the shop. Ralph was wrestling the bottom end of the eight-inch diameter ventilation duct, trying to get it started into an angled diffuser box, and the other end of the twenty-foot long pipe rested in the rafters near the roof. A ladder had been set up to access the top end, Andy couldn’t climb up there, and someone had to go up and move the end of the pipe so it would line up with the bottom fitting. The smart way to do it would have been to lay the whole thing down on its side on the floor, but nobody, especially not an apprentice, could ever tell Ralph anything. “Take your bulldogs with you so you can cut the hanger strap,” he added.

I had been cutting some patterns out on the bench and hated the interruption as well as his insult, but I was still trying hard to get along with the asshole. “Okay.” I slipped the heavy bulldog snips into the loop on my belt and headed up the ladder. He struggled with his end a while, getting nowhere, and from above I could sight down along the pipe and easily see the problem, so I pushed the end away slightly so it would line up with the collar on the bottom.

“Don’t move it you dumb fuck!” Ralph yelled. “Just do what I tell you!”

“Okay,” I called back and relaxed to enjoy the show. He finally got frustrated and for some stupid reason jerked the pipe upwards, towards me, about two feet, and in the process knocked the snips from my belt and into the open end of the pipe.

“Watch out!” I hollered as the heavy snips rattled down the nearly vertical pipe.

“Huh?” Ralph said, pulling the pipe towards his waste for another attempt at connecting it to the fitting that he was straddling. He dropped the pipe as soon as the snips hit him and instantly clamped his hands to his groin and hit the floor.

He was white as a sheet when I got down the ladder, and for the first time since I’d known him he had nothing to say. The blood oozing through his fingers demanded immediate attention, but he adamantly refused to let anyone examine or treat him and insisted that we haul him to the hospital. He finally passed out, and being as Andy was useless and I’d recently had first aid training I cut away his trousers to try and stop the bleeding.

His whole crotch was a bloody mess and it only took one look to see why. The open end of the snips had hit him right below his stubbly little cock and severed his entire scrotum as cleanly as if it had been done with a hatchet.

I expected that my career as a sheetmetal worker had come to an instant end as Ralph’s balls, but it was determined that he was responsible for his own castration. He was in charge of the crew and he had directed that I climb the ladder, and his stupid thrust with the pipe had dislodged the snips that shot down the pipe and severed his nuts. He came back to work after a few weeks but quit a month later and moved elsewhere. That was kind of a shame, actually, because when he returned to work his whole attitude seemed to have changed and he was a lot more pleasant to be around.

His son-in-law determined that sheetmetal work wasn’t for him and moved on and found another job.