Blood, Guns and Whores

~An
All American Tale of a Boy and His Dog

Written and Illustrated by W.Ross Ayers

An SFWC Co-Publishing Studio Production 2011 by LND, inc. All rights reserved

Blood, Guns and Whores An All American Tale of a Boy and His Dog, is a coffee table novel TM made of micro chapters and illustrations about a boy growing up in the small farming community of Blissfield, Michigan and on to adulthood in San Francisco.

W. Ross Ayers
Goto http://www.BloodGunsAndWhores.com to read all the posted chapters, check out how this is cool and different. Or just buy the book to get the full rich experience of the illustrations, artwork, and story in the way it was meant to be experienced.

31. Belt Maintenance

Two weeks after Christmas my mom decided to move to Florida. The house still had not sold. I had fixed up all the messed-up parts of the house, the ones I could fix anyway. We had a moving sale. I watched as my childhood went to strangers for fifty cents a memory. My first G.I. Joe, my Battlestar Galatica Cylon fighter, my posters, my aluminum baseball bat, my stuffed teddy bear I had had since I was six. Everything that we didnt sell we packed into boxes. A week before my mom left, Kerrys parents asked me to stay with them so I could keep working to pay for my year in France. They said I could stay for free in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall upstairs in their well-kept old Victorian style house in Blissfield. I said yes. At the end of the week my mom drove to Florida. I drove to my girlfriends house. Soon after moving in with Kerrys family, I did the math and realized I wasnt going to make it. I saw that working at Press Plastics for $4.25 an hour was not going to make me enough money to pay my way to France. My parents werent going to help out. Of that I was sure. The next Sunday afternoon I looked through The Toledo Blade for higher paying jobs. Belt Maintenance of Toledo needs a new team member. Travel and learn a prosperous trade. $6/hr. I had an interview with the manager sitting in his office. He asked me questions and I told him I needed to earn money to spend the next year in France as an exchange student.

I got the job and started the following Monday. We repaired conveyor belts for the ore industry around the Great Lakes. We worked in steel mills in Pittsburgh and Gary Indiana and on huge steel ore liners docked in the frozen winter ice of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. The office was in East Toledo. East Toledo is the shittier side of Toledo on the other side of the Maumee River. Its covered with asphalt, gravel, dingy little bars, factories, brown worn grease-stained Carhartts, mullets and rusty pickup trucks. The guys working at Belt Maintenance were just like the midnight shift at Press Plastics, but rougher and smarter in a way. Two other guys got hired the same time I did. It was the busy season. One of the guys was about thirty. He had three kids and had been out of work for awhile. The other guy was my age. His girlfriend was pregnant. He had dropped out of high school. Their parents had kicked them out. He was going to take care of his new family. The dropout and I drove with two of the other more experienced guys. We had to repair a conveyor belt in the bottom of an eight-hundred foot ore liner docked in Toledo for the winter. The sky was smooth gray. We hadnt seen the sun for a week. We walked across the metal gangplank from the cement dock onto the cold steel ship. We hauled the tools and supplies setting them on the deck. The freezing wind cut into us. I put on my rawhide gloves trying to keep my hands warm. The thick metal door with rounded corners and a big wheel in the middle stood open in front of me. I stepped up and ducked down to go through it into the guts of the ship. Darkness surrounded me. I squinted as I waited for my eyes to adjust. I stood on a metal mesh platform with a thin three-foot high metal rail. I looked down four stories into the blackness of the bottom of the ship. Girders crisscrossed down into the black hole below me. The inside of the ship was filled with thin metal stairs and metal mesh landings welded to the rusty steel walls. It reminded me of fire escapes I had seen connected to the sides of tall buildings. The ship was a huge metal building turned outside in. Everything was covered with a heavy dark brown dust an inch deep. Bare bulbs each caged by metal mesh stuck out of the walls at uneven intervals, glowing blotches in the darkness. Our job was to lower the six foot metal bars and the three-by five-foot metal heating plates used to vulcanize the torn belt down the four stories. To lower the parts we used a thin metal cable on an electric winch bolted to the mesh landing, and a small pulley we had hung from a girder above us. Once everything was lowered, the two experienced guys could start repairing the torn belt that lay motionless on the soot-covered rollers three feet above the thick steel ice-cold floor at the dark bottom of the ship.

Each six-foot bar weighed over two hundred pounds. Each plate weighed fifty pounds. The bolts that held the bars and plates in place were three feet long and five inches wide. They weighed twenty-five pounds each. The nuts were eight inches across and weighed ten pounds each. The first two hours the four of us walked down and back up the four stories of metal stairs over and over again, carrying the large bolts, nuts and the supplies to mend the rip in the belt. We were then ready to lower the bars and the plates. I stood on the metal mesh platform at the top. I looked down four stories into the blackness of the bottom of the ship. My arms hung heavy to my sides from the work I had already done. I took a deep breath, sat down and rested. The two experienced guys walked slowly down the metal stairs. From time to time I could see them passing through the glowing blotches of darkness. Each time they were smaller. The dropout and I strapped the first bar onto the small metal cable. We tied a guide rope to the end of the bar to weave it through the girders down the dark hole. Are you ready? Yeah, lower it down, a voice echoed from the darkness below. Standing on the metal mesh platform I held the guide rope as the dropout powered the winch. The winch whined and the pulley above twisted and strained. I pulled and tugged the guide rope maneuvering the bar between the girders as it lowered. We got it, a voice echoed from the darkness below. We strapped the next bar to the thin metal cable. Are you ready? Yeah, lower it down. Standing on the metal mesh platform I held the guide rope as the dropout powered the winch. The next bar went slowly down. The pulley above twisted and strained... then jumped. The small metal cable bounced off the pulley and fell. The guide rope buzzed in my hands between my rawhide gloves. I dropped to my ass.

I squeezed as the rope buzzed between my hands. The bar bounced off the girders, flipping with more and more force as it toppled down. Clang! Clang! Clang! Watch out below! In my mind I saw the two unprotected men, helpless in the darkness at the bottom of the ice-cold ship. The rope buzzed louder between my hands. I squeezed tighter, being pulled on my ass across the metal mesh floor to the edge of the deep dark hole. My feet jammed against the siding of the metal mesh platform. The weight of the bar pulled me to my feet squatting. Then it stopped. Squatting with myraw hide gloves between my knees, I was leaning over the darkness looking four stories straight down. I was frozen holding the small rope looking into the dark bottom of the ice-cold ship and into the silence feeling powerful on the edge of death, living. Thirty feet below the large bar swung like some surreal pendulum, tilting up and down, swinging slowly back and forth tapping against the girders. The weight balanced between my knees. What the fuck is going on up there? Its okay. I got it.

Blood, Guns and Whores An All American Tale of a Boy and His Dog, is a coffee table novel TM made of micro chapters and illustrations about a boy growing up in the small farming community of Blissfield, Michigan and on to adulthood in San Francisco.

W. Ross Ayers
Goto http://www.BloodGunsAndWhores.com to read all the posted chapters, check out how this is cool and different. Or just buy the book to get the full rich experience of the illustrations, artwork, and story in the way it was meant to be experienced.