Dopecentury XXII --- Pinkie
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
Brick on brick on brick on brick. Build something big from small pieces. Lay them down in a line. Mortar the gaps. Build something bigger. A row runs down. Runs round a circle. There’s nothing held there.
Brick on brick on brick. A wash of white. There is only a way. This is the only way. brick on brick on brick on brick. Build a wall across the clay.
Brick on Brick on brick on brick. There is no returning.
Brick on brick. Brick on brick on brick. Brick on brick on brick. Brick on brick on bricks and mortar. Brick on brick on brick.
But this is just free association of words to the sound.
A small corner of the city. A dark dank alley. Water streaming down the center of it. What else is there if not the description of it? What’s the feel of it, in narrative words? A lonesome alley? A forgotten alley? Literal words don’t do they job. Describe the alley and the feeling will emerge.
A slanted light. A drop. Rust and steel. Rickety structures. Smoke that drifts up from a fire burning in a drum. Smoke in the afternoon light. The afternoon light that slants down between the buildings. Between the drop. And the drip. Rusty brown water dripping from the metal of the fire escapes.
What if there’s a story?
A man warms his hands at the fire, in the afternoon light, in the smoke, the rises between the drop, between the buildings. He lights a cigarette. Exhaled smoke mingles upward with the smoke from the trash fire. Acrid and damp.
The cigarette in the man’s fingers. He is missing part of a pinkie, and the stubby end sticks out at the same angle as the cigarette. The end of his pinkie had been found, months later, much to late to be of use, desiccated and forlorn among the dry sawdust, in the collector of the cutting machine. “What good was a pinkie anyway?” he had wondered as it went shooting off hit finger when parted by the spinning blade. Turned out to be a significant portion of his grip strength. “You’ll never throw a baseball the same way again.” His boss had said to him. “I Haven’t thrown a baseball in 30 years anyway,” he had thought.
But grip strength did seem to matter. He couldn’t swing a hammer as hard. He could barely twist a screwdriver without it hurting. And he would often go to fit one cut piece of wood up against another and find the piece slipping precisely because his pinkie would have held it in place in the past.
More than anything though, the loss of his pinkie slowed him down. He had always worked so quickly before. His fast, high-quality fabrication and construction were what his employers valued. His skills and speed had propelled him to the top of his field.
But losing that bit of pinkie slowed him down. At first, it was almost imperceptible: the marginal difference of hitting a nail just a bit less hard, turning a screw a little less quickly. Those marginal slownesses added up quickly enough that it did not take him long to notice that his overall output was: slower. Still the same high quality, just taking longer to get there. “Well, can’t stay fast forever,” he said to himself. He figured a marginal percentage slower work was a price of increasing age. He didn’t let it bother him.
But the slowness lay over him like a blanket. Or more like the smoke that collected from the ash-end of his cigarettes. The smoke gathered and thickened and blackened and increased the viscosity of the air, until he felt like he was almost swimming through it when he was at work. Projects that formerly took days were now taking weeks. And it wasn’t just the slower pace of his hammer or turning screwdriver. Now everything took longer. He swam through the thick smokey air from one part of a project to another, and each part seemed to take an eternity. Not just slowness, but weighted down with heaviness. It began to feel that his speed has seeped out of his open pinkie wound, never to be recovered.
Not that he minded totally. Moving more slowly, taking each part of a project one at a time, allowed him to focus in on his work. He got lost swimming slowly around the tiniest of details. The work was more rewarding to him for it. He could spend all day cutting two boards to finger-join them so they would align with a perfection that no gap would penetrate for a thousand years. This was truly fulfilling work.
Unfortunately, it did not pay. From outside his smoke-filled workshop, his employers and clients watched as time slowed down behind those huge closed garage doors. They watched him smoking up cigarettes, and swimming back and forth through the black fog, searching out the precise piece he wanted, and then take maybe the whole day to make a single cut.
Part of the slowness was just moving slowly, but another part was carefulness and precision. He didn’t measure twice and cut once. He measured many times. And considered different angles, different approaches. It was sometimes recursive work, where a single angle to join between two pieces would set him backward, thinking about how those pieces aligned to get to that angle, how those alignments fit within the whole project, how the project fit within his larger work goals. He would re-ponder all these things until he worked his way back down to the angle between these two pieces (if he did), and then proceed with the cut — if some other check did not get in the way first.
The benefit of this was that he was always sure of every move. He knew he wasn’t making just the right cut, and doing it correctly, but that the cut would fit perfectly into the piece, the piece would fit his work, and his work would fit his client or employer’s need — that it would fit in precisely the correct place in the world.
His employers and clients could not argue with the results and merits of any particular join or piece of work when he showed them. They were first-rate, unquestionably. Second-to-none in the world. But the pace at which the pieces were coming together had become glacial.
Finally there came a day when his employer calculated that it would take him nearly two-hundred years to finish the piece he was currently working on if he proceeded at his current pace. He was let go.
And in the alley behind his workshop, he smokes his cigarette, And he feeds little pieces of scrap, small imperfect or cast-off bits from his slow but perfect projects, into the burning barrel and the smoke rises up between the buildings, between the drop.
See, without story there is nothing there. Without story it’s almost impossible to write. The description is never really enough. You can’t build a story from description alone. And description can often detract from the story.
Brick on brick on brick. A wash of white. There is only a way. This is the only way. brick on brick on brick on brick. Build a wall across the clay.