Hammer Down

“I was born to rock 'n' roll, everything I need
I was born with the hammer down
I was built for speed.”

         “Built for Speed,” Motörhead

 Lemmy Kilmister ofMotörhead

British thrash metal band Motörhead formed in 1975, the same year C.W. McCall had a smash hit with the novelty song “Convoy,” a trucker fantasy, which gave rise to the CB craze (“Pig Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck, and I'm about to put the hammer down”), about teaming up with a thousand other rigs and defying the law by crashing through toll gates.  Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister considered himself a punker and was an admirer of the Ramones and not only wrote “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.” but performed it with the band in 1996 at their final show.  Joey Ramone remarked: “It was the ultimate honor – like John Lennon writing a song for you.”  The final verse contains these lines:

Bad boys then, bad boys now,
Good buddies, mau mau mau,
Keep it up, rock n roll,
Let the music save your soul

In Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul,” I learned in the chapter “Hammer Down” that the three most popular CB handles are Gator, Coyote, and Lone Ranger.  Gator is also slang for a large piece of tire tread.  A tractor without a trailer is nicknamed a bobtailer.  Fayette, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg, is Fayettenam because so many soldiers get sent overseas from there.  Murphy asserts, “The work is so hard and held in such low esteem that there’s not a lot of time left over for bigotry.”  Still, there’s a pecking order, and the teasing from grizzled veterans is incessant, often based on one’s looks or ethnic origin. In the chapter “Hammer Down,” Murphy described driving through South Carolina as part of a ten-truck convoy:

  The front door of the convoy was a Bowman freighthauler followed by three Armellini reefers hauling fresh flowers, then me, then a skateboard steel hauler, an Atlas bedbugger, another skateboarder hauling hot tubs, and the back door was a Schneider freight box called a “Pumpkin” because of its orange color.  We flew together for 135 miles doing 65 the whole way.  We all fell into a groove.  Everyone was driving well, everybody was professional, everybody was going fast but not crazy, and there was a plane of consciousness that we had together. It’s the closest thing to a Zen experience I know, except when I’m in my loading trance. Both of those things are what keeps me out there.  The rest of it is just hassle.

At bowling the Engineers spotted Pin Spinners 91 pins, an unusual development – normally we get pins.  I rolled a 447 series, a pin over average, as we took 5 of 7 points.  We’d have won all three games except that Frank Shufran left a ten-pin in the tenth on a pocket hit whereas a strike would have given him a double.  As I was leaving Hobart Lanes, George Villareal, who’d been at the Steel Pen Conference last weekend to pick up wife Betty, gave me Nancy Nau Sullivan’s business card. The author of the highly acclaimed memoir “The Last Cadillac,” Sullivan was disappointed to have missed me. She’s writing a book about Gary pioneers Tom and A.F. Knotts and wants to have lunch.  Part of the so-called “sandwich generation” responsible for both children and parents, Sullivan dealt with compassion about caring for an ailing father. She wrote: “His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn’t grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all.  The dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could.”

 

During Melissa Fraterrigo’s conference workshop, Betty Villareal told me she had been a frequent contributor to IUN’s award-winning literary magazine Spirits.  In the Spring 2013 issue appeared “Pencil Me In”:

The imprint that they make is permanent,

black, blue, red can change your mind,

but not your view of what you see or believe.

Held tightly in the hand of time,

the point would be explained or drawn,

erased and perceived on the parchment.

Only those with gifts of sight will follow,

Only the gifted can write what takes place - - -

Can you see between the lines?

The wooden tool can wound,

Like the bloody knife has teeth

Or the spice that salts the open cut.

Beware!  This instrument has malice,

It can change a life or lift an impression.

W.K. Buckley in 2003

In the Winter 2003 issue of Spirits was William K. Buckley’s poem “This Mechanic,” about working at Steel City Truck Stop, located a couple miles from IUN at 3001 Grant St. in Gary and now a Petro.  After explaining his routine, Buckley wrote:

I work with cooks and tough waitresses,

Down-and-outers and crazies, who bum cigarettes,

With drifters and lot-lizards, hicks and fat drivers,

And bored country kids - - -

So don’t jive me about making it big,

I’ll give ya’ a five if you need it,

But don’t hand me that crap about

The American Dream.

Maintenance that’s our old truth

It gives us meaning

In this industrial soup.

In that same Sprits issue is Joe Gutierrez’s “Memories of Grandpa,” about Colonel Ulysses Lee Grant Comptin, a great storyteller of tall tales who died in 1940 when Joe was seven.  Gutierrez, who grew up in an Indiana Harbor neighborhood eradicated by urban renewal, wrote:

  His trigger finger in his right hand was gone, and, depending on the time of year, he told a different story of how he lost it.  If it was winter, he would wrap his long arms around himself like he was freezing, then shake his hands like he was trying to warm them up.  Said his finger froze off when he and three other soldiers crossed the Bering Strait.  It was the middle of February, and they were in a wooden flat-boat that sprung a leak. His fingers were long with big knuckles, so he volunteered to plug the hole with his finger.  He said he closed his eyes and stuck his finger in the bottom of that boat and saved their lives.  By the time they got to shore, his finger had turned blue. When he went to touch it, it just fell off.

  If it was summer and he was in a hunting mood, his finger was bitten off by a wolverine he killed with a bow and arrow handed down to him by his great-grandfather.  Grandpa said his great-grandfather was raised by the Iroquois, who kidnapped him when he was three years old.  Grandpa said when he let his arrow fly, it hit that wolverine right in the shoulder blades.  Said that devil lay there like he was dead, until he got up close.  When he reached down to pull out his arrow, that sucker screamed like a banshee, grabbed hold off his finger, and bit it off at the knuckle.  He got so mad, he bit down on that wolverine’s nose and tore it right off.  Grandpa said that monster started crying like a baby, then laid down and died.

  If he was really in a story-telling mood, a shark bit his finger off in Lake Michigan.  Said he built a raft out of railroad ties and rolled out a few miles to do some fishing.  Said he was so far out, he could barely see the shoreline over the waves.  Fished from morning till night and caught nothing.  When he was just about to head back, he finally got a bite, a big one over four feet long.  Grandpa said he fought that sucker for hours and almost had him, when a shark jumped up and snatched that four-footer clear out of his hands.  Grandpa said he was so mad, he jumped in, caught that shark by the tail and swung it around. Said he grabbed the top of its mouth with his left hand and pushed its jaw down with his foot.  He struck his right hand in past those razor-sharp teeth and down its mouth when that damn shark decided to dive. Grandpa said he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.  The next thing he knew that shark bit down. The Colonel had just enough time to pull his arm out.  At that last second, his finger was off and that shark was gone.

Barb Walczak’s bridge Newsletter reported that Sharon Massey and Judy Selund scored 73.75% at the Fort Wayne sectional.  It was the first time they had played together.  Judy said that they just seemed to mesh, while Sharon told Walczak: “Judy is an easy partner to play with and is rock steady.”  Years ago, Judy and Bob Selund were in our bridge group. Sharon’s son was one of my first students.