Mushroom Mines - Part 3

"I kneel on the uncomfortable grate, my knees still bruising through they are cushioned with green, garden pads.

Charles, an energetic gay man who has worked at the plant for many years sings to 80s songs happily giving life to the room. Mary, an older women close to retirement does a little jig on her stool to his melody. When I started I thought she might be a grandmother type. I turned out to be have right, as she is quite two faced, both a grandmother type and a sergeant like lady. She wore colored tights, duck taped knee pads and a tool belt to hold her knife and marker. She has worked here much of her life and picks massive numbers of mushrooms everyday with lighting fast hands. At break she doesn't bother to remove her hairnet, the first thing I do, and she seldom stays for the whole break.

The rest of us work in silence until we get the call through the grate that it is in fact break time. Break is a somewhat of an oddity, and sort of depressing in a round about way. Often there is silence. Mary drinks tea and Charles reads the paper, while the others go outside to chain smoke. Tyler, a gay my age who is only a week newer then myself sits across the table from me. Tyler has dark hair, big, beautiful, blue eyes and a lip ring. He wears hoodies and smokes occasionally and never brings a lunch. He is starting a new chapter in his life at this job, as he is not going back to school in the fall. I hope that he does not become a prisoner of the mushroom mines permanently. He is a mischievous guy who makes irresponsible choices , though it is evident that he is a smart, good hearted, boy . He has a gorgeous smile and an honest, genuine personality, though I would guess that he would be very different with his buddies then with me. Burning tires, fucking chicks, blasting music and fixing cars.

Workers complain about poor people things; health care, taxes and past worker gossip. Tyler and I stay quiet twisting water caps or peeling of food labels. The workers ask Jacob, a younger, tattooed man if the baby is his. He says he things the girl is faking it. Tyler and I are only slightly shocked by this new subject that we have no background on.

Once at the end of a lunch break while we alone put on our ghost gloves and gathered up our stuff, I asked Tyler is he finds our breaks odd. He said something that has ingrained itself in my mind. " Yeah, the conversation does seem weird... but it's better then silence.. that's really awkward.. It's a weird time, but it's nice to just be picking mushrooms." He's right but it made me ask myself if factory work dulls things, kind of desensitizes you to life.

From room to room we would venture like a pack of dogs. We sanitized our equipment between rooms in a large container of water. As we encircled the basin of chemical I often imagined us as horses drinking from the water trough or antelope at an alligator infested watering hole.

We would work until there were no longer any more room numbers written on the work board and then we would clock out one by one and drive home dirty and tired."