Metal romance

The welder must have been a handsome young man. Or why would his girlfriend love him the way she did? In remembering these things, he pictures her coming into the house.

The lower floor doubles  as an automotive repair shop. And so you had cars and car engines in various levels of disassembly. Parts strewn everywhere. You had welding machines, compressors, grease blackening the walls, tools on the floor. If it looked as if there was no method here for organizing the physical layout, it was because there wasn’t.

And then there were his henchmen, his mechanics and painters, his teachers. They all looked like him. Or was it, he came to looking like them?  Shirtless grease monkeys. Unkempt hair flying everywhere. They wore unwashed shorts. They wore slippers where they should have worn boots if only these were not the early 70s, if only life in general was not so poor. He was only in his early twenties.

Dirt was their body armor against the obvious dangers of working with machines for fixing other machines so that they worked and ran and sometimes even looked beautiful on the road. And of all these machines, the welding machine was the most daunting.

The oxygen-acetylene torch mixes explosive and combustible gases at the handle where you hold it. Two tanks attach to this with rubber hoses. You light it at the tip and then it issues forth a flame so hot it can melt most metals. You use the tool to weld and join metals together or to cut it to any shape and dimension.

The cutting torch is a big beautiful machine. But when running on idle it produces black smoke so thick they become soot immediately on contact with sweaty skin. The welder looks like a coal-miner when she comes in.

She wears tight jeans over a loose pristine-white T-shirt as was the style of the day. Her hair was cut short like a man’s. But standing there, saying “hi” in his hell-hole of a shop, she looked in his eyes every bit like an angel. He felt embarrassed with himself, the way he looked, the way she looked in comparison, and the dirt all over him. He wondered what she was doing here. But all he could do was smile and turn off his cutting torch.

“Go ahead! Keep working. I just want to hang out and watch.” She sat herself on the car seat set on the greasy cement floor.

“Metal is ductile and malleable.” That’s what his old science teacher, Fr. Nunez S.J., told him in high school. And indeed, metal may ordinarily look strong and hard, but with a bit of heat it becomes exactly like clay. It can be stretched or shrunk. You can form it with a hammer but not easily. There are secrets to the craft.

And if you raised its temperature high enough it becomes as water. It flows. It can be welded into itself or casted into a mold. Once returned back to room temperature, it can be shaped to unbelievable exactness. You can drill a hole into it. You can grind it. You can sand it to a mirror sheen if you needed to.

And then there are all sorts of metals: tin, steel, brass, copper, aluminum, etc. Each have their own specific characteristics, their own appropriate uses. Each requires its own particular methods for working, for cutting and welding. Each one is a whole world unto itself. But if there is something which sets it off, it is that metals are more predictable than people. And so, while on this day she sits now lovingly watching him chin on hand, and while he himself feels as if he is Robert Redford playing dirty welder, who knows where all these will end?

The technologies applied to tools for welding and cutting metal have changed. While in the old days they made do with a hand pumped acetylene generator which tended to explode from time to time, now they use a TIG welding machine and a plasma cutter. These use new inverter technology. Their insides look more like computers than industrial tools. But they are clean machines. Now they wear shirts, masks and protective gloves. He wears working boots.

Who knows where she is now? The automotive repair shop is gone. Now they do only sculpture. The shop is many times cleaner. And on any weekend such as this, work stops into a stillness. Alone inside this stillness of metal and machines he remembers. He contemplates. People are metal, ductile and malleable. Yet so unlike metal, they are absolutely unpredictable. They are good that way, and yet…

He still doesn’t look anywhere near to Robert Redford. But in his late middle age he can think to himself: I must have been a handsome young man or why did she love me that way?