"No, but I learn..."He waved me off.
"You can follow orders?"
"Yes."
"Keep yourself safe?"
"Sure."
"Sure? Don't hand me any of that 'sure' shit. Safe is a matter of working at it all the time...Be at the Nicholson shanty at the Frederick Building at 7:30 Tuesday."
Keep Yourself Safe. This is the watchword for all ironworkers. Cherry has seen friends fall off beams from dozens of floors up: all through the book there are quick noises and men vanishing instantly into the wind and silence below. They pay the widow and children a full day's pay, and another connector takes the dead man's place. There's another risk: unemployment. Ironworking is dependent upon the amount of building going on, and many ironworkers are lucky to work most of the year. When a job is finished, they look for more work, wait in line. When a building's almost done, and construction is light in the area, they start to say to each other, "Tuck your money in the bank, boys," and try to cheer each other up by saying, "Hey, what of it? I was lookin' for a job when I found this one, right?"
But for Mike Cherry ironworking held a third uncertainty. He was already in his thirties, starting at the bottom of a very hierarchical trade, and very afraid that he wouldn't "make it." That he wouldn't learn fast enough, that the other workers, contemptuous of inexperience, wouldn't accept him. This is a continuing apprehension throughout the book. The day that he becomes a connector is practically an epiphany.
He's too anxious to "become" an ironworker. It's as though the wreckage of his life was so complete that he had to rebuild it like a skyscraper, and to Keep Himself Safe. He tries so hard to become an ironworker that part of him becomes a super-ironworker; the other foot twists uncomfortably in the writer's camp, so that when it comes to setting this down he has as much trouble defining his "book" as the Coop did.
CHERRY LIKES the work more than the other men do (he's in a position where, even though he has no choice, he must decide whether he likes it), so he never follows up the ironworkers' constant bitching, the potential agitation that always gets channelled off someplace, at the bar or at the bank. He's so into the job that he never really answers any important questions about ironworkers. If we want to find out what the men are like, or even what their jobs make them like, we miss out. Cherry's narrative is always at the workplace--when he moves to the gin mills the talk is usually of the work. We get page after page, with diagrams, of how a derrick is set up and how a Chicago boom operates. This might be something a worker has to think about on his job, but it says little about, say, how he relates to the machine.
Cherry's book can never quite realize that a job's essence is its relationship to society at large. What do ironworkers think about? How does their community work? Whenever Cherry fears his subjects are getting too much like automatons with accents he reverts to a "fun" incident--the workers playing a joke on an apprentice named Peter the Putrid Punk, or collecting on a girder to watch the hookers go by on Sixth Avenue. But the games are usually just buddies horsing around--not iron-workers--and they seem artificially imposed, stuck in to jazz up the plodding descriptions of the work.
The trouble is that there is a special feeling about being an ironworker, a special life, special requirements and frustrations. And Cherry gives enough glimpses of them that we feel what's missing. But he can't bear to write it down. The book's tragic figure is Timmy, an alcoholic connector who's on the "drunk gang" (unimportant projects--usually wrecking) and pours out his life story one night in a bar. He is someone who was created by ironworking--it defines him--and when he recurs throughout the book he is powerful. But it leads Cherry nowhere: when Timmy falls off the 44th floor--just as he is kicking booze and becoming a competent ironworker again--Cherry can only start apologetically to philosophize about What Is An Accident, then give a kind of literary "what the hell." But you know he cares about the fear--they all do. Yet every time he starts to put his finger on it he gives up.
ALL OF THIS stuff he knows, and he knows it is important. But he's reticent--the reticence of a trade that keeps to itself, suspicious of anyone who doesn't know what it's really like, belligerent. And he's afraid--he's too much an ironworker to spill everything out at once, thinking of his pals reading the book: the revelations come in spurts and cut themselves short. He's bored: the job has made him feel that it just doesn't matter to write it all down because his readers are bigwigs and wouldn't understand anyway and hell, he could fall off the iron tomorrow.
Maybe you just can't find the right crazy accident, to put someone who thinks in the written word into a life that communicates with its hands and mouths. He's liable to get confused--to get sunk in the job, so that writing it down would be betraying it--and then say what the hell, shove it up your nose.
Cherry finishes his book saying that he'd like to tell more:
But there are still buildings to put up, and still gin mills to tell stories in, and if you should join us in one of them some night, we'll tell you the rest of it. It's easier to tell stories than to write them, anyway.