Car Top Cutter
by Richard Plant—Age 48—Staunton, VA
Ronnie Gooch had greasy hair down to his shoulders. He wore a body like a jungle cat’s. Grunted fuck it to the power winch we cutters were supposed to use: with his bare hands hefted hundred-twenty pound black vinyl rolls and dropped them on the cutting table with a thunderous crash. A skull and crossbones grinning from one T-shirt, stretched across another, Like what you see? Ask for it. Ronnie Gooch knew dirty talk to entertain the girls who stitched and boxed the vinyl car tops that we cut. He drove a pitch-black Pontiac with fire decals flaming down the sides. They said: he had a python for a pet, lived with a brother on parole, kept a woman that he won by fighting in a bar. Cigarettes and barbells, cussing, screwing women, driving fast, drinking beer, and winning games of chance at Frontier City were the only passions he professed. Also common knowledge: Ronnie Gooch made more per hour than the rest of us. Slinking past my cutting table, Ronnie muttered, Smell me as a daily greeting. You bet I do! That would be me, piping back, a seasonal employee, a skinny high school kid on summer break, courting risk in this small, verbal way.
I learned to grunt and strain and shove with my whole body just to ease fresh rolls of vinyl from their pallets twenty feet above the concrete floor. Ronnie showed me how to trace and cut the long rectangles fitted for the tops of station wagons and sedans, simple patterns he himself despised. For him, the T-tops and the sharp diagonals; he was master of the sports car’s tricky notch and curve. Summer mornings riding into work, I clenched those secret muscles growing firm beneath my shirt and counted all the stoplights that delayed me from my place in the production line. I still remember: Time card shelved beside the clock. Chrome and vinyl’s oily smell. Plastic templates furled below the cutting table, patterns I would pluck and trace. Waiting for the thrum of life, the jagged, polished blade.
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