Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  When, as executor of the Thomas Crumlesh Estate, I was approached with the idea of this retrospective I welcomed it on two accounts. Firstly, it is past time that a major exhibition of his work be held in his native country, a country that does not own a single piece of work by her only artist to have made a contribution to the popular imagery of the late twentieth century – a prophet in his own land indeed. Secondly, I welcomed the opportunity to assemble together for the first time his entire oeuvre. My belief is that the cumulative effect of its technical brilliance, its humour and undeniable beauty will dispel the comfortable notion that Thomas was nothing more than a mental deviant with a classy suicide plan. The rigour and terminal logic of his art leaves no room for such easy platitudes.

  Several people have speculated that I would use this introduction to the catalogue to justify my activities or, worse, as an opportunity to bewail the consequences. Some have gone so far as to hope that I would repent. I propose to do neither of these. Yet a debt of gratitude is outstanding. It falls to very few of us to be able to put our skills at the disposal of genius: most of us are doomed to ply our trades within the horizons of the blind, the realm of drones. But I was one of the few, one of the rescued. Sheer chance allowed me to have a hand in the works of art that proceeded from the body of my friend, works of art that in the last years of this century draw down the curtain on an entire tradition. His work is before us now and we should see it as an end. All that remains for me to say is, Thomas, dear friend, it was my privilege.

  Dr Frank Caulfield

  Arbour Hill Prison

  Dublin

  From the beginning they called him the kid, sometimes the Irish kid but mainly just the kid even though he was eighteen and taller already than any of the men in the crew. But he was thin, desperately thin and pale and he looked like a stricken tree standing in the gravel yard fronting the warehouse. He was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt and his hair hung lank in his sunken face. He was a detail in misery, looking as if at any moment he was going to burst into tears.

  His new boss, now striding from the warehouse towards him, was John Cigali, an Italian American in his mid-thirties, a self-made man with a broken coke habit and four years’ military service abandoned after amnesty was handed out to Vietnam draft dodgers. He now eyed the kid with unhidden scepticism.

  ‘Have you worked with fibreglass before?’

  The kid shook his head wanly.

  ‘Never mind, you’ll learn. From now till the end of summer you’ll be eating and sleeping fibreglass.’ He peered more closely at the kid. ‘Is there no sun at all in Ireland? You look as pale as shit.’ He then turned on his heel and returned to the office.

  Mike, the kid’s cousin, emerged from the office clutching a sheaf of pink forms. He was in his mid-twenties, over six foot tall and with his head cropped to the bone. He thrust the pink forms at the kid.

  ‘Signatures,’ he said. ‘State and federal tax, insurance, that kind of shit.’ He took a pen from his shirt pocket. ‘Welcome to America, sign up and piss away your soul.’

  The kid signed the forms on the hood of the Oldsmobile nearby while Mike fiddled with the locks of the loading bay doors. When they were opened the kid saw tools and buckets stacked neatly on the metal apron.

  ‘All this shit has to go in the truck,’ Mike said. ‘Start loading while I finish writing up these documents.’

  The kid began loading up. There were several rolls of fibreglass matting, buckets of chemicals, paint brushes and rollers, a giant vacuum cleaner that looked like a huge reptile, several hand tools for the tool rack and, lastly, two massive jack hammers weighing nearly a hundred and twenty pounds each. The kid could barely lift them; he staggered rigid-legged to the truck and dropped the first heavily among the other tools. His face was flushed and a pulse throbbed frantically on his jawbone.

  ‘Out of the way, kid.’

  Mike had come quietly up behind him. He was carrying the second jack hammer, handling it easily before lowering it lightly into the truck. He grinned at the kid.

  ‘This is as good as it gets,’ he said, making no concession towards the kid’s embarrassment. ‘From here on out it’s all downhill. We’re ready now so let’s go. We have to be there by midday. The others are there already and John’s going to follow us in the car.’

  The kid took his seat in the front of the truck and they moved off, driving for two hours through the claustrophobic New England landscape where beech forest grew right to the margins of the road, through the small cities of Holyoke and Springfield and on into Connecticut where the terrain rose steeply and his ears popped, past intersections in the middle of nowhere where no traffic flowed but where traffic lights still swung from overhead cables and finally onto the interstate hewn from raw rock. While they drove the radio blasted out retro rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, all classic seventies music. When the kid asked him did he listen to any post-punk music, The Smiths for instance, Mike told him bluntly that he didn’t listen to faggot music.

  Beyond the suburbs of New Haven, where the country opened up into a grey wasteland that spread as far as the sea, they pulled in at the entrance to an immense, wired-off compound. Over the entrance hung the logo of the CHEMCON company. After Mike signed in the truck and two men at the security booth, the red barrier lifted and they drove up the pitted road to the plant. To their left, in front of a warehouse complex, a small, vile lake spread itself out over two acres, bordered on one shore by a multicoloured refuse tip. All about its edge yellow drainage pipes had their ends uncovered, all carrying spill-off and waste from the plant beyond; on the lake’s surface floated languid clouds of grey scum.

  Mike motioned to the lake. ‘Nothing in that sewer but two-headed fish and unspeakable things. It’s a real cesspool.’

  They rounded the farthest shore of the lake and pulled in between a decrepit warehouse and a series of brickwork laboratories. Up ahead a battery of chemical tanks blocked off the end of the alleyway. The kid got out of the car and stood in the silence: silence like a coma.

  ‘How come it’s so quiet?’

  ‘The whole plant is on shutdown, three weeks of it. Bar a skeleton crew to keep it ticking over there are no other workers here but maintenance and repair crews. That’s why we’re here, we have a heavy schedule of work to complete before they get back from their holidays.’ Mike’s voice trailed off in fatigue. ‘It’s a waste of time if you ask me, this place is only a shit hole.’

  The kid looked about him. Corrosion and decay seemed to work in the air like a virus. The metal storage tanks raised on concrete platforms stood like shabby monoliths, their seams and rivets weeping with rust. Pipes dripped from cracks that needed sealing and some of the entrances to the laboratories gaped blankly without doors. All around, the brickwork added a terracotta tone to the corroding metal and some of the brickwork itself had been graffitied over with obscene hieroglyphs, a lurid psychedelic detail.

  Mike was handing him a yellow hard hat and safety glasses.

  ‘See those pipes? Last year we lagged every one of them, tried to dry them off and coat them with fibreglass. We said at the time it was useless, told them that the resin would never take to the corrosion and that the whole thing needed replacing. But it was no good, that was what we were contracted to do. Look at the mess now.’

  Around the storage tanks the lattice of supply pipes was hung with a filthy bunting. The fibreglass matting had come away from the corroded metal and hung in strips, flapping lazily in the warm breeze and streaked through with a green hue from the acid; it was an unspeakably doleful sight.

  A car approached behind them and slouched to a halt beside the truck. The boss got out. He was already wearing a hard hat and glasses and he spoke directly to the kid.

  ‘Go nowhere without that hat and those glasses. We don’t want you going back to Ireland with a patch over one eye or daylight showing through your head. No smoking either,’ he said. His voice then lowered to a note of fatigue. ‘This whole place
might go up in a bang any second.’

  He was holding a massive torch, inserting batteries and flicking it on and off.

  ‘OK, if we’re ready I’ll show you the work.’ He paused for a last moment in the sunlight to look around him. The ruin and decay of the plant seemed to find a raw spot in him. He spoke softly to himself. ‘I hate this fucking place, it burns a hole in me every minute I’m here.’ Then he was making strides towards a darkened doorway in the warehouse, calling in his wake for them to follow him.

  Inside, out of the sun, the kid couldn’t see a thing: he just followed in the wake of the boss’s torch. Underfoot he could feel the concrete crumbling wetly, slewing sideways into treacherous pools. All about was a kind of serpent hissing and a heavy dripping of liquid. In front, high up beyond the torchlight a red neon sign pulsed, DANGER TOXIC. The kid slowed and clamped the hat down further on his ears. He had a feeling that terrible shapes and creatures were straining out towards him in the darkness, trying to lay mangled claws upon him. But worse still was the total presence of decay which seemed to agitate the darkness, working in it as it worked in every pore of the concrete and metal.

  ‘This is it then,’ John declaimed, swooping the torch in a low arc. ‘One thousand square yards of corroded concrete, eaten away by acid and God-knows-what shit. It has all to be lifted down to the subfloor and replaced. That’s all there is to it.’

  The kid’s eyes were now attuned to the murk and he had a dim view of the shambles all round. On all sides the floor was breaking down into pools of sludge, the acid raining down from the web of overhead piping feeding the phalanx of holding tanks ranked against the opposite walls. A flooded conduit ran the length of the floor and against the farthest wall a massive fan chopped the air lazily.

  ‘This is hell,’ the kid breathed.

  ‘Not at all,’ the boss retorted, his voice ringing off the metal. ‘This is smoke-stack America, a piece of living history.’ He turned to the floor. ‘I have to go and get those pipes emptied. We need those lights fixed as well and I want to get that fan moving properly, we need some air in here or we’re going to suffocate. Mike, take the kid to the canteen and show him the rest of the crew. I’ll get you when everything’s set up.’

  Mike led the way from the warehouse, out past the brickwork labs where no one worked and past the silent workshops littered with discarded tools towards a raised timber shack that may at one time have been painted. Inside, seated in a booth, he was introduced to the rest of the crew. There were three in all. Jeff, the boss’s younger brother, a heavy slob in his early thirties with none of his brother’s military bearing. He was sprawled out blowing smoke rings at the ceiling, his Adam’s apple exposed. Kevin and Leo were in their early twenties, friends of Mike and both bearing the grey hue of a binge that had not entirely been purged from their systems; both were drinking black, unsugared coffee. In true American fashion he shook hands with them all and they made room for him in the booth. Jeff was curious.

  ‘So what brings you to America, the land of the free and the home of the bribe?’

  ‘A student visa.’ The kid tried to smile but gave up when the corners of his mouth wouldn’t work. He lowered his eyes. ‘For three months.’ It sounded like an apology.

  ‘No need to be ashamed, boy, we’re all doing life here. What are you studying?’

  ‘English and philosophy. I hope to graduate next year.’

  ‘We’re all graduates here too,’ Leo said. ‘Honours students from the University of Budweiser, doing post grad in booze and beaver.’

  ‘You know Jack shit about beaver,’ Kevin said, ‘Pam and her five sisters is your limit. Leo is all talk, kid, all talk and no tackle.’

  The kid finally managed a smile, a thin, composite expression, more pain than mirth. ‘One thing’s for sure, you’ll find no women or booze in this fuck of a place. You’re not likely to learn much either.’

  ‘Is it as bad as it looks?’

  ‘No, it’s a lot worse. This place is the devil’s asshole, kid, once you’re here there’s no getting away from it.’

  ‘Do you not go out after work, for a beer or something? It’s real hot in that warehouse.’

  Jeff shook his head. ‘There’s no time, we work nearly eighty hours a week on this contract, anything to get it finished. Take it from me, you’re not fit for much when you’ve done a day’s work in this place, you just crash into bed. Pussy will be the last thing on your mind.’

  They talked and smoked a while longer, downing more coffee to kill off the deep-rooted hangovers. The kid learned quickly that there were only two topics of conversation in blue-collar America – sex and money – and it wasn’t always obvious which of the two was at issue. Presently the boss arrived, carrying a clipboard, all business.

  ‘Are we ready?’ he asked. ‘Have we scratched and smoked enough? If we have then it’s time to rock. I’ve got lights set up and the fan working so let’s go.’ He swung his arm in a beckoning arc and the crew got up and followed him.

  In the warehouse two carbon arc lamps had been mounted on stands and were casting a lunar glow over the floor. Against the farthest wall the fan now moved at full speed, tumbling heavy wads of warm air through the length of the room. The pools glistened blackly all around, heavily cast over with fleeting rainbows. John was handing out rubber moccasins and heavy gloves.

  ‘Pull these on, those boots will fall off your feet in two days if you don’t. Keep these gloves on too.’ He turned to the floor. ‘First thing we do is unblock that conduit, see can we get as much of this fluid as possible to run out into the manholes. Mike, you and Kevin get shovels and work through its length. The rest of you, get squeegees and start moving that slop towards the door.’ As the rest of the crew moved off he turned to the kid and gave him one last appraisal.

  ‘OK, kid, this is your chance. Now we get to see what you’re made of.’

  Working under the carbon lights, in the sharp reek of the acid, they spent the rest of the day drying out the floor, slopping the heavy sludge with the rubber squeegees and then using the vacuums to suck up the residue from the pools. By the end of the day the floor glistened like a sand flat and they brought in a series of blowers to continue the drying overnight. As they were leaving the kid was standing by the truck, inspecting his blistered hands.

  ‘Piss on them,’ the boss said, coming up behind him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Piss on them,’ he repeated. ‘It will wash them out and the salt will harden them. You’ll get no infection either.’

  ‘Yah, sure,’ the kid replied. ‘Have it your way then.’

  But as they drove to the motel they made a stop at a drugstore and the boss presented him with a small package – a bottle of meths, some cotton wool and a roll of lint.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, it’s an investment, not a present. I’m not losing any time with those hands.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Damn right I won’t.’

  The real work began the next day, breaking up the floor with the massive jack hammers and barrowing out the rubble to the refuse tip near the lake. The kid vied gamely for his turn on the jack hammer and then caused much guffawing among the rest of the crew when he was thrown off balance in a heap by its first surge of power. But he got up and tried again, gritted his teeth and hung on for twenty minutes before handing it over to Mike. He stood clenching and unclenching his numbed hands, shaking from the vibrations. In the canteen his hands still shook and he slopped his coffee at the first gulp. So, for a time he drank from a straw, and for long after it was necessary, just for the clown value of it.

  But very quickly, after a few days, he found nascent muscle in his arms and back and he was able to take his full turn. He stood with his legs braced apart and his arms stiffened, the massive vibrations shaking every bone in his torso, his head pounding with rhythm and his whole being running with adrenalin. A definite change had come over the kid: he was happy and he had begun to
smile and his hands were healing fast. Best of all he knew that he had hacked it, knew it in his heart and knew it from Mike that the boss was well pleased with him. He had no worries about holding down the job for the rest of the summer.

  By the end of the first week the kid was having a feeling of almost total rejuvenation. The chemical plant became his element and he thrived in it like a hothouse orchid. He began to flex the new-born muscles in his arms and back and they were wondrous as wings, and he took to walking around at every opportunity with his shirt off, singing crazy fragments of songs, his white torso glowing in the pale light. The boss was unimpressed.

  ‘Put it back on,’ he told him curtly. ‘You’re not Charles Atlas yet.’

  Beneath the arc lights, with the compressors and blowers working, the warehouse grew baking hot. After the first hour’s work their bodies ran with sweat and their shirts clung like second skins. They took it in turns to foray into the daylight for fresh air. The kid preferred to walk to the refuse tip on the waste ground behind the warehouses and stand on its low peak where he caught the thin breeze that blew in over the lake. He would stand there on the summit for the duration of a cigarette, slick and steaming like a new-born thing.

  He was finding himself enchanted by the place. Like a child his mind took in the palette of decay spread all around him, the green murk of the lake, the copper tones of the rusted metal and faded paintwork, the blackened chimney of the incinerators; all these colours fixed his imagination into a coherent spectrum of ruin. The kid now knew that there was no other fact in creation, no other dynamic in the world except this corrosion and wearing away, this attrition which seemed to level everything down to a uniform plane of ruin and which had this chemical plant as its centre and origin. And he stood there in the middle of this desolation, a new-born god, lithe and keen-eyed, ready to spread his wings.