David Pérez

Connecting at the Meat Factory

A version was first published in Memoir

I arrive at the meatpacking plant on a Monday morning. Cattle carcasses hang from overhead conveyor belts like giant teardrops, their crimson flesh glistening in the scorching July sun, muggy in that distinct New York City way, with dirt, grit, and glazed heat seeping into your pores. Workers in chalk-white overcoats yell and sing as they push the skinned animals through olive green metal doors. 

The year is 1980, and I’ve come to visit my father’s workplace: Stars Meatpackers, located on Ganesvoort Street in lower Manhattan, adjacent to the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. 

In the two decades that my father labored there, I'd never shown an interest in his workplace. Yet if you subtracted sleep, it was where he spent most of his life. The reason he woke up at five a.m. Monday through Friday. The place he rode to on the downtown No. 6 train, starting at Brook Avenue in the South Bronx and ending at Union Square. 

A side door opens, and my father's 5'6" frame appears. "Hey, hijo, come on in," he says. Pops is dressed in his usual work clothes: flannel plaid shirt, blue chinos, and cheap leather shoes. A few months ago, he began wearing glasses, a decision he had put off for years. The lenses magnify his light brown eyes, speckled with a hint of grey. He looks down as we shake hands. "Your sneakers will get wet," he says.

I'm wearing white Converse sneakers to go with the razor-creased Wrangler jeans, a popular Puerto Rican fashion combo of the time. Even though I was visiting a meat factory, I still wanted to look good. Go figure. 

"I'll be careful," I say, entering Pops' domain. The first thing I notice is the noise, a cacophony of clanking hydraulic pumps and water hoses set on stun. But after dancing in discos with speakers the size of redwoods, I'm used to loud. My father seems used to it also. He guides me to the locker room, where he hands me a white lab jacket smeared with dried blood. 

“I feel like a doctor,” I say, putting the jacket on.

“Meat packer, doctor, same thing,” Pops says, and passes me a pair of rubber boots, the type worn by firemen. “But doctors don’t have to wear these.” 

I laugh and slip the five-pound boots over my Con's, ready to face puddles and sawdust. The locker room has about a dozen dented lockers, with the requisite Playboy centerfolds taped to the wall. A linebacker walks into the room. "What's up, George!" he bellows.

“Carl, come over here and meet my son,” Pops says.

I shake Carl’s meaty paw, which feels like a worn-out catcher’s mitt. Flashing a gold-toothed smile, he says, “I’m the fucking foreman, the guy who pushes everybody around, but doesn’t kiss the bosses’ ass.” 

“That’s a good motto to live by,” I say.

“David is studying to be an actor,” Pops says.

“For real?” Carl says.

"I'm just starting, but yeah, it's kinda fun so far." Two months ago, I enrolled in HB Studios to study acting after dating a woman who had done a few plays and a short stint in soap operas. She encouraged me to look beyond my current low-paying job as a mailroom clerk for SSC&B, a giant advertising company. 

 Carl gets into a boxing position. “Yo, David, check this out. I’ve been punching carcasses way before that Rocky dude.” He begins throwing jabs and hooks at an imaginary target, humming the movie’s theme song. “That should have been me up there on the silver screen, yelling ‘I coulda been a contender!’”

“I think that was Marlon Brando.”

“Stallone, Brando, same thing.”

“Carl used to box Golden Gloves, and now he’s fighting dead cows,” Pops says.

"Could've been, should've been. Life's like that, right, George? You were supposed to be foreman before me, but you said no."

Pops shrugs his shoulders. “Too much paperwork,” he says.

"Yeah, right. Hey, I gotta go, but take an early lunch after giving your boy the grand tour, okay? He's got the right wardrobe on."

Carl leaves, and my father and I trudge our way into a small windowless room occupied by a solitary stainless steel table. On top of it is a side of beef roughly the size of a basketball.

"Ah, this is where you pump," I say. That's my father's official job title: meat pumper. As a kid, I mentioned it to a couple of friends, and they teased me about it big time. Pumper? What does he do, fuck the meat? 

"No, I work on the line," Pops says. "But I can't let you in there, so we'll use this room." He explains that both the bosses and the union can't allow unauthorized people to be inside the main factory; if an accident happened, there would be hell to pay. And accidents did happen, all the time: broken limbs, sprained backs, people knocking themselves out on the wet floor, fingers sliced.

With hands covered in tiny scars, Pops demonstrates his pumping technique. He holds the slab of meat and uses a special type of scissors to pull out a vein. Wrapping the vein around his fingers, he uses his other hand to inject the vein with a fearsome needle filled with water. Then he does it again with a couple of other veins. Rinse and repeat. The meat squishes as if it's burping. 

"How many times do you do this a day?" I ask.

“I don’t count; maybe a hundred? It’s my job, hijo.”

I want to ask if he ever gets tired or bored, but I decide against it. It's not like he's beaming with pride at his pumping. Could I handle such monotonous work? 

Pops asks me if I want to check out the “curing room,” the place where vats of chemicals like sodium nitrate do the final processing of the meat.

“It’s really hot in there,” he says.

“I’ll pass.” 

***

Afterward, at a nearby coffee shop, my father and I eat sandwiches and drink café con leche. He ordered roast beef on rye ("It's Kosher!"), I opted for ham and cheese on white. We discuss the various jobs that workers do and how everyone depends on each other. A single breakdown in the production line affects everyone. Pops loves having a union. Without it, he says, the workers would be treated just like the meat: sliced, diced, and shoved out the door.

Like my mom, my father is fifty-four years old. His black hair has thinned, but his body is as sturdy as a fire hydrant. Both my parents were born in Caguas, Puerto Rico. They were part of the first wave of Puerto Ricans to settle in the United States in the 40s and 50s as a result of Operation Bootstrap. This U.S.-led rapid industrialization campaign resulted in close to a million Puerto Ricans leaving the island, the majority landing in New York and other East Coast states.

Pops sips his coffee, lost in thought. Outside, delivery trucks and taxicabs compete to see who can honk the most. The Meatpacking District, as the area is called, bubbles with factory work by day and prostitution by night. Its name is well-earned.

I think about what my father said about not wanting the foreman job because of the paperwork. That was true enough, but it hid a more profound truth. Pops was functionally illiterate. He did read directions well, though, and enjoyed The TV Guide.

“You know, Pops, I know you don’t like to talk about reading and writing and all that. But, you know, how did it happen that you never learned?”

My father continues to stare out into space. After a minute or two, he says, “A lot you don’t know, hijo. In Puerto Rico, I walked five miles to school, sometimes barefoot, with my brothers. In the third grade, my teacher lied and said I stole a book. He made me tell my father. Oh boy, my father was mad. Not at me, at the teacher! My father knew I wouldn't do that. The next day, he took me to school, went up to the teacher, who he knew, and yelled at him. The teacher looked at him and said, 'Like father, like son.' My father said, 'You calling me a crook? I'll punch you in the neck!' Oh boy, the teacher got scared. My father took my hand, and we left; I never went back. I cried. I loved school. I begged my father to let me go back, but he was a proud man. My mother said no, too. She was tougher than my father, like a bull. "Why you no punch the teacher?" she said. "Maybe I'll go do!" After that, I worked my whole life. At eight, nine, and twelve years old, I came to this country with my brother Ricardo, picking peppers and spinach for a dollar-fifty a day. The boss's wife liked me."

I shake my head. Wow. This is the most that my father has ever said to me in one sitting. After sliding down a hard road of drinking and gambling, he’d only recently gotten his act together after one day driving home in his 1958 Impala and not remembering how he’d done it. “I could’ve killed myself and not known it,” I overheard him tell my mother, who replied, “That wouldn’t be a bad idea.” 

I think about this as Pops polishes off his sandwich. How he’s trying, really trying to mend his ways; working to be responsible and not waste all his paychecks on poker, Bacardi rum, and slow horses. 

“I’m okay, hijo,” he says. “How about you? You like acting?” 

 "My teacher says I have good instincts. I'm just a beginner, learning about technique. But I'm going to give it a try. I mean, I like my job in the mailroom, don't get me wrong. It's not a union job like yours, and I still need a roommate to pay the rent. But it's clean work, I get to dress nice, and we have a lot of fun with all the secretaries and stuff. Sometimes the executives in the company call us "mail boys." Oh man, we never let that go. We'd say, "How old do I have to be before you stop calling me a boy?" or, "Oh, excuse me, you must have meant Roy." Anyway, it's nice that I'm trying to be what I want to be now, rather than later. Still, you do what you gotta do, right?"

The waitress brings over the check, which my father pays. “I need to go back to work,” he says.

"Me too," I say.