Bye-bye, Larry

by Katherine Karlin

Larry Michalik did not die a glorious refinery death. He did not explode in a fireball as the spark of a welder’s torch ignited methane fumes. He was not sheared by the claws of rail cars coupling in the yard. He did not dive into the mouth of a flare stack, leaving behind his work boots on the diamond-plate catwalk. He did not wander into an empty tank, purged with nitrogen, and drown in the oxygen-free air.

Larry Michalik merely lowered his union coffee mug one morning, dropped his head, and went out like a flame.

We thought he had dozed off. For the rest of the shift, we prodded him with the eraser end of a pencil, jotted down his readings, and silenced the alarms buzzing on his control board. Only when his relief showed up did we realize Larry was dead.

Here’s where I should deliver a eulogy. For the most part, oil men are easy to like. When I started this job, they all looked the same to me, but I made a point of drawing a story from each of them. On the evening shift, in spring, when the refinery lights twinkle against the darkening sky and we fish plastic bottles out of the sludge pond, I get them to reveal something personal. One keeps a girlfriend and a whole secret family in Florida. Another committed acts of sabotage before the ’83 strike. A third has a brother serving time.

You never know what a man will tell a young woman, warm and receptive, who is not his wife. I don’t care if the stories are true; the moment is full and tender. Days later, I will pass the same man on the hot tarmac or in the bright light of the control room, and electricity crackles in the air between us. We don’t even have to look at each other.

But strip away Larry Michalik’s blandness and there was more blandness. The closest thing he had to a hobby was Ann-Margret. He taped in his locker a life-sized poster of young Ann-Margret in a mini-dress and go-go boots, her chin tucked coquettishly and her hair blown into an after-sex tangle.

“I tell you what, Gina,” Larry said to me once. “She looks better at 60 than you do in your twenties. Better than you ever will.”

I dug my fists into the pockets of my coveralls. “I like the movie she made with Bette Davis,” I said. “You know. The one where Bette Davis is a drunk old beggar-woman and Ann-Margret’s her daughter being raised in a convent overseas, who thinks her mother is some fancy society lady. Then Ann-Margret brings home her fiancé, who’s, like, the prince of Spain, and Bette Davis has to get Glenn Ford to help her clean up and pretend she’s rich.” My voice cranked up a notch with excitement. “Right up to the end of the movie you expect her to admit that she’s just an old drunk, so the daughter can tell her she loves her for who she is. But what’s cool is that Bette Davis pulls it off. It’s the only movie I ever saw that says lying is the best policy.”

I watched Larry’s face for a sign of recognition. He simply looked into the distance and said, “She was just a young filly in that one. What a beautiful girl.”

The fact is, I didn’t care much for the deceased.


Before the wake, we stumble off the midnight shift and gather at Stan’s taproom. The wives will meet us at the widow’s house, bringing tuna casseroles and Jell-O molds. Stan’s is nothing more than a room with a long counter and a single neon Rolling Rock ad and a mirror so corroded it reflects nothing. I sip a beer and roll cork coasters down the length of the bar; dressed in my girl clothes—a denim jacket frayed at the collar and a short denim skirt—I feel bare.

Franny Sadlowski and Chessie Cesare sit on the next barstools. Chessie, our shop steward, has the Philadelphia Inquirer open to the business page. Franny reads aloud a quiz from a copy of his girlfriend’s Cosmo called “Are You Truly Honest With Him?”

Here’s what I know about Franny: He has a round little pot belly like a piglet. He’s 39, and his girlfriend is 17.

About Chessie I know this: He’s 43 and has a long, sad Sicilian face. After his divorce, he moved in with a real estate agent, ten years his senior. In the mornings, he takes his coffee and newspaper out on the balcony of their condo and props his feet on the railing, and he watches his real estate agent go off to work in her mint-colored suit, her hair a shimmery blond helmet, joining the other attractive divorcees who stream out of the building every morning—a river of travel agents, executive assistants, event planners. Chessie has come a long way from his South Philly days.

Besides that, I know little about Chessie’s private life. Because we’re both Italian, I thought he’d extend a little old-fashioned paisano camaraderie. But when I angle for stories, his face slams shut like a check valve.

Franny asks, “You’re away on a business trip, and carry on a flirtation with a handsome co-worker. Do you tell your significant other?”

Chessie looks glumly into his beer. “I don’t carry on flirtations.”

“You don’t go on business trips,” I say.

“The hell I don’t. I was in Alaska.” That’s another thing about Chessie: He did a stint on an icebreaker in the Coast Guard. “And even there I never had to flirt. I’ve never had trouble nailing a woman. What girls there were up there, I banged them.”

“Inuit chicks?” Franny looks up from his magazine.

“Nah, man. These were American girls. Cheerleaders.”

“Oh,” Franny says.

The other mourners are paying their tabs and flapping the front panels of their jackets, birds about to take flight. My tongue feels swollen to twice its size, and I pull it out of my mouth with my fingers.

“Put that thing away,” Chessie says.

“It feels weird,” I say. “Does it look too big?”

Franny peers into my mouth. “You’ll make some guy very happy.”

“Look, don’t point that at me,” Chessie says. He thinks I want him. In fact, Chessie lacks the imagination necessary to conjure up a world in which not every woman wants him. But it would be accurate to say I want to be him. Or at least, I want to have his swagger, his confidence, his ability to divine the cool from the uncool by the grace of his presence. I want to unlock that strongbox, his mind.

There on the business page is a three-column picture of our current plant manager, Margo Allshouse. The photo was snapped from a low angle to make her look tall against a distillation tower. Her arms are folded, her mouth set with determination. She is wearing a tailored suit and a hardhat. She’s our first woman plant manager, and came to us fresh off a lockout she’d engineered downriver.

Famously, during a recent grievance procedure, Chessie jumped to his feet and said, “Lady, we make gasoline. What the hell do you do?” For weeks it was a mantra around the plant. The guys at the catalytic cracker embellished the story by having Chessie grab his crotch. On the docks, they were saying he had unzipped his fly and freed his penis, flexible as a chicken’s neck, to waggle at Margo Allshouse. By the time the story hit the distillation units, Margo Allshouse had yawned and said, “If you had two dicks I could still outfuck you, Chessie.”

Now, most of us think Chessie’s vendetta is getting a little old, and, as he starts to read aloud from the business page, more of the men slap money on the bar and head for the widow’s house. “‘The brawny Delaware Valley oil worker is becoming a thing of the past.’” He swallows some beer. “That’s a quote. Fucking Margo Allshouse.”

I pull some crumpled dollars from my skirt pocket and smooth them out on the countertop. “She assumes we don’t read the business pages,” I say.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Chessie says.

“Okay,” I say. I handle my tongue again, considering his challenge. “I’ll try to think of something you don’t know.”

I could tell him that I’ve seen Margo Allshouse around town, at Miss Kitty’s and at Patsy’s, cozying up to the bar with the other corporate dykes, wearing silk blouses and drinking ice-clear martinis. These are the women who laugh too loud and look around to make sure we’re watching. I’ve always resented them encroaching on my territory, and wished they would crawl back to the B-schools they crawled out of.

Still, I once tapped on our lesbians-in-arms connection to my advantage, on a particular evening shift when I got my period and didn’t have a single tampon in my locker. A few years earlier, some of us had petitioned for a Tampax dispenser in the women’s change room, but as soon as we got it we busted the lock and stole all the goods, and they never restocked it. A janitor had told me that the executive women’s room had tampons for free, baskets full of them, wrapped in pink wrappers and rose-scented like bouquets. They were there for the taking.

This was around the holidays, and I’d been eating a lot of fatty foods, butter cookies, and bundt cakes. My flow was as thick and clotted as the grease from a Christmas duck. So I put on my coat and walked down River Drive, between the noisy cat crackers and the hissing steam lines and the jungles of dense pipe, careful to skirt the icy puddles, until the road opened to the low brick buildings of the executive offices. It was easy to break in; after big office parties, we used to help ourselves to the leftover cake and punch, once all the managers and secretaries were gone. Because I was the skinniest, the men usually hoisted me to a second-floor window that had been left open a crack; I could slither in and run downstairs to admit the others. On this night I was alone, but I was able to scale up the drainpipe and work my way into a conference room.

The women’s bathroom was everything I dreamed it would be. A fantasy of feminine hygiene. I struggled out of my coat and dropped my coveralls to insert a tampon. Then I suited myself up again and stuffed every pocket with extras. I put tampons in the hip pockets and back pockets of my coveralls, in the thigh pockets where I usually carry a pair of channel locks, in the deep, wide pockets of my Carhart jacket. I tucked some in the sweatband of my hardhat.

The hallway smelled of disinfectant, and the exit lights shone on the waxed floor. In my work clothes, I felt like a dirty blight. Tampon paper rustled with every step I took. Behind me I heard a door opening, and the crustacean click of a woman’s heels. I froze. The clicks came closer and I turned slowly. Because I was so stuffed with tampons, my arms were bowed like a gunslinger’s. And there was Margo Allshouse.

Katherine Karlin is an assistant lecturer and doctoral candidate at USC. E-mail: kkarlin@usc.edu