The pounding was
terrible. It had a jagged, off-beat
rhythm that shook the inside of your brain like Jell-O on a rail-road track. Seven boy scouts were whacking arrhythmically and painfully. They were triturating the heads of metal stamps
with hammers. Each would stamp a letter
into the soft, pliable leather. The assembly
line eventually produced a slit of leather that read REL ø IEF.
These
weren’t just any pieces of leather, nor any random boy scouts. They were on assignment from my slave driver and
perennial “It’ll be fun”-buddy Sean Twigg. Sean had decided it would be a great idea to
shanghai his friends into slaving over cacophonous hammers and deadly fumes of
leather staining. No, but really: he had
politely asked us to assist him in his Eagle Scout project, which was to
shanghai his friends into slavery. No,
wait, it was to make leather bracelets to raise money for tsunami relief. It was for a good cause, and I figured I could
brag about it on a college transcript, so I attended his good cause jamboree.
Because I have no discernable skills and
the attention span of a newt on a seesaw (that is to say, not very long), I bounced
from one menial task to another. I shunned
the precision of measuring and cutting the leather straps and hobbled over to
the hammering table. The basement was an
odd shade of gray, partly from the sky, and lack of windows, and partly because
of the odd dust that takes over one’s body upon entering. I’ve never been there when I didn’t leave
covered in mysterious dust. The hammering
table was manned by eight young boy scouts who sang mock slave songs. I pushed over the Boy Scout closest to me and
took his job. His job was to apply a
moist sponge to the strips of leather so that they would be nice and soft for
their date with the hammer. I took a
piece of leather and placed it on the two by four that appeared, by the soggy
wooden puddle around it, to be my work station. I held the strip with my forefinger and swept
the damp sponge over the body of the leather strap. I did this for quite awhile until I realized I
could do four such straps in one motion. Oh, how I serially swiped the soggy sponge to
the sweet straps of skin!
“Stop going so fast!” one young Boy Scout
intoned. “Yeah!” his buddy chimed in, “you have to slow down!”
“Well,” I said to both young men who had
sarcastic smiles on their pasty faces, “If by ‘Slow Down’ you mean ‘Work Harder’,
then yes. Yes I will.”
Through events too boring to mention
here, I ended up at the staining table. I
was not willing to take the responsibility of actually staining the leather. The process not only involved a chemical the color
of chocolate motor oil, but also seemed like it had a very low margin for
error. I took to taking the freshly
stained pieces to be dried on a newspaper spread about the floor. When they were dry, I would bring them back to
be finished. I would then bring these
bracelets to dry. A rumor of pizza
floated on the dusty, chemically impugned air and echoed in the empty stomachs
of the slave laborers. It was on its
way. Mutiny was jokingly mentioned, as
well as talks of “breaks” and “ear plugs.”
“Pizza?” I mockingly yelled above the
sound of hammers. “If by ‘Pizza’ you mean ‘Work Harder’, then yes. You can have two slices.”
And so they did.
(As a special note, there were a lot more
people helping than I can mention here, but everyone helped. The proceeds go to the Knights of