Philip Levine - Fear and Fame lyrics

Half an hour to dress, wide rubber hip boots, gauntlets to the elbow, a plastic helmet like a knight's but with a little gla** window that kept steaming over, and a respirator to save my smoke-stained lungs. I would descend step by slow step into the dim world of the pickling tank and there prepare the new solutions from the great carboys of acids lowered to me on ropes - all from a recipe I shared with nobody and learned from Frank O'Mera before he went off to the bars on Vernor Highway to drink himself to d**h. A gallon of hydrochloric steaming from the wide gla** mouth, a dash of pale nitric to bubble up, sulphuric to calm, metals for sweeteners, cleansers for salts, until I knew the burning stew was done. Then to climb back, step by stately step, the adventurer returned to the ordinary blinking lights of the swingshift at Feinberg and Bresilin's First-Rate Plumbing and Plating with a message from the kingdom of fire. Oddly enough no one welcomed me back, and I'd stand fully armored as the downpour of cold water rained down on me and the smoking traces puddled at my feet like so much milk and melting snow. Then to disrobe down to my work pants and shirt, my black street shoes and white cotton socks, to rea**ume my nickname, strap on my Bulova, screw back my wedding ring, and with tap water gargle away the bitterness as best I could. For fifteen minutes or more I'd sit quietly off to the side of the world as the women polished the tubes and fixtures to a burnished purity hung like Christmas ornaments on the racks pulled steadily toward the tanks I'd cooked. Ahead lay my second cigarette, held in a shaking hand, as I took into myself the sickening heat to quell heat, a lunch of two Genoa salami sandwiches and Swiss cheese on heavy peasant bread baked by my Aunt Tsipie, and a third cigarette to k** the taste of the others. Then to arise and dress again in the costume of my trade for the second time that night, stiffened by the knowledge that to descend and rise up from the other world merely once in eight hours is half what it takes to be known among women and men.