Hardware
Long ago, when I was in my late teens in Vancouver, I worked for a downtown Woolworth’s on Friday nights and Saturdays. This was one of the worst jobs I ever had, as my bosses had no care about either me or the job. This was obvious when they moved me, one day, from the cosmetics department, where I knew little but at least had some experience, since I myself wore makeup, to the hardware department in the basement, where I knew absolutely nothing. It was a complete joke to put me there; I almost wonder if it was meant to be cruel. I had never hammered a nail or made anything or fixed anything that a hardware department might be involved in. I was lost when customers, invariably men, asked me about nail sizes or screws or almost anything, really, as no one gave me one iota of training for this position.
Still, there in the twilight of the store basement, I was aware of a strange kind of atmosphere, partially caused by the dim lighting, partially by the smell rising from the bags and buckets of nails, screws and other bits of metal, plus the rubbery odor of the garden hoses, the odd chemical smell of hemp matting, the earthy smell of bags of potting soil that kept breaking open. So many things in buckets, so many things coiled or piled or spread or leaning against others against the walls or sides of the counters, like a pirate’s spread-out treasure in some dim cave near the sea. It was a world completely foreign to me, a very male-oriented world in those days, and it fascinated me even as it frightened me. That’s why I found this poem interesting:
Poem: “Ode to Hardware Stores” by Barbara Hamby, from Babel. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission (buy now)
ODE TO HARDWARE STORES
Where have all the hardware stores gone — dusty, sixty-watt warrens with the wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red? Where are Eppes, Terry Rossa Yon’s, Flint — low buildings on South Monroe,
Eight Avenue, Gaines Street with their scent of paint thinner, pesticides, plastic hoses coiled like serpents
in a garden paradisal with screws in buckets or bins against a brick wall with hand-lettered signs
in ball-point pen — Carriage screws, two dozen for fifty cents — long vicious dry-wall screws, thick wood screws
like peasants digging potatoes in fields, thin elegant trim screws— New York dames at a backwoods hick
Sunday School picnic. O universal clevis pins, seven holes in the shank, like the seven deadly sins.
Where are the men — Mr. Franks, Mr. Piggot, Tyrone, Hank, Ralph — sunburnt with stomachs and no asses,
men who knew the mythology of nails, Zeuses enthroned on an Olympus of weak coffee, bad haircuts,
like railroad spikes, finish nails, fence staples, cotter pins, roofing nails — flat-headed as Floyd Crawford,
who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi or make eye contact. What a career in hardware
he could have had, his blue-black hair slicked back with brilliantine, rolling a toothpick between his teeth while sorting
screw eyes and carpet tacks. Where are the hardware stores, open Monday through Friday, Saturday till two?
No night hours here, like physicists their universe mathematical and pure in its way: dinner at six, Rawhide at eight,
lights out at ten, kiss in the dark, up at five for the subatomic world of toggle bolts, cap screws, hinch-pin clips, split-lock
washers. And the tools — saws, rakes, wrenches, rachets, drills, chisels, and hose heads, hose couplings, sandpaper
(garnet, production, wet or dry), hinges, wire nails, caulk, nuts, lag screws, pulleys, vise grips, hexbolts, fender washers
all in a primordial stew of laconic talk about football, baseball, who’ll start for the Dodgers, St. Louis, the Phillies,
the Cubs? Walk around the block today and see their ghosts: abandoned lots, graffitti’d windows, and tacked
to backroom walls, pin-up calendars almost decorous in our porn-riddled galaxy of Walmarts, Seven-Elevens,
stripmalls like strip mines or a carrion bird’s curved beak gobbling farms, meadows, wildflowers, drowsy afternoons
of nothing to do but watch dust motes dance through a streak of sunlight in a darkened room. If there’s a second coming,
I want angels called Lem, Nelson, Rodney, and Cletis gathered around a bin of nails, their silence like hosannahs,
hallelujahs, amens swelling from cinderblock cathedrals drowning our cries of Bigger, faster, more, more, more.
