Tinkering (Circa 1958)

[FranktheFrank]

Tinkering (circa 158)

‘I’m not really a poet.’
Charles Bukowski

Reg tinkered with the pump
‘Don’t touch this,’ he said, touching
The baffle plate. ‘It’s cast, and it’ll break
In a sec just by looking at it.’
And I’d known at that moment
That’s what something Reg had done in the past

The zenith of Reg’s life had been as an aircraft
fitter in the War. Precision was the name
of that game. But that didn’t equate in peacetime
when drilling holes in a pipe flange for a ship.
‘He took three days,’ Hayden told me.
‘Just to drill six holes, three days!’

I was surprised that pay-day, to see him
in the Docko, the Dock Hotel. Only it wasn’t
an hotel, it was, two bars, lounge and smoker.
Lounge for captains and chiefs, 1st’ and 2nd’s
Deck and engineer officers and at a push 3rd’s
and the rest of us crammed into the smoker.
There was Reg sitting in the lounge surrounded
by good-time girls and a Nancy-boy.

Reg was good-looking if a little worn,
he’d worked a darker that week, a 24-hour shift
and paid a full-weeks pay week. In effect
Two weeks pay. It was a toss-up whether he went
with the girl, well she was past her best, mature like
or the boy. But I’d never seen Reg so happy.
As if he’d finally discovered the hidden
pleasures of the ship-repairer’s craft.