Well, when i first started working at Inland Steel, all those years ago, I noticed something peculiar about the way the boys celebrated their birthdays.

They would usually catch a guy in the shower, and beat him with a piece of radiator hose for the number of years he is old.

About once a week, this would happen, there were nearly two hundred guys in the shop and rarely a week went by when someone hadn’t a birthday to celebrate. About once a month, someone would go to the hospital, bleeding from the back or legs, often as not a bruised testicle, sometimes a torn scrotum. These were the guys friends. Whoever was the victim of this celebration would gleefully reciprocate when it was his turn. I witnessed this in my first couple weeks of employment, so my birthday became a closely guarded secret. I never participated in this foolishness, and I never desired to.

One day I couldn’t conceal was my hire date; they were less nasty about that, but the only time I ever got caught on my service anniversary was in my second year of employment there; three big guys caught me in the shower while a fourth with a paintbrush coated my wedding tackle liberally with Cop graf, an anti seize compound that was a mixture of grease, graphite, and copper. The gooey, slimy stuff was the consistency of toothpaste and had a high concentration of finely divided copper bits; they called it “The Bronze pecker” and it took forever to get off; literally months later I’d be in the shower and see a tiny fleck of copper where no tiny fleck of copper should be.

At least I didn’t get beat too.

I’m still a bit standoffish about telling people my birthday.