A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I took a job walking the eight inch highway. For the uninitiated, it means ironwork. You spent your life walking six or eight inch wide steel beams, and you learned to be well balanced and alert. I have a lot of ironwork stories, but those are for another time.

On this particular day, I’d spent several hours tossing or catching rivets. Riveted ironwork went out in the thirties, for the most part, but there were still places where it made the most sense, and we used it on this job. Anyway, you had a pair of tongs and an acetylene flame, you heated the straight end of the rivet until it was red hot and tossed it to a catcher, maybe two or three floors up. The catcher had a sort of a wire-mesh pail, in which he’d catch the hot rivet, put it in the hole, and the guy with the air hammer would head it down, and as the rivet cooled it would draw those pieces of steel together tighter than a mallard’s ass.

At any rate, it was tedious work, my arms were sore, and I was beat by noon. Instead of taking my lunch, I sat down in a port-a pottie to crap, and promptly fell asleep.

To be awakened an hour or more later by someone beating on the door “you gonna be in there all day?” I jumped up, my arms like lead, pulled up my jeans, and opened the door- only to pitch facefirst, legs and feet sound asleep- into the mud and gravel of a construction site. While the whole crew watched, laughed, catcalled, and applauded.

I worked another couple of months, but to those guys, I was always “Sleeping beauty”.