My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Rusty Sunshine as a child

Rusty and I went down to 5th Quarter Pizza the other day. He got to talking, and this is what I remember of it:

“Left home when I was 12, doin’ farm work. $40 dollars a month and you got you room and board. They’d buy you clothes but that didn’t amount to nuthin’ more’n a pair of overhauls an’ a shirt. That didn’t last long.

I started chasin’ around with the daughter of the woman charged with the hirin’ at the stock yards. I come in with my brother’s social security number and she didn’t say nothin’. Let me work. My first job was finish shearing sheep. They’d come down the line chained by a rear hoof from a system up in the ceiling. When they’d get to ya’, the wool was dangling from around their face still. I’d trim it off and throw the bundle in a hopper. They were still alive, but not for long.

After that I moved over to a cattle line. They saved the blood for somethin’. Not from the sheep, just the cattle. You had you a big long knife, probably this long, say a foot long, a metal shield come up along behind it to catch the blood, so only about four inches of the blade actually stuck in the neck. It funneled into a steel can, like the old milk jugs. You filled six or eight of ‘em and then pushed your cart to great big tub and poured it in.

Cows made a helluva racket, it was somethin’ awful. I don’t know why but the sheep didn’t complain much hung up there like that. It was dangerous work too, you had to grab a hoof and hold ‘em just so. The old boy worked beside me taught me. He was real good. You only get kicked a time or two before you figured it out.

The floor was like cobble stone, it was real slippery in there. Ever once in a while one would get loose inside and you’d hear a siren. That meant get the fuck outta there an’ quick because someone was coming with a big ol’ shotgun to shoot the sunbitch.

The place was huge. HUGE. Armour on one side, Swif’ on t’other. Cattle as far as you could see. You could drive a mile down the road and that was all there was. You never seen so much cattle in all your life. Different ones in different pens, they’d get graded out by quality. Grade A, Grade B, guys got to where they could tell just by looking at ‘em what they’d be.

It was good money. Good money. A slaughterhouse was one of the best jobs you could find back in that part of the world. South St. Paul Minnesota.