Back in the day, I lived in a rural Mennonite township in the heart of Nebraska whose population failed to exceed 1,000, probably including livestock. I’d tell you the name but then you’d just say, “Never heard of it” as though there were a chance in Hell that you’ve heard of any of the countless agricultural communities that pepper the desolate plains. I was both a local and transplant. Local because my Vietnamese parents immigrated and gave birth to me in the state and transplant because soon after, we had left for California only to come back after years on the coast. Having lived in what is now the hip “OC,” I hated what we had returned to. The crowded skyline once filled with corporate high-rises and planes taking off at sharp angles from the abbreviated tarmac of an airport named after an actor who gained fame for his portrayals of Old Western heroes were traded in for silos, grain elevators, and endless fields of corn and other unglamorous remnants of that Old West that no one cared to remember. Likewise, my life had been transformed from that of your typical adolescent in the upper middleclass suburbs of Los Angeles to that of a complete alien to the life of an agricultural community that fanatically worshipped a religious sect referred to as Cornhusker football. In rural Nebraska, hard agricultural labor and above all, competing in high school football, were true marks of one’s manhood. Being the undersized son of a doctor, rather than a farmer, and being prohibited by my uber-paranoid mother and that doctor to join the football team, I had a whole lot going for me.
In order to make enough money to visit my friends in Southern California as well as cast off the physical abuse an adolescent alien endures in a homogenic, mentally monotonous landscape where his “manhood” is constantly in debate, I would work a number of odd jobs through the winter and spring shoveling snow off driveways, mowing lawns, painting houses, and hauling irrigation pipe. No it wasn’t just a single large irrigation pipe. “Pipe” is plural in agricultural communities for the same reason why there could be a “hunnered or so” and you could even use them to “warsh” with “warter” from the “crick.” One season I spoke with Ted, one of my very few friends who was related to many farmers in our community who were known to pay good money under the table for mindless, hard labor. After speaking with his Uncle Rondelle, we were offered a job that promised to pay $25 an hour and accepted the job before we learned the exact nature of the work. The next morning, not wanting to be late, I woke up at 4:30 and made my traditional “working man’s” lunch of leftover fried rice, a pouch of shark fruit snacks, and a gallon jug of ice water. Ted pulled into the driveway at 5am and I could hear his rusty red pickup squeaking and creaking up the driveway. It was, in all respects, a piece of shit. However, this particular piece of shit had a name and it was Old Pete, after the man he had purchased it from. Pete was an elderly man who barely had the energy to sign over the title to the truck before collapsing into his grave and Ted thought it was the least he could do to commemorate the man by naming his truck after him since it seemed to be following the same fate. In accordance with our protocol, I lowered the gate which made a loud metallic screech in protest as my Labrador pup, Cassidy, jumped into the box with Ted’s two German short haired pointers. I begrudgingly climbed into the cab and tossed my sweat and dirt stained leather gloves on the seat where Ted was smoking a cigarette through a shit-eating grin and listening to BTO’s “Taking Care of Business.” The song was almost inaudible as it piped through the distorted dashboard speakers that were caked with dust from miles of driving country roads with the windows down. Ted claimed to listen to the song as a joke meant to chastise the integral yet mindless performance of our functions in the American labor machine but I knew it was much less of a philosophical statement than that. He genuinely enjoyed the song and often hummed the corny labor mantra throughout the day to goodheartedly spite me and my disdain for it.
As we bumped and bounced our way for several miles down gravel roads, watching the sun rise through the bug stained windshield and enjoying morning smokes, the dogs barked and whined with anticipation. I caught a glimpse of myself in the dusty side view mirror and realized how far I had come from the days of cruising BMXs with my buddies through endless SoCal strip malls and finding trouble on beach boardwalks. Despite the fact that I’d ditched my baggy shorts and Flojo sandals for irrigation boots and Carhart pants, I still felt like more of an outsider than a local. God knows I was still treated as such. I wished I could be as excited as the dogs but then again, they didn’t know any better. I wished I didn’t know any better.
When we finally pulled up to the farm, I realized that we were going to be put into a high risk situation—something I should have already assumed when wages were set at $25 an hour under the table. We were, after all, on a cattle ranch and I hate--absolutely hated--working with livestock. I knew from previous experiences that chickens could be deafeningly loud, horses could toss you around like Christopher Reeve, and pigs, when packed like sardines into a concrete mile-long feedlot, could bang you like a screen door in a hurricane. And cows? Yeah, I was guilty of watching TNN. I’d seen them buck, stomp and pulverize the genitilia of chap-clad hicks in vindication for their relatives who went to the slaughterhouse only to be carved into delicious steaks and succulent burgers.
Our boss, Rondelle, approached us holding a large plastic bag which the dogs assumed were treats and jumped and revolved around him like carousel horses to the tune of a pipe organ. They were whining and barking in anticipation and made it hard to hear his greeting to Ted and grimace of disgust towards me as we followed him over to a pasture where 12 polled Herefords were grazing. Those are cows by the way. I have two years of mandatory agricultural education to thank for that. After removing some of the contents he tossed me the bag and inside I found hundreds of thick rubber bands. Walking straight towards his first victim, we were shocked as he nonchalantly grabbed the cow’s testicles. I don’t care who you are or what your sexual preference is but anytime you see anyone grab anyone’s testicles, the first thing that goes through your mind is shock. Was this some kind of rural rite of passage? Were we about to pass the threshold from childhood by handling this animal’s manhood? I remember a weird sensation coming over me which can only be described as both a loss of physical and moral balance, something here was deathly wrong. We watched in horror, as he wrenched the animal’s testicles with Herculean force and instructed us to castrate the remaining 11 animals by wrapping the rubber bands, as he did, repeatedly around their scrotums. “The idea is,” he explained, “to cut off circulation to the suckers so they just plum fall off.” Despite the cow’s wails and dangerously powerful kicks in protest, Rondelle remained steadfast as he worked, spoke, and castrated. His purpose was clear and his hands were steady. He would not rest until he was sure that the rubber bands were wrapped around that cow’s nuts so tight that they would literally fall off from lack of circulation. The animal writhed as he wrenched its masculinity away. Before our boss had completed the instructions, I remember falling into a deep state of disbelief. It was as if I could no longer trust even the simplest of truths or matters of my existence. It was as though up were down and down were up and rubber bands were meant for castrating animals. Despite disproving questions of my manhood through hard physical labor, despite needing money to leave what was now even more of an alienating culture and environment, I turned and ran.
And ran.
And ran.
And I can still hear the dogs barking in hopeful anticipation for what they thought were treats.
