Temet Nosce

Temet Nosce

by Rick Pritchett

         "That was a difficult case to adjudicate. The defense countered with a bevy of experts to try to deflect our evidence, but our panel of experts trumped their testimony."

         I sat at the table listening to Brent's spiel. The beautiful woman at our table, Angela, listened as well. I had heard it before, dozens of times. It was just enough detail to be believable but not so much as to drum up any specific questions from his target. It was a variation on a theme using material he had gleaned from the national papers or from any one of Grisham's novels.

         "When we went to closing arguments," Brent continued, "I was certain that the jury was going our way, but I needed that final push. You know what I did?" Brent had a way of almost always ending his sentences with a question.

         "No, what?"Angela asked, leaning in. She was as fooled as the fictitious jury he had created.

         "Of course I reiterated the evidence, which was overwhelmingly in our favor, but I also asked the jury to feel. 'What if', I asked, 'it was your child that had been at that party? What if it was your child that was on the coroner's table, brutally murdered? Do you remember those pictures? What if'", he paused and flashed a quick look at me. Imperceptible to anyone not ready, but I knew it was coming. It was the final cast into the pond. The cast that would net his prey. He turned his gaze toward Angela. For effect he whispered, "'What if it was you who sat in the jury room facing down the killer of your child. Wouldn't you demand justice? Take up your duty and carry out justice for this victim.' The jury was out just two hours. They found him guilty on all counts. Pretty cool, huh?" Brent's recitation of an ending of a Law and Order episode that he had recently watched was flawless. He had been itching to try it all week.

         "Good for you," she said. Apparently Angela was not a Law and Order fan. It was obvious, in fact, that she enjoyed Brent's ending. It was cool. Good triumphing over evil and all that. The brief silence that followed, Brent and Angela peering into each other's eyes, was my cue and my chance to escape the table. I took the opportunity to venture outside. The air was cool and refreshing, autumnal clear. Time to ruin that. I lit up a cigarette and took a deep pull dragging warm happiness into my lungs. Inside, Brent and the woman would be engaged in idle chit-chat, drinking and talking about nothing, Brent spending his way into her dreams and talking his way into her bed, the end inevitable.

         Friday nights in Chicago in the fall, there's no place better. I leaned against the club's wall and watched couples brush past me on their way to wherever. None of them were in a hurry but none of them were really lagging. All of the couples walked with a similarly determined but leisurely gait. They had somewhere to go but not somewhere they had to go. They existed in this moment for the pleasure of each other's company. I, leaning against the wall of a nightclub I couldn't afford to be in, overshadowed by the presence of downtown and its majestic buildings, did nothing but interrupt the couple's passage through the area. My smoke, billowing out of me at regular intervals, would reach out to these strangers. The usually omnipresent wind was nowhere to be found tonight, unable to carry away my exhaust. These passersby, offended at being poisoned and taken out of their dream state, cast sharp glances at me, briefly quickening their pace to avoid even the tiniest of contact with the offending wisp. There was a time when smoking was considered sophisticated. Now, the smoker is nothing more than a leper or a carrier of some unknown yet highly contagious disease to be avoided at all costs. Except, that is, in the factory.


         "Hey man, you got a smoke? I left mine in the car, and I don't wanna waste my break time goin' back to get 'em."

         "You still owe me from yesterday."

         "Damn it, you're right. Fuck it, man, do me a favor I'm dyin' over here."

         "Sure, just pick me up next shift."

         "No problem, man. I got you covered."

         In our factory, the eternal craving for a cigarette marked the passage of time better than a clock. Entire work relationships were built around the fifteen minutes spent pulling tar, nicotine, and carcinogens into one's lungs. Brent Nolan didn't smoke, but he didn't fear the smokers faction either, and although he wasn't part of the "tarbabies" as we called ourselves, he and I did have one thing in common. Both of us had graduated from college and neither of us had "put our education to use" as my father was fond of saying. We had become "content", another of dad's sayings, "with the mindless factory life".

         Inside the factory, every day, for all hours, we loaded rows of blank lids onto the conveyor belt. The lids traveled up the belt, up, away from the operator, and into the machine itself, the press smashing the blanks into something usable. The lids, scored so that they can be opened, tabs added, emerged from behind traveling back toward us. We packed the lids, a hundred each, into thin bags, thinner each year as we tried to save costs, and we moved the filled bags onto the wooden pallets creating neat little triangular stacks. Once the process ended it started again. Our goal, to be faster and faster. Repetition, the key to our success. The machine, loud, pulsating, never stopping (at least never supposed to stop), creating lid after lid. Repetition, the key to our success, loading, packing, stacking, and loading, packing, and stacking again. Faster and faster, focusing, starting the process again. For twelve hours, this is our life, our routine.

         The noise of the press forces us to wear earplugs, and on those rare occasions when you need to speak, you must scream to be heard. Under such conditions, little talk exists during the working portion of the day. My father was wrong on one count. Factory life was far from mindless. At our machines we are islands of production. Left alone, an inner silence countered by the noise of the press, we force our bodies into its repetitive processes, and we think. We think about the weather. We think about the next cigarette, the last seeming like hours ago even though it was just thirty minutes since the last break. We think about how making one small adjustment to our machine would increase our productivity, that would make this press the best in the plant. We think about how we cannot make that decision on our own. We think about Friday nights. Friday nights were what kept us going. Right now, as the cool air outside the club fought in my lungs with the warm fire I inhaled, coughing, I pictured our factory.

         "I'm starting to see can lids in my dreams. Do you see them too?" Brent asked me one day during break about six months into his employment.

         "Of course. Try doing this for ten years. Every action you do inside or outside the plant becomes tied into loading lids onto a belt, watching lids come around, and bagging lids for transport. You assimilate your productivity actions into your daily actions. Just wait, you'll see."

         "I don't intend on being around here that long. I've got plans. You know what I mean?"

         Brent Nolan, at age twenty-eight, had plans for many things. He planned on "running the place" as he stated on many occasions. His plans conflicted with many of our normal operations.

         One of the many unwritten rules was that only mechanics, who knew the intricate details of the machine, or management, who apparently knew everything else that was important, would recommend machine changes. Brent Nolan, however, was above this rule. To his advantage, he had three things working for him: Traditional good looks, an extremely extroverted personality, and the fear that he had built into his immediate supervisors that he "might just get uncomfortable on the line and try for Supervisor. You know what I mean?" He knew exactly what Brent meant. He knew that Brent might put his college education "to use". Thus an offhand remark about his press' "lack of safety due to its excessive speed" resulted in a reduction of his output, the others taking up the slack. Brent noticed that "these lids here", lids for our most important customer, "might just run a touch better on his machine, don't you think?" The next day his line was primed for that product. His plans became reality.

         "Hey, I've got an idea, wanna hear it?"

         "Sure."

         "My brother has a place in Chicago. It's small, but it will accommodate two couples, and he's hardly ever there, right? He said I could use it whenever I wanted, so I was thinking, why don't you and I drive into the city on Friday's, pretend to be lawyers, wait, we can do this no problem, just let me do the talking, OK? Again, why don't we go into the city as lawyers and hit on chicks? It's foolproof and it'll be a blast, don't you think?

         Indeed, Brent had plans. Thus, Friday nights were born. Friday nights were part of his plans, plans to keep us sane.

         The key to our plan, we learned over time, was to hit bars that weren't filled with tourists. The younger tourists drank too much. One might argue that sloppy, buxom babes willing to go home with you is a good thing, but the easy score did not fill our needs. "Older" tourists, we found, became too engrossed by our stories and became less interested in leaving the bar with us. No, what we needed were women trying to break away from their daily lives, escapees like ourselves. We needed our ladies to buy into the charade we created. That was what our plan was all about.

         Tonight's activities started like most. We entered the bar and sat at a table. Our table had a view of the bar and the general seating area. Scanning the joint, we found our mark. She was "out", but she seemed unsure how to enjoy being "out". Brent and I pulled up seats next to her. We kept our backs turned to her, waiting for her friend. None came, but Brent knew that she was the one. I was out of luck for now. We continued ignoring her for the appropriate amount of time, talking quietly about nothing but never letting our conversation die. Finally Brent turned around.

         "Excuse me, I hate to be rude, but I am hoping you can provide some input into a discussion my colleague and I are having. I know you probably wish to be left alone, and I apologize, but my friend cannot seem to leave his work at the office, and our debate requires, well, I hope you don't mind how I put this, but what we are looking for is a woman's point of view. Do you think you can help us out?"

         "Um, Ok."

         "My friend and I were in front of a jury yesterday, a rather gruesome case involving the murder of a small child." The woman pulled back in her seat with a small gasp bringing her hand involuntarily to her mouth. Brent continued, "Throughout the trial I had to weigh how the evidence was to be presented. My partner here suggested that I 'stick to the facts' while I wanted to tap into the emotional aspect of the case. It's a tricky proposition, really. You don't want to obscure the scientific data by adding layers of, well, melodrama, but you don't want to be so sterile as to take away the impact that a death can have. So you see my dilemma. Do you think you can help me? Tell me, can emotion and fact find balance?"

         This was the moment of truth. Brent had honed his skill at engaging his mark in conversation. He knew that our women beamed, proud of the fact that we were interested in their opinions, especially moral or legal ones. The former made them feel superior, the latter made them feel smart. Both made them talkative and less suspicious.

Tonight, Brent's woman, a stunning blonde wearing a short black dress, paused in thought then said, "Well, I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but you probably should find a balance." She paused again, briefly, and continued, "I mean, boring old facts just won't cut it. I'm all for some drama".

         Brent smiled and turned to me. "See buddy, I told you, right?" He turned back to the beauty. "My name is Brent. Thank you for your help, and it is nice to meet you. You are...?"

         "Angela."

         "Angela. How nice. Why don't we move over to that table over there?"

         Another Friday night in Chicago. Here I was, out again, as always. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The more that things change, the more they stay the same as the saying goes. Still leaning against the club's wall, I took the last, soothing drag of my cigarette and peered back into the club. Brent, surprisingly, was speaking with another, older woman seated at the table next to ours. Angela was still at our table, but she had a stunned look in her eyes. Through the glass the brunette and Brent mouthed words, inaudible to me, but their eyes said hate. I stomped out the butt of my smoke and strolled back into the club.

         "Your friend is an idiot." The usurper said as I walked up to our table. She was a short woman with a hard face. It did not appear that she smiled much but I liked her face. It was a face that projected strength and toughness and most importantly purpose. She managed to do one more thing which endeared me to her. She lit a cigarette despite the no smoking sign on the entrance door. The smoke quickly engulfed her in a nicotine fog. She was dressed casually, more casually than most of the patrons, wearing tight black jeans which were appealing and a polo-style golf shirt marked across the front with what appeared to be a corporate logo or some sort of marketing message. Through the haze that surrounded her, I made out the wording on her shirt. TEMET NOSCE.

         "That may be true," I said, "but are you generalizing or is their some specific area which qualifies my friend for the idiocy moniker?" This was not the first pain in the ass we had encountered.

         "Don't listen to her," Brent said. "She's just a bitter old hag." Brent did not end that sentence with a question.

         I looked at her again. Upon closer inspection my first impression, that she was an older woman, was incorrect. Despite her rugged appearance, it was obvious that she was not that old. She answered, "I asked your friend about his case. I wanted to know how the voir dire process went. When he failed to answer me sufficiently, I pressed him. Turns out he has no idea what voir dire is. I explained to him, attorney to attorney," she paused and winked at me, "what voir dire is. Your friend should do some research before he decides what fake profession he wants to be. Are YOU an attorney as well, or do you have a real profession?" She leaned back in her chair, comfortable with her question, and glared at me demanding an answer.

         I thought back over the past five years. After all of the clubs and after all our efforts at deception, excellent deceptions which fooled many bright women, we imagined we were attorneys. In those instances we almost believed it ourselves.

         "You know the answer to your question. Of course we are not attorneys. In fact, we both work on a production line making can lids for pop and beer cans."

         Brent opened his mouth to answer, but I shot him a look which stopped all comments, even those which ended in a question.

         "For five years," I continued, "we have played this charade and played it perfectly."

         I paused and thought about our routine. For five years Brent and I spent our Friday's like this. Five years of chasing women in our own fashion. For five years we never altered our pattern. For five years we lived our lie. But now, after five years, our Friday nights, once filled with excitement and sexual experiences beyond what we could even dream, have drifted into the routine of the husband who, sitting on the couch, turns to his wife and asks:

"What do you want to do tonight?"

         "I don't know. What do you want to do?"

         "I don't know. Whatever you want."

         Stifled, they sit, unable to move, left wordlessly watching some lame reality TV show.

         Brent's lines changed. I tweaked my role as required. For five years we masterfully adjusted our attorney story. Our routine persisted, but any satisfaction that it provided had, in retrospect, ceased to exist long ago. Our great plans led nowhere. Nothing had changed and nothing would. For all of our ideas, Brent and I would be at the plant again on Monday and some bar on Friday.

         I looked at the brunette. Her countenance, smug with a quality of independence; I felt I had to continue. I dropped my gaze to an area of her body where, hours ago, my intentions would have been different.

         "I look at your shirt, TEMET NOSCE, know yourself. I thought I did, but until tonight I failed to really grasp what we are doing, evading reality. Know yourself. How can I know myself if I'm some made up stranger?"

         My gaze remained fixed on the young brunette who seemed timeless. She nodded and blew a gust of smoke into my face, smiling.

         Turning to Brent I too smiled. It was a sad smile, I realized he would never come out of this fantasy world. I reached into my pocket and handed the lovely stranger what remained of the pack of cigarettes. I would not need them anymore. As I headed for the door my smile became the smile of pure joy. Friday nights with a purpose. What a peaceful change.