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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK244 Jack FritscherI was led deep into the innards of the plant, a movie set right out of Metropolis that I%u2019d seen at the Chicago Film Society. In the section producing malt syrup only the center of the rooms was lighted. The walls receded into murky darkness. Half the malt building was storied, floor above open floor, with the steel skeletal anatomy of the cannery. Empty tin cans rattled down forever, cause and effect, from the third floor to the carousel spigots on the second where they were flushed full of syrup, lidded and cooled, whipped through a labeling chute and stacked automatically twelve on their sides, still warm, ready to be pushed by a button into a cardboard carton held by a man who started the boxes through the sealer, its brush tongue and harrowing lips gluing and folding the flaps down hard, pressing the boxes against the rollers moving toward the final chute to the busy shipping dock. The rest of the building was open-storied like a Spanish mission built around an internal plaza, jammed with furnaces and boilers and copper tubing. Vats from the basement, explosive with pressure, flowed up to the second floor, their small openings steaming in the close hot air. Piping raveled through them like catheters rinsing steel patients. Everything was connected, explicit, unlike the Byzantine tunnels and pipes under Misery. Brown sacks of flaked green-yellow hops stacked in acrid bunkers stood ready for brewing. Periodically, tugging men emptied them into the small mouths of the vast pressure cookers that exploded in heat and steam and froth churning a full story high. They flushed the crude syrup up through the swollen tubing to a black steel hop-jack for rinsing and cooling, then drained it down, dropping it a floor to twin one-story vats separated by a catwalk, there to lay for final straining and cooling before canning.That first day was like all first days for the new guy, isolated, abandoned, nobody loves me, consigned to the shit-work high on the catwalk. At least I was new. At least I was a guy. Fifty feet above the floor, vertiginous, alone on a small platform, learning to be one of the boys, I had to turn three-foot water valves from flow to ebb and back again on tanks as big as a school bus. Angel of God, my Guardian dear. I was standing on top of a kettle in hell, making thick tea by sloshing a thousand gallons of water back and forth through two tons of soggy tea leaves. Turning water into beer. The screen baskets of the final seining filled with a brown wet sawdust steaming like hot dung. The boiling brew, falling through the seine, bubbled down from the hop-jack hissing in wet clouds from the small door opening into the huge tank which I had to climb into with a shovel to scrape out the last waste. If not a worker-priest, a worker. Many men feared climbing into the small hole of the big tank. I was big. I was tough.