To weld steel, you strike an electric arc by scratch-tapping an electrode on the surface of the metal. It’s a similar motion to striking a match, and like a match, if it’s done right—not too fast, not too slow, your movement neither rough nor timid—a small burst of heat and light erupts. That’s the arc. Then a tiny lake of metal turns molten where the electrode meets it. That’s the puddle. To look at the light, you need the dark-tinted glass of a welding mask to prevent corneal flash burn—an eyeball sunburn. To weld, you push or pull the puddle with the electrode, guiding it into a bead. If welded correctly the cooled bead will join the two pieces of material into one, and the joint where they once were separate will be stronger than either piece was on its own.
I never understood how people got careers, or even jobs. At twenty-three, I was freshly sober and extremely messy, and I had only ever worked in sceney downtown restaurants and the sex industry. I had happened into everything in my life, and I wanted, more than anything, to become tough.
I had never known a metalworker before I met Dean. He was a builder, specializing in architectural metalwork. “Welding is the vocation of criminals,” he had once told me, through teeth that were holding a long thin copper-dipped filler rod for a TIG (tungsten inert gas) welder. He was leaning against a rusty acetylene tank with one eye squeezed shut, holding a machinist’s square up to the steel angle clamped to his worktable. “Makes it a nightmare to find good guys. If you learned how, you’d definitely get work.”
Welding itself is a delicate operation. If you strip away the affectations and accessories of grizzled manliness, the manual movements of holding an arc and running a bead are closer to knitting than to anything else. You need a careful eye, a steady hand, and a stubborn perfectionism that will compel you to spend thirty minutes grinding out a weld that took an hour to complete if you think there might be an air bubble trapped inside.
Dean’s Brooklyn metal shop was dark, grimy, and cluttered, the thick steel slab tables covered in greasy clamps and metal shavings. My heels crunched when I walked across the floor. I had never been in a place like that before. I loved it.
On one of the many days when I stopped by his shop to deliver lunch, I casually asked him what he thought about me learning how to weld, fully expecting derision.
“You should do it,” he said, without hesitating. “I could help you get started.”
Flush with the fantasy of reinvention, when I left I was already carrying myself in an imperceptibly different way. My shoulders were a hair straighter, my body a tiny bit less languid. I hadn’t done anything yet, but the idea of recreating myself with proper armor made me feel stronger. I thought that if I learned to weld, Dean would see me differently. He had always treated me like a silly person, someone undeserving of respect.
“Just ignore her,” he would say to his guys when I hung around the shop while they were working. I wanted his approval so badly that I decided I would remake myself, and I would do so in a way that would make it impossible for him to scoff at me. My dominatrix job was his richest source of material for why I was frivolous and slutty. Metalwork was tough, honest, and serious. In my head, the math worked. Even though I literally punched and kicked men for a living, being a domme had rarely made me feel tough. The idea of it was, but my lived experience didn’t match. If I could be a welder, I thought, I would finally feel hard enough—for Dean, and maybe even for myself.
Hardness is the ability of a material to resist friction, abrasion, and indentation—to resist change brought by force. It is not a fundamental physical property, but rather a characteristic. In metrology, the scientific study of measurement, there are six hardness scales. Each one has a specific application—the Vickers scale, for example, is a microhardness test, used to measure the hardness of small, thin materials like ceramic or composite, while the Shore scale is used on polymers and thermoplastics. On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, the kind of carbon steel used on buildings is scored at four Mohs units. Ice—the kind you might drink—scores a one and a half, while a diamond—the kind you might wear—gets a ten.
I got my first metal job by walking in and asking if I could work for free. I don’t know exactly what the guys there thought of me, but Dean had asked his buddy Rob to hire me as a favor, and Rob said okay, and just like that, I had a job. Kind of.
Rob’s eponymous shop, Ferra Design, was amazing. They did fabrication work similar to what Dean did, wildly expensive custom metalwork for restaurants featured in Time Out New York and townhouses occupied by Forbes listers, beautiful heavy things that would survive an apocalypse. On my first day, Rob walked me around the shop, showing me the lathe, the band saws, the German welding tables, the racks and racks of material, the jobs in process. It looked like a combination shipyard and sculpture studio. I was dazzled.
Ferra was the most truthful place I have ever been involved with. The shop’s slogan was “If you demand the highest quality, expect to pay the highest price,” and there was no fudging of anything. Precision was an almost religious code for everyone who worked there, from the two old-school Brooklynites who founded the company to the Pratt Institute graduates who worked for them as fabricators and project managers. My job was to do the low-skill repetitive work, like sanding, to free up the real guys to do the high-skill operations. While mine were the most rote of the tasks available, requiring vastly fewer skills than the welding, fabricating, and computer-navigated water jetting the other shop workers were doing, perfection was no less important. I had literally never done anything like that before. Sure, the operations themselves were new, but that wasn’t the shocking part. They were simple chores anyone with decent focus and hand–eye coordination could do. The hard part was the commitment to excellence.
In metalwork, perfection is relative to function. “Good enough” for a decorative fence is different than “good enough” for structural steel beams on a high-rise building, which is different than “good enough” for an aerospace turbine. Perfection, as a philosophical ideal, is inherently unachievable, but technology and industry edge ever closer to its possibility. A perfect weld has zero porosity, full penetration, and no cracks or undercut. If you’re working on buildings, which I often was later in my career, an inspector from the Department of Buildings comes around with a portable X-ray machine to check your welds for imperfections from the inside, but the truth is that when you are welding, you can feel perfection.
At Ferra, it was humbling when my cuts on the band saw came out a full eighth of an inch off, when there were visible scratches peeking out of the material I had sanded, when a hole I drilled was off center, when I left a jagged burr with the grinding wheel. And because I had no experience with being humbled, it felt humiliating. It is impossible to tell lies with steel, so I hid the pieces I mis-cut in the scrap pile behind the saw and I burned with shame when my work was checked, knowing it was subpar. I wanted to do better, but the only things standing in the way were focus and effort, and I genuinely didn’t know how to give them.
I had lived my whole life like a raft in a current, following whatever path offered the least resistance, so I didn’t know how to steer, how to drop anchor, how to row. It was easy to call anything difficult impossible and float away from it—at least it always had been. But I really wanted this job. I had a deep and immediate respect for Rob and the guys I worked with at the shop. Every one of them was palpably brilliant, intensely driven, cool, and surprisingly gentle. No one was ever creepy. They were each generous with their time and talent, teaching me different ways to do things, giving me lessons and space to practice. I had happened into a warehouse of MENSA-meets-Bunyan big brothers.
Matt, a project manager at the shop, taught me how to handle metal with respect, the way you might handle a large animal. Unlike other materials, metal does not respond to force—only to technique. One morning, before we were headed out to a jobsite, Matt handed me a piece of precisely bent steel to cut.
“Take an inch off with the grinder,” Matt told me. “I scribed the line for you.”
I clamped the awkward piece to the edge of the fabrication table and started burning through it with the grinder. The problem was that I had never cut something so thick with a grinder before. It wasn’t until I was about a quarter through the cut that I saw how jagged and irregular it was. I could tell it was fucked but I didn’t know how to fix it. Matt came up behind me just as I was letting the gravity of my mistake sink in.
“Wow,” he said. “That looks like shit, huh?” Matt is so mellow and even tempered that he can say things like that without them feeling personal. Everything is we and everything is how can we fix it, how can we do it better. He believes in the work, and in collaboration. I, on the other hand, believed in shame, which I felt. It did look like shit.
“Let me show you a better way,” he said. “And then we can figure out how to fix that side.” He took the grinder out of my hand and started cutting from the other side. He went over the scribed line, just barely scoring it along the whole length of the cut, making a long shallow groove. He kept going over and over the groove until it was all the way through the material, and it looked perfect, like a machine had made it. The cut was straight, true, square, and precisely where it was supposed to be.
“That works better, yeah?” he said, kindly. I nodded, red in the face with gratitude and embarrassment. He dragged the cord of the TIG welder over to the table and meticulously filled in the gouges I had created, then ran a grinding stone over the steel until the whole piece was perfect again.
Once I had been at Ferra for a couple months, Matt started staying late to give me welding lessons. He would sit next to me at the fabrication table with a mask on so he could watch my work, a little pile of scrap metal between us.
Weld the two rusty ones together.
Fill the gap.
Keep the heat low.
Drop one bead.
I kept welding, doing these wax-on wax-off exercises, torch in one hand, rod in the other. I was used to men helping me or doing me favors with explicit ulterior motives, and Matt didn’t appear to have one. I couldn’t see the angle and I was willing to believe there wasn’t one. Matt was generous and he liked teaching; he knew a lot and was willing to pass it on. I wanted him to feel like the time he was investing in me was worthwhile—like I deserved it. I sensed from him that he believed in something about me, that he thought I was worth the training, and that my hard work mattered even when I was clumsy.
To test the hardness of a material, you take an object of known hardness, like a ball of tungsten or a spheroconical diamond indenter, press it into the material, and see how much pressure the material can stand before sustaining damage. In industry, these tests are performed under extraordinarily specific and tightly controlled conditions. The point of all this testing is to ascertain the conditions under which a material will fail. When you are building a high-rise tower, or a bridge, or the components of a car’s braking system, the differences between too hard, not hard enough, and just right are the differences between architecture and casualty.
I loved working at Ferra, and for the first time in my entire life I was proud of what I was doing for money. Rob, who had changed the trajectory of my life by giving me the job, had graciously started paying me by my second week of work there. But it was barely enough money to pay rent, and I had kept a few dominatrix clients to bridge the gap between my car service and restaurant habits and my suddenly finite paycheck. Around the time I had asked Rob for work, I had also applied for a spot as an apprentice with one of the big New York City ironworkers’ unions. There were so few available apprenticeships and the waiting period to see if you’d gotten one was so protracted I’d nearly forgotten about it, but one day when I was guzzling a coffee in the material storage alley outside the shop that served as our break area, I got a call from the union, telling me there was a spot for me in the apprentice class that would start in the fall.
The union job paid so much money, more than quadruple what I made at the shop, plus benefits. I liked money, and I had dropped out of college, which seemed like the only avenue to a well-paying job that didn’t involve nudity and ejaculate, so I took the job, working as an apprentice ironworker for Local 580.
Ironwork was different from the kind of metalwork we did at Ferra. The work was bigger, heavier, less precise, and performed at heights on high-rise buildings. I didn’t know how to do any of it. There are a lot of professional avenues for a welder to take, and when I used to tell people I was a welder, they would usually ask first if I was an artist, then if I made jewelry. It was hard, I think, for people to imagine a small young woman doing the kind of work I was doing, making things so big it took cranes to lift them. I spent most of my welding career working in architectural fabrication and installation: metalwork for buildings. Those jobs run the gamut from relatively cushy indoor operations like Ferra, making bespoke spiral stairs and fancy doors and other custom architectural features, to decidedly un-artsy construction welding, which is ironwork.
Ironwork takes place in the middle of the sky. Cranes raise great giant stabs of steel I-beams, and welders like me lean over urban abysses to weld joints that aren’t accessible to anyone with reasonable fear of heights or death, in the bitter cold and the blistering heat. Ironwork, unsurprisingly, is men’s work. It is heavy, dirty, and dangerous: one of the seven most dangerous jobs you can have, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the United States—the country where a presidential candidate once called for “more welders and less philosophers”—about 2 percent of ironworkers are women.
When I started my membership with Local 580, the union office told me to go to an address in Long Island City for a physical, height test, and drug test. All of this had to happen before I could go on a list to be placed at a job. When I arrived, I could tell from the group assembled out front that this job was going to be a far cry from Ferra. I was the only girl at Ferra, too, but the workplace culture was much less concerned with displays of masculinity. My bosses and coworkers had all gone through the Industrial Design program at Pratt Institute, where they learned as much about Richard Serra as they did about tensile strength and the drift capacity of steel. They were all craftsmen, artisans rather than construction workers, which created a distinctly different vibe.
As I walked up to the long line of men and took my place at the end, I tried to look at everyone without being obvious. I was afraid to be seen looking—it felt of paramount importance to appear cool, chill, and unaffected by my difference. I felt like a dumb little fancy pony in a group of Clydesdales. The men lined up with me were different from the Ferra guys—they were the exact type of guys that had been catcalling me as I walked down the street since I was thirteen. Big and boisterous, unafraid to take up space, talking loudly and swearing often. There were so many of them, one set of muscles after another, everyone dipping Skoal and talking shit with each other. I didn’t see any other women.
Finally, the nurse called me into the medical trailer for my physical.
“Oh! Look at you!”
“Hi. I’m Margo.” I could tell she was surprised to see a girl, and that she was wondering why the fuck I was trying to be a part of this thing, this man brother iron balls dick testosterone thing. I was wondering the same thing myself.
On the first day of apprentice school, which started before our job placements, the instructors explained the work line to us. We had to call to put our names and union book numbers on the list for jobs, and it was a first-come, first-served system. You sign up, and then you wait. While you’re waiting, they told us, you have to be ready. You would get a call—The Call. You had to keep your tool bag packed and sitting by the door, your work clothes laid out like a firefighter’s. You had to be rested and sober, with your phone bill paid and the ringer turned on, because you were going to get The Call one morning, maybe at seven but maybe at five, with an address you had to hightail it to that same morning.
I felt like I was going to vomit while receiving these instructions. Everything about the system seemed like it was set up for maximum stress, and I was so self-conscious and unsure of myself just being around those guys—being stared at for my conspicuous gender and talked at but not to—that I didn’t feel like I had any more to give. I remembered feeling a similar way when I started working as a dominatrix, when I didn’t know what I was doing and felt bored into by the stares of the men I was working for. In both spaces, I was young and green, thrust into an extreme circumstance by the wildness of my desire to feel tough. I thought if I acted a certain way—if I acted hard—I would become so. In a way, I was not wrong. It just took much longer than I expected, and by the time it happened, the veil of what I had once understood toughness to be had lifted and there wasn’t much left for me to hold on to.
Toughness is a material’s ability to absorb energy without rupturing or fracturing—that is, to resist strain while under stress. Tough material, like steel, is not easily cracked or broken. It is possible for a material to be hard but not tough—a diamond, for example, doesn’t easily scratch but would shatter if you took a hammer to it—or tough but not hard, like the silk of the Darwin’s bark spider, which is many times tougher than Kevlar.
As I waited for a call from the Local 580 job list, my anxiety got worse and worse. I would train as an apprentice for three years, working alongside the journeymen on jobsites for a percentage of their pay and attending apprentice school at night. I hadn’t yet worked a day as an ironworker, but it didn’t occur to me that it was okay to be inexperienced. Even though I was explicitly there to be trained, I felt like I had to arrive already knowing how to do everything, to make up for being a girl. The thought of showing up on some construction site with a giant group of men I had never met and seeing them look at me as a joke, a disappointment, some stupid girl when they had called for an ironworker, felt impossible. I could barely bring myself to think it through or imagine what it would look like. I didn’t feel like I had enough armor to protect myself from this torturous self-consciousness, and my dread grew bigger and toothier with every day that passed without The Call. My anxiety ratcheted up to a rolling boil of near panic, and I was scared of that feeling, because my coping mechanisms for anxiety had historically not been very good.
Knowing I would be heavily outmatched and outnumbered on a big union jobsite, and needing a task to channel my worrying into, I focused on trying to erase what remained of my outward femininity. My head was already shaved down to a #2, as it had been since before I started at Ferra. I laid out the outfit for my first day: two sports bras, dark Hanes tank top, oversize T-shirt, Carhartt vest, knit hat. Thick canvas double-knee Carhartt pants, two sizes too large. I wanted to vanish my body inside of them. I had bought a package of boy’s briefs at Duane Reade, not because I was actually trying to pass as a boy, but because it felt important to build the new, genderless image of myself from the ground up. I laid a pair of those out too. I removed the small diamond studs I always wore in my ears. I clipped my nails to the quick. The whole process was a reverse drag, a self-conscious deleting of anything gendered female.
Nevertheless, I have never felt more girly than when I was first stared down by a gauntlet of fifteen hundred men on my way into work at six thirty in the morning. When I finally got called to a site, I made it there before the doors opened at seven, so they were all loitering outside smoking cigarettes under the scaffolds, men from every trade slurping roach coach coffees out of paper cups and waiting for the workday to begin. I didn’t even look up at the building. Later, I would learn it was designed by Jean Nouvel, situated on the end of a block known as “Starchitect Row.” There was a Gehry across the street, a Shigeru Ban down the block. Photographers from Dwell and Architectural Digest were constantly holding up traffic by standing in the middle of the street to take pictures. But all I saw was men.
“Hey, do you know where I could find Local 580? Or Marc Rivera?” I said, dropping the name I’d been given on the phone and trying not to look at any one of them. They all had hard hats on, dinged up and plastered with stickers like a table in a punk rock bar. My hard hat, brand new and as yet unworn, was all black and had no stickers. It was clean and smooth and matte. I tried to hide it behind my body.
“Yeah, the big guy, right? Likes to dance?”
“I’m not sure. Is this the way in?”
“Yeah miss, go right ahead in.” I hated him for giving me permission to enter, for declaring that I needed permission, his, any. For calling me miss. I realized how little any of my physical preparations had mattered. Shaved head and baggy clothes-ed or not, I was a girl, and I was in a men’s space, and none of my attempts to perform masculinity offered much comfort.
I mumbled a thank you as I walked inside. I heard raucous giddy laughter around a corner. A huge man toddled over to me, with a smile so bright he reminded me of a child. He looked kind.
“Are you Margo?” I nodded, upon discovering I was mute. “I’m Marc! How you doin’, chick?”
I liked Marc immediately, and my instinct was a good one. He was safe, equal parts fun uncle and chatty pal. During the years we would work together, he always treated me like a daughter, and could reliably be found singing and laughing and spitting sunflower seed shells onto his belly. I needed someone to be nice to me right at that moment, and he was perfect.
________________
I worked for the local for five years, and on all but one of the construction sites I welded on, I was the only woman ironworker. Walking from the parking garage to the site at six thirty in the morning, the sidewalk was always a stream of neon green and safety orange, Red Wing boot prints in the dust outside the building. I looked for other girls, keeping my eyes carefully unfocused, my expression purposefully blank, but it was rare to see one, and the closer I got to the site, the smaller and more seen I felt, a small girl, a vague oddity, something in the way. In my local union of about twenty-five hundred members, I knew the names of the other five women by heart. MargoNicoleMarilynJenMarleneJill. No matter how good we were at welding, or how much we tried to blend with the men, we were all known, collectively and interchangeably, as “the girl.”
There were women working at other trades on some of the jobsites. Riding the hoist in the morning, I’d catch a glimpse of a plumber with a long braid down her back, a steamfitter with skinny jeans tucked into her Red Wings, an electrician with red lipstick on under her hardhat. Not all the women tried to disappear into the cloud of testosterone like I did. Some of them asserted their femininity with their presentation. I found this mortifying and distanced myself from them. I didn’t want to be part of some weird girl gang. I wanted to be one of the men.
Steel itself is closely linked to masculinity in the cultural imagination. The identity of the ironworker is thus deeply invested in a performative stereotype of masculinity—a strength that eclipses that of a regular man. “Men of Steel,” as the hardhat stickers said. But what is inherently masculine about steel? Steel is hard and hard is strong, yes, but there are many harder materials out there, like rubies and diamonds, yet the jewelry industry is not, to my knowledge, rife with the kind of sloppy gendering that happens in the building trades. The culture of ironwork is obsessed with how tough you are, how fearless and strong, how well you can get it done. The guys were always bellowing stuff like Git ’er done, little hypermasculine pep talks on the way into the hoist in the morning—stuff that to me was like a cartoon parody of Big Tough Man World. The thing that made it more than just parody, however, was that the work was heavy and scary, difficult and strenuous. The performance of strength seemed redundant, because everyone was strong.
To be strong is to resist damage. There are two measures of the strength of a material. Yield strength measures the amount of force required to initiate the deformation of the material—to start bending or warping it. The yield strength of a material represents the point up to which it can remain itself, unchanged by the forces of the world. Tensile strength is a measurement of the force required to break a material. Some materials have high yield strength but low tensile strength, which means they can resist a great deal of force, but once the force alters them, they can’t hang on for very long. Concrete is such a material; it is very difficult to initiate damage in concrete, but once you’ve gotten into it with a jackhammer, it flies easily apart in shards and chunks. A material with high tensile strength can exist with structural integrity even under the pressure of damaging forces. The tensile strength of structural steel is about seventeen times that of human skin.
The physical discomforts of metalworking cannot be overstated. In the ten years I worked as a welder, I was lucky to never suffer any serious injury, but I gained a body-wide collection of small second-degree burns and knife slices, multiple instances of frostbite, more smashed toes and fingertips than I can recall, and a toxic accumulation of manganese in my blood that has yet to dissipate. I fell into a hole carrying hundreds of pounds of copper welding lead, took a spinning shard of drill bit to the cheek, broke my thumb in a vise. I burned my hair, my thighs, my forearms, my neck.
The first time I hurt myself welding wasn’t serious, but it was so painful that I went mute, too stunned by the sensation of being burned to let out a noise. I was TIG welding at a fabrication table at Ferra, holding my torch in my right hand and my rod, the long thin stick of copper-coated metal I was melting, drop by drop, into the groove I was welding, in my left. Unlike other types of welding, the tungsten inert gas welding process separates the electrode and the filler material, and thus requires both hands plus a foot pedal to control the amperage from the welding machine. If you need to hold or adjust anything while you’re working, there aren’t many good options. I had gotten into the bad habit of pushing the cold end of the rod against my body to choke up on it when it started to run down—an amateur’s move, I was about to discover.
I finished the bead I was working on, clicked my hood up, and sat up straight, trying to uncrunch my back. Without thinking or looking, I pushed the rod into my chest to get set up for my next weld and immediately felt a pain that was shocking in the way of a hornet sting, piercing and cruelly concentrated on a tiny area of the body. I had somehow flipped the rod and pressed the red-hot side into myself.
TIG rod is skinny—this one was probably a sixteenth of an inch, just twice the diameter of the metal in a paper clip. I usually wore a standard welder’s suede jacket, but it was hot that day, and I was stupidly wearing a T-shirt. The rod burned straight through the shirt, through the spandex of my sports bra, and deep into the soft flesh at the very bottom of my breast. I was so startled by the sensation that I froze, my mind a few beats behind my body, the breath gone from my lungs, my mouth filled with cold saliva. I didn’t understand what had happened for a moment that felt like a very long time, and when I did, I was overwhelmed with an embarrassment that distracted me from the pain as it spread across my chest and into my shoulders. The rod went in so far, melting the spandex of the bra into the depth of the wound, that the tiny lump and scar has held to this day, looking like a bullet wound from a doll-size gun.
Every winter that I worked on-site, I swore to myself it would be the last one, my boots stuffed with hand-warming packs, my belly full of cayenne pepper pills to raise my body temperature, a hair dryer in my tool bag to keep frostbite at bay. Later, when I was working on cranes in the Honolulu summer, I learned about another host of discomforts, smearing thick zinc on every visible piece of skin and chugging electrolytes to keep from passing out as I sweated through my thick welding jacket. All of which is to say, the money was good, but I earned it.
After a while, some of the men warmed up to me. I worked hard, and they saw it. When the foremen came around asking who wanted to stay late for overtime, I always said “I will.” The ones I felt most comfortable with were dads—men who knew how to take care. John, who meticulously planned his daughter’s birthday parties; Patrick, who saved up to get his kid horseback riding lessons. I was careful not to talk much about my personal life, because it was important to me that they saw me as a neutral entity and never pondered my gender or sexuality. My biggest fear, workwise, was that I would be thought of and treated as weak, sexual, or vulnerable in any way.
The men, however, talked about everything: their families, their work gripes, their injuries, the jobs they had worked on. The ones I steered clear of talked performatively about sex, while others made a big show of editing their stories—“Watch your mouth,” they would say, reminding each other that I was there, that they were not alone. I was equally uncomfortable with both versions of special treatment, but because I didn’t talk much, they talked to fill the silences. My hope was that they would treat me like a daughter—if not theirs, then at least someone’s.
Of the men who were fathers, none of them wanted their daughters doing our job. Some brought their sons into the business, but not girls. It was too rough, too heavy, too cold, too dangerous. That’s what they said. They saved money to send their daughters to college, to give them lives that didn’t include frostbite, spatter burns, and zinc poisoning.
Underpinning all these awkward dynamics was a palpable element of territorialism I never stopped feeling in my decade of metalworking. Why are you here? they would ask, sometimes snarky, sometimes playful, occasionally with genuine curiosity, but it wasn’t a question, it was the drawing of a boundary. Some asked me straight out—especially after they found out that I was smart, that I had gone to private school, that my dad was a lawyer. Why?
Why not? I always shot back, short and flip, intended to silence. None of us was trying to start a dialogue, we were just testing which trees to piss on. The truth was, I wondered the same thing all the time.
By the time I graduated my apprenticeship, I finally cut my last ties to sex work. I’d long since deleted my dominatrix website and let go of my dungeon lease, but I’d kept my last remaining client for my first few years on the jobsites, seeing him at his apartment once a week for an hour, during which I gave him an extremely lackluster session, often still dressed in my welding clothes. I had wanted to stop seeing him the whole time and once I started working for the union, I could technically afford to, but I had been afraid—afraid to lose the connection to easy money, but more than that, afraid to fully step into the new version of myself I’d built from scratch. Going from the jobsite to those sessions made me feel like the ultimate fraud, as if all my performances of toughness were just a farce to cover up who I really was, which was something dishonest and malformed that didn’t fit anywhere. When I made journeyman, I finally told that last client I couldn’t see him any longer and erased his number from my phone, but I felt permanently stained by overlapping sex work with my new career. So when the men asked me Why are you here, I heard it as an accusation, an assertion that I didn’t deserve to be in the world of hard, honest labor.
Ductility and malleability are the measure of a material’s ability to deform under, respectively, tensile and compressive stresses without fracturing. Loosely speaking, tensile is pulling and compressive is squeezing. Tensile stress is the resistance of an object to a force that could tear it apart. Think force under tension, like the chain on a bicycle, the string on a guitar, or the cables on a suspension bridge. A material with high ductility can easily accommodate pulling forces. Compressive stress is just what it sounds like, and the quality of malleability is the measure of a material’s ability to stay intact in the face of compression—think about gold, the most malleable of all the metals, which can be easily marred by the compressive force of the human jaw.
Welding is an acquirable skill. You do it long enough, and you get good at it, or at least better. I was shitty at welding for a while when I started at Ferra, but I started to get better quickly, because the fabrication table was a place where I could press away all my anxieties and preoccupations. It’s reductive to compare everything to meditation—meditation is its own thing—but there was a mind–body state created by the repetition and the embodiment of focus that did something good for my brain. As an apprentice, I did whatever tasks I was assigned. My favorite type of work was to be left alone with a repetitive task, tightening a seemingly endless series of bolts or welding the same series of seams all day long.
I worked for the union during the year, and in the summers I would take off and go up to the farm with Dean. We worked on the house, did farm chores and projects, and sometimes when he was running a metal job down in the city, he’d hire me for a day or two to help with the delivery or installation. Dean’s jobs were strictly hierarchical. He dispensed enough instruction to serve the job, but no more. Since I’d gotten my union job, things had shifted a bit between us, but barely. He still mocked my work, but with a different angle: now, his material was that unions were for lazy idiots. He made fun of my coworkers and my tasks and, by extension, my whole existence. I was bitterly disappointed that I had devoted my whole self to being worthy of his esteem but had somehow still failed. Occasionally, though, it would be different. There were a few things I had learned how to do that were valuable to him, like installing material at heights, and when he needed those skills, he treated me like someone who had something he wanted. Even though I knew it wouldn’t last, I relished the feeling so much that I would do anything to earn it, climbing up any sketchy ladder he pointed to, ready always to risk my safety and self-respect.
I wanted to be partners with him—in business and in everything else—but he never saw me as more than a resource, someone he could extract from. He was willing to mentor me in a limited capacity in the trade and the business, but I would never be his partner, I would only be his employee. At one point, shortly after I had completed my union apprenticeship and earned my journeyman ironworker’s card, we agreed that I would move upstate to the farm and work for him on a big job he had taken. I was excited. I thought that if I did a good enough job, maybe it could be the start of a new dynamic for us, professional or otherwise.
Working for Dean on an ongoing basis was a fucking mess, it turned out. He’d built a huge, beautiful, glass-walled shop on the property upstate, yards away from the house, so we never had to leave. We never had to leave. I became tethered to the property in a way that felt so claustrophobic I would invent errands to go on simply to get a breath of air I didn’t have to share with him. As a boss, he was critical, manipulative, and demanding, a far cry from the mentorship I had gotten from Matt and Ferra or the training I’d received on my ironworker crew. With Dean, nothing was good enough, and if anything went wrong, he flashed immediately to anger.
“What did you do to this?” I remember him demanding about a structural steel frame I had welded, a task he had left for me to do alone. It wasn’t a complicated element, and I had done an okay job, but I hadn’t clamped the tube steel well enough to the table and when I had run the beads along the seams to connect them, the heat had pulled and warped the steel, putting a subtle but distinct twist in the whole piece where it was meant to be perfectly flat. On-site, we would bolt the frame to the roof we were working on, where it would serve as support for the series of extremely expensive aluminum trellises we had fabricated for the owner of an NFL team. No one would ever see the frame, and I was pretty sure my mistake wasn’t big enough to cause a structural issue.
We had been working fifteen hours a day for weeks to finish the job, and there is always a degree of triaging that takes place on big jobs. Not everything can be both perfect and on time. I had thought the small mistake would be okay—I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I thought it was not that bad. But Dean had fifteen years of experience on me, and he had a much better eye—a boss’s eye, tuned always on mistakes and imperfections.
“This is all fucked up, what did you do? I thought this was good to go on the truck?” His voice was rising. The frame was sitting on the welding table, waiting for us to load it. He pulled the corner up, trueing it with his eye and finding it lacking, looking madder by the second. I felt my face getting hot, my throat starting to close. It was nighttime, and the rest of the guys had gone home. We were alone in the shop.
“I’m sorry, I thought it was good to go. I didn’t realize it had warped so much.” He wasn’t listening, so I trailed off. He dropped the corner of the frame back onto the table, letting it slam with a loud metal clang, and stalked out of the shop. I knew there was no time to start the frame over, or to cut it up and fix it. We were due in the city to install the job in the morning. I didn’t know what to do—whether I should follow him into the house and apologize, keep packing the truck, or just sit there and wait for him to come back and yell at me. In my body there was a strong urge to run, destination unimportant, just away. I fought it, and watched him go into the house. I was cold and dirty and wanted to change before the five-hour drive, but I was afraid of tangling with him, so I stayed in the shop and loaded the tools in the truck, feeling so ashamed I could barely stand it. When he came back to the shop, we loaded the frame and the rest of the material together without speaking and drove to the city in a caravan, he in his big dually pickup, me following in my smaller truck, grateful for the separation. The next day, at the jobsite, we installed the frame. I waited for it not to fit, perched on the edge of panic that the warp I had fabricated into it would cause a catastrophic installation issue. But we dropped it into place, and it went in just fine. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t trash—it was good enough. I wanted to ask Dean why he had yelled at me, why he had stressed perfection in an instance where it wasn’t necessary, why he was so intolerant of my errors, why he had to terrorize me over them instead of teaching me. But I wasn’t stupid, and I knew those questions would only lead to more of the same, and I didn’t want to get yelled at anymore, so I said nothing.
A couple years later, I started working as a freelance subcontractor, outside of the union. I knew the work and the business well enough that I didn’t want to be told when I was allowed to have a cup of coffee or take a bathroom break anymore. That’s what I told myself, and it was true. But the other, bigger truth was that I didn’t want to be “the girl” anymore. I was a card-carrying journeyman ironworker, licensed to weld and erect steel in every United State and southern Canada. I had graduated at the top of my apprentice class and earned a prestigious award from the Department of Buildings. I had worked on Nouvels, Gehrys, Calatravas, the new Freedom Tower. I had seen them at their most unpretty, and I had, in some small way, been part of what made them stand. But my name on-site, always, was still The Girl.
Every new man that came on my crew would give me his coffee order, assuming I was the apprentice. And every morning, every season, I still put on two sports bras and two shirts because I was afraid of my nipples showing through my clothes. I had grown my hair out, so I covered it with a bandana, secretly jealous of my one female coworker who brushed out her waist-length hair in the shanty every afternoon, giving no fucks. The work it took to maintain my image of desexualized indifference was heavy, always, and I understood that no matter how good I got at the job, it might never go away.
If you know how to work with metal, you can play materials god and change some of its elemental properties. Take steel and temper it correctly, and you’re left with a material that is stronger and tougher, with improved ductility and decreased brittleness. Tempering steel is simple: heat it to the appropriate temperature for the alloy you’re working with, which will be very high but below the melting point, and hold it at that temperature for about two hours. Then, quench it in cool water or oil and heat it slowly at a more moderate temperature. Tempering makes steel more useful for the tasks of daily living. When you’ve completed those steps, you’ll have the kind of metal that is appropriate for a knife blade, a hand tool, or an automotive part.
When I left New York to move to Hawai’i, I took a small bag of welding tools with me. I had a plan to work for my friend Elko on his farm, doing manual labor and managing his crew of workers. I knew metalwork was the most efficient way for me to make money, but I didn’t know how to arrive in a new place and get a metal job. Even though I had been welding for almost a decade and carried nearly every license a welder could have, I still felt unqualified—not because I was new, but because I was a girl.
In liberal New York, the unions have rules about gender equity, and there was such a palpable fear of sexual harassment lawsuits that a lot of the guys policed each other’s language or steered clear of me altogether. That didn’t exactly make things easy, but at least I knew that as a union member I would have the same priority for placement on the work list as any other member. In Hawai’i, I didn’t know how it would work. I put my name on the work list for the local union out of Honolulu as a “boomer,” or traveling member from another local, and I waited. And waited. And waited. In New York, you could call in to the work list line and an automated voice would read you your number on the list. Everything was transparent, in large part because of a discrimination lawsuit that a group of Black union members had successfully brought against the local some years back. It was a good, functional system. In Honolulu, you had to call the front office and talk to a person, and they would only confirm that your name was on the list.
Working on Elko’s farm, where I exchanged my labor for rent on the tiny shed I lived in without plumbing or electricity, I wondered if I really needed to go back—to face it all again, all the men, all the explaining, all the proving of myself. I fed animals and planted seeds and weeded gardens during the day. I barely had enough income to put gas in my truck, but Elko was kind and treated me with respect. I could work in a tank top, no bra.
In the summer of 2015, I finally started getting hired for union welding jobs in Honolulu, thanks to some low-key political manipulations that were performed on my behalf by a man I was sleeping with. I worked on crane installations and structural steel under the hot Pacific sun, and in the middle of the summer I got on a fast-paced overtime job on a building that was behind schedule. The ambient temperature of the site registered ninety-four degrees. I was put to work alone, welding connection points on the I-beams. The decking crew was right behind me, laying down sheets of reflective metal that created a mirror effect. The sun and the decking blasted my eyes and skin with blinding UV rays in every possible position.
On my fourth day, a piece of molten slag pinged off the decking and burned its way through my pants, settling into the soft flesh of my inner thigh. It burned a hole the size of a pencil eraser in my skin and wafted a charred-hot-dog smell through the haze of iron welding fumes. I knew from experience that it was futile to try to dig the slag out of my clothes. I was wearing a thick suede welding jacket, gauntlet gloves, and a safety harness with two thirty-pound bolt bags attached to it, and I was straddling an I-beam several levels up the building. Undressing quickly was not an option.
I had spent so much time, by then, training myself to disassociate from pain—physical, emotional, whatever—that it was no longer just a trick I could perform, it was the way I always was. I didn’t know how to have a normal reaction to anything. Before I felt the pain, I felt the shut-down, the cementing of my face and severing of the connections between my experience and my affect. I had gotten so good at masking that the mask had become my face. I didn’t quite feel what was happening—it’s more that the sensations were being logged for me to experience later, in a safe and private space, where I could be alone and unharden myself. But in another way, okay, yes, I felt everything.
The pain started as a white-hot laser point and pressed outward, at once targeted and diffuse, my entire leg feeling as if it was being disintegrated, or perhaps microwaved. As the seconds passed and I sat, frozen, my welding hood thankfully still down over my face, my gloved hands clenching the flanges of the beam so hard my fingers would later ache, I felt the pain pulse and wave, moving into and through my body, settling in my low belly with a heavy wash of nausea. I felt as if I might fall off the beam, even though it was wide and I had my feet tucked into its lower flanges as if they were in stirrups. The pain from the burn and the lack of vision under the hood made me feel like I had been spun in a washing machine and had lost orientation to earth and sky. When I am in great pain I become very still—a scared animal’s instinct to freeze, or maybe the illogical notion that I can somehow evade the pain that way—so I had to tell myself consciously to move, first to unclench one of my hands from the beam, then to push my hood up, letting the bright sun stream into my eyes.
I felt as if I had been hit. I threw up a little bit into my mouth, swallowed it, and picked up my torch, which was dangling in the air. I had been sitting, absorbing the pain of the burn, for long enough that the tip of my rod had gone cold. I took a few more minutes, wishing I had a cigarette, feeling the post-orgasm feeling of the pain receding, feeling myself reenter my own body. Then I clicked my helmet back down, struck an arc, and kept welding.
My body bears an erratic constellation of scars from similar incidents. All welders’ bodies do. They are concentrated on the forearms, wrists, neck, clavicle, tops of the ankles, and backs of the hands. All the gaps between garments where sizzling metal finds its way in. There are also errant burn scars I am unable to explain: left breast, top of right thigh. Belly. When hot slag falls inside or burns through layers of bulky protective gear and settles in for a slow, deep sear into flesh, it leaves marks that seem to be permanent.
Straddling the I-beam above the Honolulu skyline—acres of shipping containers to my right, an expanse of blue and palm trees to my left, the scents of plumeria and the sweet-bread bakery down the road mixing with the oily chemical tang of hot steel—I clenched my eyes and mouth closed as I worked, waiting for the pain to recede. If metalwork has taught me anything, it is how to absorb pain without reacting. How to be hard.
When I look at my body I see its evidence all over me, the wreckage hardness has left behind. My arms, which once were slim and fit for spaghetti straps and delicate bracelets, are thick from a decade of lifting welders and steel. The funny bulge between my ribs on the left side, where my intercostal muscles tore while I was lifting a bundle of stainless-steel handrail and never quite healed. My ripped-up shoulder, which for years could not lift so much as a mascara wand without several audible clicks and a sear of pain. All the burns, the scars, the fucked-up toenail that didn’t grow back right after I dropped a pressure plate on it when I was an apprentice. My eyes, full of microscopic particulate metal. My lungs, which spent a decade huffing fumes “known to cause cancer in the state of California,” filling with acetylene and welding flux, clouds of metal, until they hacked up black phlegm with little spots of blood.
When we speak colloquially of hardness, toughness, and strength, we often conflate the three, but to pull apart the definitions is to understand that there are many ways to resist the forces of change and harm, and many circumstances in which one and not another is called for. I went to metal for the same reasons I went everywhere else: to try to rebuild myself as a creature impervious to damage. To live with the reality that I am made of a soft center, that I am delicate and sensitive and utterly available for harm at every moment of every day, was unbearable to me, and so I tried to disprove this fundamental fact of existence. I tried so hard, until I had to admit to myself that it was impossible, that there is no way to be a human without being vulnerable to hurt. To be a soft thing was my greatest fear, and greatest shame, but it was true all along—the great awakening, for me, was not in becoming ever harder, tougher, stronger. It was, instead, in becoming brave enough to look my softness in the eye.
The night after I burned my thigh on the beam, I made a quiet decision. Sitting on the lip of a friend’s bathtub with Bactine and silver sulfadiazine and big rolls of gauze spread out around me, I decided I was done. What I had bought myself with my banged-up body and my endlessly swollen and deflated ego was a sense of access and self-assurance that was mine to keep. I had found the place for which I was most ill-suited out of all the possible places I could have inserted myself. I had persevered through the hard stares and the namelessness, through being called “sweetheart” and “the girl” and being treated like a novelty and a moron. I had hardened myself, and now my work was through.