By MetalbondNYC

One day I looked out the window of my apartment in Manhattan and I saw several construction workers across the street taking down some scaffolding from a building. One of them in particular caught my eye … he was wearing an upper body harness, and I noticed his well-worn work pants and boots.

I grabbed my camera and took several pictures, including the one here:

There’s always a lot of construction going on here in New York City, which gives me the opportunity to see lots of hot construction workers. I gotta say in all honesty, that I have great respect and admiration for men who earn a living in construction. Men who work with their bodies, who build things — who make things happen. Sometimes I fantasize that I would like to do what they do. It’s quite a contrast from the kind of work that I actually do to pay my bills — sitting at a desk, working with software, manipulating words, pictures, charts and graphs for print publications.

Back when I was in high school, growing up in the Midwest, I spent a summer working for a cousin on his wood lot. All summer he would cut down trees, then cut them up with a chain saw to sell over the winter as firewood. But he needed guys to split the wood and to stack it in cords and ricks, so he hired me to be one of his grunts.

Part of the summer I had been grounded by my parents for getting in trouble, and I was not allowed to go anywhere — except to work for my cousin at the wood lot.  So, in a way, I was in his “custody” so to speak.  I would show up in a baseball cap with a gallon of water and some work gloves, and I would spend hours and hours splitting the wood with a hydraulic machine he had, and then hauling it over to staked-out posts where I would stack it. He had a lot of wood to process, so this went on every day for months. It was hard work, and I was always exhausted at the end of the day, covered in sweat and sawdust.

One day I arrived at the wood lot a bit later in the day, and my cousin had another guy there working. His name was Conan (I remember this because the movie Conan the Barbarian had just come out). I recognized Conan immediately from my high school. He as a year or two older than me, and he was new to the school, having just moved with his family from out of state. And everyone admired him because he was so hot. This real-life Conan had a fantastic body, quite muscular and athletic, and he was wearing nothing but boots, work gloves — and a pair of British flag shorts, the same shorts the drummer in the Def Leppard video wore … remember them?

My cousin told me to look at Conan, explaining that he had been out there all day, working in the hot sun. My cousin was clearly in awe of this guy and how strong he was and how much stamina he had for hard work. Yeah, it was almost like my cousin was proudly showing off his “property” to me — a new work slave for his collection that he acquired somehow. I had no idea how my cousin, who was in his late 20s or early 30s at the time, would have connected with a guy from my high school, but he did somehow — and with the hottest one, too!

Sometimes when I was home in bed, I fantasized that Conan was my cousin’s work slave. That my cousin forced Conan to work for him without pay, that he was only allowed to wear the flag shorts and nothing else while sweating for him all day in the hot sun, and that at night he was kept by my cousin in the tool shed, chained to a ring in the wall. Or perhaps my cousin kept him locked behind a locked metal grate in the garage.

Anyway, back to the present day and that harnessed construction worker I photographed out my window. For some reason, seeing him made me fantasize about becoming another man’s work slave. Perhaps a hot property owner with a farm or a ranch — someone with lots of work to be done. No pay, no rights. He might even take away my wallet, my keys, my phone, my plane ticket.  How exciting it would be to spend, say, a week or even a whole month at a remote location, doing physical labor for another man’s benefit — or simply for another man’s amusement. Maybe he’s locked a chain around my neck with a padlock, to constantly remind me of my current situation.

You know the expression, be careful what you wish for? Well, I’m feeling a little bold these days. Yeah, I think I am ready for a challenge.