By Joshua Ryan

The Haute Cuisine de Paris Select Tour … Mike had finally agreed to book it … I was lingering on a foggy street on the Ile Saint-Louis … Then from somewhere — some seventeenth century house? Some charming local church? — a bell was clanging. “Cmon,” Mack said. “Ain’t got all day.” He was already on his way to the shit holes, where a line had formed — a line of identical packages of rocklike muscles dressed in identical boxers and tees. A dream, and a nightmare.

I was one of the last to get to the holes, so I was glad I’d shat my guts out the night before, and all I needed to do was piss. I didn’t bother to line up for the sink. I went back to my bunk and started turning myself into the image of Mack, who had already dressed.

I can’t say they didn’t give us enough time. It was all hurry up and wait for our turn at the Chow Hall. While waiting, the workies shot the shit with each other, paying no attention to me. They weren’t interested anymore. I wasn’t new. I just stood by my bunk until Boss Web yelled, “Awright, make your line!” and we all marched off to the chow palace. Bill of fare: egg and cheese on bun, grits on the side. Hearty food! What you’d get in a fast food place, if the place was about to be closed by the health inspectors. Also a cup of coffee. No cream, no sugar, but the first coffee I’d had since I signed those papers. By the time I got through with it, I was so high that Ace came up beside me and said, “Coffee. It happened to me too. My first day. Watch your step. I don’t want you havin any accidents.”

“Awright — into the trucks.” We marched out to the road in front of the Office, where there were eight or ten trucks pulled up. All white, all with long beds and bars on three sides of the beds. The crowd separated into lines. I didn’t know which line to be in, so I stuck with Mack.

“Keep with me,” he said, looking around at the workies lining up for their trucks. “It’s two coffles for every barn. Except for Number 6. They’re the maintenance guys and the kitchen guys and whatever. Rest of us — two coffles for every barn. You go with me, you’ll be in the right coffle. Field boss will take care of you.”

Which means that when you’re lined up, a workie who’s a field boss goes down the line with a long thick chain, and the chain has shackles attached every few feet, and he locks a shackle onto your right leg. Now you’re coffled.

I had Mack in front of me, and Ace behind me, so now I was chained next to both.

“Boss Leroy!” Mack said. “This here’s my new bunkie.”

The field boss looked up. Another black man. This time tall and rangy. “Yeah. Nother newbie. He gonna keep up?”

“Yeah boss,” Ace replied.

The field boss muttered something and went back to locking guys’ legs into the chain.

I looked at Ace and said, “You think I’ll be able to do it? I remember what you said to me last night.”

“That’s why you’ll keep up,” he said. “Just do what I do.”

Mack helped me figure how you climb into the back of a truck when your leg is locked to a chain. I wanted to grab him and kiss him for that! But I was now in a coffle, and I had to do what everybody else was doing.

We had to stand up in the back of the truck for our ride to the field. It was a bumpy ride, but there wasn’t any danger of losing your balance — we were all packed in too tight. No guards, just the field boss driving the truck. I guess they didn’t worry about ten guys running off through the countryside, chained together, with their collars tracking them wherever they went, and forests of razor wire all around them.

The place where we stopped wasn’t any different from any other place — flat, ugly, full of dirt. Except that this one was an onion field. I’d always hated that smell. You don’t go to a fine restaurant and smell onions in there. You smell onions when you walk past a Mama Mary’s Mangia. We scrambled off the truck, and another truck came up and dumped off another cargo of workies. So now there were lots of us, standing around, chatting and farting and whatever. The field bosses opened the storage compartments on the sides of the trucks and laid out rakes and hoes and so on. Then everybody pulled off his cap and rolled up his sleeves, and Boss Leroy went down the line, spraying something smelly on our skin.

“Sun screen,” Ace said. “Shows that they care.” “About gettin their money’s worth,” Mack said. “Sure,” Ace said. “Why not? Who the fuck do you think you are?” “Same as you are,” Mack grinned. This state has a dull, cloudy climate, and it wasn’t even summer yet, but all right, they didn’t want to fry anything but our brains. If we had any. Which we didn’t, or we wouldn’t be there. None of the white dudes was as white as me, but none of them was as dark as the Mexican dudes. Everybody (except me!) had that thick, rough kind of skin you see when you’re passing a construction site and a worker comes too close to you. “Bend your head and close your eyes,” the field boss said, and he sprayed the sun screen on me. So much for my beautiful complexion.

After that we shuffled past the truck and picked up our tools. My coffle was one of the hoe squads. We got to hoe weeds out of the onions, which means that you stand in a line and grub them out with your hoe. It seemed pretty easy, till the boss came down the row and noticed I was hoeing out onions along with the weeds. I didn’t mean to; I just wasn’t any good at it. So he yelled at me and called me a mofo and told me not to do it again or I’d be down on my hands and knees diggin the shit with a trowel. Whatever a trowel was! After he was gone, Ace said to me, “I thought I told you, do what I do. Huh? Can’t you handle that? Don’t try to move so fast, dude. You got the resta your life.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

Next time the boss came along, he told us to put our shoulders into it for a change, these onions will be rotten before you get the fuckin weeds out, and he was yelling at me just like the rest of them. He did that about 20 times that day, but our pace never changed. Everybody knew we had the rest of our lives to work that field.

We got a break after a couple of hours, and even though I’d slowed way down, my legs and shoulders were definitely giving their all for the onions. I hadn’t been so stiff in ages, and I knew it would only get worse that day. So I planned to use the break doing nothing — as little as you can do when you’re chained to nine other workies with the same idea. I used to love lolling around, as Mike called it. You know, just layin on the couch, hittin on the fashion sites, havin another swig of brandy … But it’s hard to loll when your chain mates want to do the same thing. There isn’t a lot of space. And Ace and Mack seemed to have quite a bit to discuss, with me in the middle and not consulted. But at least there was a jug of water that got passed around.

At the end of the break a piss was on schedule. If you want to know whether you’re chained in a coffle, find out whether there’s a scheduled piss. Goes like this: everybody stand up, face the same way, start shootin. It was OK to piss on the onions. “Mr. Hamilton won’t mind,” the field boss said, with one of his few attempts at humor.

Then a strange thing happened — if being one of ten workies all pissing together on command doesn’t seem strange enough to you. “Boss!” somebody called out. “I gotta do it.”

The boss didn’t look friendly. “I’ll put you on the ball,” he said.

The ball?

He unhooked the dude from the chain. Then he chained him back up, to something I couldn’t see. “Sorry, boss,” the dude was saying. “Musta been the chow this morning.”

A ripple of laughter ran through the coffle. “Yeah right,” Mack said. “Like we don’t get the healthiest fuckin grub in the world.”

“You’re ready,” the boss said. “Don’t take all day. Resta you, back to work.”

The chain started moving, taking me with it. I picked up my hoe and shuffled back into the row. I guess I was the only one watching the dude that had to “do it” trudging across the field, holding what looked like a round piece of steel. That thing was almost the size of a cannonball! I never saw a cannonball, but that’s what they look like on TV. So that must be “the ball,” and there was a chain from the ball reaching down to the guy’s leg. He was carrying a fuckin steel ball, and it took both his hands to do it, and he was stumbling off through the field with the thing attached to his leg.

“You hearda the old ball and chain?” Ace said. “Well that’s what you’re lookin at, dude.”

“What’s it for?”

“You sound sorta upset.”

“Yeah! I wouldn’t want that to be me.”

“You’ll get your chance. We all do. Some days, you can’t help needin to shit. So they put the ball on you and send you off to the shitter. That’s the wooden box over there.”

The guy was still waddling through the field, but I could see that he’d almost got to something that looked like a box. No walls or anything. Just a wooden box on a wooden platform. Which now the guy was squatting on. Squatting on a platform, out in the field, with his pants down on his legs, and a ball chained to his ankle, and everybody able to see him. Although, like I said, I guess I was the only one that was looking. Everybody else had seen it before.

“It’s like a porta potty,” Ace said, “but without the useless frills. And it reminds you of what you are.”

“Always did that for me,” Mack said.

“Keep hoein,” the boss said.

While hoeing I got to watch my fellow workie completing his shit squat out there in the open, then humping back to the coffle, where he was chained in again.

A few rows later, and it was time for our picnic lunch. The field boss brought it out in a bucket that was packed someplace in the truck. It was warm, depending on what you mean by “warm.” It was definitely beans, and there might have been some kind of pork that fell into it. When I took the ladle and dug out my portion, I realized I wasn’t that hungry anymore. I tried to dump some of it back, but it stuck so hard to the ladle that Mack said, “Never mind tryin to dump it; I’ll just put it on my plate. Yeah, I like the stuff, OK?” The plates were old pieces of tin bent up at the sides that looked like they’d been knocking around the fields for a hundred years. Rounding out the repast was a tin cup full of coffee, drawn from an old iron pot. Definitely black and definitely cold. Another group piss, and we were back to work.

By the end of the day I was wondering, during the moments when I was fully conscious, whether the purpose of our work was to get the weeds out of Jerry’s onions or to give us good feelings about our home in the barn. Because that’s all that any part of me wanted. My feet were dead in my boots, my hands were cramped in the shape of my hoe, my shoulders were stiff enough to be lumber in a wall, even my skull — my hard bald skull — was pleading to be let out of its cap.

So despite all the scary stories I had spinning around in my brain, I couldn’t wait to jump into a shower with 20 other workies, four or five to a head. That first gush of water was like that first gush of cum I ever had, back when I didn’t even know I had “masturbated.” I was seeing everything through a daze — the concrete shower room with bars instead of windows, Boss Web lathering a gob of soap across his huge black chest, Mack looking eager to polish his balls, and Ace looking like …

Why didn’t I see it before? Ace was perfect. Perfect weight. Perfect height. Perfect muscles, not bulky or showy, but hard and heavy. Beautiful long cock between two perfectly symmetrical balls. Even his feet were exactly what feet should be. After the shower, he methodically dried them with the little towel we had to share, then passed the towel to me and stood in the breeze that was blowing field smells through the bars, drying off the rest of his body. When he started dressing back up in his sickening white workie suit, I felt like I wanted to cry. WORC had a lot to answer for, when it ruined a hot guy like that.

That was one more gruesome introduction to life as a workie — but after a day spent in the fields, even the faggiest travel expert would have given Hamilton Farms a five-star ranking. Quaint, rustic environment; group housing, totally secured and convenient to all local attractions; convivial showers, open to the landscape; plentiful, lukewarm water; free uniforms and laundry service; trademarked “Barn Boss” concierge service, available 24/7; table d’hote, always complimentary to guests of the facility; field trips provided daily; engaging group life, in which you can expect to meet new friends.

At dinner — “chow,” “grub,” “shit” — I kept remembering things that Jerry had said, that I hadn’t paid any attention to at the time. Such as his telling Mike the good things about running his farms with workies. One good thing was that almost all the food he fed his workies was grown right on the property. All except the “animal products.” He didn’t want to get into cattle or hogs; there were too many regulations or something. But with “home production,” the cost of having a workie was even lower than it was in other businesses. And when you own a lot of workies, there are huge economies of scale. But he also said it was a business like any other business. “People think I pay a hundred bucks for a collar and all the rest of it is profit. Which is stupid. First, I’m buying the workies. Then I’m paying the taxes and insurance, and I’m paying for all the housing, and the farm equipment, and the fencing, and the seed, and the cannery. And I’m hiring a bunch of free men to provide security. I try to keep their numbers down. The idea is for workies to boss the other workies. Which is basically all right. But I’m giving them all free housing, free clothing, free healthcare, a totally secured environment, and totally organic food. Free to them! Not to me! So who’s getting the good deal here?” At the time, I was just, yeah yeah, whatever, shut up, Jerry. But now I was eating Jerry’s totally homegrown food, and enjoying his totally secured environment, provided when the field boss locked me onto the chain in the morning and the jeans dude came around to lock me into the barn at night. So it was all coming back to me.

As for “meeting new friends” … That night, Ace and I were pissing next to each other in the latrine, and he said to me, “OK. I told you to keep up, right?”

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the wall.

When I heard his question, my dick shut down. I couldn’t piss anymore.

“Right,” I answered.

“So you did it. You kept up.”

“Thanks, Ace.”

“Later.”

He put his dick back into his shorts and walked away, his workie number black against the hard white cloth sheathing his butt. My piss started to flow again. End of a great first day on the coffle.

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