Workman in a main copper furnace, ASARCO, El Paso, Texas 1993,
Photograph by ©Bruce Berman
Requiem
Photo and Text by Bruce Berman
Workman in the Belly of the Beast of the long gone ASARCO smelter.
I loved you and hated you. You tasted like sulfur and gave me so many sweet images.
For an ad agency, I once lied about you for you: the Contop pollution control project which was a $20million joke that never actually did anything except asuage the feelings of nearby Kern Place rersidents whose equity shot through the roof once you were disappeared. They shared the same air as you did.
I dropped a virtual tear for you when you were blown down, your dirty skin replaced by a Grid of Developers who insisted (their) progress was impossible with you.
Millions if not a billion drove by you on I-10.
Your Balls were esposed right there in the middle of a large American city as they drove by. Was that stack a monument of porn? Was it a deterrent? Did we like a deterrent?
You provided a living for hundreds in many generations.
You were bipartisan. You spit down and poisoned two cities and two nations.
I’ve sat in shanties in Juárez and smelled you and I have clinked beer bottles, while my eyes watered from your exhaust, standing in tony house parties in Kern Place.
To say the least… you were definetely something!
I miss you and your edge, your soul of wildness, your huffing and snarling fire.
You were, they say, a remnant from an era that needed to die. We did to you what we do to old rabid dogs.
You were removed with a promise of something great to come.
You couldn’t be tamed so you had to die, dramatically disappeared and eventually replaced by… what?
