You never forget your first Calico...

I was a very young

21

and it was my first job

as an electrician's apprentice

in NYC

I had never dealt with men

before

I had avoided them

on purpose

but construction

was an exclusively male

bastion

in the early 80's

until

the battering ram

of Affirmative Action

bashed

the doors

to the building trades

open

for women and non-whites

so

on July 10, 1983

I naively came

smiling in my hard hat

with my pig tails

bouncing

onto

the jobsite

expecting to

be treated

fairly

as an employee

or at least

civil

as a human being

but what I got when I

arrived

at The World Trade Center complex

was anything but fair or civil

(but that is for another blog)

I was one of only four

women

on the construction site

(I was the token white women

the others were black, Puerto Rican

and Chinese

as the Affirmative Action

quotas dictated)

and I soon learned

that we were considered

prey

fair game

treated like strays

that had made their way

onto a worksite

and

from the looks of

the pornography strewn

sheetrock

it was clear that

we were not welcom

here

so there I was

all alone

in a

hostile

environment

when I met my first

Calico

there she was

looking as beat up

as I felt

with her tattered ear

and her stumpy tail

dirty and undesirable

kinda like me

at the end of the work day

she must have been watching me

for awhile

before she felt safe enough

to make her presence known

much the same way

I observe

my surroundings

to assess my safety

and

on this particular jobsite

I never felt safe

so I had to come up with

creative ways

to prevent harm

as I had heard

about all of the

tradeswomen pioneers

who were

sexually assaulted

on the job

while coworkers watched

and no one helped

so

knowing

that I was working in a

war zone

I employed all of my most

extreme survival techniques

learned

in my own childhood home

She came one winter's

Solstice morning

like a vapor

appearing out of the

early morning mist

around 5:45am

when it was still dark

and I was warming myself

by a fire barrel

when I first noticed

Miss Calico

I was contemplating

the day's work/warfare

and trying to come up

with a scheme

to keep the men off of me

for just one more day

their brazen hands

had already groped me

while I was on top

of a ladder

with my arms up 

tangled up in a ceiling

of razor sharp pencil rod

and I dove down

onto the molestor

with my

trademark feline

fuck it

let's do this

attitude

with fists flailing

figuring

I could give an ass whoopin

as good as I could get one

but on this misty solstice morning

Miss Calico came

bearing

a solution
whispering

dance with me sister

dance with me

and so we did

we danced around

the flaming barrel

and the men never bothered me again

because they thought I was crazy

I was reading a

Sword & Sorceress

sci fi book

at the time

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

with

a heroine named

Sabazel

and

I christened my

Calico

sister witch

Sabazel

and took her home

to make her my own

dirty and undesirable

no more...