“So son… you want to be a roughneck, huh?” The buzzing and flickering of the fluorescent lights distracts Terrance for a minute, so he picks up a broom and gives the lighting fixture a solid whack. Unperturbed, the light continues to buzz and flicker. Apparently, this action satisfies whatever demand the buzzing places on him so he puts the broom back down by a filing cabinet.
I just met Terrance. Just five minutes ago. And I am not impressed.
The feeling is almost certainly mutual.
Terrance has a twirling cluster of nose hair exiting his left nostril. It is held in place by a small, pebble-like booger the color of lime. Despite the fact that he has male-pattern baldness and Caucasian skin, Terrance had grown out the hair on the sides of his head into a pony tail held in place with a gaudy silver clasp set with a turquoise gem. Two brand new cowboy boots gleam at me from up top his desk. So shiny I can almost see my face in them. I know without asking that Terrance hasn’t done a day’s hard labor in his entire life.
Without asking I also know that Terrance is being rude to me. In fact, he’s being rude on purpose. He has asked me that question about wanting to be a roughneck no less than three times, in between the various phone calls. Restarting the conversation over and over, never even hesitating before picking up the next ring. Despite the fact that my application is right in front of him, Terrance has also managed to call me by the wrong name twice. Again, on purpose. What makes him madder is that I don’t bother to correct him.
“Yes sir,” I answered. “I need the money to pay for college.”
That wasn’t the only reason I was there. Even at that moment I knew it. I was there because my dad said I wasn’t man enough to do it and because I was finally old enough to be sick of listening to him say that sort of thing. But mostly I was there because I was a dumb kid. That’s why I let Terrance know upfront that I only wanted to work there a short while. A way of signaling that I was a person of secret value. Which, again, was stupid.
“Just the summer then?” Terrance already knows that this is the case. I told him that on the phone when I set up this interview and again when I entered. Part of me felt like it was the right thing to do, so I wouldn’t be hired under false pretenses.
I realize after a moment, Terrance just wants to see me beg for it.
This whole situation must amuse Terrance greatly. I also realize I don’t care.
“I know sir… I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s not worth it to bring me on for the summer. You’re thinking ‘this kid doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into’ but I promise I’ll do my best, sir. You won’t regret it.”
I know this is all bullshit. This is a company that hired my step-dad. If they hired him, they’ll hire anyone.
“It’s a very tough job you understand, not many people like us out there.” Terrance laughs.
He’s referring to our skin. As his chuckle dies, Terrance lifts up one of his hands from my application and pulls the pebble like booger off of the clump of nostril hair and wipes it on his pants. No embarrassment. No shame. I’m not anybody in his eyes that he should be embarrassed or ashamed by my opinion. He puts my application in the garbage at the side of his desk.
“Do I have the job, sir?”
Terrance would have given this job to any meth-head off the street, but he won’t give it to me. Not until he sees me crawl.
“You should go apply over at Peterson. Peterson sometimes hires kids like you for the summer. You won’t be a roughneck, of course, and of course the wage is less. He’ll have you drive around and check pumps. Not much to it, but you’ll make a decent amount.” Terrance leans back in his chair and presses a button on his phone to silence a sudden ring. He’s looking at me. I know what he wants. He wants me to plead my case.
“Sir, I want this job. I promise I’ll work hard. I’ve worked in sawmills. I’ve roofed houses. I’ve worked construction. Just give me a chance.”
I could tell Terrance a lot of things, and back then I thought they were all very impressive. I couldn’t see that I was square peg trying to insert itself into a round hole. I was deaf to the idea that my desire was ludicrous. I wanted to tell Terrance that I once got a personal phone call from a Nobel Laureate who wanted to congratulate me on winning a scholarship in his name. I wanted to tell him my Enlightenment Literature professor had followed me out of class the last day of winter quarter and told me I was the best student he ever had and he wanted to push one of my papers for publication. I wanted to tell him a lot of things, but none of them had anything to do with greasing gears or tripping pipe or digging trenches. I wanted to work on a drilling rig because I hated the part of myself that even felt pride at such things.
“You’re persistent, aren’t you, kid?”
I think of my dad telling me that I was a pussy for my whole life. I think of the indignity of being beaten by my sister, a girl, for so much of my young life. Of all the shit-sandwiches eaten over and over again.
“Yes sir. If you throw away that application I’ll just fill out another one. I want this job.”
“Are you sure? This is going to be rough kid. There’s a reason they call working on a drilling rig roughnecking.”
“I’m sure.”
With two nicotine stained fingernails Terrance pulls my application back out of the garbage and then pulls a form from inside of his desk. He writes a few words on it then hands it to me.
It’s a form for a drug test.
I’m in.
I know where I have to go.
Terrance tells me, anyway.
In under half an hour, I’m at the drug testing facility.
The whole place feels like a cheap movie. Or an ultra expensive movie where the producers are trying to signal that everything is cheap. You couldn’t have made a cheaper or dirtier place if you tried. I remember that the walls were covered with cheap fiber board panels that were designed to look like real wood paneling. Except the panels buckled in odd ways and never abutted one to another properly. The ceiling lights made them look like plastic. I’d had the exact same paneling in my room in my mother’s basement for the first few years of high school, which is how I remember.
If I had to guess, the waiting room used to be a kitchen and a living room. The whole facility began existence as someone’s house. It’s all so cheap and it reminded me of the animal shelter in my hometown. Everything feeling like it came from the discount section at Home Depot including the furniture. If a guy put up a few walls it would be a house again and not a drug-testing lab.
From the appearance of the other folks in the waiting room, everyone but me is on parole. People leave me alone, for the most part. I leave them alone in turn. This was before cellphones were everywhere and people still knew how to be bored together. Then my name is called.
The first thing I notice about the lab tech who walks me to the bathroom is that he is very flamboyantly gay. I think nothing of it. It doesn’t register to me that there is anything untoward about this arrangement.
In the years that have since transpired, I have sometimes wondered if having a job staring at dicks all day is why that odd man chose to keep living in rural New Mexico instead of moving to a larger population center. I can think of no other reason someone would keep living in that hell-hole. If this sounds like the homophobia of a young man, I assure you that it is not.
I’d done two other urinalysis tests when I’d worked at the sawmill the previous summers. Thinking myself well-prepared, I’d chugged two bottles of water in the car on the way over. I expect to be shown to a bathroom with a cup to do my business. I am not prepared when the lab tech enters the bathroom with me.
Something about the whole building has thrown me off balance. Bad construction is like my kryptonite. All the bad work catches my attention and I can’t quite ever be at peace. This bathroom used to adjoin someone’s bedroom. I can see where the wall was patched. What does the plumbing look like underneath? What’s going on here?
I stand there, confused, waiting for the lab tech to leave. He continues not leave.
“I need to see it come out,” he whispers.
“For a job?” I exclaim. “I didn’t just get out of prison or anything.”
He shrugs by way of apology but there’s something I don’t like in his eyes.
“It’s the rules,” he says.
I take the cup from him, roughly.
I definitely don’t like his eyes, but screw it. It was difficult enough to get through Terrance. I’m not backing out now.
“Fine,” I say.
I undo my zipper and position the cup, promising myself that if the lab tech does anything funny, I’ll throw the contents in his face. I raise up the shoulder nearest to the lab tech but he just leans over to get a better look. I can’t squeeze out a drop.
My penis wants to crawl inside my body like a turtle head.
This last something like thirty seconds or several decades.
The technician moves imperceptibly closer and licks his lips to say something but I grunt and a little bit of urine comes out. The technician looks like he’s about to say something again, but I grunt even louder to shut him up. Like some weird gorilla doing some weird gorilla thing you see in movies. I continually grunt until the whole thing is full. Then I stop like a goddamn faucet right on the line.
I want to hit something, if only to make a connection with something solid. I feel unmoored, untethered from the right and well-ordered world.
The lab tech laughs like this is the funniest thing that has ever happened in his entire life and I blush as I tuck myself back into my pants.
I hate everything that has just happened and leave as quickly as possible.
I promise his eyes were wrong. I promise I don’t think it was actually in the rules he had to watch. Why didn’t I say anything?
A few hours later I’m driving my mother, my little sister, and my little brother to the video rental store. I’m paying with the fumes of my savings from the previous summer. I’ll have money soon enough. I’ll be making almost double what I made in the mill when the paychecks start rolling in. I need to do something wholesome to get the start of the day out of my system. I feel like I’m in some dingy movie from the seventies. It feels like the day began in a pornographic world. A dirtier world than the one I want to inhabit.
What I want is the clean, well-mannered world of my imagination. The world that has never existed, but which I’m sure must exist. Where behaviors are appropriate and every action has a theme. Where a man can do a thing and know it was right.
We turn a corner to find a motorcycle accident in the middle of the road. The motorcycle is partially wrapped around a power pole. There’s a dark skid-mark right up to the collision. There’s a guy staggering in the middle of the road gushing blood. Distantly, there’s a truck circling the scene, which I initially take for someone confused as to how to help, or else gawking at the spectacle.
I park the car immediately and get out. I’m upset with myself for not doing anything at the testing facility earlier like asking to see a specific copy of the policy. Which I realized I ought to have done the second I left the damn place. Who just lets another man watch him piss without putting up some kind of resistance? Without demanding proof? At least I know what to do here and don’t get panicked over the sight of blood.
I look over my shoulder and tell my mother to call 9-1-1. My little brother and sister have eyes the size of saucers. I approach a guy in leather pants and leather vest who is gushing blood everywhere while he is attempting to pick up the remnants of his motorcycle. His arms are covered in road rash. Within another few paces I can smell the booze coming off him.
“Dude, sit down! I’m here to help. You’ve just been in an accident.”
“No shit!” he says, full of hostility.
“Sit down and let me have a look at you.”
“I’m fine.”
It was at this point I noticed a motorcycle helmet on the ground, neatly cracked in half like a geode. If it hadn’t been for that helmet, I suppose that guy would have been dead when I turned the corner.
“Oh man, you’ve at least got a concussion. You’re not thinking straight, buddy. Please just sit down for a minute. The ambulance is on its way.”
“Did you call the f—king cops?” he shouts, scandalized.
Now he’s not trying to pull his motorcycle off the telephone pole anymore. Now he’s approaching me with his fists up. I step back and throw up my hands to show I’m not threat, but part of me wants to punch him in his stupid goddamn face. Another part wishes he’d fall down dead right there. I’m so tired of trying to behave reasonably and responsibly in this world. Part of me wishes to do a lot worse instead.
The circling truck changes direction and speeds between us as I continue to back up. The tires kick up dust and dirt all over my pants.
“You get the f—k away from my husband!” a drunk woman shouts.
To my mounting medical horror, in a display of freakish drug-addict strength, the man gushing blood from half a dozen wounds has lifted his motorcycle up to his chest level on the other side of the truck and thrown it into the bed. Then, comically, he tosses in each half of his broken motorcycle helmet. They spin like tops.
“Oh f—k me,” I say.
With the weak part of my mind, the part of me that’s a writer that is always standing back to watch what is happening around me, the part that my father distrusts and dislikes, I make a note of the license plate number of the truck.
“Mind your own f—king business!” the wife says.
“Lady, please! Your husband needs an ambulance and a hospital. You could kill him if you just go home.”
I throw up my hands, but I’m helpless.
The husband is already opening the passenger door.
Then they’re off. More dust. More gravel thrown on my pants. Two middle fingers target me as they make way to the main road.
I make sure to give the 9-11 operator the license plate number when I get back to the car. I still hope they got arrested.
Minutes later, we are at the video rental store and I am determined to know peace. I am determined to find order in the arts. I tell my little brother and sister to get whatever they want. I need a comfort movie. Something where good destroys evil. Bruce Campbell. Army of Darkness. I’ve seen it a dozen times. I make my way to the action movies.
A pair of teenagers blocks my path. Fourteen or fifteen, a boy and a girl, holding hands. The girl is heavily pregnant. They discuss the terms of a buy one get one promotion. All I can think of is a girl back home with big eyes and a pretty smile who was never my girlfriend, because, and I quote: “You never asked.” I don’t have a girlfriend at all, or even a friend, really. I’d made sure of that.
“Go on, babe. Get whatever you want,” the boy says.
“Ah, sugar, you should get a movie, too,” she coos.
Why don’t I have anything like this young couple? Why am I so much less worthy? Why am I chasing the approval of a man who will never give it to me? Why is it that the world has always felt too grotesque and petty for my sensibilities? Why do I hate myself so much? Why, at the end of it all, do I hate myself so much?
“Nah, I want you to have it,” the boy murmurs into the top of her hair.
“You mean it?”
Then he says it, words which I will remember even if Alzheimer’s or dementia takes the rest of my memory. Words caved into the rock of my soul. Words Shakespeare himself could never have conceived.
“Of course. I f—king love you and shit.”
She looks at him, this boy with half a mustache, with an expression of the most profound true love in the universe.
I f—king love you and shit.
I didn’t even watch Army of Darkness when we got back to my mom’s house. I went to bed that night realizing I didn’t even know the question at the source of my eternal unrest. I didn’t know what I wanted or what I didn’t want. I was as lost as a lost man can be.
I didn’t know shit about f—k.
And I hadn’t even started work on the drilling rig yet.
You mentioned the teens in the video store before but I don't think you told us the whole scene. How incredibly moving. Thank you.
There are definitely drug-test outfits with policies to avoid you smuggling in a baggie of somebody else's clean urine. I undetstand this is because there are workers-comp. insurance policies that incentivize such policies.