Leave Your Troubles At the Gate

            BEFORE Josh called and told me that he had nearly run the semi off the road to avoid a head-on collision with an anesthesiologist texting away while behind the wheel of her brand new Camero , I was sitting at my desk, head in both hands, sweat soaking through my first winter layer, brought on by my most recent employee confrontation. I thought about what I was trying to convey to Beau that morning as I chewed him out, steam pouring out of my mouth against the cold in the air and the cold emanating from him towards me. I told him to leave his troubles at the gate and pretend that nothing was more important inside this fence than work.

I imagine what it would look like if we could leave all our troubles at the gate when we arrive at work each morning, at varying times before the production lines start up at 6:00am. Children and wives and grandparents and girlfriends and mistresses and at least one self-proclaimed baby mama hop out of trucks, cars, vehicles that can only be described as jalopies, where they take their places behind the chain link fence, twining their fingers like ivy through the cold thin metal. “Can’t take ya with me, baby,” the guys say, and the concerns hop out of their vehicles with a “Pick me up when you get off?” Everyone, myself included, offer some kind of affirmative- nods, smiles through pain, a chipper ‘you know it’. Each passenger door slams closed and we blow a kiss to the fight we had last night about soggy meatloaf, or the light bill that’s two months late, or the affair that won’t die, or the bottles hidden at the bottom of the trash can again, the surgery our daughter needs that this job’s wages won’t come close to covering.

With a clear head and a clear conscience each man works like a bandit. A ten-hour day knocked out clean and true, one swift strike to the workday’s jaw. We power machines down. There’s not much about life work anyone talks about on the way back to the time clock, because inside these gates we're all pretending that work is all there is. Everyone’s an actor giving a flawless performance as a dedicated lumber stacker, lumber grader, truck driver or maintenance man, even the boss’ son starring as planer mill manager, a steadfast pillar of commitment that assures the community that this plant is here to stay. They clock out and I lock up.

We start up our cars and trucks and pull down to the gate to find our worries and troubles and concerns right where we left them. A few of the lesser concerns talk amongst themselves, but the big ones- Is my wife going to leave me? Is my girlfriend pregnant again? Am I about to lose my job? Am I going to be a good daddy?- they are silent against the fence, fingers like ice cold vices glued to the fence. The greetings are much different than the partings. Each man sighs as his biggest Worry slips in the vehicle. Each Worry leans over as if to stroke her hard-working man’s face and give him a kiss. Instead, her frigid hand slips through his chest, as if the flesh was an unbuttoned shirt in July, waiting for one cool breeze. Worry slips her fingers around her man’s heart and squeezes, infrequently, but enough so he doesn’t breath like he did at work today, after he left this worry down by the gate, put on his work face and began to act his part. Each man tries to breath, but a full and satisfyingly deep breath is just out of reach. “I missed you,” each Worry coos, looking deep into her man’s eyes. The costumes are off, the play is over, and the lights are now going up. The lighting reveals more worries, more concerns. possibly pebbles of happiness if they could focus. But today the worries are like a broken tooth he can’t stop tonguing. It’s broken and it’s hurt, but it’s his. “Missed you too, baby,” he says, and they hit the dusty trail. 

Daniel's First Day

Wrote this a good while ago...

THE S382 planer screams like a Tai-fighter each time a board flies through. The top and bottom head, two cylinders covered with eight rows of spiraling knives, scour the rough lumber until it shoots out, like slow motion laser beams. In the line of fire of the outfeed, where the boards are spat out of the machine, is the stacker operator. I imagine he’s a member of the Rebel Alliance, and the bad guys can’t hit him. The boards are eaten one by one, their screams filling my head with imaginary starships, and I’m gone.

            Yesterday morning will not get out of my head. The new employee’s first day, he’s waiting by the front door, holding the new hard hat I just gave him in one hand, an insulated lunch box in the other. It’s full of bottles of water. Safeguard against the Mississippi heat. Then he lurches. His left leg juts out like a spider’s looking for a perch, then his hips sink. His head seems to have filled with solid lead, because it’s tilting out over his knee. His eyes are unfocused, his jaw slack as useless chain. “This mother fucker is still drunk from last night,” is the thought the crawls across my eyes, and I almost instantly regret it. His ponderous head has become magnetic, and he crashes into the ground, on the biggest rock within 50 feet, left temple first. Right arm springs to his body, and one leg stiffens straight out while the other struggles to find a fetal home. He’s shaking. Convulsing. Seizure. “Somebody call 9-1-1,” I say, jumping into a kneel beside him. I hear the words, “I don’t have no service,” and I say, “Go inside and call 9-1-1!”

            He goes limp, and I almost piss my pants. Then his eyes come to life, but like a drugged-up patient waking up from surgery. He starts trying to stand, and begins to fall over. This time I catch him. I try to sit him down, but he wants to get up. I try to help him stand, but his legs won’t hold him. His face was already pockmarked, but now he’s pouring blood out of a gumball-sized hole in his cheekbone. Not the temple, the temple is still sacred.

            The local fire department arrives, and I sigh in my heart because I don’t have to take care of him anymore. The Mexicans have already walked down to the line to begin work. They’ve seen some shit. They know there’s no point watching shit get worse if you can’t do anything about it. The American blacks and whites stop watching because everything is going to be fine. The entertainment is over. He’s put on a stretcher, strapped down, and the real EMT’s from the nearest big town, 30 minutes away, arrive. It’s amazing how smug driving 30 minutes to take care of a bad concussion victim can make a Deep South paramedic unit. They rotate the victim to his side four times so he can spew vomit onto the slag. Spew. Vomit. Ralph. Upchuck. He done? Think so. They slide that poor bastard in the ambulance and off he goes.

            Is there anything you need from me? Is there anything I can do? His wife is here and in the ambulance now, no one seems quite sure what to do with his car. “We’ll come get it later,” she says, then adds “He was so excited about having a job.”

            Inside I look over his application. He was a big rig driver. Drove big forklifts, too. What if he’d had a seizure on the road? How come the comparable blessing, having a seizure and busting his face open and sustaining a concussion that came from a blow loud enough to sound like someone hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat, why did that blessing have to come to me? In front of me? It’s like a homeless angel came and bestowed a shopping cart full of spit filled cans to me to clean and turn in for scrap.

            The boss and his boss (my dad), pull up a couple hours later. “Quite a morning, huh?” my dad says, shaking my hand. I understand. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Don’t give him anything else to freak out about. No big deal, no freak out. “Get any trucks in this morning?” The worst part is it works. Their tactics work like a box of fucking Lucky Charms. “Four,” I answer. We go to the local meat and three, and I have fried catfish and three vegetables.

            His dad comes and picks up the car later that day. He says the same thing as the wife. “He was so excited about this job. Hadn’t had a seizure in nine years. Doctor always told him that nerves’ll do it, but that never had happened.” I nod. “Doctor put ‘im on some good med’cine, shouldn’t have no more problems now.” I wish him the best. His time card was punched in at 6:55AM. I write in 7:05AM as the time out.

            I saw him at a different meat and three about six months later. Face still pockmarked, steps and handshake hauntingly jerky. Everything all good? I ask. Everything’s great, he says. He wouldn’t have lasted for us. Too much stress at our yard.

            I wonder what a seizure feels like. I know it’s not letting go, but I want it to be. I want to have a letting go seizure, where I seize up and say, What can I do? I’m sorry, but I’m going to be completely out of commission for the next 30 seconds. Not going to check the numbers. Not going to enter data. Not going to analyze the problem and figure out why the guys are working so poorly in this blissful 105 degree, 100 percent humidity, 120 heat index weather. No, my body is doing what my mind refuses to do, it is saying no to all this bullshit and shutting down for a minute. I’m going to rest by not resting, it says. I’m going to relax by tensing up everywhere. Wait until I’m done. Then you’ll know peace. Then you’ll know serenity. Sit up and wake up and puke up your breakfast, young man. You just lost your job five minutes into your first day. 

Famous Friends

ON the way to the eye doctor for my annual checkup, I started wondering what it would be like once my wife and I were best friends with Beyonce and Jayzee. I’ll learn how to correctly spell my new best friend’s name soon after we start hanging out I’m sure. This daydream came about for fairly obvious reasons. One, I was going to pick out new glasses, that day. As everyone knows, in my mind at least, the fate of the free world rests not so much on who is elected the president of the United States, or whether or not Iran obtains nukes, or the euro fails and western Europe descends into another world war, albeit economic and boring as hell (from afar). No, the fate of the free worlds rests upon what glasses I choose. Upon picking said marvelous glasses, a ripple of approving murmurs will spill out from our little town of Starkville, MS, and gather steam, momentum, the power of the people of our great nation itself, and people everywhere will begin with a whisper and finish with a shout, “What amazing glasses, Jim!” Hunger a thing of the past, poverty eradicated, all weapons of mass destruction fired into space and destroyed… as long as I make the right decision. The wrong decision, and the whispering to shouting motif rings real again in my imagination, but with anger and consternation and pure, joyous schedenfraud at my ridiculous glasses that channels into the earth, straight to every fault line on the planet, the derision of all mankind roughly grabbing those plates and cracking them in their bitter hands like old, tasteless chocolate.

            I have not been diagnosed with narcissism, but I fear its only because I usally keep these thoughts to myself. Usually.

            The other reason Jay-Z and Beyonce will obviously want to become besties with my wife and I is because we have a daughter born within a month of their daughter. I worried we wouldn’t have much to talk about when we go to visit them in Neeeew Yoooork, or when they come see us in Mississippi, but by then we’ll also be billionaires, because the fantasy series that’s been kicking around in my head for a year is going to be pretty darn successful. J.K. Rowling will keep calling my assistant saying, “One lunch, Damien, a single hour long lunch with Mr. Hunt,” to which Damien will patiently sigh and say, “J.K., I told you, Mr. and Mrs. Hunt are still with Mr. and Mrs. Jay-Z. They’re having a month long play date. He’ll text you when he gets back in town.” So why wouldn’t Jay-Z and Beyonce want to hang out with us? Probably for fear that they’ll wish their daughter was as sweet, playful, and full of baby charm as ours, I’d imagine. If imagining was something I did.

            It used to be, back when I was 12 and I first got a TV in my room, and I was watching Jay Leno on Friday nights, I’d imagine myself sitting on that couch, just joshing, just cracking Jay Leno up so bad he’d really want me to come back all the time. I’d initially be invited on because I was such an amazing football/basketball player, a white Deion Sanders. I was doing upwards of 50 push ups a day when I wasn’t tired from playing a couple hours of Nintendo (Secret of Mana) every day after school, or better yet, getting up early in the mornings to get in some RPG time. I’m not sure how many people really admit to wanting to be famous; that phrasing itself sounds horrible. I simply want to be invited to fabulous Hollywood parties, attend them when able, decline when not, and still get invited back. To be on friendly terms with Tom Brady or Drew Brees, Beyonce or Jay-Z, to call up M. Night Shamalan and say, “Come on M., the Village? I didn’t even see the whole thing through to the “climax” on the sci-fy channel and I know it was dumb. Sure, come over around 7 and we’ll kick around some ideas over some scotch.”

            It’s not so much that as thinking you are someone more special than you really are. That someone will stop you as you’re walking back to the truck after the bi-weekly writer’s group that meets on Saturday mornings and say, “Hey, you’re an amazing writer, aren’t you! Not bad looking either, I must say, not bad looking at all!” Why does this person look like Heidi Klum in her youth and talk like Yukon Cornelius? I don’t know. Childhood plus adolescence pretty much equals adulthood, and the math never checks out. It is also, for me, a way to avoid the real work of writing, which is my self-professed dream. I can’t believe those people, however, who say, “If you don’t love it, it’s just another job you’re going to hate.” When did George Walker Bush start giving out shitty life advise to Redbook? Anyone who has truly had a passion for any avocation and not been a savant at said passion will at some point or other loath that dream, right? Why this dream, you ask? Why is it so hard? Why won’t it come easier? I push and I push and I push, but the rock doesn’t even get close to the top of the hill. It moves a few inches. I give Sisyphus comparative comfort.