for William Safire
I worked construction the summer
I turned sixteen, thinking it would be
a quick way to make money for beer
and drugs. My friend Pete’s father
owned the company, and he promised
me and my friend Mac that if we worked cheap,
under the table for the summer, he’d see to it
we’d get ten bucks an hour in the fall.
I saw this as a quick fix, rather than what it was,
the beginning of a long series of bad jobs
that broke my back and spirit, that made me
wish I could use my brain instead of my body
to earn a wage. I had no idea that I’d never see
the ten dollar job, that Pete’s father
was an asshole who used us for two months
to dig a foundation and haul scrap iron.
I had no idea, either, that beyond
the horizon of that construction site
lay an equally unpleasant assortment
of labors: glasscutter; janitor; housepainter.
And more: garbageman; stockboy; salesman.
I didn’t want to end up like my father,
almost forty years inside the steel mill,
and when he was gone, no insurance,
no pension, no stories to tell. Mac and I quit
when we realized that Pete’s best friend Joe
was the only one who was going to get the fall job,
and one night at Fairmount Lanes, Pete
and Joe walked in and Mac decided we were
going to take out some frustration on their heads.
He was going to take Pete; I’d take Joe.
And the truth is if we’d gone through with it,
we’d've gotten our asses kicked, drunk as we were,
strong as they were, and that’s how it is
in this life, and if you think it’s different than that,
if you think some angel’s going to watch over you
and make sure you get the ten dollar job,
and the Petes and Joes get the shaft, then you might
as well try to make a living as a writer, get a job
digging ditches and write how it feels to have
calloused hands and sore muscles, how it feels
to work hard for your money for some bastard
who thinks of you as a mule or a cow, and wait
and see if some hot shot agent in New York
doesn’t call you up and say, “Your foreman tells me
you’re writing a novel. I’d like to see your work.”
-Chris Kennedy
