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Three Jobs by Sean Lovelace
1.
Every Monday.
Every Monday, they’ll
tell you, is a thick rope. Every Friday some FM DJ rings a bell, a klaxon, some gift certificate we’re supposed to salivate
over, and then exchange for freedom. Work is poetry and potion to a god. A warm elixir, a daily swill. Aching throats are
prayers. Don’t ask me the odds on an answer—I’m no true believer, but I’ve held many jobs. The worse
odor I’ve ever smelled was a body we found floating in a railway tanker. That was my DuPont gig, out of Millington,
Tennessee. During offloading, one of the valves wouldn’t pull, so we popped the manhole cover. Someone swore. Someone
coughed and retched. I stared into the hatch. Wasn’t my first or final dead body, but the chemicals certainly showed
me something. Opened my eyes, as they say. Ate away his clothing. Crimped and pickled his skin. Blanched his hair neon pink.
I sit here drinking Dos Equis in the afternoon, typing on an Olympia of all things (word processors still do exist, though
barely), in a squatty Mexican restaurant in Indiana; and that man’s story just came to me like a sudden sweat, again.
2. Work is movement. Clutch and grind. Things fall apart, etc. It’s my skin
cells, my bone and muscle, my blood I’m shedding when I crawl into a dark hot pit with a crew of rangy Illegals, when
I bend and clack my spine, grip in my sweaty hands a metal pick, scraping scalding pick, given to me by a company employed
by a company employed by Mercedes Benz to clean the robots of grease and grime and polymer spackle, the robots that build
the SUVS purring these glistening streets. The automatons glint and glimmer. Chrome insects with yellow corded veins, jaw
lines of steel. These will be the next ones, you have to believe. Some form of master, somewhere down the road. And they will
never sleep or sicken. Never die. Never answer, or need to, your pleadings. Can you speak clang and clatter and hiss?
3. The mop and bucket of blood. The fistful of gurney chrome. The odor of surgical
soap, the intercom crackle, and then, after a long blue night, I drink coffee, eat Bugles from a Tom’s Machine, sit
cleaned-out inside, wire-bushed, on a cold bench in the employee lounge. The emergency room of Denver Health Medical Center,
right in the aorta of that sprawling arterial city. The “Gun and Knife Club,” someone clever said, and the name
stuck. Even has its own documentary on Discovery. Its own police station in the lobby, built in the 1980s, for the gang-bangers
who sometimes trailed the ambulance, to finish the job. And down the hallway a Methadone clinic, a McDonald’s, a gift
shop. Who wishes for a Christmas ornament with GUN AND KNIFE CLUB etched in red across a silver bulb? Someone. Blood is silvery,
pig-iron blue, this quivering yellow. An amazing thing, the hues of blood. A luminous river. A throb. The way it glosses red,
a purplish orange. A mercurial shimmering black. It sputters, runs, gels. It gushes. See it scurry and pool, dry to the crackly
brown skin of fallen leaves. “Death, it’s going around,” a doctor tells me one Friday night over a pot of
coffee so thick we could float a stethoscope bell atop its oily surface. Me and my notebook: the Flat Boy…pressed (Dr.
B. said “ironed”) against the side of Walgreen’s by a delivery truck blurred and blued the flesh teenager
floats into the ER, a skeleton, arms all abscesses and bone. pretty girl, about ten thousand lives ago. “Ya’ll
sell syringes?” man swallows a condom of cocaine, it bursts mid-colon. why didn’t he tell us? i’m not going
to lie to you, we don’t do that. you’re going to lose that leg fold and fold again, fold away down sucking tailpipes.
pecking at cigarette butts. lug nuts. opossums feeding in the parking lots. when did this start? side effects (brain damage,
melancholia, bloating) nurses huddled under awning smoking cigarettes. nurses huddled. student nurse found in custodian closet,
crying we can save you but you might not be what you were sky like soapwhat does the opossum think while faking death?another kid on a Kawasaki.
donor-cycles, we call them donor-cycles foredoomed to failureseriously, listen, everyone stop what they’re doing
and listen. this isn’t going to be a positive outcomehypodermic glistenI left the ER. Left the whole hospital, and all that came
with it—that immediacy to life, death, hope, suffering. Too close, for me. I started feeling nothing, to float through
my shift, eyes closed. So I cleaned out my locker and took a bus straight to Lo Do. February, an eerie quivering glow, since
it was snowing in full sunlight, a Denver phenomenon. Over mugs of Fat Tire my friend said, “You quit? Them benefits.
All those nurses! Are you crazy?” But what did a bricklayer know about emergency rooms? What he’d seen on the
beautiful TV. Still, I do wonder why. Or I wonder: what have I stuck with? Books and beer, I suppose. I’ll be honest.
Those two, a flurry of words, and a feeling I am supposed to be somewhere else.
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