Terminal

FOUR

So, let me get this straight. You’ve got hair on your dick? Not on your balls but on your dick?

On the shaft?”

“Yeah.” John took another bite of his bologna sandwich. “Doesn’t everybody? You mean that you guys don’t?”

Sherm and I arched our eyebrows at each other, and after a second’s pause we started howling. I sprayed soda across the lunchroom table, I laughed so hard.

“John,” I wiped the soda up with a napkin, “how many guys have you seen in porno movies with hair on their fucking dicks?”

He shrugged. “I just figured they shaved, dog. A lot of those guys shave their balls, you know.”

Still howling, Sherm turned to the table behind us.

“Yo, Louis, check this shit out. John’s got hair on his dick!”

Louis, who ran the Number Four line, looked perplexed.

“What, you mean like around the balls? Don’t we all got that?”

Sherm nodded at John. “Tell ’em.”

Frowning, John’s ears began to turn red.

“I’ve got hair growing up the sides of my dick. It goes about halfway up. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

The entire lunchroom exploded in laughter. John’s ears turned completely scarlet.

“I’m gonna start calling you Carpet Dick.” Sherm chuckled.

That was pretty much how it went every day. We’d file into the lunchroom at twelve, head back out at twenty-five after—just enough time to take a piss or call home before the bell rang and we had to be back in our work areas. Sometimes we talked about sports; how the Orioles and the Ravens and the Steelers were sucking, or listened to the various NASCAR camps debate the drivers; who’d forced who off the track and whether Ford was better than Chevy. Other times it was swimsuit models and porno starlets, or music, or hunting, or the latest movie, or what happened at the strip joint on the edge of town. In between these topics, we razzed each other constantly because that’s what guys do.

I bring this up, not because it’s important that my best friend was a mutant with a hairy dick, but because it was the last good time I can honestly remember before things turned to complete shit. In the last twenty-four hours, I’d been diagnosed with cancer; told that I was dying and that there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it, thrown up a very large and disgusting piece of myself in the toilet, lied to my wife, and learned that the credit card was shut down, the electricity was about to follow, and we couldn’t afford to pay for any of it. But it got worse. It got a lot fucking worse.

The whole day had been progressively bad. I overslept and was almost late for work. I felt like shit. Part of it was depression. It’s not every morning that you wake up and remember that you’re dying. But that’s what I did. I got up, looked at the alarm clock, cursed, shuffled to the bathroom, pissed, and as I was shaking it off, I remembered.

But it wasn’t just the depression. My head was killing me. I swallowed four aspirin with my first coffee, and they had no effect. I stopped on the way to work, bought another cup of coffee and some cigarettes, and puked the coffee back up a few minutes later. The cigarettes tasted like dried dog shit, but I smoked them anyway. My coughing fits came in spurts, and each time one struck, my head felt worse. All morning long, I hocked bloody phlegm into black piles of foundry dirt and covered them up with my boot so that nobody would see them. The heat was bad. By nine in the morning, the temperature inside the foundry usually hovered around ninety-five degrees. That morning was no exception, especially around the furnace and ladle areas, where it was considerably higher. I ran the Number Two line, which was about fifty feet from the furnace. It was scorching in my area. The company provided us with free sports drinks that they kept in big coolers at different areas on the floor. I drank and drank, but it still seemed to sweat right through me. I felt like I had a fever. My mouth tasted funny too—a sickening, sour mixture of sports drink and tobacco and bloody saliva. Sweat ran into my eyes beneath my safety goggles and my skin felt tight and itchy.

The foundry wasn’t just hot; it was dirty and loud too. All day long, forklifts rumbled, dumping hoppers full of scrap metal into the furnaces. Every time they backed up, there was a deafening BEEP BEEP BEEP that made my temples throb. People paged each other over the intercom all day long. Each breath brought more dirt into my lungs. When I went home at the end of each day, our shower turned black as I scrubbed the iron particles and grime from my pores. I was never completely clean until the weekend, when I had two extra days to get the grit out of my system. My arms were a crazy quilt of pockmarks, where burning flecks of metal had spattered them over the last five years. I used to watch the old-timers, wondering if they had started like me. Most of them had ugly burn marks that put my little scars to shame. All of them suffered from a terrible, racking cough; what we jokingly referred to as “black lung.” I remember my old man had it, before he ran off with the waitress and did us all the favor of getting killed.

That morning, while I stood there sweating and aching, I wondered if maybe the foundry had given me cancer. Maybe Michelle and I could sue them. Then I lit up another cigarette and decided that it didn’t really matter one way or the other where I’d gotten the cancer. The Number Two line mold machine—specifically, a ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot steel-and-hydraulic monstrosity—was called The Hunter, since that was the name of the company that manufactured it and because “compression mold maker” was too much of a mouthful for some of our more illiterate coworkers. It compressed tons of black sand into small four-foot-by-four-foot block molds. These blocks had a pattern inside of them. In my case, the pattern was of a power steering gear. The molds exited the machine and traveled down a roller belt to the pouring department, where they were filled with molten metal and sent to the next department via conveyor.

The sand entered the machine through a funnel at the top. Beneath this funnel was a small, cramped space where the pattern was kept. When the sand poured in, the pattern, along with the other three walls of the space, would squeeze together and form the mold. Around ten that morning, I was wedged into the space between the pattern and the walls with a socket wrench in hand. I had to change patterns because we were starting production on a different mold after lunch. The machine was locked out, a safety procedure that involved the operator shutting off the power and putting a big red tag on the power button, warning everyone that turning it back on would be a very bad idea.

Except that Juan didn’t know it would be a bad idea because Juan couldn’t read English, including the warning in English on the lockout tag.

Juan was a good guy. He threw darts with his crew down at Murphy’s Place on Friday nights, was willing to trade lunches, and had been teaching me to swear in Spanish. We’d gotten as far as Chocho, Chíngate, Chinga tu madre, and Hijo de la gran puta. Now I was learning how to use them in a complete sentence.

That morning, he stopped by my machine, noticed my line of molds was getting low, looked around, and didn’t see me inside the machine. Figuring that I was in the bathroom or on break, and being the good guy that he was, Juan decided to help me get caught up on production. He removed the lockout tag and turned the power on.

I was still inside when I heard the hydraulics kick in. The motor shrieked to life a second later. I immediately dropped my socket wrench and sprang for the funnel. Juan pressed the first button and I heard a heavy rustling as two tons of sand filled the hopper above my head. I shouted, but with his earplugs and the noise from the furnace, he never heard me. Clearing the funnel, I grasped the angle iron and pulled myself out. I slid down the ladder, and he finally noticed me cursing at him in both English and Spanish.

“Juan! What the fuck are you doing, man? You could have killed me!”

“Yo, I’m sorry Tommy!” He held his hands up in front of him. “I didn’t know you were in there. I figured I would—”

“Save it, man! For fuck’s sake, dog, what the hell were you thinking? Don’t you know what this is?” I fingered the lockout tag.

“I couldn’t read it.”

“Well you better fucking learn!” I grabbed him by the shirt, and his eyes grew wide. He pressed against me, and I shoved him backward, slamming him into the machine. His teeth clicked together, and I saw the anger building inside him. It was boiling inside of me as well.

“Let go of me, puta!” he shouted.

“Chinga tu madre, motherfucker! I’ve got a fucking wife and kid, man.” I ranted. “You want them to have a husband? Huh, bitch? You want them to have a father?”

He brought his knee up to my groin, but I blocked him. Enraged, I threw him to the ground. Juan landed in a pile of greasy shop rags and rolled to his feet, fists clenched. Growling, he circled toward me. I came in low, feinted left, and plowed into him with a right. He went down again.

“I. Could. Have. Died.” Each word was short and clipped, and punctuated with my fists.

“Don’t hit me no more, Tommy! I’m sorry, yo!”

He flung his hands up in front of his face, and I realized what I was doing. What the hell was wrong with me? I was fucking dying anyway! Why take it out on Juan? Was this one of the seven steps of coming to grips with my terminal illness, beating the shit out of my coworkers?

I dropped my fists to my side and stood there panting.

“I’m sorry man. You just scared me is all. Dammit, Juan. Look for these things from now on, all right?”

He nodded, mumbled something in Spanish, then let me help him up. He limped away toward the bathroom, still muttering under his breath. I finished changing the pattern, then zoned out till lunch, not thinking, not speaking. An automaton.

After we were done teasing John about his hairy dick, we filed out of the lunchroom. I was on my way to take a leak when Charlie had me paged.

“Thomas O’Brien, please report to the office. Thomas O’Brien, please report to Mr. Strauser’s office. Thank you.”

Charlie Strauser was the plant manager. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a decent guy. I got the feeling that when he had to give us shit, he was just following the shit dished out on him from above. And you know what they say about shit and hills and the force of gravity. I knew what this was about—the fight with Juan. It had to be. Somebody saw us and reported it, or maybe the little fucker had decided to drop dime on me. I didn’t need this shit, and to be honest, I couldn’t see getting fired for it. Last year, Big Greg and Marty got into a knock-down, drag-out brawl over Dale Earnhardt Junior forcing another driver off the track, and Big Greg put Marty in the hospital for three days. But they didn’t lose their jobs. Still, at the very least, I’d get a few days’ suspension—probably without pay. And that paycheck was the one thing Michelle and I really needed right now.

I opened the door to the plant offices and stepped through it, savoring the air-conditioned coolness. The door swung shut behind me, and the silence was loud. Gone was the whine of the machines, the buzz of the grinders, the roaring furnaces. They’d been replaced by the quiet sounds of typing, and a phone ringing somewhere behind one of the closed doors. I walked down the hall, my boots leaving black footprints in my wake. Reaching Charlie’s office, I knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer, but I heard a voice inside, so I opened the door and peeked in.

Charlie was seated at the desk, his back to me while he talked on the phone. Without looking, he motioned for me to come in. I closed the door behind me, and stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do next. Finally, I sat down in one of the oversized chairs and tried not to eavesdrop.

“No, I don’t think it’s what needs to be done. For Christ’s sake, Steve, you’re talking about half my work force. Half! And yet you don’t expect me to cut production. The night shift is shorthanded as it is, and attrition on the day shift always goes up in the summer…”

I tuned him out and looked around. On the desk was a family portrait; Charlie, his wife, and their two kids. Both looked about my age, maybe a little younger. Pencil holder from one of our vendors. Stapler. Big computer with the company logo flashing as a screen saver. Coffee mug, also with the company logo. A Far Side calendar. In-and-out basket. A few assorted other items. All in all, it was much cleaner than my work area.

But what really caught my eye was the wooden desk plaque. It read: I have gone out to find myself.

If I should get here before I return, please hold me until I get back.

“Fine,” Charlie continued. “That’s fine. No, I’m not being facetious, Steve. Whatever you say is how it goes. You’re the boss, right? And since you’re the boss, I’ll let you explain it to the media when they show up this afternoon.”

He slammed the phone down, then swiveled around in the chair to look at me. I froze, gaping in shock. His face was…

“Sorry about that, Tom. That was the main office.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Strauser.”

I stared at his face.

“Is it Tom, or Tommy, or Thomas? What do you prefer?”

“Tommy’s fine, sir.”

“I let your foreman know that I needed to see you, so he has somebody else running the Number Two machine.”

“Okay.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He looked like a character from a Marvel comic book. His skin was pale, and his face and neck were covered with red and blue lines, like somebody had drawn on his skin with a Magic Marker. He stared back at me, and I tried to tear my eyes away, but couldn’t.

“Cancer,” he said, and I jumped in my seat.

“W-what?”

“Cancer. I’ve got cancer, Tommy. The blue and red lines on my face and neck. You’re staring at them. Don’t worry; everyone else has as well. It’s part of my treatment.”

“Oh.” Speechless, I felt like I was back in the doctor’s office again. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Strauser.”

“Charlie, Tommy. Everybody calls me Charlie.”

“Well, that’s messed up, Charlie. I’m sorry to hear that you’re sick.”

“It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”

He shrugged, and I felt like punching him in the face. How could he be so nonchalant? He had cancer, for fuck’s sake!

“The doctor’s pretty positive that they got it all. I’ve got a few more treatments, then we’ll know for sure, but I think that I’ll be sticking around a while longer. Somebody needs to run this place. And I’ve got a grandbaby on the way—our first. Don’t want to miss that!”

“Oh. Well that’s good.” I felt like puking. My fingers clenched the chair arms, digging deep. He was quiet for a moment. He shuffled some papers around on his desk, took a sip of coffee, and dropped a pen into the pencil holder. Then he sighed, sounding a lot like my doctor had before he’d delivered the bad news.

“Tommy, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Here it came…

“Look, Mr. Strauser, if this is about what happened with Juan, he was the one that—”

“Relax, Tommy. I heard what happened, and it sounds to me like you were justified—though don’t you dare quote me on that, because I’d deny it. Juan will be getting written up later today for not following safety procedures. But this isn’t about that.”

A new headache started up then, centered in my left temple and spreading like fire.

“Tommy, I’m sure you’re aware that we’ve been having some problems. The economy is down, and as a result, so is our production. You’ll recall a that few months ago we laid off everybody with three years or less tenure?”

I nodded, not liking where this was going.

“Well, that hasn’t had the desired effect that senior management hoped it would have. As the economy worsens, so does our profitability. So now they’ve made the decision to have another round of layoffs. This time it affects those employees with four to six years of tenure. Unfortunately, you fall into that group.”

“I—you’re laying me off?”

“I’m sorry, Tommy. I really am.”

“Shit!”

“It’s not just you, Tommy. I’ve got the unhappy duty of telling thirty-three more of your fellow workers this afternoon. It takes effect at the end of the shift today. Believe me, that’s not my decision. Management says studies show if you terminate an employee or lay them off on a Friday, there’s less chance of workplace violence. Not that I think we have to worry about that with any of you guys, but again, it’s not my choice.”

I sat there, speechless.

“You’ll need to turn in your time card, and any safety equipment or company tools that you have in your locker or at your machine.”

“Okay.”

He reached in a drawer, pulled out an envelope, and slid my paycheck across the desk to me.

“Here’s your check for this week and next week, as well as your severance pay and payment for your unused vacation time. I hope it will help.”

“I’m out of a job.” It wasn’t a question. I was just stating it out loud, trying to get used to the sound of it.

He lowered his head. “I’m sorry, son.”

“Damn. Well, I guess that’s it then.”

I started to rise, but he held up his hand.

“Tommy, wait a moment. Can I tell you something?”

I sat back down, nodding.

“I’ve worked here a long time. In fact, I started out on the Number Two line, just like you. Back then, we only had three lines total, and two men per line. Believe it or not, your father worked with me. Do you remember much about him?”

“I remember that he was an asshole.”

Charlie grinned. “That he was. That he was indeed. He was a drunk, and he liked to fight. I never got along with him, and neither did anybody else. In fact, when you applied here, I was hesitant to hire you. Like father, like son, you know? That’s what they say. Odds were you’d be an asshole too. But I did take you on, because we needed workers. I figured maybe you’d last a month before we had to fire you for calling in sick and missing days. Or maybe insubordination.”

I stared at him, listening.

“But we didn’t. You surprised me, Tommy, and after about six months, I realized just how unfair I’d been to prejudge you like that. You’re nothing like your father, and I want you to know that. You look like him, yes. God, you look so much like him that sometimes I almost call you by his name. But you’re not him. You’re a good man, and a good employee. Be proud of that. I’m very sorry to lose you. I’ve got to tell this to a lot of people today, but I wanted to tell you first. I felt that I owed you that much.”

“I appreciate it, Charlie. Thanks.”

“I know that right now things must seem pretty grim. But they won’t be for long. Of that you can be sure. You’re a young guy and a hard worker. You’ll be able to find a job. I’m positive of it. And I’ll be glad to give you a reference, tell them that you were a model employee. The important thing is to not let this get you down. Too many guys in this town, guys like your father, would use this opportunity as another chance to get loaded and beat up on their families or knock over a liquor store. You’re better than that. Don’t dwell on it. If there’s one thing that this fight with cancer has taught me, it’s not to dwell on the bad things in life.”

I was gripping the chair so hard that my fingers had gone numb.

“That’s all,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that.”

I stood up, shook his hand, and walked to the door.

“Thanks again, Charlie. Thanks for being straight with me, at least.”

“Like I said, Tommy. Don’t dwell on it. You’ll be fine. You’re young and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

I closed the door behind me, then I ran. I ran down the hall and into the foundry. I ran to the bathroom and exploded through the doors. I almost didn’t make it in time. The puke and blood sprayed between my fingers as I lurched into the first stall and collapsed to my knees. There was a lot of it. The soup I’d had for lunch, blood, spit—and more of my insides. This time, it was something gray, like an uncooked sausage, covered in blood and what looked like diluted motor oil.

You’ve got your whole life ahead of you…

I puked and I cried and I puked some more. I crouched there until I felt like an empty skin. I looked at the piece of myself floating in the water and I howled. Charlie echoed in my head some more.

Don’t dwell on it. You’re young and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I was young, twenty-five. I’d never live to see twenty-six. My whole life. I had my whole life ahead of me.

And that added up to not much time at all…

On the way home, I stopped at the bank to cash what would be my last paycheck. Five hundred dollars. That’s what I was worth. One week’s pay, five years’ worth of severance, and my unpaid vacation. Five hundred bucks. And once the immediate bills were paid, that would leave us with two hundred.

The line at the bank was long. It was Friday and everybody else in town had gotten paid too. Apparently, like me, none of them trusted direct deposit. I got stuck between a thin, jittery woman with three crying kids, and a wheezing old man that stank of arthritis cream. It took a while, and as we shuffled slowly forward, I counted the security cameras to pass the time. Then I counted them again, along with the tellers, the exits, the windows, and everything else. I counted four nondigital cameras; six tellers; one exit (though I was guessing that the employees had a fire exit somewhere); two windows, plus the drive-thru. This bank, my bank, was less than ten minutes from two major highways, plus dozens of back roads.

“Fuck it.”

The skinny woman gawked at me, pulling her three kids close to her. I grinned until she looked away.

“Fuck it. Fuck ’em all.”

I moved forward and the cameras watched me silently.

I didn’t care. Grinning, I gave them the finger.

The guy who said that money isn’t everything was obviously never poor. Money is everything—

the root of all happiness. I read in a magazine that the number one thing married couples fight about is money. People lie for money, cheat for money, steal for money, and kill for money. They kill themselves and each other for dead presidents on pieces of paper. Money is what makes the world go round. Lying on your deathbed, you might be judged by the company you kept while alive or the way you treated your family or what those you love really thought about you; but even this stems from money. Maybe it seems like the two are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. The more money you have, the better you can treat your family. Money allows you to provide more of the things they need. The friends you have around you are determined by the size of your wallet. Do you think Donald Trump hangs out with homeless guys and crack addicts all day long? In the end, it’s all about the green. To paraphrase the Beatles, “and in the end, the love you make is equal to the cash you make.”

Want a roof over your head? That takes money. Want to eat? Money. To get the money, you’ve got to have a job, but even that takes money. How are you going to get to work every day?

Drive? The car costs money: gas, insurance, repairs. Take mass transit? Those bus tokens aren’t free. Ride your bike? Hey, even most service stations are charging a quarter for the air pump these days.

It’s very simple. In our society, you can’t live without money. I wasn’t going to be living much longer, but Michelle and T.J. would be. I was sick and tired of seeing Michelle wear worn-out panty hose with runs in them and fashions from five years ago. Tired of getting T.J.’s toys at yard sales. Tired of buying generic brands that tasted like cardboard. Tired of saving aluminum cans to turn in for beer money. Tired of living from paycheck to paycheck and never getting ahead or saving money for the future. Tired of us being poor just because of where we lived and how we’d grown up.

My wife and my son could have better lives after I was gone. They deserved it. I wanted T.J. to go to college and be somebody smart—not work in a dirty foundry like his old man and his grandfather had done. I wanted them to be happy.

Happy.

Happiness equals money. Money equals happiness. It’s fucking arithmetic. When I look back on it now, I don’t know. Would all of this have happened, would I have come up with the idea if I hadn’t been dying? Probably not. Instead, I would have busted my ass five days a week for shit pay, until alcohol’s soft middle age crept up on me and I died of a heart attack, probably while on a fishing trip with John and Sherm or sitting in the bleachers, cheering on T.J. as he made the winning touchdown for the school (because I had no doubt that he’d be a quarterback when he got to high school). Even a heart attack would have been preferable to the cancer—but then again, what chance at a better life would I have been able to offer my family?

That guy, the older guy who remained a white trash loser and went on to die, he could have never given them the chances that I wanted to provide. And those chances—that better life—could only be paid for with money.

The cancer was killing me, eating away at my insides. In a few weeks, it would leave me a husk, like the shells that locusts leave behind on the trees, a hollow shell that used to be Tommy O’Brien. But while it was doing that, while it was gnawing away, it was also liberating me—freeing me to take risks that I would have never taken before. Allowing me finally to do something to make our lives better.

I drove home. It was bingo night, and Michelle had already taken T.J. over to her mother’s house, so I was alone in the trailer. I undressed, and took a good long look at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. Two black, puffy circles hung beneath my eyes. My skin was pale, feverish; and my jaw and neck were swollen. My cheeks were puffy too. It looked like I had the mumps. My teeth hurt, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the cancer or the fact that I hadn’t been able to afford a dentist in five years. I’d lost weight—like an anorexic on the Atkins diet. Most of all, I just looked tired. Beaten.

I wasn’t beaten, at least, not entirely, but I was tired. Tired of this trailer and thrift shop clothes for my wife and yard sale toys for my son. Tired of this way of life. I was sick of it all, and I was going to do something about it.

I stepped into the shower and let the water wash over me. It seemed to help my headache, so I leaned into the spray, letting it pound against my temples and forehead. My skin had gotten sensitive over the past week, and the stream felt like sandpaper against the sore parts, like it was grinding away the old Tommy and revealing what lay beneath. It felt like a baptism. I thought about the bank.

I was going to do something. What was the worst they could do to me if I got caught? Life in prison? Lethal injection?

Those sentences both added up to less than a month…