by Joseph S. Pete
I’ve burned human feces on remote
outposts, I’ve dropped bombs down mortar tubes, and I’ve rushed out to inner-city
murder scenes late at night. I've been told by stern-faced cops I needed to “get
the hell out of here now” or I'd be arrested. I've been singed by the pulsing
heat radiating off a 1,600-degree Fahrenheit steel slab in a hot strip mill; burning
fiercely like an indoor sun, the steel’s heat was enough to make me stagger
back. I’ve live-broadcasted vacant house fires where billowing, black smoke
choked the whole block. I've been followed by police cruisers as an
intimidation tactic after reporting on city council meetings. I’ve been shot at
and cursed at. Readers have left me rambling, profanity-laced voicemails;
prisoners have sent me long, discursive letters in chicken scratch handwriting.
One could say I’ve had some
interesting jobs.
Careercast.net, an upstart job search
website looking to boost its profile through what public relations pros call “earned
media” and what really amounts to Hail Mary press releases, puts out an annual
list of the worst jobs. It’s based on criteria like stress, injury rate, job
security, career prospects, and the like. Every year, without fail, the worst
three jobs are almost always journalist, military personnel, and lumberjack.
I’ve been a reporter whose work has
taken him to the docks, the halls of Congress, and the supersonic
boom-punctured, beer-soaked bacchanalia of
the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the much-hyped race day. I’ve been a soldier
who was deployed to the unforgiving furnace of Iraq where many teenage recruits
died far too young. I’m not sure journalism is actually worse than soldiering,
but the claim sure got them a lot of free media coverage. Over the years, I’ve
always joked I need to work as a lumberjack to complete the trifecta of worst
possible jobs.
Currently, I work as a journalist, and
I’m hardly “the media elite.” I cover heavy industry in one of the sootiest,
heavily industrialized places on earth, where a smoky orange-red haze long hung
over the lakeshore and even sludge worms couldn’t survive because of all the
toxins dumped in the Calumet River. Though good-paying steel mill jobs have
been oxidizing away here in the Rust Belt, I still visit factories and
refineries often enough that I keep a hard hat, plastic eye protection, and an
orange safety vest in the trunk of my decade-old Honda Civic. As recently as
the 1980s, driving a foreign-made car could get you a beating or your car
windows smashed out here in steel country, but that was before pretty much all
the major foreign automakers have since opened factories in the United States
and started buying American-made steel. Now there are billboards right by the
steel mills for BMW dealerships proudly declaring the German car is made in
America. Twenty years ago, such a billboard would have been the target of arson,
with a gas can left right by the pole in order to taunt the investigators. Now
no one glances twice at such an ad. Values change. Customs evolve. Steelworkers
don't hide baseball bats behind signs on the picket lines anymore. Some
behaviors, like slashing the tires of scabs, have become less tolerated. People
mellow or lose their fighting spirit.
Life grinds you down. My father
repeatedly told me to do what I loved for a living because I’d have to do it for
eight hours a day, for a full third of my fleeting life. He was an attorney and
later a judge who clearly loathed every minute of it. I thought he was speaking
from hard-won experience. I thought he was imparting fatherly wisdom. I thought
he was being profound. Only later in life did I learn it was an oft-repeated cliché,
one that was quickly nodded off as trite when I was supposedly offering career
advice to a younger colleague.
But I’ve tried to do what I love,
writing, despite long odds and a legacy media industry that seems to be
terminally contracting and ultimately bound for the silent graveyard of
history. The threat of layoffs hovers persistently, something shown in academic
studies to be deleterious to one’s health. Every year, more beloved colleagues
shuffle out the door with their personal effects stuffed hastily in plastic
trash bags or cardboard boxes. I've hauled their things to the parking lot and
dumped them unceremoniously in their trunks as they wonder what their future
holds.
But
despite insecurity, low pay, diminished career prospects compared even to a
decade ago, a growing reliance on underpaid freelancers, and the general scorn
of society that’s been conditioned by politicians to distrust and even hate the
media who labor to keep them informed, I feel privileged.
There are worse jobs, completely
soulless drags rewarded only by a
paycheck.
Take my first job as a janitor.
Unlike many of my peers in high
school, I wasn’t particularly interested in starting work at a fast food
restaurant, a Cold Stone Creamery or wherever that would hire an unskilled,
untested teen. My classmates were all more social and itching to drive to go
visit their boyfriends or girlfriends, to shop at the mall, to venture into the
city, or to sustain a social life. I was largely content to spend my weekends
walking to the library and then camping out and reading as many books as I
could.
But soon I came to appreciate a little
pocket money could be beneficial. I could check out a bunch of library books
and then buy some bacon, coffee, and eggs over easy at a nearby diner where I
could continue reading before heading home to my boring, dreary house. I could
even catch an indie film at the arthouse theater by the library or ride a
commuter train into the city, where I could visit the Art Institute and wander
wonderingly in the great canyons of skyscrapers in downtown Chicago.
So the summer after I entered legal
working age, I took a seasonal job as a janitor at the Catholic high school I
attended. Summer maintenance meant a deep clean that required not only the
motley janitorial staff that worked there year-round but also the cavalry of
high schoolers who were pressed into service for a few months.
Though I grew up just outside the
murder capital of the United States at the time, I lived a sheltered suburban
existence and the job was my first true introduction to grit. Literally. The
janitor’s shop used industrial-strength soap filled with gritty particles to
help clean off stubborn grease and intractable grime. The shop was a dingy,
dusty. subterranean place crammed with frayed mops, bulky wet-dry vacuums, and
metal shelves stocked with spare light bulbs, paper towers, toilet paper, and
sundry other supplies. It was the first place I came across an old-school
timecard puncher and those buffed metal mirrors that present you with only a
distorted funhouse shadow of a reflection. The coffee maker was always
percolating wheezingly toward a sputtering crescendo and the coffee pot was
ringed with a stubborn brown stain that could never be removed, no matter how
much elbow grease was applied. It was my first glimpse into the dark underbelly
that keeps places like old schools running.
We were dispatched to deep-cleaning
tasks such as polishing a thin ring of brass around the hallways of the fifty-year-old
private school building, which my father had attended before me. Since there
was little supervision, many of my fellow student-workers checked out and
killed time during the day by sleeping in empty classrooms. I was meticulous in
my duties but easily bored. I polished the brass to a gleaming sheen but with a
green bristle pad in one hand and a splayed paperback in the other. I probably
inhaled way too much toxic brass cleaner in the process but plowed through many
books. It helped that I had a jangling set of keys that granted master access.
I could get into the teacher’s lounge or library to immediately replace any
book I had finished with a new one. At the time, my taste was indiscriminate. I
lapped up classics like Don Quixote
and A Clockwork Orange and also
plowed through science fiction fare like Arthur C. Clark’s Space Odyssey trilogy and Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, as well as Catholic work I deemed necessary
and canonical, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas’s tortured writings. And for some
ungodly reason, I particularly was drawn to philosophy such as Kierkegaard,
Hegel and Nietzsche, the denser and opaquer the better.
As an antisocial loner, I was drawn to
books both as a needed alternative source of stimulation and as a version of
Linus’s blanket. I even read while mowing the vast front lawn, the baseball
field where the state champion team played its home games, and the football
field that was home to the legendary Battle of Broadway with neighboring
Merrillville High School. It’s not particularly difficult to push a lawnmower
while reading a book. Books in fact rest neatly on the control bar, with one
hand pinning down each side and a flick of the thumb to turn the pages. I still
plod along on the treadmill with a book in hand and often walk with a book,
which a possibly drunk passerby once shouted was impossible even though
hunched-over zombies peruse their smartphones literally every second of every
day while walking the streets of any major city, college town, and quaint burgh
from sea to scrolling sea.
But the straight-and-narrow priest who
served as the high school principal despite a lack of academic background
believed I could not properly focus on the sacred attention-consuming duty of
walking in a straight line while propelling a lawnmower and reading. He yelled
as much at me. I pocketed the book while he glowered, then pulled it back out
when he went inside. He later came back to check that I didn't resume reading,
as though I were completely untrustworthy. I remember distinctly I was reading
Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which I
was eager to devour after savoring the haunting poetic melancholy of his
poignant war memoir Good-Bye to All That and which I thought was a
historical tome that even an elderly, conservative principal could appreciate.
That was the exact moment when I
realized that work was rubbish, that small-minded managers would follow petty
rules unthinkingly, and that I was likely in for a lifetime of stifling
oppression. That was the moment I realized you subject yourself to penny-ante
tyrants to eke out a living, and that you sell not only your time and your toil
but also your interiority and any small gesture of self-expression while you're
officially on the clock. They didn't want to let you stake anything back for
yourself, however tiny and inconsequential, almost as if out of spite. It was
the moment when I realized I should try to get paid for something creative and
fulfilling, something I wanted to do and could pursue as a craft, even if it
meant leaving a lot of money on the table. It was the moment I realized you
have to serve yourself first. You either pursued your own dreams or forsook
them forever.
My high school alma mater vindicated me,
after a fashion, more than a decade later when it announced it would abandon
the campus I spent so much time polishing and mowing in favor of the far-flung
suburbs, effectively giving up on the inner-city transfers who saw it as a
pathway to a better life, and certainly giving up on the neighborhood that gave
it purpose in the first place. Half the nearby stores were boarded-up, and the
school followed an outward migration to the greener lots of new subdivisions
further south. On some level, I knew the moment I was told to put down the book
that this was yet another institution that would ultimately fail me. What kind
of school tells a kid to put down a book? I've come to learn that all
institutions ultimately fail, that the rumbling, unthinking machinery rattles
along until belts wear thin, parts snap off, and corrosion wears it all down.
In the end, everyone is disposable and everything is ephemeral. The rust always
wins.
I'm pursuing my passion as a writer
for a daily newspaper now but fear it's only a matter of time before the rust
catches up to me.
Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning
journalist, an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana University graduate, a book
reviewer, and a frequent guest on Lakeshore Public Radio. He is a 2017 Pushcart
Prize and Best of the Net nominee who was named the poet laureate of Chicago
BaconFest, a feat that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never accomplished. His literary
work and photography have appeared or are forthcoming in Dogzplot, Stoneboat, The High Window,
Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, New Pop
Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch
Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Chicago Literati, Bull Men's Fiction,
shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, Lumpen, The
Rat's Ass Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, Vending
Machine Press, and elsewhere. He once wrote the greatest, most
compelling author bio of all time, but it was snatched up by a blue heron that
swooped down and carried it off to the sea. C'est la vie.
