Personal Worsts
by Rick Kempa—Rock Springs, WY
We’re sitting around the campfire after dinner when Adam says, “OK everybody, what was the worst job you ever had?”
Dave says, “That’s easy,” and he dives right in with the summer of ’55 that he spent scooting around on all fours in coal cars in a train yard, stuffing burlap into jagged holes so that the coal, when they poured it in, wouldn’t leak out. “I’d read Dante in college that spring,” he says, “and I remember thinking, man, I’m there.”
This leads to the meatpacking plant of my own hellish summer, 1976: how, every night, all night I pushed huge steel “trees” of meat suspended from an overhead rail in and out of giant ovens. I was always soaked from hosing down empty trees, and so when I entered the ovens, my clothes hissed and spit steam.
“I’ve got one to top that,” says Paul, “from the toothpaste factory. My job was to wrestle big barrels of powder onto a conveyor belt where a claw snatched and raised them to the ceiling and dumped them in a vat. Toothpaste powder covered everything: my goggles, mouth—even though I had a mask—my lungs, I’m sure. Every two hours, I’d stagger to the water cooler where the old fuckers would pound my back and call me whitey and laugh.”
“Your turn, Adam.” We’re grinning, because he’s sixteen and has been working only three weeks at Burger King—his first job, let alone his worst. “Well,” he says, “I don’t know if you’d call this bad, but I’ve got this boss who stands around all day giving ‘friendly tips.’ Yesterday, I was resting against the counter after the lunch rush, and he shouts, ‘hey, don’t lean there!’ so I say, ‘Well, where should I lean?’ and he says, ‘Nowhere.’ He made me scrub a step stool for an hour! The dickhead.”
We’re all howling and Dave shouts out “Dickhead!” and Paul says, “He’s just starting out, and he’s already got his worst!” and Adam’s blushing, but glad.
As our noise subsides, I get to thinking how strange that we should be so proud of our worst, so willing to own it, and how, in time, our worst becomes in some mysterious way (as even Adam will someday see), our best—because we lived and survived it, because it’s ours to relive as we wish, because, damn it, we were young.
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