I remember what I was wearing on the day of my Great Realization: a pair of Carhartt overalls and a baseball cap. On the cap, the shameless logo of my employer: a kitschy name with no vowels and two r’s. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but not long ago I was just another drone-line Brooklynite in the churning gears of a tech startup.
I was a sycophant. A disgrace. A content strategist.
My soft hands, delicate fingers typing away as I dragged and dropped content blocks into yet another marketing email. I toiled on an eye-catching subject line. Perhaps I should include an emoji, I pondered.
That’s when the mental dam inside me broke.
Suddenly, it became clear that this so-called ‘work’ of mine had no real meaning. Sure, my salary was higher than anyone in my family’s history. My 401K was a pipedream of my forefathers. To the outside observer I had an excellent work-life balance, given my company’s paid time off policy. But none of that was truth. None of it was real.
The feeling was one of deprivation, an emotional and moral starvation. My whole piddly life had been spent avoiding crossing the threshold from boy to man. The sage wisdom of my unemployed, alcoholic uncle struck me, my Great Realization: I did not understand the value of a hard-earned dollar.
“I have to do something about this—and the rising gas prices,” I announced to Derek in IT. He was sipping his English Breakfast tea next to me in our co-working space filled with frivolous admities like non-gendered bathrooms and English Breakfast tea.
Derek was confused. I was not.
I immediately submitted my resignation on the #random channel on Slack, turned in my company-provided MacBook, and returned to my Brooklyn apartment. Upon entering I had a newfound disgust that my live-in girlfriend was not whipping up a hardy dinner of ham and beans but, rather, doing her job. That is, if you can even call being the founder of a nonprofit that facilitates art classes for inner-city youth a job. Where’s the dignity in that?
Her office was our living room for Christ’s sake. They call it working from home. How preposterous! Have we as a society given up on the sanctity of separating our work from our home? Is our ability to check the mail at 2pm on a Wednesday not corroding our sense of a good and orderly life?
“I’m leaving,” I declared to Wren as I made pace to my closet to pack every flannel shirt I own.
“But you just got here?” she stated with a tilt of her head.
Wren was confused. I was not.
I dashed out the door, suitcase in tow. I stopped off to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds—cowboy killers they call them—and took the train to Port Authority. There, in the underground, amongst the screeching metal of the rails, I felt the call of the dark and the damp. I yearned for the caves of my most primal ancestors. Only there, underground, would I finally understand the value of what one-hundred cents really amounts to.
At the Greyhound ticket booth, I slammed down a one-hundred-dollar bill—the earnings of a weak and fragile man—and demanded a ticket to the coal mines of West Virginia.
“Sooo… Morgantown?” the teller suggested.
“Good as any other place on this godless rock,” I offered back. Tears welled up in both of our eyes and he stepped out from behind the ticket counter to shake my hand.
I was off to do something about these rising gas prices, as a coal miner. Coal was my salvation. A chance to do life the right way and do right by my fellow man.
As the cityscape dissolved into the tapestry of Appalachia, I felt a craving rise inside me. It was for a cigarette, and I indulged in a Marlboro Red only to be immediately rebuked by my neighboring bus riders. Good, I thought. Only the ostracized can be redeemed by God. I extinguished the Marlboro Red in a nearby discarded 2-liter of Mountain Dew and looked up to a banner basking in heavenly glow. It read: Welcome to West Virginia Coal Country.
Upon exiting the Greyhound I relieved myself on the side of the road and followed the stream of my own urine until I found a worksite. The smell of fresh coal invaded my nostrils and I thought of the loving embrace my lips once made on my mother’s breast.
Before descending the ladder to join my fellow laborers I adjusted my Carhartt overalls and baseball cap, firm, until I could feel the rhythm of my blood pumping in my forehead and testicles. The moment my Nike AirMax 90s hit the first rung, I knew there was no going back.
Down in the coal mine, dust swirled everywhere, glorious. Amongst the dust, my tribe: real men who swung their pick axes as they hacked up black mucus from their lungs. Their axes halted when they clocked my arrival and insisted that I should not be down there.
“I had a lemonade stand when I was six,” I assured them, naming the only other time I had perhaps made a hard-earned dollar.
But I was not the man I used to be when I was six, I explained. That version of me felt like a dream of a memory from a movie that I couldn’t remember. But I needed to get back there. I was going to become the man I was when I was a six-year old boy.
The coal miners were confused. I was not.
I stepped forward, toe-to-toe with the foreman who looked me over, head-to-toe. He went to open his mouth to speak, but went silent when I flashed him my pack of Marlboro Reds.
“I just want to make a hard-earned dollar,” I told him. “Just. One.”
I handed him a cigarette and he handed me a pick ax. It was time to get to work.
And work I did. I smashed. I banged. I tossed broken coal over my shoulder with a shovel. These were the motions of greatness. Of manliness. Gone were my thoughts of email marketing and brand language brainstorms. This was the language of humanity. Of decency. My muscles burned. My hands blistered. My life of lattes and lunch-and-learns with thought leaders was fading into the background of a painting of a memory that I once dreamt of after falling asleep during a movie.
I inhaled, deeply, taking in the fresh coal dust and checked my iPhone: no service whatsoever. The time display read 11pm. I looked around- everyone else seemed to be gone. But then-
“Hey kid!” a bellowing voice rang out. The foreman.
He reached deep into the back pocket of his jeans and handed me a balled-up one dollar bill. One hundred pennies. Twenty nickels. Ten dimes. Four quarters. One dollar.
One hundred cents right there, in the palm of my hand.
But it was worth more than that because it was hard-earned.
And then, I collapsed.
When I awoke in the hospital, I was surprised to see my girlfriend, Wren. On the bedside table next to me, my dollar and pack of Marlboro Reds.
Wren cupped my black-smothered face with her silky hands and kissed me deeply.
“What happened?” I grumbled into her mouth, but the doctor interceded.
“You worked underground for twelve hours without stopping for food or water, inhaling only coal dust and Marlboro Reds,” he reported.
“Right.” I nodded over to the pack of cigarettes. “Speaking of—”
Wren plopped the final Marlboro Red on my lips and went to light me up.
“You can’t smoke in here,” the doctor shrieked out.
But Wren and I turned to him, needles in our eyes, and he immediately pissed his khakis. He slowly backed away and admitted to never having worked an honest day in his life.
Wren and I stared at each other, smiling in a loving gaze. “You found me,” I finally whispered.
She nodded sweetly. “The FindMyFriends app on iPhone works even when the phone doesn’t have service.”
I scoffed- of course.
“Damn technology,” I lamented.
“Good for nothing,” she agreed and curled up next to me in the hospital bed. She laced her tongue around my cheek, carving out a heart in the settled dust on my face. I took a drag off the cigarette and blew it directly into her ear.
“How are the gas prices looking these days?” I asked after regaining my breath from a racking series of coughs.
Wren rolled her eyes, “Higher than ever.”
“Fits,” I said, exhaling a long stream of smoke, a gumshoe bested by his twin fem fatales: the broken global supply chain and declining international diplomacy.
“I’m going to get you a soda,” Wren sang out and reached for my daily pay on the bedside table.
“No!” I yelped. “Not that one. That one’s worth more.”
“Yes, of course,” she agreed. We stayed like that- me upright in the bed and her, standing beside me- for what felt like hours. We had entire silent conversations about our future together, using only our eyes and American Sign Language.
We spoke of how we would build a life, a family. Until finally, Wren closed her eyes, the eyes of an angel. She firmly placed her hand on my penis and we prayed together.
“A-men,” we chanted in unison and opened our eyes.
“I’m going to go get that soda now,” she said and turned for the door. But at the threshold she paused and craned her head over her shoulder.
“How about ham and beans for supper tonight?” she asked, a homely lass of a woman.
“That’d be great,” I told her. “I’ve earned it.”