A Day in the Life of the Working Class

The workday started at 7:00, but it was not until 7:22 that Tommy Keough and his rusted-out clunker, with its yellow party plates, noisily pulled onto the site—he simply couldn’t be burdened with the monotony of the morning safety meeting. The men looked at each other and snickered as he took his time pouring himself out of the truck and walking around to the rear passenger door to grab his cooler. When the door opened, an empty Busch Light tall boy rolled out and rattled across the gravel. The crew erupted into laughter as the wind caught it and teased the man, allowing it to settle just long enough for Tommy to make a futile swipe before suddenly blowing it out of his reach again.

When he finally wrangled it and walked over to us, he wore a wry smile; his bloodshot eyes hidden behind a pair of dark-tinted safety glasses that spited the cloud-covered sky. “WHAT?” More laughter. He was in on the joke. He had not tied his boots yet, which was actually a good sign. Had they been tied, it would’ve meant he had not gone home the night before and was riding a bender into the workday. The untied boots told me that he had slept, and probably in a bed.

His hard hat was so adorned with stickers that you could not tell what color it was. Some were the usual Union local number, or mandatory site orientation decals, but the rest made up a collage of cliché, melodramatic performative labor transgression. A defecating bull with a cross over it—to let’em know he tolerated no BS—save his own, I guess. An English pointer with a cross over it—no birddogging. Which was an understandable objection, seeing as how his work ethic changed dramatically based on who was watching him. The visage of Jesus Christ (for he was a carpenter) wearing a hardhat and giving a thumbs up. A boy urinating on the letters “OSHA” (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). A backhoe with the phrase “WHERE DA HOES AT?” emblazoned on the bucket. The words “Sheet Metal Workers, We Hang Ducts” with a lynched duck hanging from the “T” as if it were gallows. Keough wasn’t a tinner—what you call a sheet metal worker; he just liked the sticker. And perhaps the most fitting: Bigfoot wearing a hardhat with the words “Jobsite hide and seek champion” beneath.

His coat and bibs were so torn and ratty that you’d mistake ’em for a wardrobe from a zombie movie, but when every day is a party, a new coat and bibs are a real waste. A couple hundred bucks can get you pretty drunk, and pretty stoned, and, depending on where you’re bellying up, a few games of Keno.

He threw out the Busch Light can and the Monster he had chugged as he approached us and began working on his coffee as he signed the morning safety sheet—having skipped the meeting it referenced. I laughed watching the big deep gulps he took from the travel mug. I had seen him catch the hair of the dog many a morning, however I appreciated that he was considerate enough to offer the crew plausible deniability. He laughed with me and threw on his pouches.

I had scarcely collected our tools and materials before he began to bend my ear about the ways his ex-wife and the new husband were ruining his kids. Why doesn’t he have custody? Lawyer screwed him. It was not the DUIs, and don’t tell him that. “She drinks too!” Fair enough Keough.

I set the Symons panels, as he shifted from his miserable personal life to some fantastical tale about a time he saved a job destined for catastrophe. I had heard this story before. Perhaps not this particular story—but it always followed the same general outline. Someone else s**t the bed, everyone froze up as the world crashed down around ’em, the sky blackened, lightning crashed, angels wept and demons snickered. And then suddenly, as if struck by the muse, Keough split the devil and the deep blue sea and saved the day and the asses of the incompetents around him. There is no one on the planet more outspoken about how skilled and knowledgeable they are than the just barely above useless.

At 11:42, he began grilling me that it was time to go to lunch. He knew that he’d looked bad if his partner was still working when he took off and, in some remote region of his soul that he had not visited in years, he probably felt a sliver of guilt. When I refused, he chided me for a few minutes before deciding that he didn’t actually care enough to lose the time he planned to steal. He went out to get a gas station sandwich and probably a mixer to refill the travel mug. As I walked to lunch myself fifteen minutes later, I saw him toss his fake bag of piss onto the dashboard to reach the weed pen stashed behind it in the glove compartment. He then pulled out his phone, threw the sandwich bag into the backseat to join its fallen brethren in a graveyard of fast-food wrappers, empty beer cans, and losing scratch-offs, and indulged himself in 30 minutes of uninterrupted dopamine hits.

He was famous for contorting the half hour we had for lunch—innovatively finding ways to double it. He would make an important personal call at 12:30, suggest he make a run to the supply shop at 11:30, head to the tool trailer at 11:40 only to never return, or sometimes simply feign negligence as if he had lost track of time. That ostensible negligence with which he watched the clock as it approached 12:30 was a tricky game though. He’d lose the excuse if the boss caught him and, like any other spent munition, would have to wait until a new one was manufactured. It can’t be the case that you’re accidentally late returning from lunch every time the superintendent shows up. He had to be seen working at 12:31 a few times first.

Worst of all was that working with him necessitated constantly babysitting his expectations because he seldom wanted to do what the work required. Thus, he fought me incessantly on every detail—all of which were essentially non-negotiable. Had I given in on any of them I would have gotten it worse from those in charge of us. “You don’t let a man like Tommy Keough direct the work,” I had been told once when he wore me down. It was as if every detail of the work was putting the man out. It was like asking someone to pick you up from the airport ten times a day. He huffed and berated my decision making and claimed I had no idea what I was doing. Even so it was mostly bluster, and he talked and worked with a smile on his face. The man loved me, and for all his faults I loved him too. When we were up against it and you could genuinely feel the weight of how important the work was and how tight time was, Tommy always came through for me. And over the years—and over 2x4s and whaler loops, and turnbuckles, and the magical substance that is hydraulic cement—I learned about the man.

He had never quite found fulfillment in life outside the bar. Perhaps not as often anymore, but for a time, when he walked in the door and everyone was happy to see him as he worked the room, he felt loved, and time stood still. More than anything else I think that’s the high he chased. He had never quite felt that in his personal life, and he didn’t know where else to seek it. So he fell back on that narrow window where he could feel a vanishing sliver of status. It could’ve been books, or exercise, or hiking, but the first place he felt important and free was the bar. By the time that freedom felt vapid and sad and empty, he was left lonely and confused, trying to feel how he did when he was 26 again.

As the day wound down, men began putting tools away and setting themselves up for the morning, and Keough looked for his out. “Hey, I got my kids tonight,” he told me as I began tidying up and he took off.

Keough would get laid off the moment the company no longer needed the extra hands, and he would ride a couple weeks of unemployment until someone else got the contract for a big job and he’d bring his antics there. Although you are filing your taxes with eleven W-2s, a man could make a decent living that way. Many political discussions love to take the diligent work ethic of the greater portion of the working class and conflate it with the life circumstances of men like Keough. But these realities are often in tension.

As frustrating as his antics were, Keough worked and he was a decent hand. I can remember a pour where the forms blew out and concrete poured from the bottom of a 12-foot wall as the weight of the material pushed the panels apart. The blowout was too vast for any traditional fix, but Tommy pulled a backhoe around and pushed the forms back together with the machine’s hydraulic arm, dug the teeth of its bucket straight into the ground and left it parked there. It was a hillbilly fix, but virtually the only one available to us, and Keough was the only cowboy around who shot from the hip fast enough to cobble something so unconventional together. Perhaps there were times where he truly did split the devil and the deep blue sea.

In contrast, if you walk onto a massive jobsite, you will find men hiding in plain sight all over the place. “Walk fast and look nervous” is their mantra. So long as you look like you are doing something, you are. Men like this do not make up a significant proportion of the working class, yet their problems make up a disproportionate percentage of the discussion about it.

I do not blame the populists from either party who romanticize the working class. Steve Bannon has likely never got stuck digging a ditch alone because the guys who are supposed to help him are smoking crystal meth in a porta-john. I doubt that Bernie Sanders has ever waited half an hour only to realize that the new guy isn’t showing up for day two. I don’t expect elite ideologues to get it, I just wish they’d stop flattening the problems of the working class into neat and tidy stories that serve their political projects. Because none of it is simple, and the fixes are not obvious. You cannot open enough mills and mines to solve the fallen nature of man, and sometimes it is those fallen men who step up when you need it most.

As I left the jobsite that evening and headed home, I passed Keough’s truck parked at a meter in front of a bar.

Image Credit: Reddit