Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(73)

That’s the thing they don’t tell you about opiate addiction. People are in pain because unless you went to college, the only way you’ll earn a decent living is by breaking your body or risking your life—plumbers, electricians, steamfitters, welders, mechanics, cable guys, linemen, fishermen, garbagemen, the options are endless.

   They’re all considered jobs for men because they require a certain amount of strength. The bigger the risk, the bigger the paycheck. But you don’t get to take it easy when your back hurts from carrying a ninety-pound ladder that becomes a sail in the wind. You don’t get to sit at a desk when your knees or ankles start to give out after crawling through attics, under desks, through crawl spaces. When your elbow still hurts from the time you disconnected a cable line and your body became the neutral line on the electrical feeder and 220 volts ran through your body to the ground. When your hands become useless claws thirty feet in the air on a telephone pole and you leave your skin frozen to the metal tap. So you take a couple pills to get through the day, the week, the year. If painkillers show up on your drug test, you have that prescription from the last time you fell off a roof. Because that’s the other thing about these jobs: they all require drug tests when you get hurt. Smoke pot one night, whether for fun or because you hurt too much to sleep, the company doesn’t have to pay for your injury when your van slides down an icy off-ramp three weeks later. I chose pot to numb my head and body every night. But it was the bigger risk.

I probably should’ve stolen pills. It would have made up for the fact I was making less than every tech I asked. They don’t like you talking about your pay for a reason. Some had been there longer. Most hadn’t. I was the only female tech because really, why the fuck was I even doing that job? Because I didn’t go to college. I joined the Air Force. They kicked me out for being gay. I’d since worked at a gay bar, Home Depot, Starbucks, Lowe’s, 7-Eleven, a livery service, construction, a dog groomer, and probably ten more shitty jobs along the way. Until I was offered a few dollars more, just enough to pay rent, as a cable guy.

   My supervisor hadn’t known, said he didn’t know our pay. But he said he’d take care of it, and he did. He said the problem was my numbers were always lower than most of the guys. All those points I mentioned. So my raises over the years had always been lower. The math didn’t quite work, but it was mostly true. My numbers were always lower. Numbers were based mostly on how many jobs we completed a day. On paper, the way we were rated, I was a terrible employee. That I was a damn good tech didn’t matter. The points were what mattered. The points, I’m realizing now, were why I spent the better part of ten years thinking about bathrooms.

The guys could piss in apartment taprooms, any slightly wooded area, against a wall with their van doors open for cover, in Gatorade bottles they collected in their vans. I didn’t have those options. And most customers, I wouldn’t ask. If I had to pee, I had to drive to a 7-Eleven or McDonald’s or grocery store, not all of which have public bathrooms. I knew every clean bathroom in the county. I knew the bathrooms with a single stall because the way I look, public bathrooms aren’t always safe for me either. But they don’t plant a 7-Eleven between the McMansions of Great Falls. One bathroom break and I was already behind.

The guys could call for help on a job. No problem. If I called, some of them wouldn’t answer. Some I’d asked before and taken shit for not being able to do something they couldn’t have done either. One of them told me my pussy smelled amazing while he held a ladder for me. One never stopped asking if I’d ever tried dick. Said I needed his. And for the most part, I liked to tell myself I could handle their taunts and harassment. But I wasn’t calling them for help. Sometimes I’d have to reschedule the job because there was no one around I could ask for help. Rescheduling meant I’d lose even more points that day.

   So my numbers were lower than the men’s. I never had a shot at being a good employee really, not by their measure. Well, there was one way.

I worked with an older guy, a veteran like me. I usually got along with the veterans. He was no exception. Once, after I explained why I called him for help, he told me that he understood. He said he found vets were less likely to treat him like shit for being Black. Higher odds they’d worked with a Black guy before. That made sense. But when I asked him how he kept his points up, seeing as how he worked slower than the other guys, he said he clocked out at seven every day. Worked the last job for free. It brought up his average. I wasn’t willing to work for free.

One year, though, the company tried a little experiment: choose a couple of people from each team, let them take the problem calls, those jobs a couple of techs had failed to fix, and give them the time to actually fix the problem.

Time was the important thing. Time is why I can’t tell you what day or week or year a thing happened. Because for the ten years I was a cable tech, there was no time. I rushed from one job to the next, sometimes typing on the laptop, usually on the phone with a dispatcher, supervisor, customer, or another tech. Have to pee, run behind, try to rush the next so the customer doesn’t call and complain you’re late, dispatch gives the call to another tech, lose the points. The first few years, I was reading a map book to find the house. Then crawling down the street, counting up from 70012 because I needed house number 70028 but no one else on the street thought it important to put numbers on their house. They’d tell me I needed to pick up my numbers. One more bad month and I was out of a job. Maybe you can understand why I avoided canceling anything but the most dangerous jobs.