Labor
I am 15. It is the summer
of 1982. I’m working illegally
at the Sonic Drive-In.
Weatherford, Oklahoma.
I am a car hop and as such,
I am required to wear
a Sonic baseball hat, the front
two quadrants of which are
made of some sort of soft
foam. The rest of the hat is mesh.
The hat’s bill feels squishy
like the Tater Tots I carry
to the car in bay 3, a tow truck
to be precise. I see as I
reach out to hook the
tray onto the driver’s
window that the woman
in the passenger seat is
crying into a knot of Kleenex.
She is also wearing
a hat, the one mandated of
all employees at our local
McDonald's franchise. She works
the drive-thru. I am thinking
many things as the driver,
a man I do not know, mines
his pockets, the glove compartment,
the space between the vinyl seats,
for the amount needed to pay
for the Tater Tots, the cherry
limeade, and the vanilla Coke.
My memory is $1.72. I think
of a boy my age in someplace
I can only think of, a place
like India or Colombia, and what
he would have to do
in his country to earn $1.72 in 1982.
The man does not have
enough money to pay for the food
and drinks, and he asks if I
can take the coke back, we’ll share
the limeade, he says to the boy
holding the tray and to the girl
still weeping, the hat still in her lap.
In 1982, if a person were to
start his car, back out of the bay
at the Sonic, make a left onto
Main street and head west
to the nearby on-ramp of Interstate 40,
he might get on the highway
and drive west toward Elk City, Sayre, Erick,
and look out his window and in
any direction, he might see as many
as thirty oil rigs at one time.
He might wonder about the men,
where they are on their fourteen-hour
shift, the hard paste on their skin,
the enormous greased chain
whipping around the dark shaft of the drill.
That man might wonder about
drilling, about the future of oil, about
the cost of the gas in his tank,
about how oil become petroleum and so
he will not consider the young man
from Watonga whose left foot was crushed
in the early dawn when the drill bit slipped
off the coupler as it emerged from
the hole in the ground nearly 100 times
the length of his truck. He will not think
of the crew chief, the ambulance driver,
the ER doctor, the scrambling screaming
roughnecks, the truckers charging past,
the highway patrolmen arriving at the scene,
or their fathers who poured the asphalt
for the highway thirty years before, or
the men who will haul the heavy barrels
of sludge, the farmer who sold his land
to the oil company, the backhoe driver who dug
the first hole, the paramedic in the back of
the ambulance unsure of what she’ll see.
The driver will not think of the
man at the wheel of the tow
truck who was called to the scene
of an accident at an oil rig to haul
the victim’s car back to town. He will not
think of the girl who took an extra job mopping
the floors of the Weatherford General Hospital
one morning a week to make extra
money for her college fund or what
she said when she saw her brother
who should be at work hurried
into the emergency room his
Wranglers sliced up the side and his
entire leg wrapped in red rags
or what her father said to her in bay 3
of the Sonic Drive-In as he described what
it was like to arrive at an oil rig accident
to do his job. And the driver will certainly
not think of the boy at the Sonic violating
the Fair Labor Standards Act in the summer
of 1982 or what this boy will remember
at his desk 32 years later, lost
in an impossible task that almost
no person would consider work.
