You know life isn’t looking too good when you find yourself standing in the middle of the road holding a stop sign twelve hours a day under the baking sun, endless cars whizzing past, their speed making you feel profoundly motionless.

Like you’re going nowhere.

In case you ever decide to do road crew work, as long as you bring water, sunblock and Chapstick, you won’t have to quit after the first day. You have to wear a neon-orange hat and vest, and thick-soled shoes. After that, it’s just mind over matter.

At least crap jobs are easy to get. After returning to my parent’s home in rural Kansas from a six-month stay in San Jose, California, where I’d racked up some debt on a Visa card, I call my friend Rob, who tells me he’s working for a crew on Highway 36. He tells me flaggers can make up to $80 a day, after taxes. For rural Kansas, that’s pretty good. I was too lazy to look for anything else. It sounds like the job I need, for awhile anyway. Rob tells me to drive out to the site and talk to the foreman, Dave.

Dave hires me on the spot while I talk to him from my car. I never got a job so easily before. The guy I’m replacing got sent to jail the night before for some undisclosed offense, opening up the opportunity for me. That tells you a lot about the job right there. It isn’t for everyone.

The first day I arrive on the site promptly at 7 A.M. and join the crew standing in an informal circle near Dave, a small guy with spidery thin legs. He’s giving directions for the day in short, sharp barks. I linger near the edge of the circle next to Rob, who I suspect would like me as a girlfriend, but I don’t feel that way about him. To kiss him would feel like kissing my brother. He was kind of good looking but about forty pounds overweight.

I’m the only female in sight on this crew. I survey the faces I see before me. They range from homely to handsome. Most are nondescript.

One face in particular stands out. This guy is tall and lanky, wearing sunglasses. His red baseball cap covers shoulder-length sandy brown hair.

After Dave is done barking, I try to start off on good terms with the crew. I ask if they’re from Scandia, the town we’re near.

“Fuck, I wouldn’t live there if they paid me,” is the only answer I get, from the tall lanky guy with the red cap.

He’s eating sunflower seeds and spits out a shell right near my shoe, as if to say “You aren’t going to last long here.” Then he takes off his sunglasses and glares at me with his pebble-colored eyes.

This glimpse of his true nature makes me bristle with indignation, but I try to rise above it. I soon realize he’s the self-acknowledged leader of the crew, right below Dave, who goes by the nickname “Superman.”

I keep hearing the crew calling the lanky guy “Pickle.” I’m curious how he got that name and ask a pudgy long-haired guy with an anchor tattoo on his upper arm. He smiles and says “He’s a pickle polisher,” like that’s some great accomplishment. I guess it means Pickle has a lot of sex.

I knew I wasn’t going to have sex with him. Although he has that sour look to him, I deem him too good looking for me. People tend to find their level, like water does. You don’t go trying for a hunk when you believe yourself to be a social dud with a too-large nose.

The second day on the job, while the sun is rising, I walk over to the mill, the yellow monstrous machine that grinds off old asphalt. Pickle is on top of the machine, working, bent intently over a metal bar he’s adjusting with a wrench. On an impulse, instead of avoiding him, I decide I’ll make him notice me. I ask him what speed he gets the mill up to.

He looks down, stares at me, his sunglasses reflecting the early-morning sun. He stares as if he isn’t going to answer, an indignant look plastered on his face. Then he seems to reconsider and says, “If everything’s humming, it’ll get up to 10 m.p.h.”

An answer without cussing, I think to myself. I walk away with a bubble of incipient good will expanding my chest.

I start to love mornings on this job. It’s the end of August, and for an hour or so in the morning there’s a cool breeze that smells like fresh-cut grass with a hint of autumn ripeness. I can hear meadowlarks singing and see mist rising off lush fields of prairie hay. There isn’t much traffic. I just stand around not doing much except holding the stop sign. I save my energy for when the sun starts beating down. Then it gets bad: I stand most of the day on hot black asphalt with no water left in my thermos, the wind blowing 40 m.p.h., chapping my lips to dry scaly cakes, whipping the heavy stop sign around like a top.

To pass the time, I talk to whoever’s in the first vehicle that stops at my sign. Truckers are the best—they’re usually starved for conversation, and offer me cigarettes, pop, even beer.

Everyone on the crew has a nickname: besides Pickle and Superman, there’s Mule, Tweetie Bird, Hippie, Bear, U.S., Cash. They call me Purple Hair because of some wine-colored hair dye left in my hair from my California experience. I kind of like the name, feeling like I’m part of the bunch. I’m grateful they didn’t single me out for some flaw like my solid build to comment on. If they had decided to call me “Chunky” or something I probably would have quit.

I keep at the job. My hands develop blisters, then calluses, from holding the metal pole of the stop sign, day after day. After two weeks, when the guys on the crew see I’m not going to quit, they start respecting me. Pickle asks me “Hey, Purple Hair, what time is it?” and I feel good the rest of the day. I constantly watch Pickle working, see how he moves in a quick flowing way, like an otter on top of the asphalt grinder, back and forth, shirtless in the blistering sun. I know I’ll never appeal to him but find myself fantasizing about him nonetheless. I want to know what his hair would feel like if I ruffled my hands through it, what he would smell like if I put my head close to his and ran my lips against the skin of his neck. There’s no definite picture in my mind of what sex with him would be like, but this is why I’m attracted. I want the idea of him—the idea of a good-looking, cool guy touching me erotically, sending shivers down my spine. If a guy like him wanted me, I’d feel validated as a desirable person.

The initial job near Scandia lasts four weeks, and by the end I’m sunburned, bruised, and disgusted with how hard some people have to work to survive.

But I want to be around Pickle, even though I know nothing will come of it.

I make the mistake of telling my friend Rob that I think Pickle is kind of cute.

Rob gets kind of quiet and says, “Well, maybe you should know what Pickle said about you before you get too excited about him.”

“What?” I ask.

“You don’t want to know,” Rob says.

“Goddamn, just tell me.”

He looks at me for a moment with a level gaze. I know he won’t lie.

“Called you a whore.”

I had “done it” twice at that point in my life, and neither of the experiences were too great. True, I had made the first move in both cases, and both cases involved beer or pot, but that didn’t make me a whore. Whores in my book were uneducated, common, their body language was loose, they liked to go up to guys and hang their arms around them, wheedling, or they were subtle, whispered unspeakable smut in guys’ ears to get them horny. I had never done that. If anything, I was awkward around men.

I tried to figure out why Pickle said that about me. Maybe it was the purple hair. I tried to remember anything I’d said around the crew that smacked of whoredom.

Pickle calling me a whore riled me, but I didn’t show it, not right then anyway.

Little by little, though, his words corrode me. Worse yet, I discover I have an even stronger crush on Pickle. I begin having erotic dreams about him. Instead of calling it quits when the job at Scandia is done, I ask the foreman if I can follow the crew down to the next job, 150 miles south, in Belpre, Kansas. He says okay.

I drive down alone one cool September afternoon, find the boss at the new site, tell him I plan to live in my car, take showers where and when I can. He looks kind of skeptical.

At least I have a decent car—my mom’s old Cadillac. The first night in Belpre I park in the vacant lot behind a Quik Trip to sleep in the roomy back seat. No one asks why I’m parked there. Staring at the dusky purple twilight from my makeshift bed, I feel a mixture of elation that I’m on my own—no one knows exactly where I am right now—and sour self-pity that this is the best adventure I’d found for myself. But I’m proud that I’d taken off on a whim—where you say “I’m going” and then you actually go.

The next day, I find a place to live with a girl newly hired onto the crew. We make a deal: rides to work in exchange for rent. She lives 15 miles away. Joleen is 18, what guys would call a “babe.” She has a 19-year-old roommate, Yvonne, who works in the kitchen at the state mental hospital. Yvonne has steely eyes like an ill-bred terrier, ready to snap if you cross her. Joleen is friendlier and we got along pretty well despite the age gap. I’m 26.

The first night at their place I lie stretched out on the living room couch, trying to sort out the day in my mind, and suddenly there’s an insistent knocking at the door. It’s one a.m. I open the door to two skinny teenage males with unruly brown hair and huffy expressions. “Who the hell are YOU?” they yell. They sound drunk. Joleen appears, leads them to the bedrooms, and it isn’t long before I get to listen to all of them fuck—in separate bedrooms, but at the same time. Yvonne is a loud one. “Oh, fuck me, yeah, oh—harder—c’mon, oh yeah” she cries from her bedroom, over and over in a breathless frenzy.

When she and the guy are finished, I stand in the darkness of the living room, start clapping, and shout “Very good!”

The guy in Yvonne’s room starts laughing. The other one yells “Bitch, get out!”

And that’s my introduction to Joleen and Yvonne’s place.

I start drinking a lot more, smoking more pot. There’s parties with the road crew, and although I had avoided party atmospheres before, I now start craving them. I’m not exactly horny, but circling around the idea of sex. I get soused one night and lay my head on the lap of this guy named Frank, feel his dick get hard under his Levis. Another night I ask this truck driver named Hippie if he wants to exchange neck rubs.

To be open with people, not as sex objects, but just as humans, that’s what I wanted. Just to touch another person. I was feeling my way with guys, trying to figure them out as people. But most of them didn’t get what I was doing. I was slowly learning something: the second you touch a guy, they’re thinking sex. Most of the ones I met, anyway.

Pickle hooks up with a friend of Joleen’s named Candy and I get to hear about Pickle’s big dick. At first I’m jealous, then I become nonchalant, figuring I could get someone to do it with if I half tried.

One night in October, a wicked-looking full moon in the east, I smoke a joint, drive my car around town looking for nothing in particular, then end up at the city park. Two nondescript guys around 20 years old are swinging in a playground-style swing set, singing something about whiskey being fine but wine is quicker.

I park my car, watch them for a minute, then get out and walk towards a fountain with jets that leap up as high as a small building, lighted with red, green, and blue flood lamps alternately.

When the lights turn red, I yell out to them “Looks like hell fire!”

They stop swinging. I have no fear as I approach them and ask if they hang out at the park a lot. They’re quiet at first, then the dark-haired solidly built one with a skull-cap type bandana on his head starts talking.

I take them back to Joleen and Yvonne’s party house, we listen to R.E.M., smoke some pot, drink some Mad Dog, and later that night I do it with the dark haired one in the back seat of my mom’s car. I know only his first name—Marty.

I tell myself to quit my loose living while there’s still time.

But I don’t quit.

Now that I’d screwed up, I went for all-out decadence. Pickle’s words still rankled, and instead of getting the hell away from this place where I seem doomed, I sink even lower. I feel the great white shark of whoredom swimming in my soul. I start doing it with every guy I can: a guy named Louis who lives across the street. A guy from Ireland, who works at the hotel down the street. A guy I pick up at a party who scares the crap out of me when he starts choking me while we’re doing it. The last thing I remember before getting out of his squalid little box-shaped house was him standing and pissing on his bare egg-carton gray foam mattress.

Then one of the road crew truckers named Bruce asks me to dinner. He seems genuinely interested in me, and treats me with what seems like respect. After two dinner dates, he rigs it so we can stay in a friend’s house in a downstairs room. He plays a song on the guitar and sings a little, a bittersweet attempt to win me over. It kind of works, but it’s mostly the tequila that gets me horny. We do it. Then he sidles into my car the next morning and leans over to give me a kiss like he’s my new boyfriend. I tell him to stay away.

None of the sex I have during this time is intimate or anything close to what is promised in romantic movies or songs. I feel like a prostitute, except I’m not getting paid. I know what I’m doing makes no sense, but that’s why I do it. In the meaningless world I find myself in, sex is also meaningless.

One night I start feeling something is really wrong. Worse than acting slutty. Worse than getting used. Worse. It’s early November. I’m lying in Joleen’s bed; she’s out fucking some guy, probably. The shots of whiskey I downed alone all afternoon are stupefying me. I think the room is a huge cave—the walls echo and the dark red carpet is a lake of blood. Someone comes into the house and there are voices in the living room but I shut them out, pull the covers over my head and try to think of absolutely nothing. Then a sudden pang in my gut makes me wince. It’s unlike any nausea I’ve felt before. It’s not the whiskey.

Right then I know, and start to quietly sob.

It’s 200 miles to the clinic. I get a Saturday appointment so I don’t miss any work. I drive myself to the appointment alone even though they tell me I should bring someone. I don’t want anyone to know.

When it’s over I drive halfway back to Belpre before the Valium they gave me kicks in. As my eyes start closing, I pull over at a truck stop and pass out, the late afternoon sun magnified on my face through the windshield. Before going under, I stare at the vivid green leaves on a stately oak standing before me, a litany of self-torture running through my brain: Stupid cunt, half-assed life. Mad at the world, trying to rebel. All you do is fuck yourself. You think you’re so smart for subverting God’s plan, a concept that has no meaning for you and never did. Now you see where it gets you. Now you see.

I go home to my parent’s and sleep for three days straight. My mom doesn’t know exactly what’s up, but she knows it’s something bad. She keeps telling me to just relax. I tell her I have some business to finish back in Belpre.

I know who it was. I wasn’t in that much oblivion. It was the dark-haired 17-year-old from the park. Turns out he was from Miami, Florida, but living in a rehab center in Belpre. For what reason they shipped him there, I don’t know. He told me after we did it the first time I was “half his life.” We did it once more. I had the condom in my hand. He told me he’d pull out. He was mad as hell when I told him. I said I was sorry and that I didn’t mean for it to end up the way it did. Then I told him to get the hell away and never talk to me again.

The truth is I never liked him, I just fucked him because he was there and I wasn’t pretty enough to get Pickle, the guy who called me a whore. I didn’t understand it, and the thought of what I did made my insides curdle. I killed. Killed. It wasn’t just the month-old zygote. I killed myself. On a stained couch in a run-down shack in Belpre, Kansas, on an October night in 1991.

I have to try to forget. I work one last day with the crew before they leave for their next job. As I drive away, back to my parents, I see Pickle on top of the mill in my rear view mirror. He doesn’t wave goodbye. Tears I’ve been holding back start flowing uncontrollably. I cry like I haven’t cried in years. It isn’t because of Pickle. I cry because even though my little adventure turned out tawdry and shitty I was sad it was over, because it was mine. I made every bad decision, but those too were mine.

§ § §

Angela Havel lives in the southwestern sand hills of Nebraska, trying desperately to figure out how she ended up there. When not dredging up the black ooze of her past, she tries to live a clean and decent life, pursuing organic gardening and making a home for numerous beloved animals.

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.

Send the URL for this work to a friend!

°