SOMEONE'S GOT TO DO IT

Miami Herald, The (FL)
July 24, 1988
Author: TOM SHRODER Herald Columnist

The concrete blocks each weighed about 40 pounds, but that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that the edges were sharp and jagged, and they dug into your hands and rubbed your knuckles until they bled. The blocks were piled into a pyramid at one end of a long hall in what would soon be a luxury high- rise condominium. There were 353 blocks. I still remember the exact number. The job foreman walked me over to the pyramid and we both stood watching it. It wasn't going anywhere.

"Got to move those suckers," the foreman said.

"Move them?" I said. "What do you mean?"

"Over there." His hand flipped out to indicate the other end of the hallway, 15 feet distant. "They're in the way."

During that long afternoon of $2.75 hours I became as intimate with that 15-foot stretch of hallway as any physical space I have ever occupied. I knew every bent nail and every cigarette butt by brand. They marked a trail of tears.

But that wasn't the worst job I ever had.

I was a college student picking up a few bucks and some colorful experience over the summer. The miserable stooping and lifting in a pointless task, the bloody husks of my hands at the end of the day -- none of that defined me. It was temporary. I was better than that.

It wasn't until I got a "real" job, my first position as a newspaper reporter, that I learned how a job could destroy more than just your back and hands.

I worked in a tiny news bureau in a milquetoast retirement town of 20,000 built on landfill and pensions. The biggest thing in town was the Optimist Club's weekly breakfast and the best news out of the city commission had to do with sewage. My boss was one of those classic newspaper burnout cases who had fallen from a large, well-known paper to an obscure medium-sized one, to an even more obscure smaller one, and finally to this glaring one-room bureau in journalism hell. He chain-smoked particularly foul-smelling foreign cigarettes, noisily sucked on his upper plate and whenever there was work to do -- which was always -- he adjourned to the sleazy dive of a bar next door and played pinball. For months I languished in the poisoned air of that prison-cell of an office and turned myself inside out trying to turn nothing into paragraphs.

I dreamed of quitting. I imagined appearing in the main office downtown right on deadline and yelling across the newsroom, "I only had time for one brief today: I quit!" and striding out a free man into . . . what?

And that was always the problem. My imagination failed me when it came to the absence of a weekly paycheck. As paltry as it was, nothing would be far less. And walking out on a job wasn't the best resume-builder. So like most unhappy employees, quitting remained only a fond fantasy, but whenever I heard "Take This Job and Shove It" on the radio I sang along with feeling.

So it is for all of us who took the safe route that we present today's cover story by T.M. Shine. When Shine's last cover story appeared we called it "Why I Work at the Drugstore." It was the chronicle of a free spirit caught in a dispiriting job by the imperative of providing for his family. The response was overwhelming. Despite Shine's unique vision, people recognized themselves in the story, and they also recognized the extraordinary talent of its author.

"A guy like that shouldn't be working in a drugstore," was the general sentiment. He isn't anymore, as you'll see. Shine had the guts to do what most of the rest of us only dream about. And he is also discovering life after the final paycheck.

Shine's next piece will be about his experiences cleaning windshields under highway overpasses for quarters. And I'm not making this up.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald