Blue Collar: Chapter Four

Blue Collar: 

Chapter Four-Thomas

Thomas knows what it means to be alone. He has spent most of his life that way. Thomas just never has been able to get in step with everyone else. Even now.

When his friends were driving their parents’s cars, loaded with girls, to school, to their part-time jobs, to parties and back home again, Thomas was trying to figure out how to make a left-hand turn.

He would drive for miles trying to figure out how to get home with a series of right-hand turns rather than just make one left-hand turn.

Keeping a car between the ditches in the country was out of the question. Thomas kept his hands at 10-and-2, shaking, half-burnt down cigarette in his mouth, beat up Detroit Tigers hat on his head paying attention to everything that was going on around him. Unfortunately that meant he didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what was going on in front of him.

Fenders and bumpers often paid the price.

Years later Thomas admitted he had been afraid to wear glasses. Thought they made him look weak.

Maybe that’s what set Thomas back. But it could also have been all the pot he smoked.

“Doctors are saying that there is a part of the brain that doesn’t develop until you are like 19 or something and that’s the part of the brain that gives you judgement,” Jim tells Carolyn one afternoon.

“When that part of your brain doesn’t develop you are trapped with the brain of a 16-year old, and pot shuts down that development.”

“You read that where? On the Internet?”

“Don’t be so anti-technology. It’s true.”

Thomas doesn’t think about that much. He can’t afford the Internet. But he does has a lot of time to think every night watching Dancing with the Stars or whatever prime-time show his mom wants to see. Thomas has been a homebody since Stevenson Tool & Die closed three years ago. No work anywhere for someone with Thomas’ skills, which are limited to showing up for work on time every day, day in and day out, for fourteen years.

“That’s gotta count for something,” Thomas tells Jim on the day that it all ends. 

“I was there every day, sick as a dog, hangover from hell. It didn’t matter. I always showed up.”

“And you always gave at least 50 percent,” Jim reminds him.

“Yeah,”Thomas laughs with that peculiar snort that has been part of his persona since high school. He still has a Detroit Tigers hat too, just not the same hair under it.

Thomas, as always he has a burning cigarette in his hand, ready to find his mouth, as soon as he delivers his punchline.

“It’s on my resume.”

“Do you even have a resume?” Jim asks as they grab a couple of quick coffees at the McDonalds they’ve been going to since high school.

It’s on Twelve Mile, one of the arteries that has taken auto and defense factory workers and the engineers that plan their day back and forth from home to work to overtime, double-time and triple-time.

There aren’t as many cars flying by as there used to be. Jim looks out of the window, leaning back to get out of the way of Thomas’s cigarette smoke.

When did it all go wrong? 

“We were like those lobsters at Charlie V’s restaurant. Sitting in a pot of water, Charlie turning up the heat slowly. The poor things didn’t know they were cooked until they were cooked,” Jim says. “Just like us. We didn’t know it was over until it was over.”

“Too bad about Charley,” Thomas says and Jim grimaces, knowing what is coming next.

“One day he’s selling seafood. The next day his boat sinks in the FLOR-ida KEYs,” Thomas says stressing the same syllables every time he tells the joke.

Now his cigarette rim shot is ready for the punchline. Jim, too. And they say it together.

“One day Charlie V’s selling seafood, the next day he is seafood.” 

Thomas breaks up with a deep, cough and laugh sending smoke to the ceiling that drifts away, out the window just like the dreams he had in high school.

Thomas never saw himself sitting in a MacDonald’s talking to Jim about where it all went bad, how it all got away. Thomas never saw more than a day or two into the future. Okay. A day was the limit. But even if Thomas could imagine, he never would have imagined this. 

No one ever imagined this.

“So what are you going to do now?” Jim asks the question that nobody in Warren wants to hear. “What’s next?”

Thomas stares at the table top tracing a stain left by a pickle that must have fried in the sun. 

“I really don’t know. Everything has passed me by. Even before we shutdown I couldn’t keep up,” Thomas says looking up his wet, blue eyes locking onto Jim and Jim flinches a bit. This is  unusual. Thomas hardly ever looks anyone right in the eye.

“Those f-ing kids that ran their daddy’s shop just pushed me to the back. I worked the oldest machines, never got a chance at the new CNC equipment,” Thomas says. “So it’s all a mystery to me.”

Some teenagers walk into MacDonald’s laughing, joking, punching each other, playing to the girls, just like Thomas and Jim has done four decades before.

“Life’s a fucking mystery to me,” Thomas says taking another hit on his smoke. Jim notices that Thomas’s been rolling his own lately.

 “I wish I could do something to help him,” Jim tells Carolyn. He’s looking at the floor, still sitting in the Lazy Boy that he calls home most evenings. Coffee cup on the small wooden table on his right-hand side. Twenty-five years ago there would have been a cigarette slowly burning in his ashtray on the left. 

No more. 

Jim never really gave it up. 

Habit. 

Addiction.

Smoking. 

Coffin nails. 

Nobody quits for good. 

“You just quit again every day,” is how Jim explains it to Thomas and Michael one afternoon at Regal Lanes, where they learned to bowl, walking in from the parking lot where some learned to ball.

“One day you realize your car will go into reverse without a cigarette in your mouth. You also realize you are never going to lose the urge, no matter how self-righteous you get about it,” Jim concludes with a sigh that just isn’t the same without nicotine.

 Jim never really quit. Now he smokes in his mind and wishes there was a cigarette in his hand, just like Warren. It never really changed. It just wishes the tool-and-die shops would start up again and black smoke would fill the sky.

 Jim picks up a pen that was laying on the table to his left, holds it between his fingers, gives the end a flick with his thumb like he used to do with his Marlboro (box only, pack tastes different), looks at Carolyn and says, “I’m as lost as he is.”

 “Now wait a minute,” she says with that look on her face, that look that could quiet a roomful of eight-year old heathens at Sunday school if she believed in church, which Carolyn most certainly does not.

“You are not lost. You almost lost the business, but you saved it,” Carolyn says knowing that story too well.

Like many tool-and-die guys, Jim was an artist. But he was no businessman. He might have understood the math of industry, but he didn’t get he math of accounting. Even though Jim loved everything about the shop, he never bothered to do the dollars and cents to find out how much it cost to create his art.

 Carolyn helped him with that. She did more than help. She did it. Carolyn knew enough about math to explain it to high school kids. Explaining it to Jim was a different story. 

“I realize that it was time to stop teaching and start doing.” Carolyn told her best friend Sally about five years ago, right when Michigan had its foot on the lever that would open the lid on the shit can its economy was doomed to fall into.

 Carolyn worked in the shop alongside Jim. He did the industry. She did the math. Together they saved the business. Together. That’s the way it had been since community college. As far as she is concerned, that is the way it always will be.

 However, it was time to teach Jim another hard fact of life.

 “Honey, I promised to live you in good times and bad, for better or worse, in sickness and in health,” Carolyn said as she takes his face in her hands. “But, not for lunch.”

“I never promised to have lunch with you every day.”

 “It is time to stop worrying about Thomas and go to work.”

(c) 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved

Blue Collar is a serialized novel.  To read Chapter Five, click here.

Sometimes Things Break is the first novella in the St. Isidore Collection series. It tells the story of one young lover and one middle-aged lover, one with love in his heart, one with murder in her soul. 

Bree wants her parents dead. Tim wants Bree. You can see where this is going, right?

Sometimes Things Break is available wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and your favorite indie book store.

For more books, articles, and essays by Rod Kackley click here or download the free Rod Kackley app through Google Play or the App Store.