(And yes, you’re welcome for injecting that 1975 Van McCoy earworm into your brain.)
Every day, I see dudes in our apartment complex walking through the parking lot and down the hill to the busy commercial street below. They’re wearing knit shirts with restaurant logos and I’m assuming they’re going to work in the kitchens of said eateries.
In these hotter-than-the-hinges-on-the-gates-of-hell summer days, they’re walking to work, maybe because they don’t have cars and, luckily, there are so many places to eat nearby.
Increasingly, they’re turning out for work every day at some risk: getting swept up by state-sanctioned kidnappers.
Whatever the risks and whatever the meager rewards – nobody working in a restaurant kitchen is making more than minimum wage – they’re hustling every day.
They’re an echo of their parents and, honestly, my parents. My dad worked for 30 years in an auto parts factory. The days were hot and dirty and noisy; he was half-deaf by the time he retired. And when he retired, he ran pay-to-fish ponds down the hill and behind our house. Once a week he drove to another city, his old Chevy pickup with a waterproofed wooden tank that he built on the back, to pick up catfish and bluegill to stock the ponds. He’d owned and ran an apartment house years before I was born and sharpened saws after he retired.
My mom’s story was similar, and I tell some of it in my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW. She and her sisters gathered wild-growing plants near their little town in Tennessee – the place that inspired the town in my novel SEVEN ANGELS – to sell to reps of pharmaceutical companies. They collected the plants in burlap sacks and sold them, at the end of the day, for pennies.
My mom ran our 20-acre farm for those 30 years my dad worked in the factory. She cleaned houses and factories, a job I helped with before I started working in the newspaper business.
I have only a portion of the hard work, the sheer hustle, of my parents. Or those guys walking to work in a hot kitchen every day.
And I’m acutely aware of that.
“I need to work more and work longer hours if I’m gonna write all these books,” I said the other day.
“You know, you can take downtime,” the reply came.
And I do take down time. Too much of it. I need to work harder and smarter. I need to hustle.
keithroysdon 