005

Then came summer. The school year ended with a flurry of exams, and as each day passed, another member of 6th Bush would ride out into the sunset, with plans to meet up with others in neighboring states or nearby cities, and promises to stay in touch. Their dorm rooms slowly emptied: no longer filled with posters and books, or dirty laundry, but instead holding only the memories of two semesters — all the long nights, mischief, mishaps, scandals, and lessons of a bunch of kids learning how to become adults.

I went back home, but **** Lake didn’t feel like home anymore. Honestly, it never has. I’ve never felt any swelling pride for the suburban footnote between two interstates. It’s an honest place, with good people. Where you can leave your doors unlocked and where people look out for each other. Where the good-old Midwestern accent starts to creep in, hearing words like “eyg” (egg) or “beyg” (bag) or “cuepon” (coupon).

To most, their hometown represents childhood innocence: simpler times, happy memories. To me it always represented drowning. Every time I drove over the bridge, with the town’s namesake lake below me, that dark water didn’t make me feel warm. It was cold, pulling me further and further under the surface. At its bottom lay all my insecurities, all my pain. My alcoholic mother, my parents’ suffering marriage, the financial hardship. Not fitting in. No friends. No purpose.

**** is the kind of place you can go if you want forty years of simple, honest living. Go to college, get a six-figure job, buy that house on the water, send your kids to one of the best public schools in the state, take the boat out all summer, and chum it up with all your old pals at every football game. But that simple life comes at the cost of culture. Of creativity. Like you’re living in a 50s family sitcom. No one tries anything new, no one embraces their true calling, no one aims high or takes risk. We all just slowly sink deeper into the water. A new restaurant would come to town, and that would be the hottest news for a year. I so distinctly remember feeling like none of us at my school would ever break the mold. Instead, we’d stay on the tracks, get good grades, come back after college, and settle down. Comfort at the cost of ambition.

I always wanted to adventure — to cast off the bonds of expectation — but no one ever encouraged that. One of my classmates was an amazing singer; I remember her shocking the crowd at an elementary school talent show, we must have been six or seven. She was always the lead in the school plays and musicals, and when she turned down studying Biology at U of M to enter CMU’s theater program, all of us thought she was making a huge mistake. Sure, she was immensely talented and passionate, but come on — no one’s ever going to “make it” here. Those Hollywood and Broadway dreams were for the east coast and the west coast, not the coast of Lake Michigan. But six years later, she’s proved us all wrong, and is living her best life as a professional performer.

I went to college thinking I’d become a lawyer. I was garbage at math. Anything above geometry simply broke my brain. I remember my teachers and guidance counselors telling me I should go into comedy, into writing, and I shrugged it off. I even felt insulted. To me, grades were always more important than creativity while I was in **** Lake. Don’t fill my head with delusions of grandeur, I’m not going to write my way into the waterfront view and two jet skis. I have to go get that six-figure income like everyone else is. So my parents can walk around and say their kid is going somewhere. Doing something. Trading in the currency everyone else traded it.

In the Eighth Grade, I was recognized as the best writer in my school, and wrote a piece for the local paper — but that meant nothing to me. Oh yeah, imagine a career filled with writing hot takes in a paper with probably only four-digit circulation. And I think all of us felt that — like we couldn’t say we wanted to be actors or musicians or move abroad and go on adventures. That we felt the same constant undercurrent of that goddamn lake. Whether we knew it or not.

It was May, 2013. I wasn’t off to internships or a summer filled with vacations — I was just looking for a job, and a few months of free food.  My dad thought he could get me an internship in the office-side of the foundry where he worked, $15 an hour, phones, copies, coffee, the usual. But they weren’t hiring interns, so with no other prospects, I took a job on the floor. A foundry in the summer is as close to Hell that one can get in this life. 120° oppressive heat, in jeans, long sleeves, steel-toed boots, and gloves.

In a furnace of molten aluminum, I toiled for ten hours a day, six days a week. First, hanging completed parts on hooks to be inspected, having to constantly keep pace as they passed by on a track. Some parts were small — a pound or two — but others were twenty or thirty. Backbreaking work, pouring sweat, $10 an hour. Trapped in your own thoughts, the only stimulus being the sounds of clanging metal muffled by ear plugs. The hooks kept coming, and so did the parts. Like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill, just to watch it fall back. The job never stopped, I was never done, the day just ended. And no matter what, it would be there when I came back the next day.
After six weeks, I graduated to a new task. Hollow castings are made around molds of sand, to keep the shape as the pliable metal cools. But if the cast fails, you have to get all the sand out from the inside so the scraps of the failed part can be reused. My new job was beating these castaway casts with a hammer to break up the hardened sand and clean them out.

Like some type of laid-off Ren Faire blacksmith looking for a steady job, I was there, in the Seventh Circle of Hell, banging the fuck out of reject parts, cutting my hands and arms on their jagged edges, burning myself because some mouth-breather threw a still-scorching-hot hunk of metal into the pile, despite just minutes ago it being boiling aluminum.

I wanted to die — not in the suicidal action way, but in the way you start to stare into the abyss and notice how fragile life is. The monotony of repetitive labor was driving me crazy, and I’d think about how dangerous the manufacturing world is. Forklifts crisscrossing the floor, molten hot aluminum everywhere — just one fuckup, one failure, and that’s curtains. The way that on a long highway drive, you realize that if you just jerked the wheel to the left into oncoming traffic, that would be it. That death is all around us, but we so often fail to notice it.

While I was working I had no social life. I would come home, eat, and sleep. And on my one day off a week, I didn’t want to get out of bed or do anything — the clock in my head counting down the seconds until I had to get back in the ferry to cross the river Styx once more.

I didn’t keep in touch with any college friends; assuming they were all living grad lives, what the hell would I have to talk to them about? I work and I sleep and I Feel myself rotting from the inside — “How’s your internship going?” “How was Europe?”

My couple friends from High School home for the summer didn’t cross my path either. I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to bite down, keep my feet under me, and finish this miserable summer. What I assumed would be my last summer spent next to this cursed lake.