That summer I had a gig at the local steel mill, Raritan River Steel. It wasn’t one of those Carnegie mega-mill infernos, but at one hundred acres it was definitely fuego enough for me. I worked in a department called Mobile Maintenance that was charged with keeping the mill vehicles up and running – no easy task given the heat, the dust and all the attrition from being around molten metal. We usually fixed shit on site, in whatever part of the mill the vehicle was stationed: in the melt shop, the roll mill, or where the ships loaded with scraps pulled up. Mechanics even had to scramble up the massive fucking Komatsu crane, a climb that used to give me the puckers just looking at it.

As a summer temp with no mechanical training, my job was to clean parts in the garage and run errands throughout the mill, delivering tools and other bullshit to the mechanics when they needed them. I didn’t have to deal with actual steel, hot or cold, for any real length of time. Mine was an easy job as far as these things go, but it was still harder than delivering pool tables, or any other job I’d had. The heat alone had motherfuckers quitting on day one. Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated, nursing a hangover-level headache.

Not easy at all.

Didn’t help that we all had to wear stiff flame retardant ‘greens’ that easily raised your core temperature by 20 degrees. Or that the white boys I worked with were racist as hell. Or that even if you had a so-called easy job, you could still get smashed by a forklift or pinned under a couple tons of steel rods. And god forbid you got some article of clothing caught in a machine or were anywhere near the rolling yard when the steel started to cobble.

But it wasn’t like I had a lot of options. The mill paid way more than all the other jobs in the area and I needed that extra loot bad – without that cash I wasn’t getting back to Rutgers. And if I wanted anything in the world at that time it was Rutgers. Not only because I was wild about university life – which I was – but because I had met a girl the year before. My first novia. She was at Douglass, the women’s college, and had the darkest, curliest hair you ever saw, and even though we had nothing in common I really thought I was in love with her. When you’re a virgin and no one has ever really loved you, not your parents, not your siblings, a first love is something special indeed.

Did she love me?

No idea, but that was part of my desperate need to return to Rutgers – I wanted to find out.

So for three months I put up with all of it, because of love. Heat, racists, nightmares about losing my limbs, being called the sand-N-word  on the regular – all of it. I can’t imagine doing it now; I was tougher when I was younger. I kept my sanity by writing letters to the girl and by working out like I was trying to avenge myself against the world. For whatever reason most days I’d just put on the radio and go straight Arnold for two hours, and then lay in bed thinking about the girl until I passed out. Weekends I read and sometimes my boys visited from their summer sitches, but mostly I was alone in that apartment with my mother who had her own crap job to contend with and her own poor choices to simmer on. I wish I could say we talked and encouraged each other but if we said ten words in a week that counted as loquacious. Whenever I was feeling especially lousy I’d bring out the money I was stacking under the bed and just stare at it. My escape route out of the mill, out of my shitty life, out of my virginity.

I clearly wasn’t that smart in those days. Who the fuck cashes their checks and then stashes the money they desperately need under their bed, in a neighborhood where larceny and breaking-and-entering were ubiquitous?

Dumb-ass-number-one, that’s who.

My mother told me to put that shit in the bank, but in those days I didn’t trust banks – wanted my money in grabbing distance.

So there I was, week after week, fighting it out, lifting my weights, writing my little half-romantic letters where I was too afraid to really say what I was thinking and feeling, and the loot was stacking up and up.

And then it was over: last fucking day and no one at the mill said goodbye or baked me a cake; I doubt they even knew I wasn’t coming back or cared. I walked out of there like I’d survived something serious. My best friend picked me up in the parking lot and that night we had a little victory tour. I’d survived the mill, and would be back at Rutgers in a week.

I got home that night all kinds of hype. Called the girl, talked to her for five seconds, hit the weights and when I was done I lifted up the mattress and of course the money was gone.

I’d heard of dudes being set on fire at the mill, splashed with liquid steel, and I assume this felt a lot like that.

I checked the mattress again. Checked the floor under the bed. Checked the other mattress where my brother used to sleep. Checked all my pockets.

I’m sure I blacked out for a second.

I went upstairs, my heart about to burst. My mother was in the kitchen, flipping through El Diario.

I grabbed her hands. Please say you have the money. Please, mami.

She looked at me blandly. Of course I have your money. Next time put it in the bank.

Which I did, the very next day.

I made it back to Rutgers. The girl and I broke up before I lost my virginity. The only consolation was that I didn’t have to go back to the mill again, but I wore my steel toe boots for a few years until I gave them to a girl I liked. She took them to Spain for a semester and never came back.

Image © Europeana