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before the bell rang and we had to be back in our work areas. Sometimes we talked about sports; how the Orioles and the Ravens and the Steelers were sucking, or listened to the various NASCAR camps debate the drivers; who’d forced who off the track and whether Ford was better than Chevy. Other times it was swimsuit models and porno starlets, or music, or hunting, or the latest movie, or what happened at the strip joint on the edge of town. In between these topics, we razzed each other constantly because that’s what guys do.
    I bring this up, not because it’s important that my best friend was a mutant with a hairy dick, but because it was the last good time I can honestly remember before things turned to complete shit.
    In the last twenty-four hours, I’d been diagnosed with cancer; told that I was dying and that there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it, thrown up a very large and disgusting piece of myself in the toilet, lied to my wife, and learned that the credit card was shut down, the electricity was about to follow, and we couldn’t afford to pay for any of it.
    But it got worse. It got a lot fucking worse.
    The whole day had been progressively bad. I overslept and was almost late for work. I felt like shit. Part of it was depression. It’s not every morning that you wake up and remember that you’re dying. But that’s what I did. I got up, looked at the alarm clock, cursed, shuffled to the bathroom, pissed, and as I was shaking it off, I remembered.
    But it wasn’t just the depression. My head was killing me. I swallowed four aspirin with my first coffee, and they had no effect. I stopped on the way to work, bought another cup of coffee and some cigarettes, and puked the coffee back up a few minutes later. The cigarettes tasted like dried dog shit, but I smoked them anyway. My coughing fits came in spurts, and each time one struck, my head felt worse. All morning long, I hocked bloody phlegm into black piles of foundry dirt and covered them up with my boot so that nobody would see them.
    The heat was bad. By nine in the morning, the temperature inside the foundry usually hovered around ninety-five degrees. That morning was no exception, especially around the furnace and ladle areas, where it was considerably higher. I ran the Number Two line, which was about fifty feet from the furnace. It was scorching in my area. The company provided us with free sports drinks that they kept in big coolers at different areas on the floor. I drank and drank, but it still seemed to sweat right through me. I felt like I had a fever. My mouth tasted funny too— a sickening, sour mixture of sports drink and tobacco and bloody saliva. Sweat ran into my eyes beneath my safety goggles and my skin felt tight and itchy.
    The foundry wasn’t just hot; it was dirty and loud too. All day long, forklifts rumbled, dumping hoppers full of scrap metal into the furnaces. Every time they backed up, there was a deafening BEEP BEEP BEEP that made my temples throb. People paged each other over the intercom all day long. Each breath brought more dirt into my lungs. When I went home at the end of each day, our shower turned black as I scrubbed the iron particles and grime from my pores. I was never completely clean until the weekend, when I had two extra days to get the grit out of my system. My arms were a crazy quilt of pockmarks, where burning flecks of metal had spattered them over the last five years. I used to watch the old-timers, wondering if they had started like me. Most of them had ugly burn marks that put my little scars to shame. All of them suffered from a terrible, racking cough; what we jokingly referred to as “black lung.” I remember my old man had it, before he ran off with the waitress and did us all the favor of getting killed.
    That morning, while I stood there sweating and aching, I wondered if maybe the foundry had given me cancer. Maybe Michelle and I could sue them. Then I lit up another cigarette and