I was in my 30s, the prime of my physical life. Looking out my efficiency apartment window, I asked myself what I really wanted to do that morning and decided I didn't want to work at Brown and Root on a hot day in a tin shed without air-conditioning, standing twelve hours on ground so unsteady that every piece of heavy equipment passing by made the tin shed shake, rattle and roll. I went to my foreman that morning and told him I was packing up and moving on. King Ray, that was his name, understood perfectly and sent me on my way with a smile and a recommendation for rehire should I ever return.
That morning was the closest I ever came to truly feeling like a free man who could choose his own destiny, but feelings are fleeting, and, of course, the money I'd saved didn't last long. Another woman appeared who I should never have married, and, soon, I was back in deep doodoo. Within the year, I was splitsville with that wife and on the road again. That's what I always think of as a Southern man's thinking, the sort of thoughts and behaviors that make up the vast majority of country-western songs—struggling, loving, fighting and moving on. An endless cycle. Of course, then I got sober and a lot changed, but a lot more remained the same. Ambivalence is, maybe, more universal than change.
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