QotD: My First Gig

What was your very first job? 
Submitted by Laurel.

QotD, what's going on here?  Are we starting to grow on each other?  I have to admit that I had almost written you off, and then you come back with what appears to be an earnest interest in my past.  Touche, QotD.  I might just be falling for you.

I had my first job when I was around sixteen.  I was a poor kid living in one of the white ghettos outside Charleston, West Virginia.  There weren't any jobs to be had.  I needed summer work, and the fast food stops were thankfully too full to hire anyone.  I applied for a social program that put kids from low income households to work.  They placed me at the state police academy, where I had to use a large sickle to clear dead brush from the side of the hill overlooking the interstate.  There were no trees, no shade; the sun was unmerciful.  I was supervised by a sergeant who must have thought I was slave labor from the way he ordered me around.  "Come on, boy.  You gotta work faster than that, ole' son."  I feigned passing out and had the program reassign me to another job.  The police academy assignment lasted all of two days before I chucked it in.

The next place they sent me to was a landmark cemetery on a mountain above the state capital building.  Burial grounds covered the entire mountainside.  It was a little city of stone angels, crosses, and dead, rotting flowers that smelled of month old rain water.  I worked there for the whole summer, and it was a real eye opener.  There were eight regular groundskeepers who patrolled the cemetery in battered pickup trucks.  Each caretaker was assigned a couple of kids like myself to serve as assistants.  There was this one caretaker who brought fried chicken legs to work, every single day, and ate them all day long.  He'd place a drumstick on a piece of plain white bread, and wrap the bread around the chicken like a taco.  Two other guys had a wrastlin' competition that was ongoing.  If their pickups were approaching one another on a dirt road, they would hit the brakes, and hop from the cabs, red smoke fuming from their nostrils.  They would run screaming at each other and then fall to the ground in each other's arms.  They would commence to wrastle until one of the older caretakers pronounced a winner.  Or, until they were too heat exhausted to continue.

There were a lot of truly bizarre things that happened that summer.  Including the time the caretakers all pooled their money, and supposedly purchased for the duration of a day some of the most wretched, local practitioners of the world's oldest profession.  Us young 'uns never actually saw any proof of this, but it was alleged by our mentors that the working girls were stashed in pickups, and tucked away in various secret locations around the cemetery.  The fellas who chipped-in could visit the ladies off and on throughout the day.  The important thing to remember here is the word "alleged."  But considering the character of the men in question, I have very little reason to disbelieve whatever horrible thing they bragged to us about.

So I can say, with something not too distantly removed from pride, that I was an Appalachian gravedigger.  I helped put 'em under, and sometimes dug 'em back up; and I once had a cheap, state-provided coffin smash open on me.  That should be a story for another time.