Working Stiff by Grant Stoddard

on how a major explosion at the refineries would blow Corringham “sky high,” then cheerfully go back to whatever it was they were doing. Several members of my family had long careers there, though I only managed to clock up two months at the refinery. This was one of the many jobs I took between ninety-day stays in New Jersey, the maximum time a U.S. tourist visa allows for EU citizens.
    A portion of the refinery was cleared for maintenance, creating a glut of extra jobs that BP rushed to fill. From Monday to Friday, I drove an eighteen-passenger bus around a three-mile circuit of the BP plant, obeying the speed limit of fifteen miles per hour under threat of dismissal. One of my coworkers was Kevin, a forty-year-old man who had lived in Corringham all his life, though, to my ear, he had a strong Afrikaans accent. On my first day, a grease monkey I’d struck up a conversation with told me that Kevin “shits in a bag.” It sounded at first likesome perverse compulsion, but it became apparent days later that this was just his colorful way of saying that Kevin had received a colostomy. I took over his rounds as he recovered from the operation by sitting in the subcontractor’s oil-spattered garage, drinking sugary tea.
    Dave was Kevin’s brother-in-law and was about ten years older, with eyes that went in markedly different directions. He worked on the refinery’s broken vehicles. Dave had worked all his life in a slaughterhouse that had recently gone under, which he bitterly blamed on the rise of vegetarianism. I’d only see Dave and Kevin every few days if they happened to catch me driving around at lunchtime.
    I started at 5:45 each morning and finished a little after 8:00 at night. My passengers were engineers, surveyors, grease monkeys, jetty pilots, and Philippine crew members coming ashore to spend their wages on booze, whores, and electrical items in nearby towns.
    Almost half of my shift was spent in total darkness, the remainder under low, heavy, charcoal-gray snowy skies as large, foul-smelling steam clouds belched forth from every nook and cranny of the plant. I’d only have people in the van for a tiny fraction of my countless daily laps, meaning I could listen to the thoughtful mix-tapes Becky was sending me at the rate of one a week. I could pull over and compose letters to her expressing my longing for her and my new American life and, as the weak winter light began to fade, furiously masturbate.
    On Saturday and Sunday I worked twelve-to fourteen-hour shifts in the refinery’s canteen, scrubbing industrial-sized pots and serving up food that would repulse foreign oilmen who hadn’t built up a tolerance to British cuisine. The “chefs” were a posse of hard-drinking, chain-smoking, pink-faced Scots who had spent most of their careers cooking for large numbers of working men on rigs, refineries, or tankers. I spent the latter half of the shift in the pot wash area. My only company at the sinks was a thirty-year-old beanpole of a man named Gazza, working to fund his seventh trip to Thailand for the purpose of having sex with young prostitutes. Over the course of five weekends, I had become an unwitting expert on backpacking, youth hostels, and the Thai skin trade.
    It was during my last weekend that the siren signaling an imminent catastrophe sounded. We were all rushed into a lead-lined, underground shelter, which I overheard a fellow evacuee saying would be “fucking useless” in the event of an explosion. The Scots, who looked, sounded, and acted like latter-day pirates, didn’t seem to care, taking great pleasure that they were being paid to stand around. Other people joined us and busied each other with gallows humor, cheerfully resigned to our imminent death. I, however, was petrified with fear. Of death itself, sure, but more that I would die here, the place I was escaping by inches and under the doomsday circumstances that every local had