Detritivore

I deserve the vomit on my nice shoes

My first job out of graduate school was at an office in the heart of Downtown Denver.

I thought I made it. All my financial woes as a broke grad student subsisting off a barely livable stipend were done—I was in corporate now. Gone now were the days of endlessly pipetting one solution or another into another with the hopes that sixteen hour days under oppressive fluorescent lights would pay off. That, finally, one of the times I mixed two clear solutions together, they’d change color and their color change would be strong enough to know that I’d cured cancer and gotten my Nobel.

Eventually you just get over it. Those foolish aspirations. Helping the world is so passé now, just ask the rich. Thankless bullshit. I didn’t save anyone or anything with the exception of the ego of a few septuagenarians desperately clinging to the twilight of their careers, chasing some dragon of being the first to name a disease. Treatment? Eh, that’s for the renewal proposal half a decade down the line. And I was one of the lucky few who actually got good data.

You learn that all the huffed chemicals, carpal tunnel, economic hardship, and emotional abuse you voluntarily subjected yourself to resulted in a couple papers published in journals no one will ever read, a couple letters after your name that no one in the real world gives a shit about, and a maladjusted superiority complex that you choose to call a “chip on your shoulder”—regardless if you even know what it means to have one. After all, this was the ivory tower of academia, you certainly wouldn’t know true hardship if it bit you on the ass. If you’re real fucked in the head, you continue the cycle. You stick around for whatever reason and pray that you’re one of the ten-ish percent of recipients who go on to become some kind of tenure-track professor, inflicting your residual pain on some youngins down the line.

I didn’t have the intelligence, drive, inherent talent, luck, or ambition to go that route. I sold out instead. I traded my lab coat for a fleece vest and consulted for companies and attorneys that were just about illiterate with respect to the scientific method. I’m not proud of it, but when an offer letter hits your inbox with that much offered in the salary, your eyes can get a bit bigger than your stomach. Smash that soul chirping like a dying smoke detector down a little bit, because when you grow up poor and the opportunity to seize your life presents itself, you grab it.

I remember when I interviewed for the position, I bought a pair of oxblood dress shoes on clearance that I put on my credit card, praying it would clear. They looked perfect with the suit I was wearing. For the first time in my life, I looked like I belonged—however fleeting that feeling turned out to be.

I couldn’t afford the parking pass to the attached garage to our fancy office building when I first started at the job, so I took the train each day. Every day I went to the office, I woke up at five, put on the nice outfit I meticulously planned the night before, and walked the half mile to the station for the fifty-minute train ride to the city. Then once in the city, I walked the final fifteen minutes to the office building. It was sterile white on the bottom floor and housed a café that sold eight-dollar lattes that transitioned to a wine bar that served fifteen-dollar glasses of house red and zinfandel starting at three in the afternoon. Then I took the elevator to floor fifteen where my open cubicle in the middle of the floorplan stared at eighty-five other people as we worked in silence barring incessant clacking, clicking, and that one lady who had no voice control taking all her Teams meetings from her desk.

I got to my desk fifteen to twenty minutes before eight and was ready for yet another day of defending the worst companies you could possibly think of. For fifty to sixty hours a week, I was bouncing between:

“Well, you can’t actually prove it was our client’s asbestos-containing products that caused your terminal cancer.” to, “I realize that your company would like to continue exposing workers to carcinogenic solvents.” to, “Theoretically, you could put this concentration of a chemical that is so obscure that it doesn’t have a common name in your tobacco products and it’s probably fine. We’re pretty sure it won’t give the kids cancer.” and so on ad nauseum.

Think about the most horrid companies you know of in the news, and I’ve probably done some work on their behalf. I’m certainly not proud of it, but when your entire education for the last decade deals with death, you tend to attract the grim reapers and angels of death that infest this planet on the search for their own wealth.

But wait—that was me too, wasn’t it? For an iota of this massive wealth, was I willing to weaponize my knowledge against those who didn’t know better? Apparently, I was.

About a year in, I was firmly entrenched in assessing whether or not huge companies whose gross negligence would likely result in disease, destruction, or death should settle with complainants or go to trial—fighting against their responsibility to pay medical bills to people who were on the way out regardless.

I was taking an earlier train now, tobacco company clients liked to have early meetings. More daylight time to market poison to children, I guess. It was even faster than driving. I thought about driving, but I learned that money still goes away faster than you think and eighteen dollars a day was still too steep for my tastes.

This new train was just early enough to still be carting the drunk and strung-out from the night before. Before the municipal crews could get to cleaning. Every morning, I stared out the window on my way to my glamorous office job that was going to make me something. One morning while looking out the window at an old derelict station that the city didn’t use, a sleeping man opposite me threw up on onto my oxblood shoes. One day, on my way off the train, glass shards from a shattered crack pipe embedded themselves in my soles. Some mornings, streams and tributaries of piss crisscrossed the floor of the train like intricate spiderwebs or varicose veins gripping my shoes. I washed the shoes more times than I can count, but does that ever go away? The waste? The detritus? Especially when you bring it on yourself.

I thought of people I knew. The ones I went to school with. My friends. The relationships I trashed to get to where I was. The love of my life who told me she hated me for what I’d become. I thought of me five years prior. I hated what I’d become. Still do.

I did it all so I could be at the top. Hold on to my perceived success. But that’s not what happened. I was being dragged to Hell after glimpsing a Heaven I would never know. Lawyers and real doctors and real scientists and engineers. The actual cream of the crop. Respect, humility, fulfillment, love, all of that.

It was a weird sensation watching your life crumble to ruin in real time despite delusions of grandeur.

The worst part is that I didn’t even get to quit this job. The universe wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction to free myself. I got laid off after a couple clients went under and couldn’t pay invoices. Funny how karma works, right? All for two weeks of severance.

I wanted to be the best at what I did. The one who thrives. Instead, everyone else did. In the process, I forgot my empathy. I forgot how to love. I forgot how to be a human. Maybe it comes back, maybe it doesn’t.

Instead, my mind hangs out at that derelict train station that hasn’t undergone maintenance in decades likely. Likely coated in years of feces, vomit, and every other kind of waste.

The kind I live in now.