PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE

SHIT TIMES ONE THOUSAND REAL LIFE EXPERIENCES "WORST JOB" Rolls of blueprints from the 1950's as brittle as Civil War documents were rolled into my arms. Manholes marked by X's inside circles, & lines of the Ellport Sewage System under the streets were barely ascertainable in 1977; but for $3 an hour my job was to find & identify all the manhole-covers in the boro, unearth them however, & flush the sewer-lines with a 1950's fire-truck converted into a shit-flushing, water-purging machine. Lifting & pulling the thick disks with a pick to expose the hole, heaving it slave-like under a hot sun-drum of death was the easy part; the souring, pungent odor of manholes not opened for a couple decades & now permeating up like nauseating soup-mist from rank depths of Hell's excrement was nasal torture. I've smelled that smell for 20 years now, an indelible infinity is pressed in my brain sparked simply by the many links of memory. I descended on a wet, rusted, mucky metal ladder, nozzle of the fire-hose in my hand. Methane-dizzy, cramped in blackness, I bent to stuff the nozzle into a still stream at the bottom, 12 feet under the world I was happier in; then I ascended, dizzy & sick, to hit the valve of the truck so pressured water wld shoot & save the cellars of the citizens, to keep the flow going, to unclog this underground network of human waste.