THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK

3.

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT AND THE STREETS WERE DEAD. I STEERED MY PICKUP TRUCK

into another empty parking lot and killed the engine. In the quiet all I could hear were the eerie halogen hum of the street lamps and the scratch of my pen as I checked off another franchise feed trough. The latest in a never-ending series of fast food and dine-in industrial kitchens that received more nightly visitors than you’d care to know about. That’s why guys like me showed up to places like this in the wee hours. I stuffed my clipboard under the armrest, grabbed my gear, and began restocking rat traps.

They’re everywhere, those little green boxes. Look around almost any restaurant and you’ll find them, hidden in plain sight. My job was to bait, move, or replace them. Sometimes I hit pay dirt and found a rat carcass, which never caught me by surprise. You know death when you smell it.

This wasn’t the mission I signed up for when I enlisted in the Air Force with dreams of joining a Pararescue unit. Back then I was nineteen years old and weighed 175 pounds. By the time I was discharged four years later, I had ballooned to nearly 300 pounds and was on a different kind of patrol. At that weight, even bending down to bait the traps took effort. I was so damn fat I had to sew an athletic sock into the crotch of my work pants so they wouldn’t split when I dropped to one knee. No bullshit. I was a sorry fucking sight.

With the exterior handled, it was time to venture indoors, which was its own wilderness. I had keys to almost every restaurant in this part of Indianapolis, and their alarm codes too. Once inside, I pumped my hand-held silver canister full of poison and placed a fumigation mask over my face. I looked

like a damn space alien in that thing, with its dual filters jutting out from my mouth, protecting me from toxic fumes.

Protecting me.

If there was anything I liked about that job it was the stealth nature of working late, moving in and out of inky shadows. I loved that mask for the same reason. It was vital, and not because of any damn insecticide. I needed it because it made it impossible for anyone to see me, especially me. Even if by chance I caught my own reflection in a glass doorway or on a stainless steel countertop, it wasn’t me I was seeing. It was some janky-ass, low-budget storm trooper. The kind of guy who would palm yesterday’s brownies on his way out the door.

It wasn’t me.

Sometimes I’d see roaches scurry for cover when I flipped the lights on to spray down the counters and the tiled floors. I’d see dead rodents stuck to sticky traps I’d laid on previous visits. I bagged and dumped them. I checked the lighting systems I’d installed to catch moths and flies and cleaned those out too. Within a half hour I was gone, rolling on to the next restaurant. I had a dozen stops every night and had to hit them all before dawn.

Maybe this kind of gig sounds disgusting to you. When I think back I’m disgusted too, but not because of the job. It was honest work. Necessary.

Hell, in Air Force boot camp I got on the wrong side of my first drill sergeant and she made me the latrine queen. It was my job to keep the latrines in our barracks shining. She told me that if she found one speck of dirt in that latrine at any moment I would get recycled back to day one and join a new flight. I took my discipline. I was happy just to be in the Air Force, and I cleaned the hell out of that latrine. You could have eaten off that floor. Four years later, the guy who was so energized by opportunity that he was excited to clean latrines was gone and I didn’t feel anything at all.

They say there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, but not once your eyes adjust to the darkness, and that’s what happened to me. I was numb. Numb to my life, miserable in my marriage, and I’d accepted that reality. I was a would-be warrior turned cockroach sniper on the graveyard shift. Just

another zombie selling his time on earth, going through the motions. In fact, the only insight I had into my job at that time was that it was actually a step up.

When I was first discharged from the military I got a job at St. Vincent’s Hospital. I worked security from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. for minimum wage and cleared about $700 a month. Every now and then I’d see an Ecolab truck pull up. We were on the exterminator’s regular rotation, and it was my job to unlock the hospital kitchen for him. One night we got to talking, and he mentioned that Ecolab was hiring, and that the job came with a free truck and no boss looking over your shoulder. It was also a 35 percent pay raise. I didn’t think about the health risks. I didn’t think at all. I was taking what was being offered. I was on that spoon-fed path of least resistance, letting dominoes fall on my head, and it was killing me slowly. But there’s a difference between being numb and clueless. In the dark night there weren’t a lot of distractions to get me out of my head, and I knew that I had tipped the first domino. I’d started the chain reaction that put me on Ecolab duty.

The Air Force should have been my way out. That first drill sergeant did end up recycling me into a different unit, and in my new flight I became a star recruit. I was 6’2” and weighed about 175 pounds. I was fast and strong, our unit was the best flight in all of boot camp, and soon I was training for my dream job: Air Force Pararescue. We were guardian angels with fangs, trained to drop from the sky behind enemy lines and pull downed pilots out of harm’s way. I was one of the best guys in that training. I was one of the best at push-ups, and the best at sit-ups, flutter kicks, and running. I was one point behind honor grad, but there was something they didn’t talk about in the lead-up to Pararescue training: water confidence. That’s a nice name for a course where they try to drown your ass for weeks, and I was uncomfortable as hell in the water.

Although my mom got us off the public dole and out of subsidized housing within three years, she still didn’t have extra cash for swim lessons, and we avoided pools. It wasn’t until I attended Boy Scout camp when I was twelve years old that I was finally confronted with swimming. Leaving Buffalo allowed me to join the Scouts, and camp was my best opportunity to score all the merit badges I’d need to stay on the path to becoming an Eagle Scout.

One morning it was time to qualify for the swimming merit badge and that

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meant a one-mile swim in a lake course, marked off with buoys. All the other kids jumped in and started getting after it, and if I wanted to save face I had to pretend I knew what I was doing, so I followed them into the lake. I dog paddled the best I could, but kept swallowing water so I flipped onto my back and ended up swimming the entire mile with a fucked-up backstroke I’d improvised on the fly. Merit badge secured.