The Good Hand Quotes

“Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom by Brian Black, The Great Oildorado by Hildegarde Dolson, Pithole: The Vanished City by William Culp Darrah, Sketches in Crude Oil by John J. McLaurin, and The History of Pithole by Crocus. Two books by Sebastian Junger supplied me with a lens through which to view my experience with the men I worked with. I read War while”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“the humiliation of endless, enduring poverty makes him bitter.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“In the seven years I lived in New York, the perpetual youth machine kept me preoccupied. I hardly noticed that my Baltimore friends were buying houses, getting married, having children, and growing into lined faces. It happened gradually, but when I return to Maryland it stuns me. I arrive at a dinner party and my clothes feel the wrong size. I get brunch with couples and their kids and my mouth feels the wrong size. I can’t say the right thing. Or speak like a normal person. My volume knob is broken. I seem only to holler when saying something inappropriate or mumble incomprehensibly when trying to explain myself. I feel the coil centered in my belly winding tighter. The easier the conversation, the tighter that coil seems to wind. I find myself looking at my friends for weaknesses, getting angry at the smallest perceived slights. I challenge lifelong confidants in tight-lipped arguments over truly trivial matters. I can’t find a job. I apply for bartending jobs and construction work, mostly.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“reverie.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“sitting swamp side.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“Everything they enjoy. Every. Single. Thing. They get it from me. They get it from me and a group of the toughest, meanest motherfuckers I have met in my life. Men they wouldn’t like, men they look down on, invisible men they will never see in a state they dismiss as flyover. They owe it all to the hands. All of it.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“ruminates”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“myopic”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“Like war stories, oil field stories stand as testament to the survival of the teller. The more gruesome the account, the tougher the sonovabitch who lived to tell the tale. It’s a cruddy, cruel bravado.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“effusive.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“The old man is lecturing me on rigging, his maw a senseless, wet noisemaker. He yammers on and on, a blathering display of trucker-mouth diarrhea.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“inside the truck the radio rattles and clicks with the constant clucking of vulgar hens, a sewing circle of truckers and crane operators nagging at each other in a constant stream of bilious invective. It spills out of the speakers and fills the cab with scab picking and snark. Dressed up as jokes—with all the plausible deniability that provides—the operators compete relentlessly to get under each other’s skin.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“It empties the lines and crevasses of my face of dust and scoria.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“Shit load is actually kind of a technical term. A shit load is a load made up of random stuff, a bunch of different shit. Drivers complain about getting shit loads because they are more complicated to tie down. More important, because the weight of a shit load is harder to distribute, they are dangerous to transport. When a trailer is weighted unevenly, things can get squirrelly. As a new swamper, I learn to hate loading and off-loading the shit loads because the rigging is complicated. Unloading a regular load, a large square box, for instance, it is pretty easy in a glance to know how to get it off a trailer. But a shit load is like a difficult math problem if it were greasy with invert, dust, dirt, and diesel and worn by time and weather. And if it were heavy enough to kill you.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“Poverty is a habit.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“vacillated”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“vesicular”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“maudlin”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“supplicate”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“Archipelago.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“homogenous.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“It seems like all anybody talks about up here is work,” he grumbles, wiping his mouth. “That is all anybody talks about,” I tell him.”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“I wonder, after working literally dozens of jobs in my life, that I”
― Michael Patrick F. Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“knuckles nearly scraped the earth.”
― Michael Patrick F Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown

“Abuse requires constant short-term memory loss.”
― Michael Patrick F Smith, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown