Nearly 40 and nearly broke, haunted by an abusive father and struggling to make it as an actor/musician/playwright, Michael Patrick Smith did what Americans have done since Plymouth Rock: He tried to reinvent himself. This time, as a roughneck in the oil fields of North Dakota.
Mr. Smith’s re-do is the subject of his ambitious memoir, “The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in An American Boomtown.’’ Writing in a stream-of-consciousness style that recalls Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,’’ Mr. Smith deftly flashes back to memories from his troubled childhood in central Maryland while dealing with the fear and despair he experienced living in a modern work camp that bordered on social anarchy.
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In the spring of 2013, Mr. Smith traveled from Brooklyn to Williston, N.D., to begin anew. Williston was at the epicenter of the nation’s fracking boom. Its population had tripled from 2008-12, making it the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the nation.
Mr. Smith found a town overwhelmed by desperate men looking for a fresh start — and lugging all of their troubles with them. The place reeked of methane and violence. A murdered teacher is found buried in a shallow grave. An 84-year-old woman is raped in her home. A 22-year-old man is raped in his truck. Mr. Smith says he lived in constant fear of becoming a victim.
Mr. Smith passes through the living room of a flophouse that he shares with a dozen other boarders. A mother sits on the couch, massaging a man’s shoulders as her 20-something son and another man troll for prostitutes on the internet. They agree on a woman they like, but the man says her asking price — $300 — is too much.
The mother says to her son, “I’d buy you a prostitute if that is what you wanted.’’
Dust Bowl singer Woody Guthrie and the author John Steinbeck sentimentalized the poor and working poor by finding dignity in their lives and turning it into art. Mr. Smith acknowledges Guthrie as a hero, and even penned a play about him. But unlike Guthrie and Steinbeck, Mr. Smith doesn’t sugarcoat what he sees. In a series of character sketches, he depicts his co-workers as violent, casual racists struggling to control their drug and alcohol habits. They blow their paychecks at strip clubs and on trucks and guns.
Mr. Smith suspects a co-worker wants to kill him. He says that most of these men suffer from daddy issues, just like him. Ironically, Mr. Smith comes to view his homicidal co-worker as a father figure.
One of the few uplifting scenes in this memoir is when Mr. Smith returns to New York to visit friends after several months working as a swamper, a driver’s assistant. Leaving a theater, he notices all of the petroleum-based products around him – gas-belching cabs, plastic earbuds, the varnish on a bar top. He suddenly realizes, “New York reaps the benefit of labor done thousands of miles away on the desolate plains of North Dakota, the labor I do. I feel proud. This is what it means to be a good hand, to do meaningful work.’’
Masquerading as a modern-day Guthrie in the newest Oil City may be a somewhat hoary idea, but considering the publishing world’s seemingly endless fascination with working-class voters in the Trump era, it’s understandable that a publisher greenlighted it.
Sadly, Guthrie’s weltanschauung is not the only thing that Mr. Smith appears to have borrowed. A central character in “The Good Hand’’ is Porkchop, a giant tattooed Native American who spent time in prison for murder. He sounds like Chief Bromden, a giant Native American imprisoned by the state, in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’’ Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but in the acknowledgements Mr. Smith thanks his editor for “the Ken Kesey stories.’’ Hmmm.
Post-truth readers who take memoirists seriously but not literally will find much to like about “The Good Hand.’’ Mr. Smith writes empathetically but not sentimentally about working men and women scuffling paycheck to paycheck, and he does so in a Skid Row patois that would make Charles Bukowski proud. He may, at last, have found his calling.
Steve Halvonik is a former Post-Gazette reporter and editor who teaches professional writing at Washington & Jefferson College.
First Published: February 9, 2021, 11:00 a.m.