Introduction
Introduction
We are stone, pure madness. We are the people who belong in loony bins, jailhouses, back alleys—anywhere you can stop for a piss on the road straight to hell.
Have you ever felt a pull so strong it yanks you away from who you thought you were? It did to who I thought I was.
A job haggles away your soul: your essence. Gets sold for thirty-five thousand dollars a year, plus dental, if you’re lucky.
I never fit behind a desk. None of these boys ever felt comfortable inside walls.
Rig pigs. Dirty, filthy pipeliners. We descend from the patch like the harbingers of the apocalypse in jacked-up F350s, rolling coal, black smoke darker than crude oil itself. You hate us for that—bitching about us behind the wheel of your Toyota Camry, making jokes about the size of our unit. Is it because we can get what we want and do what we want?
Hide your children, hide your daughters, hide your wives.
Most of our crew are from broken relationships, or in broken relationships, divorced by beautiful, beautiful gold diggers. Whore lovers and beer chugging madmen get together when excess loves company. We are the boys… Lavish, crazy, glorious…
Twelve-hour days are nothing. I really mean that. Fuck, give us a few rips and we’ll go for days. Some of the best guys I know are out here. Loyal. I mean, really loyal. Out here, that’s all you got. When it’s forty below and you’re broken down, and out, and done, and you still have to get the work finished, you’re thanking the heavens that you have your buds with you.
When I’m sure I’m going to die, when my fingers are blue, useless sticks, and I can’t feel my feet through steel toes, because I’m selling my soul for someone else to sell a barrel of black gold, I still know I’ll do it over and over again …
When I first came up here, before they beat the boy out of me, I never thought I’d say it, but it’s a wonderful thing to see suffering. It’s even better to be a part of it, tasting it while it slaps me around and calls me worthless.
It’s okay to call us God. You can do that. Call us a dream. Or maybe call us truth, because you only find truth through pain, can only reveal a man’s character through a fight. And if you cry, you might as well leave, because we don’t tolerate the weak. Junk yard dogs don’t play well with little bitches.
We have a saying, and it reads like gospel from the Bible itself:
You can’t be a pussy and a pipeliner.
