Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim — Read

In the dirty clothes that he had worn upon his arrival, qualified by a clean shirt, he went forth on the next morning and found work as a lineman's helper for a telephone company. He was required to climb up the wooden poles; hand tools to the lineman; unwind huge spools of wire; make simple repairs under the lineman's guidance. As he labored from pole to pole, down a suburban street, taking the impersonal whip of the sun and winning the pricks of insects on his sweat-dappled face, he felt dully grateful toward the physical orders that were crudely obliterating the confused demands of his heart and mind. As he toiled on, this dull feeling gradually rose to a self-lacerating joy. He revelled in the cheap vexations brought by his tasks -- the unpleasant scraping of shins against iron rungs and the sting of dust in his eyes -- and his self-hatred stood apart, delightedly watching the slavish antics of the physical mannikin.

Then, when this emotion paused to catch its breath it was replaced by a calmer one, and his insignificance receded a bit, beneath the substantial lure of arms and legs that were moving toward a fixed purpose. "I am doing something definite now and that is at least a shade better than the indefinite uselessness of my thoughts," he mumbled to himself as he lurched from pole to pole. The slowly mounting ache of his muscles became a bitter hint of approaching peace and he looked forward to the moment when he would quit his labors and enjoy the returning independence of his body, as though it were a god's condescension. He worked quickly and breathlessly, as one who hurries to a distant lover's arms. Filled with a doggedly naive hatred for his own deficiencies, he welcomed this chance to insult them with disagreeable and infinitely humble postures, and he gladly punished himself underneath the violence of the sun. It was, indeed, a spiritual sadism deigning to make use of the flesh.