I began daily perusals of the classified ads that quickly turned into rapid column scans for any heading out of the ordinary. Opening up the classifieds on the first day of a new job search is an exciting prospect — somewhere in the smudgy folds of this daily journal may lie the keyhole to your livelihood, like an Easter Egg hunt with a single golden egg hidden somewhere nearby. By the time you reach the bottom of the second column, passing all of the posts for Accountants, Administrative Assistants and Attorneys, the deflation seeps in. You have, in effect, seen about three dozen times the words “Nope, not you” stamped in newsprint. Bank Tellers, Bartenders, Busboys. Nope. Nope. Nope. Carpenters. Nope. Cashiers. Nope. And so on. No custom-made golden egg therein lies — rather you are scanning the pabulum of job offerings that any old Joe can fill. The infantry as it were. But you make it all the way through to Waiters and Welders and breathe a sigh of relief that the ritual is over for the day. Time for a burrito and a beer.
Initiative surrendered to resignation surrendered to sloth surrendered to feelings of worth equivalent to carpet lint. Still, my girlfriend put no undue pressure on me. I just started to feel worthless. Usually at times when the self-esteem is driven to such depths, a willingness arises to do anything to restore the character of a solid work ethic. Still, I have never been able to take a job that didn’t somehow offer new personal growth or physical challenge. Since the former category was Kalahari-dry, I opted for the physical challenge that every man should at least once experience: construction.
With construction the pay is good, even for an unskilled laborer, and with time you pick up secrets of the craft and an ever-present safety net forms below you. Anywhere you go, in the States and beyond, people are building things. I always enjoyed working with wood, so it was with a newfound verve that I set out on my first day of work.
I reported to the jobsite at the crack of dawn in the upscale neighborhood of Atherton, California to find the foundations and framework of a house starting to take shape. Aside from the apprehension that accompanies the foray into a totally unfamiliar environment, I stood back and imagined what it would feel like, six weeks from then, to look at the structure again and see something I had a part in creating. An edifice that would be there for lord-knows how long. I could sense the pride, and so I stepped up to the plate.
There was no orientation for the new laborer, no ropes to be shown, no introductions. A man with a well-worn tool belt — new tool belts, the sign of a greenhorn, are the cause of great derision in this kith — pointed to an oaf falling out from his girlfriend’s Celica and said, “That’s Daryl. You’ll be working with him.”
I suppose Daryl had one pair of work jeans because the trousers he wore had been worn through several days of work recently. This noticed by smell and stain. Smack in the middle of the someday-to-be driveway were three stacks of 4’ × 8’ floor plywood. It was our charge to distribute those sheets throughout the house. Two at a time. All morning.
Ten minutes into the job I learned a very valuable lesson, one which would shape many later decisions in the navigation of my professional voyage. Laborers are shit on. And being the greenest laborer on a jobsite meant that the other laborers — two in this case — finally have somewhere they can shit.
There was nothing redeeming about the labor. The pile of plywood never seemed to get smaller and the house got bigger and bigger with every load we hauled. Taking orders from Daryl was not so unsettling — at times I was almost amused. Approaching a three-and-a-half-foot gap through which we had to pass: “Tilt it up a bit so it’ll fit through,” he suggested. Well, no shit, Pythagoras. That was a real puzzler, I thought to myself, grimacing as I tilted the triple stack of splintering plywood.
The most disconcerting aspect was that because we were hauling the plywood in, there was no floor. To navigate across what would be the various rooms of the house, we had to balance on floor joists. No big deal where there were planks laid out for us to walk on, but Daryl liked to show off his prowess, skipping across non-planked joists as fast as possible. Since I was always bringing up the rear, I could see when the joist might switch from lateral to longitudinal and I would plunge through to the crawl space — only a foot or two drop, but good for some scraped shins and nervous family jewels. I appreciated how many calories must be expended just to lay a horizontal floor, but romanced by the notion I was not.
Seemingly about 72 hours later, our lunch break was signaled. I had planned to spend the hour riding ten minutes by bike back to my apartment, spending forty minutes making a sandwich and bitching about the job, then ten more on the bike to the jobsite. When I got to the apartment complex, my girlfriend and a friend of hers were taking in the lovely weather at poolside. They looked at me and could tell right off that I had not had an enlightening morning. Did they understand the chasm that opened up inside me, having just spent the worst five hours of my career hauling three tons of plywood with Jed Clampett, only to come home and find two beautiful women in bikinis by a crystalline pool? Did they know I was dying inside? OK, in comparison to Peace Corps devotees, missionaries and freedom fighters, this ordeal was a little light in the pants. But in my eighteen-year-old frame of reference, I was Sisyphus. I tucked my tail and headed for the studio to make a tuna sandwich.
Standing over the dish of tuna with a dollop of mayonnaise waiting patiently to be stirred into the flakes of fish, I stared. I held the fork in my hand and I stared down at the fish. Where did that fish come from? How long ago was it swimming? Was as much pain and discomfort involved in the extraction, dismemberment and packaging of that fish as it took to lay a…floor? By god I was standing on one! I looked down at the floor, totally unaware that I would one day answer my own question about the tuna. I was snapped out of my whimsical pondering by the cold realization: I had to go back. This calm was temporary. I had the rest of the afternoon, the rest of the week and the rest of the summer to look forward to. It was a chilling thought, dead in the middle of June.
I put the fork down without mixing the tuna and went into the bathroom. I undressed, took my swimsuit from the shower rack where it was drying, and retired to the pool. Prosperity could wait. I didn’t even weigh the decision — it was simply what my constitution had in store. Not until today, as I sit here typing, had I considered how Daryl got the rest of that plywood into the house, but just now the probable answer occurred to me: one at a time.
The tinge of cowardice I felt lasted about four minutes, tempered by the awareness of my utter expendability, and was completely gone by the time I hit the apron of the pool. I wasn’t too proud to admit I got my ass kicked. A veritable wellspring of compassion and empathy, my girlfriend didn’t seem to blame me one bit for not returning. There are other jobs, she assured me. There certainly were.
That night the phone rang. My girlfriend answered it and handed the receiver to me. It was the foreman of the job — a man I never met in person, having been hired via telephone — and I will never forget his greeting:
“Do you like your job?”
What kind of question was that? Had he sat for a while thinking about what he would say? It was uncomfortably stated, though his tone was not admonishing. There was no “Hello, it’s Phil. Say, I have a question for you.” There was not even a “Hello, this is Phil.” Just: “Do you like your job?” The coward in me had not yet fallen dormant, so I made up the ever-popular excuse that a family emergency had called me back East and I was flying out that evening. It rolled off the tongue as if it were true. Whatever his motive was, hidden behind his question, I inadvertently derailed it. Then his response:
“Well geez, I’m sorry to hear that. Listen, call us when you get back. The guys at the jobsite really liked you.”
Was I hearing him correctly? They wanted me back after no-showing for the latter half of the work day. Perhaps people given to work with Daryl don’t usually last until lunchtime. How the guys at the jobsite “liked” me was a real poser — I hadn’t exchanged words with any of them except Daryl, and when I lied and said “See you in an hour” when I left for lunch. Still, it was nice to know my job would be waiting for me when I got back to California.
