A Working Stiff's Manifesto (19 page)
“Oh, really. Did he ask you for $2,000?”
“He said I'd have to invest something. We're going to lunch to talk about it.”
Art comes over. “Me and Janine are heading off to lunch.” He grabs my shoulder and looks at me with sincerity. “I trust you. You're in charge until I come back.”
“Sure.” We're pretty slow right now. Just a few housewives wandering around, looking at prints. Art walks off with Janine, putting his hand gently around her waist as they leave.
About half an hour later, a harried blond woman comes in wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “Is Art around?”
This guy's been in town one day and he's got more women looking for him than I've had in years.
“He went to lunch,” I tell her.
“Let me guess. With a girl.”
I quickly realize that this is his wife. “I didn't see. He just left.”
“Bullshit.” She comes around the table and introduces herself, then scoops up all the cash in the drawer. “You can't trust that bastard with money, either,” she says, as she storms out.
So this isn't turning out to be my dream job either. Instead of having a few nice easy hours selling paintings with a jovial boss, I now find myself caught in the middle of a soap opera. Art, who has “gone to lunch,” doesn't return for five hours. His wife doesn't come back either. So their entire business is left in the hands of a guy from the temp service he has known for a day.
Around six o'clock, when I'm wondering if I should just close up shop and load everything back into the truck, Art and Janine come back, looking a bit disheveled but holding hands.
“Your wife came by,” I tell him. I wonder if he's spent the afternoon telling Janine about his wife's battle with terminal cancer, or the time Charlie had him surrounded and all he had was a penknife and a box of matches. But the news of her arrival doesn't seem to surprise Janine. Art is the one who gets upset.
“Did the bitch take my money?”
“Yup.”
“Where'd she go?”
“I don't know.”
Art storms off, leaving Janine there with me for another two hours. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with all this artwork. I realize I don't have keys to load it into the truck, and if I didn't have to get his signature on my temp time card, I'd just go home right now.
Janine starts telling me about what a wonderful guy Art is. Perhaps she's convinced he was the first man to walk on the moon.
“Listen. I'll be at the bar if Mr. Wonderful comes back. At nine thirty, I'm going home.” I go to the hotel bar and order a beer, and after a few minutes, Janine comes in and joins me.
“I know what you're thinking,” she tells me. I'm thinking about whether or not I'm going to get paid because my employer has disappeared without signing my time card. “Most people are so boring. I know he's full of shit, but he's not dull.”
He's not dull. That's great. This is a guy who would have taken $2,000 from either one of us and jetted off without a word. This is the type of person I've become sick of over the past few years, the smooth talker who wants something from you and takes it the minute you let your guard down. These are the people we need to guard ourselves against, the encroaching evil that feeds on what's left of us after a career of failure and disappointment, and this girl sees him as entertainment.
She touches my leg. Maybe I'm entertainment too. “Listen,” she says. “He came back. He knows you're pissed. But he wants to know if you can come back and help us load the truck.” I laugh and order another beer.
So the next day, I'm sent to help another guy who has his own business, this one installing computer wires. When I show up on time and sober, he is prepared to take me on and make me a managing partner.
This is a common refrain, I'm starting to realize, from people who own their own businesses. They all want reliable help. But with most of them, I've learned, there's a reason why they don't have it. In Art's case, obviously, it would be pathological lying. In Ken's, I'm sure I'll find out.
The first day, honeymoon day, goes by wonderfully, as honeymoon days will. I drive from one office site to another and get down on my hands and knees under desks and change a few switch plates. Then all I'm required to do is wait by the switch plate while Ken goes off into a central wiring room and asks me over a walkie-talkie when the power comes on. Without a helper, he'd have to walk back and forth from the room to the switch plate every time he connected a new test line, so my merely being there and doing next to nothing is saving him tons of time. He mentions this over and over, obviously grateful for my assistance. Then he takes me to lunch.
“Just quit the temp service,” he tells me. “I'm paying them fourteen an hour for you. They're giving you eight an hour. I'll give you ten and then we both make more money.”
“Hey, that sounds good.”
“Do you like to travel?” he asks.
“I love to.”
“This job involves lots of travel.”
Now we're getting dangerously close to classified ad bullshit. Travel can mean a lot of things. It can mean Rome and Paris, or it can mean sitting in a van on the interstate for six hours on our way to an office park upstate. I suspect the latter. But Ken seems like a straightforward guy, and I tell him that he doesn't need to sell me the job, I've already bought it. I've got nothing else going on right now, and learning a little about computer wiring might come in handy.
This gets him excited, and when we get back to the truck, he hands me a manual about a thousand pages thick, the bible of computer wiring. “Look that over,” he tells me.
So I do. It's a thousand pages of incomprehensible drawings of resistors and capacitors and networks and interference wiring and hundreds of other terms I can't even begin to understand. This is a manual for electrical engineers, not for an English major who has expressed a mild interest in the field. I need something a little more like
Sesame Street
.
“Take that home with you,” he says. “I don't expect you to understand it all in one day.”
That's a relief. I put it between the seats. “So what happened to your last helper?” I ask.
“I've had about nine in the last five months,” he tells me. “They just keep quitting. I've no idea why.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Sometimes the job gets really difficult. It's not all crawling around on office floors. Factory work can be a little sweaty sometimes. Some guys don't like that. How do you feel about it?”
“About breaking a sweat? It's not so bad. I'm used to it.”
“It's a tough business,” he says. “A lot of competition. You gotta push. Gotta work hard. You gotta kill yourself to survive.”
The oxymoron seems lost on him. I nod in agreement. After Alaska, I don't think there's work out there that I couldn't keep up with.
He nods. “A lot of the guys I've had lately are just pussies, I guess.”
I work with Ken for a week and everything is still going well. I still don't understand the electronic crap, but I'm excellent at carrying equipment around and using a walkie-talkie, which is most of what the job requires. He gets a contract to work at a factory, which is one hour away, and we leave every morning at six and return at six at night. Then I learn that Ken doesn't like to take weekends off.
“This is my business,” he says. “I've got this contract. I need to have this finished on time or I lose money.”
“So we just work ninety days in a row?”
“You can take days off now and then if you'd like.”
So I realize that Ken's definition of a pussy is someone who wants a day off now and then. That's okay, he's committed to his work. I'm sure he'd be reasonable about it if I complained about the hours, so I decide to hold off complaining until I get really tired. In the meantime, the overtime will come in handy.
Summer has come around, and the factory is a cinder block structure with no air circulation inside. Part of the work involves drilling holes through the cinder blocks that we will pass computer wires through. At ground level, this is no problem, but most of the drilling has to be done about twenty feet in the air, right up near the roof, as the wires will be above the drop ceiling. Up near the roof it's like an oven. Drilling through a cinder block fire wall, while trying to keep your balance on a ladder as you're soaking yourself with sweat so that everything becomes slippery, is slow work.
Ken doesn't like slow work. “How long does it take to drill a hole?” he shouts up the ladder one day. Every time the drill gets going into the cinder block, the ladder starts to vibrate and I have to slow down, so I can only do a little at a time or I take a twenty-foot fall. I come down the ladder, covered in cinder block dust, and explain this to him.
“Are you scared of heights?” he asks with obvious disgust.
“I respect them.”
He shakes his head and walks off. A plasterer nearby who has seen this comes over.
“That's dangerous as hell,” he tells me. “You should be using a scaffold. I'm almost done with mine. You can wheel it over.”
So an hour later, using the scaffold, I'm actually able to balance while pushing the drill through the block, and I get all eight holes drilled in a matter of minutes. I show my handiwork to Ken, who nods once and says, “Come on, we're running behind. I need help with this push rod in the roof.”
This goes on for the rest of the week. No matter how quickly we get done, we're always running behind. By Friday evening, I've worked sixty hours.
“Can you work tomorrow?” Ken asks.
“I'd love a day off.”
He thinks about this, then nods. “Okay. How about Sunday?”
I sigh. “All right. Sunday.”
“If you worked tomorrow,” he pushes, “it'd all be overtime. Sunday's the first day of the new week.”
“I need a day off, Ken. I've about had it.”
He thinks this over. “Okay, Sunday. I've got some work to do on another one-day job I can do tomorrow.”
This guy's a hard worker, and I respect that, but I'm almost tempted to tell him to take it easy, that he's going to kill himself. I know he wouldn't listen. This is the type of guy who might one day own a million-dollar companyâdriven, ambitious, aggressive. I wouldn't begrudge him any of it. But me, I'm not looking to be a millionaire any time soon. I need a day off.
Sunday morning at six I show up at his place, and we drive out to the factory. Ken has me drive because on Saturday, my day off, he has worked twenty hours straight at the other job he needed to finish, so now he sacks out and gets a little bit of sleep. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy as we set up the ladders and get to work, pushing wires around through the roof.
“Pull the wire,” he shouts at me. We're in different rooms, about thirty feet apart, and I'm holding a mass of wires.
“Which one?”
“THE ONE I JUST GAVE YOU!” he bellows, furious. All the wires look the same, and I'm not sure which one he just slid through. I pull one.
“DAMNIT! Not that one. For Christ's sake!” And then I hear a short yell and the sound of a ladder collapsing.
I climb down and run into the next room, where Ken is lying unconscious next to his ladder. I yell his name, try to get him to respond, but nothing. I run over to a phone and call an ambulance.
At the hospital, the doctor tells me Ken is lucky that he's not paralyzed from the waist down, and he's going to have to stay a few days. I call his mother, who drives three hours out to the hospital, and then I leave to load all the stuff back into the truck.
It's ironic that this man who works so hard for his independence now has to room with his mother. Those are the choices. That's the glamour of running your own business. Kill yourself to survive.
And that's the end of that career.
I decide I'm
done moving around.
There's no dream job out there. It's the same for everyone. You've got to do something or you starve, and what it is really doesn't matter. At least there are jobs available, jobs that will keep your head above water, keep you one step ahead of the bill collector.
There are people who tell me they've found their dream job. Guys I'm sitting around getting drunk with will tell me that sometimes, the younger ones. But then three weeks later, I see them bartending. “So what happened to that great job you were telling me about?” I'll ask. They shrug. “Didn't work out.”
I know enough not to even say the words anymore, so I don't have to be on the receiving end of that conversation. If I've got a job I can take for even a week, I consider myself blessed and I keep my mouth shut.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, Thoreau said. Later, he added that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, indicating that few, if any of us, were taking his advice. Fuck him, he had a trust fund. Who the hell else but a rich man could afford to spend a summer sitting by a lake thinking about life? I'll take the next thing that comes along and stick with it, because the looking, the hope that something better is out there, drains you of more energy than the drudgery itself.
Before I get the paper out again, I go out for a beer with the plasterer who lent me the scaffold. The whole plaster crew is there. It's Friday, payday for all of us, and we throw our money around as if it doesn't matter. It doesn't, is the lie we tell ourselves for the evening. I watch a guy place a $300 bet on a baseball game and act like the score of the game is of no consequence to him. We drink and talk while the game is on in the background, and he's quiet, sitting at the table, his back to the big screen TV. His team is getting crushed, the score is 10â1, it's over by the second inning.
“Eddie,” one of the guys says, laughing. “You do that every fucking week.” They get a kick out of this, watching him self-destruct, watching him piss his money away. You've got to be better than someone. Eddie stares into his beer.
