Characters
The summer I turned sixteen I took a job pouring smallish concrete slabs that would eventually add up to be a parking lot at the local rental center. This was the first of many jobs of this type that I would have for the next decade or so. Some days, we didn’t work on the slabs though. I did a variety of things related to retrieving or dropping off items which could be rented. Since it was the summer I turned sixteen, I was not given full trust on the driving front. Usually it was me and another guy, who years later I would come to recognize as the composite average of the types of people that shared responsibilities with sixteen year old kids. He was rad, if viewed through eyes with more road in front than behind. He was wiry, and energetic in a maniacal and shifty sort of way. A cigarette hung loose from his lips at all times. He was always eager to prove his strength was equal to whatever task you were doing, long enough for you to witness a few short bursts of effort anyway. Once, on a mission to retrieve a bunch of folding chairs his bloodshot eyes widened and excitement shot through his whole body. “PUNCH BUGGY YELLOW” he screamed as he fired a shot at my unsuspecting shoulder. His cigarette was lost to the chaos while the truck swerved and he corrected only just in time to avoid disaster, cackling like the madman he so clearly was. I had aged out of this game, but he hadn’t. Another time he had come into possession of a nudy calendar, and hung it proudly in our break room or whatever it was. The owner eventually cottoned on and threw it away. His defeat for all the remainder of the week was more pronounced than any sports hero that has ever come up short.
Then there was Ballsack Bret (name partially altered—guess which part) so named because during a drunken game of horseshoes he had stumbled over in such a way as to perfectly puncture his ballsack on the horseshoe pin. There was a different guy, whose name I forget at this point, that was well older than even the oldest of them. I was driving from one job to another, with him in the passenger seat. Carrying forms or tools or something, to be used in service of building the foundation for a house. He pulled out some secret vial from within his person and snorted the contents, considering me only just long enough to apologize that he didn’t have any more for me and to let me know that actually it was a prescription medication.
Sometimes, when you cut a board in the right spot it seeps sap out from the grain. When this happens, a sketchy looking guy that isn’t even necessarily somebody on your job will materialize behind you. Then, grinning ear to ear, he will take out his pencil and make his impression of the female anatomy exactly where the sap drips out. He’ll then make direct eye contact with you, seeking understanding without sharing any words. When he finds it he will nod, then disapparate back to wherever he was before.
The smallest unit of measurement is a cunt hair. The bigger version of a tool is the Big Dick level or crowbar or whatever. Somebody with the ability to lift something heavy is said to possess “retard strength”. One time the GC wanted us to wear harnesses and tie off to something when we worked on the roof. My boss squared up and called him a pussy with such an acidic hatred that I dropped what I was holding and prepared for violence. We didn’t wear those harnesses, and my boss saved pride and maybe 3 cents an hour.
I never wore gloves, safety glasses, or sunscreen. I cut boards made from cement and glue, inhaling the fine dust without care. My buddy Ray worked a ramset (basically a .22 pistol) inside a basement for hours before emerging unaware that blood was running from his ears. I risked certain death, 50 feet in the air and balanced in the blowing wind and snow on a 12 foot ladder which was placed on an ice covered 2x12 wooden plank set between two massive extension ladders—just to nail the last piece of siding up. There are safety guards on saws which all carpenters know how to pinch open with a 16 penny nail. The first thing you learn after you pick up a nail gun is how to bypass the mechanical depression safety feature so that you can fire nails across the job at will. I hit a deer right in the head once, from no less than 40 feet. It isn’t like in the movies though, the nails flip around and bounce off whatever they hit. Long before I was a rock climber I knew a regular wedding ring wasn’t going to be for me because I worked with a guy that fell off a ladder with his ring pinched between the rungs. He landed in two pieces instead of the usual one.
Here you will also find excuses which defy even the most fantastical of fools to believe them. One guy was late because on his way to work the car in front of him just fucking exploded. He leapt into action and pulled the driver out of the car, but unfortunately as you could see from his hands which were clearly not bandaged by a first responder or even a human adult of sound mind, he was not going to be capable of working that day. Another guy was totally on time but then his friend from high school called at 6AM and told him that he needed to be the best man in his wedding right then and there. Tux not required, and you should be done just in time to roll into work when everyone is done lifting that heavy ass log into place.
There’s Snowbear, he of 9 fingers plus one really disgusting 10th finger that was sewn back on after contact with a saw blade but, like, not well. It was both too dark and too pale. It shot away from the knuckle at the wrong angle. The fingernail was sharpened to an unnatural and lethal point—ok that part I made up. Among my proudest accomplishments was that I was able to put in a solid day with Snowbear, who worked harder and faster than any 2 men I have ever known. The cost was occasional fingers, and also quality I guess.
There’s Farmer. I was paired with him in the early days because I was useless and he didn’t need any help doing anything ever. He remains among the most intelligent people I have ever known. One time he derived a formula I had recently learned in my physics class through experimentation of his own, but that’s just one rather cliché example of his rare genius. Farmer didn’t finish high school. One time Farmer made it through almost an entire day with one steel toed work boot and one flip flop without even realizing it. Seriously. Perhaps the smartest person I know has done some of the dumbest shit I have ever heard of.
If you can’t carry two, you better run with one.
The Tarantino brothers had been exposed to some kind of radioactive substance, or other power source. The oldest was an old man but 50% stronger than the rest of us. When he met my son he hoisted him up balanced on his palm in a way that wasn’t appropriate for the precious cargo, but nobody blinked. His strength and balance was deft and obvious. His younger brother was less gifted in most ways save size of body and heart. One time we hoisted a wall, but realized it was beyond us too late. As we struggled to avoid releasing the full weight too fast and crushing ourselves he persisted. He was strong, but not that strong, and the wall eventually ended up somehow entirely on his neck. As we all struggled to hoist it off in a panic he wriggled out and laughed it off. His neck was indestructible. I saw him cry from happiness when he received a free hat from the lumber yard one time. Real tears. Real happiness.
There’s Pile Driver Pat, who was raised by circus people and had tattoos which I was told could prove this somehow. One day he totaled his truck by driving it directly into a crane at speed. After, he gave me a piercing unholy stare “I’m not passing the drug test, maybe I’ll see you on the next job”. A perhaps shockingly large percentage of the people I worked construction with dulled the edges like this, and a perhaps shockingly high percentage of them were able to be productive despite it. The exceptions were all partial to the drink, although Pat wasn’t just drunk.
One time we hired a homeless guy named Rabbit to do some menial task, like carry shit from one place to the next. He was full of stories, but it was several days before one of us realized that they were all from the movie Eight Mile and he believed that he was Eminem.
There’s racism, of course. There is a type of combination sheeting and insulation which is black in color. They don’t use that stuff anymore, but it was popular in the ‘70s I think, and so when you demo older houses you come across it occasionally. I don’t even know what the real name for this stuff is, the name I was given has the N-word in it. You work with a lot of Mexicans, here in Colorado anyway. Sometimes whole teams of them would descend upon a job, marking their arrival with music, a grill, and the general atmospheric shift toward something closer to a party. Their arrival was also marked with hostility and slurs from the white guys on many of the jobs I was on.
A lot of the racism felt natural to the general insensitivity of the environment. A place where you measure in cunt hairs might occasionally dip into the further reaches of our lexicon for shock value. Some of the racism was undoubtedly born the same way it always is; from fear. A team of people performing a job, often better and always cheaper than you can, is kind of terrifying to behold if you haven’t exactly diversified your portfolio. The really bad stuff, the shit that comes unprompted and belies true hatred and ignorance, that stuff gets passed down father to son from what I can tell. That shit exists on job sites only because it exists everywhere.
AJ’s favorite prank was to time his morning shit perfectly for when you arrived on site, then kick the porta-potty door open so you would have to witness him in the act. The far more common reverse of this prank was obviously beneath the man. He fucking hated Nirvana too, because real music was born in the 80s and died when Cobain came in and fucked it all up. A smallish stocky man with a thick beard, strong Polish roots and a massive heart—that was AJ. You could count on him for hugs, sage advice, and some sort of catalogue which I understand could be used to purchase women.
There’s Mr. Derr, the redneck daytime strip club loving asshole GC whose inferiority required frequently taking the young kid (me) to task but whose words were so Southern as to be unintelligible. He could almost never get his point across successfully.
If you fall off that, you’re fired before you hit the ground.
Each year, in the small mountain town of Ward Colorado they used to hold a competition. Derek would take on any challenger, and if you could defeat him in combat he would bestow upon you a hand made spear. Wes, formerly a boxer, won that spear the year he entered plus the respect that came with it. Another time Wes was unhappy about how slowly a foundation was being torn down. He snatched the sledge hammer, exclaimed his disappointment with the prior user, and smashed the wall with the power of Thor. The sledge bounced right back off the wall and hit him square in the forehead. A lesser man would’ve been killed instantly I have no doubt, but Wes simply stumbled off to fight another day. Perhaps not enough days followed that one though. He is a since dead drunk and some version of kin to me. Like all drunks, I get the feeling he had enough. Like all kin, I get to thinking he didn’t. Mostly, he was a good man for the time that I knew him.
I was lucky to work with all three of my brothers at one time or another. I could fill many pages with their stories of course, but it is their interactions with the people around them when they work that is worth sharing about here. Nobody has spent an appreciable amount of time around any of them without smiling, laughing, and generally enjoying themselves because they prioritize that over every other task. That could be in any setting and under the strain of any labor. I like to think that people would say that about me too.
Genuine curiosity about the people you work with and spend time with involves asking questions and listening to the answers, and although the questions take many shapes they are all the same question: “what is it like to be somebody else?” You can never answer that question, but I never came as close as when I worked construction. Mostly, these people all did their best to answer that question for me. They only came up short because of the limitations with human communication and my own insidious desire to flatten everyone I meet into a character. Their strengths and weaknesses varied wildly, but didn’t extend beyond or beneath the general population. In other words, the guy that builds your house isn’t really much different from the guy that designs it or the guy that lives in it. The guy building the house just presents a more truthful version of himself, in my experience.
I work a white collar job now, and I have been for 14 years. It takes a tremendous amount of time to get to know my coworkers, relative to what I had become accustomed to. It can be done eventually in most cases, but some of these people are actually unknowable from what I can tell. I once heard that there are two kinds of people; those that shower before work and those that shower after. The separation between these two types of people has less to do with when they get dirty, and more to do with how willing they are to share of themselves.
Of course, if you have a desk job you won’t be able to hold it for long if you show up drunk, stoned or inconsistently. So, yeah there is a lot less of that. The environment is also quiet, dull, and mostly colorless. There is a fear, which is born of consequence and so only exists in the places that the consequence exists. The fear is that your ideas, your past, and all of the things which make you interesting and unique will be your undoing. The consequences which bring about this fear don’t really exist on a job site. That’s why you can say outlandish and terrible things there, but also why you can be yourself. An office environment is not like this. In fact, most of regular society is not like this. People dress up in masks most of the time. Layers of real or bureaucratic hardship separate you from any type of drama, but so do literal walls and dividers. If that wasn’t enough, most of these people have been conditioned by fear to present versions of themselves which are so bland that nothing offensive or interesting could possibly be conveyed.
Perhaps once a year I am required to attend a gathering of some type or another which collects legions of other people from my field. It is a special type of comedy to watch people put in situations where they need to speak constantly, but where they attempt to say nothing. Sweat builds on their face, and their eyes dart about like wild animals—heart rates spiking. Someone cracks a terrible joke and everyone laughs way too hard. My God, what has made them this way? I know the truth of it. They are not this dull. They do not all love their company unconditionally. They do not all love whatever boring shit is most socially acceptable to love, like baseball or beer or whatever.
What is it like to be somebody else?
At one office I worked with a guy that used to systematically eat at every establishment whenever he moved to a new location and rank them within a notebook (before we had apps for this purpose). I worked with a guy that—hand to God—had the courage to remove his own stitches after he got a vasectomy. Once he got me so drunk after a meeting that I actually slept in the hotel lobby in order that I could be strategically placed to make my ride to the airport—which good thing I did because when people started coming down in the morning I had to go wake his hungover ass up and we barely made it. I puked twice on the plane.
Another guy was in a band (still is). A real band that had a song which played on a TV show one time. He drove a van, with a sticker that had a lizard in suggestive attire. I think he slept in the van sometimes actually. When I pointed out the sticker, I asked “what’s with the lot lizard” and he was surprised another button-up shirt type would know what that even was. He was flawed and imperfect and different, like we all are. He didn’t try to hide it though, like most of these people do.
One guy put his money where his mouth was, quit his job and moved to Cambodia to bring first world engineering prowess to a place in real need. He had strong and specific believes in his God, abstained from alcohol, and met my more abrasive or strong opinions with kindness. Another guy divorced recently, instead of retiring which I gather was the alternative choice. Actually, a whole mess of guys did that.
I work with some guys that are smarter than I will ever be. I have worked with guys that are so fucking dumb that it reinforces the reality that you get born into these office jobs most of the time—same as you get born into the alternative. Some guys don’t stop talking, like ever. One guy basically never said a word the two years I knew him, but that was his thing and I don’t hold it against him.
There is the same problem with ego here, as there was on a job site and in the world at large. Performance is more difficult to measure though, and so superiority is occasionally reinforced in strange and sinister ways which are unique to this place. I knew a guy one time whose job was invented and in my experience before and since; unnecessary. He could turn dark on a dime, owing to this reality and my knowledge of it. I could tell you the basic facts of the man, but I couldn’t tell you much else because he kept himself hidden. Some people can’t get through life without blood on their bootheels but paper men always find themselves in rainstorms eventually. When you work in an office I think you can put it off for a little longer, that’s all.
What a fucking bummer it must be, to have never spent any time in an environment which is free of the fear most people have of being themselves. A place where you can see the measure of a person, plain as day. Where you can attempt to learn what made them this way. Without time spent in a place like this, you probably can’t appreciate that the depth and complexity that exists within you also exists in everyone else. Even the people that you don’t agree with.
The guy that builds the house isn’t much different from the guy that designs it or the guy that lives in it. This sentiment reeks of condescension. As if above some threshold you might be surprised to find complexity of thought inside the mind of a man laboring in the sun or snow. At some point another person’s political beliefs, language, race, culture or background become so foreign to us that we must package them into a generic and simple character. What a mistake, to believe anyone is simple.
Note: all of the images in this piece are from DALL-E2, an AI image generator. The descriptions that I gave the AI are as follows:
Wiry, energetic, maniacal and shifty. A cigarette hung loose from his lips. 50 years old, white guy. shoulder length greying hair and lots of wrinkles. This one took several iterations, and I’ll add the result was fine but doesn’t look anything like the real person.
A cartoon of an adult male hand with a misshapen pinky finger that was sewn back on after contact with a saw blade. The finger is a different color from the rest of the hand. I’m given to understand that these things suck at hands. You should’ve seen the ones I didn’t use.
A hand made tribal spear drawn with crayon and you can see the entire spear. You still can’t see the entire spear. In fact, every image is zoomed in too far.
A lizard dressed in woman's clothing. The first description used “prostitute” but the AI refused to even make an attempt.
This is neat for me because this piece wouldn’t have had any images otherwise. Maybe that would’ve been better, but ultimately I didn’t think so. The generator created these images in seconds, and spits out four options to choose from. If they all suck (they often did) you can revise the description and it’ll try again.