A snow-crowned edifice (chapters 1-3)

Chapter 1
Have you ever smelled so bad that whenever you lifted your arms you thought you were going to throw up? I’m sweating so much that every time I lean against a wall, paint rubs off on me and I end up looking like a wannabe mime, a real half-assed wannabe mime. Now I’m sweating drops of white paint and I’ve got to carry a rag around to keep from f*****g up the carpet, which, if damaged, George assured me will come out of my pay check. I think it’s called an honest day’s work, what a joke. I’ve never seen anything so dishonest in my life.

"It’s just padding the bill" George said "you take the material cost and you multiply it by 1.5, then you take the estimated amount of time it will take x amount of workers and x amount of supervisors to complete the job. Now, say you think it’ll take 12 workers and 2 supervisors 80 hours to finish it, you take the average hourly pay for each of your workers and you multiply it by the amount of hours you’ll be paying them and then you tack on 45 minutes per day (10 for the 80 hour job) for the amount of break-time you legally have to give each of your workers per day. So for this hypothetical job, your client is actually paying for over a hundred hours of work that is not going to be done. That’s a hard sell…”

“Another hard sell is the fact that you’re going to need 2 supervisors for just 12 men. So you’ve got to tell the guy ’hey look, in order to do the job efficiently we’re going to have to be working in 5 different places in the building simultaneously and the reason we need supervisors in the first place is the same reason we need enough supervisors, as its usually the case that without supervision each workers productivity decreases by as much as 25%. Do the math-15 minutes out of every hour you’re paying 10 workers to do nothing, which at the average hourly rate is costing you 30 dollars per hour for nothing. That adds up, over the course of the job, to 2400 dollars for nothing. Now you take the average hourly rate of a supervisor (25.00) and multiply it by the 80 hours necessary to do the job and it’s 2000 dollars. So by adding just 1 supervisor I’m saving you a lot of money ok...’ "

Then he would say, mimicking his Oscar worthy performance, shaking his head with a look of brutal honesty,” Listen guy, it’s not gunna do me any good to stretch this job out any longer than I have to. I’m the owner; I don’t get paid by the hour. I get paid by the job. So if anything, I wanna get this done as soon as possible" And he would follow it up with a chuckle and another pithy explanation " See, the trick is to make it seem like it’s in your interest to save him money, that way when you tell him how much money you’re saving him, you don’t look like a slime ball and he actually believes you. If you can do that, if you can make the big numbers seem like they’re actually saving him more money than the small ones, you’ve got it made. You can charge him whatever you want and he’ll be askin you if there’s any way you can charge him more...and if he can make you a glass of lemonade.”

“And then” he says “you take that money for the supervisors and the man hours that you won’t actually have to use and you put it toward materials. See with most jobs you’re working with expensive stuff, important stuff like granite and carpeting and paint that runs you 250 bucks-a-bucket and so if you give a legit estimate on the materials, you’re going to be fucked if anything gets messed up… Try askin the owner for an extra 2 grand cuz one of your guys broke the counter-top and see where it gets ya... So you fudge the numbers a little just to cover your a*s and then if you’re smart and your workers don’t f**k anything up, you’ve covered the material cost for the next job and that next job becomes 100% profit beside the man hours" He was that kind of guy.

George was just enough of a sociopath to make it seem like a smart idea to screw people on a daily basis... or an hourly basis as the case may be. One time he nearly convinced me to keep my senile grandmother locked in my bed room every day rather than put her in a nursing home, to save money "what, you think they’ll take such great care of her" he said "bullshit. They’ll give her a couple Jello cups at dinner time and let her sit in her room all day watching re-runs. Don’t you think that if she were in her right mind she’d want to be with family? What’s the difference to her who’s supplying the Jello or paying the cable bill? You’re her grand son. And so long as you’re doing that for her, and its not like you’re going to ENJOY having that senile old bag sitting on your couch talking non-sense all the time, then why not treat yourself to some supplemental income. You’d be doing right by the both of you". Had grandma not come at me with an apple corer when I went to pick her up, she’d probably be sitting on my couch right now, high on medical marijuana, eating Rammen noodles with a plastic spork.

Chapter 2
The house looked like a hollowed out pumpkin. All its technological guts hung out at the sockets like deer tacked to the wall of a butcher shop. The wall plates had been removed and there was a rectangular natural-wall colored imprint around every light switch in the house. The bathrooms didn’t have any vents anymore and the toilets didn’t have any seats. Somebody must have broken the seal on the sliding-glass windows that opened into the back yard which stretched a couple acres in each direction and a few peach trees had grown to maturity, its branches drooping under the weight of the numerous full ripe peaches that seemed ready to fall to the ground amongst a heaping pile of rotten fruit, bruised and old, beginning to smell, no doubt.

The front of the house looked immaculate with its winding stone walk way and the fake grass the owner had shipped in and implanted for the Saturday open house, the huge polished oak double-doors that I nearly broke my back carrying in from the truck, the designer curtains that kept the neighbors from puking every morning. I can imagine the advertisement in the newspaper-" two-story contemporary Victorian, 3 car garage, 10+ full acres of useable land, 4 bedrooms w/ a new hot tub on the deck of the master bedroom,$649,000" next to that deceptively pleasing photo. Some young up-and-comer probably got so excited that..."honey, I can’t open the real-estate section, I think the pages are stuck together" ...you get the idea.

I didn’t get home till after 10 that night. George and I decided to kick back and have a couple beers in the hot tub. The only thing was the electricity was shut off weeks ago and all we had at our disposal was the hot water faucet in the master bathroom. We got some buckets and filled up the Jacuzzi with the hottest water we could muster. Also, we grabbed one of the illegal aliens we had working with us that day to make the atmosphere a little less...homoerotic. George left his shirt on-a two-button collared deal with paint and caulking smeared and dripped down the front and he wore a pair of tea-shades, reminiscent of the beatniks, sipping miller highlife from one of the wine-glasses left behind in the cupboards. Jesus stayed quiet, I don’t think he speaks English anyway and he might have thought we were kidnapping him. In fact, that might explain the look of terror painted on his face and the way I kept having to grab his arm and pull him back into the tub while he looked like he was trying to run away.

I, on the other hand, had taken off all my clothes including my underwear as to sharpen the contrast between George and I and to leave the center of the tub as a point of clothing equilibrium where Jesus sat terrified, jabbering to himself in some dead language, “Acorro...Acorro...ACORRO!". When I got home I was drunk and woke up promptly at 6:30 to puke and go back to work. I couldn’t find my boots and had no idea whether or not I put them back on when I got out of the hot tub. So I wore slippers and hoped for the best.

"Hey Georgey, you try to get me drunk and take advantage of me last night? I woke up naked with a sore a*****e" "kid, you are a sore a*****e." "Yeah, yeah" I say feigning skepticism. "Yea dream on... maybe it was Jesus, I think acorro ’means f**k me hard white-devil’ or somethin like that... I don’t know. My mandarin is a little rusty" "I think he’s Mexican" "no s**t?" "No s**t" I say flatly and start fixing myself a cup of coffee and lift the half-full bottle of i.b. profin from the cabinet in front of me in one mechanical motion. George stands in the doorway, "hey Noah" he says, beckoning me with his forefinger. I approach. "What the f**k are you wearing?" “Yea, I know. I didn’t have time to get changed this morning. Happy hangover" I say lifting my coffee cup to his with the plastic contrived sound of “clink”.

"No, I mean on your feet" he says dryly. "Oh yea, I can’t find my boots." "Why not?" "I don’t know, I can’t find em" "where are they?" he asks. "Well if I knew that don’t you think I’d have em?" He pauses briefly then says "well you can’t work in those" "why the f**k not?" “They’ll soak up paint and mud and every f****n thing. You can’t wear em". "Then I’ll work barefoot". "Nope. Can’t do it." "What?” "Listen, this whole ’under the table’ situation is all well and good. I pay less, you get more and everything’s hunky-dory. But I bet if you drop somethin on your f****n foot and smash your toes, you’re not gunna want to pay for the surgery. And that puts ME in a tough spot cuz I don’t wanna pay your medical bills out of my own pocket any more than I want you goin to the labor union on me. So I’d like to avoid that if possible, ok?".”No, I’ll be fine”. “Listen, this is NOT a negotiation. Get somethin on your feet or you’re done for the day".

I sigh in resignation, "fine." He continues "get in my truck, drive home and get something decent to wear" "I don’t have anything but my boots". He sighs, "alright, my wife’s home. Drive to my house and ask for a pair of boots. I got extras" he says tossing me the keys. “That’s half an hour each way!". "Drive fast". “I might as well go to bobs and buy a new pair at that rate." "You wanna foot the bill, it’s your call" he says. "What? You’re the one pushin the goddamn boots!" "Hey, that doesn’t make em any less necessary. It’s not my fault you lost your boots. And it’s not my fault you didn’t recognize you couldn’t come to work and do f****n hard labor in pink bunny slippers". "Hey, if you wanna pay me an hour for nothin, that’s up to you. I just don’t think it’s bringing either one of us any closer to finishing this s**t." "Who says I’m payin ya?" "What?" "Don’t look at me like that, it’s your mistake. I’m not payin you to drive to my house so you can borrow my boots, that I leant you out of the kindness of my heart, to fix your goddamn mistake. It’s not happening."

“Fine, I’m goin home. I got a f****n hangover anyway.” I say, my voice trailing along the hallway as I begin to walk out the door. “M**********r” he grumbles. “What’s that?” “M**********r... Just…come back here… God-damn-it!” “What?” “You heard me…son of a b***h! But you’re lucky, you’re lucky we got a big day ahead of us. Otherwise I woulda told you to go f**k yourself.” “Whatever, George. But I-“he cuts me off “But I swear to god, if you hurt yourself I’m not payin you a dime for the goddamn medical bills. You’re gunna have to take it up in court if you want a dime out of me. I’ll do the surgery myself; amputate your broken foot with a rusty axe”.

And then the day just kind of went on as usual. We got foot long sandwiches from subway at lunch time and that was about it.

Chapter 3
“When you’re spackling a wall” George said “you’re always gunna have to do at least 2 coats, if it’s a sheetrock at least 3, 4 coats. See when you put on the first coat, it’s gunna dry into a little dimple. Then hopefully you put on the second coat and it’s nice and flush with the rest of the wall. Sheetrock’s real porous so your first couple coats are gunna get sucked right in. So what ya godda do” he says “is fill that hole somehow so that you don’t spend all day on a couple little divots. One time, matter fact, I had a guy workin for me, a real dumb son-of-a-b***h, a big native Indian guy with about the people skills and intelligence of…uhh… that hammer over there. I called him chief runs with scissors. So he’s workin for me and I tell him ‘do 2 coats of spackle on this hole here’. He says ‘why we need 2’ I say ‘cuz the first one’s gunna suck right into the wall and the 2nd one’ll be the finisher’ so he goes about his business, I’m at the other end of the house. I come back and the hole’s swelled out about an inch from the rest of the wall, looks like a f****n boil on an old guy’s neck. I go ‘what the hell is this’ he says to me’ oh, I think air must of got trapped’ “Me and George look at each other and roll our eyes. “So I say ‘oh well we can’t have that’, I grab my razor-knife and slice the f****r open…Know what it was?” he asks. “What?” “A f****n paper towel. The stupid son-of-a-b***h stuffed the hole with a paper towel!” and we both howl with laughter.

“So I said to the guy” he says “I like where you’re comin from. I just can’t have anybody that f****n stupid workin for me. You’re fired. Get your s**t and get the f**k out” he says still laughing a little.

The days passed like an old car that drags its muffler through the streets at 15 miles an hour, making laborious progress, scratching along through the eardrums of on lookers and making a nuisance of itself. In the nights, oh the sweet honey-suckle nights, I spent either smoking dope in the woods that crawl bleeding on their hands and knees for miles in one direction and about 50 yards in each of the others, or at the board walk a little outside the center of town where the cops drove by every 10 minutes after dark and we all flayed on our stomachs on the pavement beside cement walls that we hoped would hide us from view. George was paying me about 100 bucks in cash at the end of every working day so invariably it fell on me to buy weed and let everybody bum cigarettes off me. We would loaf around the streets till slowly one and 2 people at a time had to be home and James and I would find a down-town stoop to duck in from the night. It was always here that I found solace and from that beat-down tiredness came openness.

Only after 9 hours of hard-days-work, only after wandering from the edge of town and back smoking joints for hours, only after the instinctual exhaustion that came from minor boredom and everybody else having things to do, and from lonely streetlights commiserating under the awning of an hour-paid motel were my senses worn down enough and all my reflexes slowed till I could be honest, till I could reach a brain-place that was penetrating. Because, eventually everything else will just roll off your back never to be seen again. They used to call em the BEATniks cuz they were tired, they were dead tired and sick of it, searching for something to deliver them from 12 and 14 hour days doing bullshit work for a worthless check, sometimes it was spiritual and sometimes it was political. So I started reading about them a lot. I left ’howl’ open on my computer for 4 months...Don’t worry, I continued to shower and wear colors...well at least as much as I had been.

"Hey Noah, get in here" "whadaya need?" I ask breathlessly, rubbing the dirty belly of my shirt across my forehead, leaving a word-bubble shaped sweat stain on my paunch. "uhmmm..." he consternates with a look of pain or gas on his face. He leans back and sits on his heels, scratching the wet curve of his hairline. "I need you to go downstairs into the basement and anything you see that’s not staying for the buyer, do sumthin with it. I don’t care what you do. Throw it out, bring it to your place, I don’t give a s**t. The owner wants to make it into a game room: pool table, wet bar, the whole 9. He thinks it’ll increase the aesthetic appeal of the house. Move any tools or supplies we got in there into the furnace room and junk the rest, capic’e?" "Yea no prob." I was sure not to make eye contact as I exited because I knew eye-contact spoke louder than black people in a movie theatre, but I felt out of sorts.

I had never seen George seem challenged before. Today he was sporting a look of confusion and exertion that felt as ominous as it was disconcerting. I paused. "You aright George" he paused "yea it’s just, I got the owner breathin down my neck, he wants the house on the market Friday. I told him there ain’t no way. He’s pushin, the carpet guys are supposed to be here today and they’re NOT and they’re not gunna be till WEDNESDAY. We ain’t gunna have carpeting on the second floor till AFTER the owner wants the first open house over and done. The trim is the wrong size and I don’t have the right saw do to do a clean enough cut… I think I’m losin my f****n mind."

"Come on, how you gunna lose sumthin you ain’t had in years?" I remark playfully. He looks at me dead-pan. "You wanna help me, finish the goddamn basement. ASAP!"

It’s hard not to get lost sifting through the forgotten memories of someone else’s family. Somehow the space they occupy at the bottom of a drawer in the basement someplace, lends intrinsic value to the pressure-cracked empty picture frames and juice-stained popsicle-stick craft projects. I rub my thumb along the outer edge of a macaroni picture-frame that holds a purple marker drawing that looks like somebody wanted to check whether or not a pen worked all over it. There’s a glitter drool-spot frozen to the edge, a spot that hardened like cement, that peeled my fingernail back to a 45 degree angle form my cuticle and let it spring back like some catapultic medieval torture device when I tried to scratch it off. As my eyes well up it suddenly becomes easier to actualize it, the imaginative visions get meat on their bones, the hollow thud of objectless nostalgia grows menacing-

"Hey Noah, you hungry?" "Yea I’m gettin about ready for sumthin." "Pizza?" he shouts down to me. "Yea, I don’t give a s**t. Sumthin quick and I don’t wanna drive." "aright buddy, I’m on the case." "Who’s face?" "The CASE." "Casey who?" "god-damn-it!" he pauses" Hey, do Mexicans eat pizza?" "The f**k do I know?" "Well I dono, I don’t think I’ve ever seen em eatin pizza. Maybe they only like Mexican food..." "Well if you’re so concerned then ask em. There’s 6, one’s godda speak a LITTLE English." "nanh, I’ll buy an extra and leave it on the back deck. If they eat it, fine, if they don’t then we got lunch for tomorrow." "Whatever, George. gimme a shout when it’s here"

We ate right out of the box, on the stairwell, folding the pieces in half and letting the grease drip off. “mother-!" he grimaced, "agggggg m**********r!" he screamed squeezing the paper towel over his hand "what?" I ask insightfully. “I poured F****N hot grease on my GODDAMN hand" he over-annunciates through clenched teeth. “Nice one". Instantly he rushes me from behind, grabbing the back of my shirt and throwing me on the ground angrily, pointing violently and berating me like a naughty catholic school boy "you little s**t! You and your f****n mouth! I’m already pissed off, I burn my f****n hand and all you got to say to me is some wise-a*s comment. What the f**k kind of thing is that to say, I’m sittin next ta ya hurt ’nice one’ f**k you!" I’ve got my hands raised apologetically " listen George, you’re no prize either. I wasn’t tryin to offend you, you’ve done worse-" "the hells that got to do with anything?" he shrugs it off, still playing the role of the authority.

"The point is I didn’t think I had to walk around on eggshells like you were some little b***h. I just wanna work with ya, I’m not tryin ta sniff your f****n panties. So quit the ’I’m fragile, consider my feelings’ hissy fit and lemme get back to work" he stops for a second and looks pensive. "And if that doesn’t work, then karma’s a b***h". He c***s his fist back and gazes at me. Suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, his face lightens and a smirk spreads the right side of his mouth. He exhales a laugh that might have been a cough and swaggers off into the dining room. So I go back to work.

I can remember starting this job 4 months ago. The owner had just finagled a few acres from each of the surrounding properties and planned to make use of his acquisition. He was hoping, with the help of an independent contractor, to remodel his way to the high 6 figures; which was going to be difficult because his walls were stained with dog piss and the carpets stunk right through them. The dishwasher had been stewing in 5 inches of its own bile for over a year and a hole had finally rotted through it and eaten in to the floor beneath it. The walls were mixed up in some unholy union of decade-old chocolate syrup and disintegrated wall-paper dating back to the Nixon administration.

It was actually a miracle that the house was even standing since none of the supporting walls appeared to be supporting anything. And the foundation comprised mostly of uncrushed pebbles with about 1 bag of Portland in the whole thing. I had never been in a house like this before, much less a mansion so I accepted the measly wage offered to me, didn’t even try to negotiate. I had stars in my eyes, it seemed that there wasn’t a spot where you could look or even a position you could stand in where there wasn’t boundless potential, my eyes couldn’t contain it all. Given proper funds, I knew this house could be paradise and the owner made it a point to shake those funds to and fro in my face like dinner-scraps to the family hound. I was unemployed anyway, had been for months. And this seemed like it could amount to something. What did I have to lose? I wanted the pride of looking at that masterpiece of Victorian architecture at the end of it all and knowing what a s**t-hole it had been when I got there.

At first I hated George. Well I still hate George, but the first time I ever met the guy, I was busy talking to the owner and he sort of came up and wedged his way in to the conversation, affecting a big booming voice and went "hey, I’m your boss. Now get me a f****n cup of coffee." When I stood there unamused he started talking about me in the 3rd person, sticking out his bottom lip and mashing his words like he was comforting a new born "Aww. I think we hurt little Noah’s feelings". When that juvenile attempt to degrade and bully me met no reaction on my part, he gave me a condescending "lighten up", as if I was the one behaving inappropriately. Eventually though, I realized that he was actually pretty laid back when he wanted to be and most of the time he’s not really going to bust your balls about anything as long as it doesn’t affect his bottom line. Plus- he can take a joke, he is part of a rare breed of old country men, who I thought had largely died out in the late 70’s, that are virtually unshakeable; real John Wayne type mother-fuckers and they haven’t gotten the memo that men are allowed to cry now. And besides, I wasn’t concerned with him. All I wanted was that succulent peach tree in the back yard.