Working Construction

They were there for the duration. I was just passing through. 

My first day on the job I reported to the Russell, the foreman, “down in the bottom” near Building D.   He was part of a group of white men watching a black man dig a hole.  I told him who I was.  A moment later I was in the hole and the black man was in the audience. 

Even at the time I knew it was a symbolic beginning.

It was 1976.  I had just graduated from college with a BA in English.  My job search had been as anti-fast track as my major--I simply asked my father and grandfather to help me find work.  My grandfather had been a locksmith at the local Medical College for years.  The people at their employment office looked blank when, as instructed,  I mentioned his name.  They weren’t hiring, sorry.  No, wait a minute.  There is something down in the morgue.  The man just quit that sews up the bodies after they’re dissected…

I let it pass.

My father had a friend in the main office of Choplin Construction.  They installed pipes for apartment complexes and office buildings.  They needed  laborers.  I started work a few days after I put in my application.         

"You been to college?"

“Yeah.”

"Then what the hell are you doing this for?"

The man’s question brought me up short. I wasn’t quick enough to make up a  story, so I shrugged, took another bite of sandwich, and waited for the lunchtime conversation to pass on to something else.     

On one level, I’d taken the job “to experience life.”  I figured I’d eventually wind up as some sort of professional and wanted to be broader than the people I knew who went directly from school into the work they’d do for the rest of their lives.  More practically,  I hoped I’d learn to do more than write papers and discuss ideas.  I admired men who could fix and build.  At this point, my most advanced technical skill was cutting the grass.                          

I couldn’t articulate any of this at the time.  In any case, the man’s question knocked me down a couple of notches.  Suddenly, sitting on a cinderblock, staring at the knee-deep pile of fast food wrappers and discarded building material boxes in the room beside where we were eating, I felt absurd.  My college career had been aimless and impractical.  I’d wasted my time and my parent’s money and still didn’t have any idea what I really wanted to do. 

Depression.

My mood persisted into the afternoon.  Russell had me screwing down pipe sleeves on top of one of the buildings.  Eventually the place I was working would be the floor for the third story but they hadn't even started the walls yet so at this point it was a roof. 

The sleeves were sheet metal cylinders about six inches high with the bottom inch cut and bent out into four little flanges.  I was screwing them down onto the galvanized metal floor that would eventually be covered with poured concrete.  Someone would come later with a torch and cut a hole under the sleeves for pipes to go through. 

Center the sleeve over an X, put a screw in the gun--BRAAANG!  Do it again.  Four times per sleeve. 

Galvanized metal.  Summer sun.  The sweat ran down into my glasses where it pooled in the lens, making everything fisheyed.  Every few minutes, I’d stop, wipe my glasses on the tail of my shirt, and look around, which was a mistake—the roof actually seemed to be getting bigger.       

There’s a special effect I’ve seem several times in horror movies: a monster chasing a person down a hall, the hall gets longer as the monster closes in. That was the way the roof was, except it got longer in all directions.  And the monster was inside my head.

“This menial stuff is all I’ll be able to do for the rest of my life.”

BRAAANG! 

“Nothing easy from here on out.  This is the working world.”

BRAAANG! 

“Piddled away college, lost my one opportunity for something better.”     

A man in a blue shirt appeared on the roof of the next building.  I could tell by the way he talked to himself that something was about to happen. 

There was another man working over there, doing something on his knees.  Blue Shirt stomped over, hit him on the side of the head.

The man went down, his hard hat clattering across the roof.  Blue shirt stood over him, shaking his finger, saying curse words I couldn’t hear.

He wound down after a few minutes, started to walk away, remembered something he'd left out, came back and cussed some more. Then he noticed me.  I got a look that would have bored a hole in a safe.  I smiled and waved.  He had gotten me out of my mood.  There wasn’t any question of interfering, and the cussee was apparently injured only in his pride.  So the incident had been guilt-free entertainment, a perfect distraction.  The rest of the afternoon flashed by.

The second day I was back in the hole.  I particularly remember that day's clay--the way huge damp chunks of it stuck to the pick. 

Weeks passed.  Things got dry.  The soil assumed some of the characteristics of cement—which actually made the work easier, though somewhat slower.

I got pretty good at digging.  I was actually proud of myself until Carter, the black laborer I replaced in the hole my first day, shed a different light on my achievements.

"John Henry!"  he said, standing back from the hail of dirt I was throwing out of that day's ditch.  "I'd slow down if I were you.  If you get too good at this they won't let you do anything else.”

  I slowed down.  Sure enough, a few days later, Russell had me working with someone else. 

Hutch was a huge man who only did light work because of his many injuries.  He commuted each day from Fredericksburg, a distance of about sixty miles: “This isn’t bad.  The last job we did was down near North Carolina.  I had to leave the house at 4 a.m.”

The first thing Hutch did every morning when he got to work was take out his false teeth.  He had a complete set of uppers and lowers.  He’d put them carefully in his lunch box, take out a package of Red Man, and extract the entire contents for his morning chew.

At lunchtime he reversed the process, putting his teeth back in to eat. 

He told me that when he used to work for a local bakery, he’d get a loaf of bread hot of the oven every day for lunch.  He’d split it lengthwise and hollow it out, then fill up the insides with peanut butter and jelly.

“Of course, that was when I was young and strong and had a big appetite.” 

In his forties, Hutch still managed to down three sandwiches, dessert and a big thermos of coffee each day between 12:00 and 12:15. 

Hutch didn’t warm to me until one morning when he caught me sleepily adjusting my underwear through the back part of my pants.

       “You going to the movies tonight?”  he asked.

       “Movies?”  I said.  “No, actually I…”

        “But I just saw you picking your seat!”

         He slapped me on the back, repeated the joke, and repeated it again for everyone who passed by that morning.  I was all right with Hutch after that.

A few days later he was in a mellow mood after lunch and told me how he’d lost his teeth.  It started with a motorcycle accident.  He hadn’t seen a ditch when he was riding through a field. 

  “You heard how a motorcycle’ll chase you?  Well, this one chased me.  It ran over me two or three times going around in circles after I fell off.”

Hutch was recuperating--casts on an arm and a leg, bandages, etc.--laid up at home on the second floor.  A well wisher rang the doorbell.

"My wife was at work.  So like a dern fool I decided to see who it was."

He pulled himself out of bed, hobbled across the room, out to the landing--then tripped on a piece of loose carpet and fell down the stairs.  “You know the newel post on the banister?”  He made a sphere with his hands.  "I landed on it with my mouth and lost every tooth in my head."

He took his false teeth out, inspected them philosophically, then put them in his lunchbox and started on his afternoon pouch of Red Man.

There was one woman on the site, a secretary who worked in the trailer.  The first day I saw her I was hammering with a cold chisel in the tight upper corner of what I think was destined to be a utility closet, standing on a ladder, scraping my knuckles in a spot too tight for our electric drill.  The masons had gotten ahead of us and set blocks before we could put in pipes.  This kind of thing was always happening.     

Suddenly the carpenters working behind me got quiet.  No hammering, no banter.  I looked around.  They were all at the window.  I climbed down and looked too.  Molded jeans, soft brown hair under a hardhat—we watched until she disappeared inside the trailer.

I've heard years of women's sneers at construction workers.  A lot it's deserved.  There's no excuse for the baboon noises you sometimes hear from behind the scaffolding.

But this was something else, a quiet moment with a lot of poetry.  It took us away from the mud and the cold and the boredom, and sent us back to work renewed, almost like church.  After this, I always gave myself a break whenever I saw the secretary walking on the site.  

That year there was hardly any Fall.  We went from t-shirts to long underwear in less than a week.  It was freezing inside the buildings where we did all of our work.  The concrete and cinderblock stayed cold even if it was sunny outside.  I hated the cold. 

Carl started with the company in October.  They gave me to him because he was new and I was the least skilled man on the crew.

Carl was in his late twenties, just below middle height, preserving the same solid build he'd had as a high school quarterback.  He moved faster than any one else on the job and in general projected an air of knowing what he was doing which was slightly out of place.

He had been a sprinkler man, he told me, a specialist in installing the networks of ceiling pipes that are only used in case of fire.  "When you see someone moving fast on the job it's likely he's a sprinkler man.  They pride themselves on it."

He had been part of a union.  The union had called a strike.  Carl stopped work--but he was the only one who did.  The company gave the men the benefits they wanted.  Carl lost his job.

The first thing we were assigned to do was run four-inch pipe the length of a hall ceiling in Building A. It took us a week.  On Friday Carl eyeballed it and said, "Damn!" It was crooked.  We took it all down.

When we started reinstalling the pipe we discovered that it was flawed, slightly bent in a way that was invisible until you saw several lengths of it connected together.  We examined every stack of four inch on the site--none of it was straight.

Russell told us it would be weeks before we could get another shipment in from the manufacturer.  "You've got to go with it," he said.  "We're behind schedule already."

We redid the work we'd torn out, compensating as best we could for the crooked pipe.  When we finished we started another hall.

The pipe threading machine was an electric motor about the size of a pig’s head.  It stood waist high on a tripod and we had it braced to the ceiling with a length of two- inch pipe.  A pipe vice, also on a tripod, held the far end of the pipe that we were threading.

Carl would help me lift the four-inch into place and strap it down.  Then we'd cut it and attach the threader.  He'd go off to measure or look at blueprints and I'd stay and mind the machine.  The pipe had to be oiled the whole time it was being threaded.

It was around 8:30.  We had cut one pipe, threaded it and put it up into place.  I was babysitting our second.  The threader turned the die.  Each time it went around I squirted on some oil.  Squirt, squirt.  Bright cut steel spiraled off the pipe and fell into the sand we had scattered to absorb the oil.

The work I was doing wasn't enough to stay warm.  The cold came up from the concrete into my shoes.  I alternated hands, warming first one and then the other in my pocket while the one with the oil can got stiff.  I think I was thinking about lunch when the threader started shaking.

Lucky for me I stepped back.  The threader broke away from its ceiling brace and slammed into the floor.

What had happened, we figured later, was that the threader had hit an irregularity in the pipe that the die couldn't cut.  An irresistible force met an immovable object--and the pipe threader came to life.  It started walking.  Toward me.

I backpedaled. The threader followed, pounding the floor like a two-car collision.  The pipe vice and the length of four-inch flailed behind it, blocking the roundabout way I could have taken to the door.  I thought of Hutch's motorcycle.  Then my back hit the wall.  There was nowhere else to go.  The machine got closer.  Carl ran in.  God bless him--he pulled the plug.

What happened next is very strange.  Hutch appeared with his helper;  then another plumber with his; then Carter; then everyone else who worked for Choplin in Building A.  They stood there for a moment in the doorway--and then they laughed.

It wasn't just a chuckle.  It was loud and long and directed at me.  I still don't understand it.  Was it nervousness, a simple release of tension after they saw I was OK?  Or did I just look funny?  I guess I probably did seem pretty comical, all pale and shaky there in the middle of the wrecked room with a death grip on the oil can.

But it goes deeper than that.  They laughed because construction is a dangerous business.  The accident that almost happened to me could just as easily have happened to them.  They laughed to give themselves some distance.

And it goes deeper still: they laughed because I was different.  I had been to college--I obviously hadn't worked my way through--and I wasn't wedded to the job.  At 23 I was the only unmarried man on the crew.  Even the ones who were younger than me had children.  Except for Carl.  His wife had a career, teaching school.  But he didn't fit in either and he hadn't laughed.

I didn't quit because of the accident.  After we finished that second hall I understood ceiling pipe.  Seriously, I had it down:  first you measure, then you cut. Then you thread it and hang it up.  Then you do it again.  I couldn't wait to move on to something else.

That Friday after we finished, Carl and I packed up the pipe vice and the threader.  Then he went to see Russell.  I swept the sand and the pipe shavings into a pile in the middle of the room.  I was shoveling them into a five gallon bucket when Carl returned.

"So what's next?"  I asked him.

"From here on out it's easy.  Russell really liked the job we did on these two halls.  He said that since we'd done them so good we could do the same thing for the rest of the complex."

"Uh huh,"  I said.  I picked up the big yellow electrical cord and started coiling it around my arm.  It didn't take a genius to work out the calculation:  one week per hall, two halls per floor, three floors in each building.  Seven buildings.  We'd be doing the same job until summer.

I thought about it over the weekend.  I gave my notice on Monday.