I had meant to write something here earlier. I was distracting by some bright shiny object or the other. I remember wanting to revisit a line I had used somewhere once “Who died and made you?” It’s a line that suggests several different ways a story could go, then I started chewing on something else. No chewing or bright shiny objects were used, not literally.
That’s a roundabout way of saying I’d forgotten the most lethal thing to me about this area; boredom. I did things above and beyond the pale, beyond the normal stupid shit kids do. Bits and pieces have been leaking out. Of all people I was talking to the grandwhelp about hanging from the railroad ties on the trestle as the train went by. I realize that version is almost the Norman Rockwell of wholesome stupid shit kids do; I’m leaving out the handicapping. Not to titillate but because it will detract from the point.
I would ramble on endlessly in one online journal or another about cross country hitch-hiking trips, and again I take out the bits … I take out bits. I am more prone to minimalizing true stories than I am to romanticizing, that is I’d rather the romance flowered from the tale than was slathered in goop. That, and, the bald truth of it is to tell any of my own tales right needs a delicate mixture of beautiful and ugly and I’m not completely sure I want to share that or that I’m competent enough too. I can do fair to middling with beautiful, with a stiff wind at my back and going downhill me and ugly look like old pals, but when you start mixing it into the blend that is anyone’s real life you have to admit that when you first came up in that hayloft all you could think about was death.
That’s a for instance, it’s a non-committed for instance, the sort of rhetorical trick one uses to prime a story for the first coat but one you have no personal investment in. Sex and death is a pretty easy archetypal rhetorical trick. It sounds like beauty and ugly at a hoedown, but, honestly, if you’re going to animate the corpse of sex and death you damn well better have something interesting to say because humans are always thinking about those two. In and of themselves there isn’t anything inherently beautiful or ugly about either one. Sorry, sidetracked. If I spent my youth chasing those particular tales, well, then I guess my tolerance for boredom would be suspect. Any idiot can get hit by a train or fuck a train it takes a special kind of idiot to bare ones throat and ass to the train while handicapped.
So, I was thinking about something I was going to tell a friend, found it awfully familiar in its essence and realized I’ve been leaking ghosts. The story is poignant yet dull and I was doing fine up to a point. Well, shit, here, I’ll tell you;
It was something like 1982, I was in my second year of undergrad studies at PSU had joined and been subsequently discharged, honorably (they don’t have an honorably sort of * well you know* …discharge) and my first born wasn’t fully baked yet. This lady who used to have one of the downstairs apartments --- oh, shit, must have been 83 and my first born fully baked and drooling. Anyhow she was this artist and she had bought a house and she contracted with a friend of hers to help fix it up and she suggested I be hired on as grunt labor. There’s a lot more to all of that, but that’s the important part for this story.
The contractor was in his seventies and he was an old agitator, one of those commie types from the thirties who rabble roused for the UFW and the like, he would have been a wobbly if he’d been born earlier. I was supposed to mask the windows as we were using an air pressure gun to paint the outside of the house. I fucked up a few odd shaped windows on the third floor, you know, crescent moon decorative light sort of windows that didn’t open. So a bunch of paint got in underneath and it took me like three hours on a ladder with a razor blade.
End of the day comes and dude is counting out fives (this is the point where the story leaked a different kind of ghost, but not the important part of the story). I hand him back fifteen bucks and tell him I’m not taking his money for time I spent undoing my fuck up. I actually had a bit of a problem with getting paid for helping out a friend anyhow. I extend that to my friends and expect it extended to me. Neither here nor there. I wasn’t expecting a pat on the back and I sure wasn’t expecting him to take the money back. What he actually did do stuck with me. He gave me a fucking lecture, more like a sermon, more like the wages equivalent of the Tom Joad soliloquy at the end of grapes of wrath. He basically told me that there were enough sons of a bitchs in the world already trying to devalue my labor without me needing to join in on the chorus. In a roundabout way, too, he told me my word of honor was only as good as I let the next guys word of honor be. We had a deal, see, on what he’d pay me an hour and if I didn’t let him keep his word mine was no good. I know it seems like it shouldn’t apply or that all that word of honor stuff is bullshit ---
I won’t give my word unless I’m planning on keeping it, though I never mistake legal tender for honor or vice versa. It has more to do with keeping shit simple, it’s easy to multi-task if you keep shit simple. That’s not the point of the story though, the point is never devalue your own labor, know exactly what your worth and don’t take any less. I always pay close attention when commies are upholding the virtues of capitalism. For all my various rants and raves I don’t really give a shit as long as the rules are fair, I mean I don’t care about the distribution of wealth as long everybody has a shot at getting what’s due them for what they put into it.
Where the story went sideways in my head is that I was going to say five bucks an hour without taxes was the best I had been paid up until then, but, yeah, no. I’d pull three to five C notes in a five hour shift waiting tables at this pick up joint near where Fischer Body used to be on a street that didn’t used to be called MLK for a guy who a century earlier would have been a horse thief. A lot of bad bored haredawg stories from that place. A lot of bad bored haredawg stories is how I got picked to work there.
I envy my dad’s dementia, what a luxury to forget all your own shit. You know I would have did things a lot differently if someone had been able to convince me it’s not the consequences of your actions you have to be wary of, it’s being haunted by the actions themselves. It’s like not only do you have to take the five bucks you have to have it tattooed on your skin.
This thing has been interrupted so many times that if I read it I’ll just delete it. Hmmm, that should have been my lead in … that or that one of the beagles broke loose last night in single digit temps. He was found with no better tale from out his beagle lips, his floppy beagle dewlaps, than from out of mine. I suspect he was bored.
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