My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

At my last yard sale an elderly woman stopped to talk to me. I said, “You’re Phillipina”. I could tell. She was. “When you go to a funeral in the Philippines, they don’t ask, ‘Did she have a lot of money?’ they ask, ‘Did she have a lot of children?’ That’s how we measure wealth there. In America it’s all about money.” That was her wisdom.

Here’s how I made money this week.

I hired a bunch of friends and a bunch of Mexicans to help me get a job done. ( I asked the day laborers, “Are you Mexican? You aren’t Guatemalan?” I wanted to know. They said Mexican. You will never see a Black person or an Asian person or a white person or a Pacific Islander or an Arab standing on Cesar Chavez hailing passing trucks. They are known collectively as Mexicans, although they may be from a more southerly region.)

I met with a guy who wanted his back yard leveled so he could put in a deck that was even with his back sliding glass doors. Not a big dream. I could help. I called some friends.

I told him $1800 to remove the dirt. And I’d take apart the deck. But we had to take down the fence and go through the neighbors back yard then down a flight of steps to get the dirt out.

How do I know how much that will cost? I don’t. Luckily I had Ian the Englishman giving me advice. He told me to say 1800. I could do the work, I knew that. I’d been the duke of digging ditches for four years in Woodside, 25 miles south of the city. But down there you could put a Bobcat (skid steer)in anyone’s backyard. Here it was all hand digging. I took the neighbors garbage bins with me and we used those to tote out over 8 cubic yards of clean fill. That’s about 10 pick up truck loads. 300 trips down the steps. I forgot to mention first we removed a brick patio. And a small deck. My friends, some Mexicans, and me.

How do you know what to pay someone who works for you?

Day laborers go for 10 bucks minimum. 12 is more humane. Unskilled labor, like digging. That’s what the word on the street is. You don’t know how well they work, you pay them 10 bucks an hour. Minimum wage is 9.79 in San Francisco.

The first day I hired a lot of my friends. One works at a movie theater. He also attends Berkeley. Another is a bartender. One more I met on photo shoots, he moves furniture. The first day was fine. The guy from the theater needed direction on how to back a nail out of a board. I remembered I had to learn that to. Straighten the nail. Short sharp blows in the direction the nail entered. Otherwise the nail bends. Then what? You need to know a few tricks. Which he knew none.

“I started hiring immigrants. It was the only way to make any money.”

The phrase rang in my ears as I looked up. Jeff had spent almost 20 minutes trying to get the nails out of one 2X4. I couldn’t be mad at him because only ten years earlier I had no idea about efficiency. I was on a rich landed estate installing a paddock gate for a billionaire. There was time to learn. Rus didn’t act that way.

“Go water the garden,” he’d yell at me. “Jeezus Christ, what the fuck you think you’re doing?” he’d ask me. He’s grabbed ahammer or a drill or a shovel out of my hands more times than I can count.

Jeff said, “Mario grabbed the shovel and pushed me aside and tore into it like a machine.”

Mario was hired help from the street. Mexicans like to show you they work harder than you. (assuming you are white) Jeff may have realized it, I don’t know, but when he swung a pick axe, everyone knew it was the first time. I wanted him to set it down and do some bookkeeping for me. But if that’s how Rus had treated me, I wouldn’t be out here today, confident and manly. God I’m a man when I’m on a job. My job. I told someone, “Sure, I can get all this dirt, brick, rock, cement and decking out of here through the neighbors back yard and down their steps for 1800 bucks”, without even knowing what the fuck I was talking about. Well, I did know. But I wasn’t sure. Which is the scary part. I knew their might be a live gas line out there. Or solid rock two inches below the surface. Or that tree may have crazy roots growing along the water line that leaks even though it leads into your kitchen. YOu look at the surface and say, “I’ve dug so many holes, I can guess.” Then you go hire people that have never dug and they don’t know how to operate a shovel. So you go down to Cesar Chavez street and hire someone who doesn’t even speak the same language as you.

I don’t want to work with people who don’t speak my language. It makes it hard. Do you remember the Biblical story of the Tower of Babylon? God got scared that people 6,000 years ago were going to build a tower that could reach heaven. (WTF God, are you stupid? Sun dried brick, no matter how you stack it, won’t get there.) Then God made everyone speak different languages, SO NO MORE CONSTRUCTION COULD TAKE PLACE. God hated construction workers.

Rolling a giant block of concrete downhill is hard if everyone pushes a different direction. I’m the lazy boss because I walk away and watch. They can’t listen to me and I have no clue what they’re swearing about. They want to show you they are smart and hard workers so they do their own thing. Talking to each other. I have to walk away. If only I could find a group of guys like me who were 19 and fresh to California. Who spoke English. Everyone is going to college to be a designer. learning how to operate a shovel sounds retarded to a white person. But here I am. The duke of digging ditches.

I’dhire Jeff any day of the week over these mexican guys. I can talk to him. He is funny. He tells jokes one right after the other in a language I speak as well. After work, we go to a bar and have a drink. I’m not much of a conversationalist because I’m thinking about what I need to load on the truck for tomorrow, but god damn right I like him more than Jose, Alberto and Louise combined.

I went to Turkey right after high school for a “5th year” of study. It made me realize how unique every culture was, and how much I loved being able to talk. It was the most important sense. The ability to bullshit. Maybe I’m blind, but I can bullshit. Maybe I’m deaf, so I’m out of this conversation. Fuck it, who ever you are, you want to bullshit with the guy next to you. If he’s too scared to crack a joke you hate him. If he doesn’t speak your language, you don’t hate him, you just see him as an instrument to get work done. That’s not how I want to live. I want to bullshit with everyone. Work is just a reason to get together and bullshit.