You should meet Will.
He doesn’t know anything about construction really. I watch him struggle with a screw gun, stripping out the heads of countless screws, unable to feather the trigger or recognize the specific noise associated with a drill bit rounding the edges of the fastener’s slot. When he hands the driver back to me a small cloud of metal flakes float down from the tip. The screw is less than counter sunk. It stands like a barren flagpole in the two by four. “It’s not working,” Will says.
I was once like Will. Green as the pee stains on an Irishman’s underwear. I’d get mad at the drill and mad at old Rusty Sunshine, who’d grab the drill still in my hand and straighten it up and yell, “keep it in line!”
In a way Rus was a patient man. It was a long term patience. Not easily recognized. He’d ask me why I got out of bed that morning if I was gonna be so useless. He’d tell me how simple it was, “Same thing every time” was his mantra. “Quit daydreaming about your girlfriend,” was another classic example of his motivational speech. “You fuckin’ guys,” was the beginning of most commands, as he shut off the tractor with an angry flick of the wrist, jumped down like the God of Dust as he kicked up a cloud of fine dirt and grabbed the shovel out of your hand and showed you how he wanted you to dig the hole.
It was patience in the sense that no matter how many times I failed, how much I had cost him in broken equipment, homeowner’s damage and “diddling around” instead of working, he always asked me at 3:30 quitting time, “You wanna work tomorrow?”
We were both in it for a long haul. Rus has the knowledge I was really hungry for. As a defiant boy who wanted absolute freedom, I wanted to know how things worked. I wanted to be able to do everything myself. “Everything” really only consisted of a small set of skills revolving around tractors and power tools. It’s not like I wanted to know how to code programs in MS DOS. Or really understand the difference in NASDAQ and DJI markets. I just wanted to be the age old macho man. A hammer swinger.
Nowadays they use nail guns. It was one of many romantic quests I set out on, all of which turned out to be very lonely. Why is that? Romance is lonely. The answer is, romance is lonely because you are playing a character you really aren’t. Romance is the act of falsifying. Setting out across country in a VW van alone was truly a lonely experience. The attempt to find yourself means if you succeed, you are all alone. You and yourself. That’s loneliness.
So, I came West to be a romantic cowboy and ended up at Rus’, digging ditches and cleaning horse stalls. The reality of a cowboys life without actually sitting in a saddle. I was lonely and that’s what I wanted. The romance was to be in love with myself. I’d made it out of Greenland. I wasn’t working at the Post Office running the bar code sorter anymore. I loved my macho body.
When I hear Will stripping out the screw head I want to kick him. It’s like the sound of dollar bills being thrown in the wind. A jet engine sucks them in and shreds them. I scream very loud but Will can’t hear over the money being wasted. Out of the corner of his eye he sees me jumping up and down and notices that vein in my neck bulging and pulsing.
Doesn’t he know I lived in a run down trailer and went without sex for years so I could learn how to do operate a simple drill? It’s hard not to impart the pain of an education as you pass it on. When I tell my girlfriend what her problem is, she asks why I don’t look at myself first. I tell her, “I like to think about you.” A little out of context, but the point is, we hurt those we love because we think about them so much. Rus has a lot of wisdom and saw that I needed it. I’m quite sure at times he asked himself, “What was I thinking?” as he looked at me, the person he accepted as a student.
I have an incredibly high arch. My foot, pick one, only touches the ground at the ball and heel. My toes curl upwards. It is strange. Out of 13 inches of foot, only about two inches make contact with the ground. I constantly fall down. I’m clumsy. I can medically explain away my twisted ankles and stumbling, but I can’t explain why I drop things all the time. Being a romantic has distanced me from my own body. I’ll try that.
Trying to teach a clumsy person how to use power tools is a terrifying experience. Especially if you like the person. It’s like pushing your child into traffic to learn how to ride a bicycle. I give Will goggles and gloves and ear protection and try to walk away. I don’t want him thinking about me standing there instead of the high powered gnashing blade spinning at 1000 rpm. Better to go around the corner and lean against the building and pray with fervor, sweating, repeating CPR techniques.
I hardly know what I’m doing and I’m trying to teach him? Yes. Because the difference between the first time and second time is much larger than the difference between the second time and the hundredth time. That is why we have this concept of virginity.
This is all a roundabout way of saying thank you. To Rus for teaching me, and Will for his patience as a student. I’ve become someone I wasn’t, I’m in a middle position. I see Rus in me, and me in Will. It’s funny all I can do is mark this transition with a blog post. They don’t give out too many awards for getting by and picking up a few tricks, so along with the thank you’s I’ll send out a congratulation to all of you who made it to this middle passage. Or figure on trying.
