i have a big home, i wander around inside it, finding new rooms. some days i stack up pennies in towers seven feet tall. there is nothing important to do but i continue to get out of bed. i practice the alphabet. people aren’t combing their hair like they used to. i stay inside and glue my name onto things. i have guns now.
Glenn, Big Jim and me. We work construction. We talk about two things at work: women and ways out of construction. You can imagine the talk about women. Possible escapes from construction: contractor in Iraq, growing pot for medical clubs, training for a biotech industry career. The more normal the job the bigger the lie we tell ourselves. We are in construction because it accepts a certain amount of deformity, it embraces a higher tolerance of vice and bad behavior. We’ll never get out of here.
Big Jim puts this plan of escape out there: “Just give up and hit bottom, then state aid kicks in. Paid training to be a truck driver. Data entry. Anything you want.”
But getting that far down takes too long to get back up, and why would we be any happier driving trucks? The state won’t train us for anything cerebral. We aren’t gonna get too smart on their dime. We failed the system a long time ago and they’re losing money keeping us out of prison so they’ll just get us back on the tax rolls. Something mindless. 
Big Jim heads home. He stopped caring 30 years ago.
Glenn says, “You could be a therapist that specializes in construction crews. Go from site to site, get the fellah’s to work out their issues.”
He was on to something there; the animosities between trades – electrician vs plumber vs drywall guys – each one is in the other’s way and leaves a mess behind and probably stole the level. Then there’s racism of worry that Mexicans will take all the work – half the time they’re actually Salvadoran.
The main source of strife is the “gray beard” as Glenn calls him. The old guy within the crew who tells you how to dig a hole, coil a hose, how much pressure to use when shutting off the garden hose valve. They use old terms no one uses any more to confuse you, like “rheostat” or something exclusive to the farm they grew up on like “rear end grease” and make unnecessary demands like “fill that bucket 5/8ths full of water,” when all you’re trying to do is mix cement.
No matter how much the gray beard knows, he still hasn’t learned one important thing. We don’t want to learn from someone we hate. The gray beard can’t understand why we do the opposite of what he says. Simply put, it’s because you’re an asshole.
We talk about ways to get out of construction and we talk about pussy, but none of us will ever give up construction completely and pursue art or music or truck driving or IT. No other job allows you to climb your way from the bottom up being drunk the whole time.
We stop talking about getting out of construction for a while. Big Jim starts to tell us why he got into construction.
“My Dad had this machine in his garage, called the Little Giant, back in Minnesota. You stepped on a foot pedal and it flattened half round and punched a groove down the center, then another device bent it. ”
“What for?”
“Made horseshoes. My dad had thirty or forty horses and he sold them to other ranchers. There was a fire and the Little Giant got super heated and the bearings were destroyed. That was all that needed to be fixed. I wrote a letter to the manufacturer hoping to get replacements, but my mom kept the letter back, kept it out of the mail. I found out and asked her why. She said she wanted me to go out in the world and do something, not stay on the farm. So that was it. I never went back. You don’t want me here, fine.”
The therepy was starting. We relied on each other since no one had ever taken Glenn’s advice and showed up with any qualifications to help us out. Glenn arrived with a bottle of whiskey and a six pack every morning. That was the medication.
Big Jim talked about Rachel.
“She was my first love. A true love but she wouldn’t settle down…she was so outgoing, she just loved everyone – always at a party or down to the Rubiyat dancing…she just couldn’t stay with me.”
“So what you called love she called a cage?” I asked.
“I guess so…if you want to look at it like that…not really. She wouldn’t commit so I just gave up. Gave up my dreams. I used to have a lot of ideas, lots of drive and I lost it all when I lost her.”
“She wouldn’t commit so you wanted to be like her and not commit to anything either?” I asked. I wouldn’t make a good therapist.
“No, just the opposite,” Big Jim answered.
“I don’t get it…”
“I’d seen the world through the eyes of love and when that was gone, it was like I couldn’t see anything…there was no more reason to live anymore.”
“That’s why when Trina came along you wanted to start painting and taking karate and playing guitar again?”
“I hadn’t felt alive for thirty years.”
So we talk about love and call it pussy and we talk about ways to get out of construction and we keep going until we drop dead.
The economy is in the toilet but California is the seat looking on as it flushes…newspapers print statistics of crisis in the middle of the country where jobs and homes and savings are swirling in circles down the drain while houses are selling for millions in San Francisco and if you manage to just be at zero savings you are richer than most of your fellow citizens. a personal economy of zero like the shape of what your ass sits on…When we split off from America will California send a text message? That’s how break ups go down these days…Washington gets its heart broken…AT&T sent the phone taps to Congress…Cali with thumbs flying calls the whole thing off…”I know you’re spying on me!” presses send…America stalks the Golden State…a curious time indeed
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