Money was tight. I’d eaten through my savings and now, when I wasn’t fantasizing about robbing pimps, I spent the rest of my time questioning my move to Los Angeles. Up in NorCal, I made a good living as a house painter. I hadn’t cooked or bought groceries for a year and a half. I ate three meals a day in restaurants, never checked prices. I traveled every winter when the work slowed around the holidays. But down in SoCal, things were different.
Everyone asked if I spoke Spanish, since most of the crews I’d be working with didn’t really speak English. I never got those jobs. Not that I was pissed about it since the pay they offered was only 60% of what I’d been making up north. Plus, no one was hiring. They were calling it the Great Recession. I thought to myself, Fuck L.A. as I drove past packed restaurants, wondering what the hell I was going to eat that day.
After a week of internet searching and emailing, I had a second interview with a Westside construction company. I met the very serious, hard-handshaking owner with the hawk eyes. I made it through the interview with him based solely on eye contact and my equally firm handshake. I saw it in his stare, it made an impression. It’s funny what often are the things that actually qualify you for a job.
Two days later, I got the call. It was the owner, he told me to show up at the company headquarters — and to bring my legal documentation for the paperwork. Then he paused, as if he were used to someone asking about legal documentation.
That Friday I was early, so I waited for the secretary to arrive. She shuffled towards me down a long hallway, like if she wasn’t always touching the floor she’d receive an electric shock. She was very committed to the floor. Her Kush Life sweatshirt told me they wouldn’t be asking for a drug test. When she finally reached the end of the long hallway, she stopped shuffling a few feet from me and asked, “Zaron?”
I knew the answer to that question. “Yes,” I said, and waited for more.
But there was no more, she just pushed tax paperwork at me.
“Do I need to fill this out now … or do I bring these back?” I asked.
But she was done with the whole talking to me thing. She shuffled away with a small audible groan. It was early in the morning. Before seven.
One of the men who interviewed me in the first interview, showed up at the cubicle, looming over me as I answered the IRS’s question. “Are you done with that, Zaron?”
I offered him my paperwork.
“Follow me,” he said.
I followed.
“Wait here,” he said.
I waited at the open door of his office. Telling myself: I really need this job.
After a moment spent digging through paperwork, he returned with a small folded piece of paper. He handed it to me.
“Go to this address and if you have any trouble call this man,” he said, like a spymaster.
There was a handwritten address, a name, and a phone number. I liked the sound of this.
The address was in Palmdale — sixty miles northeast, up in the mountains. Google told me it had snowed there on Monday. The middle management man asked if I had ever painted a house that had been burned, lots of unforeseen problems. I told him I could run their job.
He nodded, satisfied, “Good, we’ll use this job to test you.”
I woke up at four thirty. Breakfast done by five. Out the door by five-thirty. By six-thirty, I was lost in the mountains, and fully convinced I was about to run out of gas. I’d gambled that there were plenty of upcoming gas stations, but in the mountains there were no gas stations, there were no exits, just long uninterrupted inclines. It was a brutal metaphor for my life at the moment: a cold, long, endlessly ascendent mountain road, and me running out of gas, headed to my first day of a new job.
Why was I about to fuck my first day of work by running out of gas? Because I didn’t want to stop driving, because I was busy gawking at the purple parade of color coming up over the mountains. Blame the beauty of dawn. That’s why I kept pushing the needle deeper into the E. Just so I could watch the morning break. By the time I was convinced I wasn’t going to make it and that I really needed to stop and get gas, I was stuck in the mountains and there wasn’t another gas station. Not even an exit.
Finally, as I fought back panic and anger, I saw a friendly exit sign appear. One mile to go. After I got gas, I checked Google maps and found my way to the house. Two minutes late.
The Foreman was already there, waiting for me. He and the only other white guy on the job-site were together, talking in the garage about load-bearing beams.
“…Zaron, good! Follow me.” He said, barely looking at me.
We walked the job-site, and he told me the scope of work. There had been a fire in the garage. It spread to the west wing of the house. Half of the house burned down. Now he and his guys were almost done rebuilding it. He wanted to know if I could make the new half look just like the old half. Could I match it so that you would never know there’d been a fire? I was honest and said the colors could be matched, but the new paint would be brighter and the old half would be dusty and faded, which would look weird. He said that wasn’t his problem. Insurance only paid for half a house. I told him I could paint the half-house in less than a month. By myself. He liked that.
I started working inside, prepping the kitchen for painting. I thought the Foreman had left. But then I heard his boots hit the bare wood staircase. I was on my knees, cleaning old blue painter’s tape residue, scratching it off with a fingernail. He stood over me.
“Hey, are you a head?” he asked.
Am I … a head? I knew what he meant, but it sounded funny. I wanted to ask about my other options. Could I be an elbow? What about a xyphoid process? I would make a rad xyphoid process if that’s all I had to do all day. But no, I had to get up every day and go make rent.
“Do you smoke?” he asked, his face flat and impossible to read.
I didn’t know how to answer. Honesty? It’s reportedly the best policy, but it had failed me on numerous occasions, and I needed this job. So, I kept it short. Just one syllable.
“Yep.”
“I told Jim you were cool. He said that’s why I was stoked they hired you … because you’re a Rastafarian. I knew it! I told him you were a head. He used to smoke, doesn’t anymore. C’mon let’s go for a drive.”
He handed me the pipe. It was already packed. Fragrant. Bright green. The Foreman backed up. And we were off. We passed the pipe as we drove across the irrigated high desert valley. We passed fields with winter produce, yet to go to market, and a rolling pasture with an obstinancy of grazing buffalo, another wide field with some regular old cows, and one hillside that was decorated with a cria herd of llamas. The names for groups of animals are always so ridiculous. A cria herd of llamas? Like llama isn’t weird enough. A group of flamingos? You call them a flamboyance. How about an implausibility of wildebeests? Or my favorite, a storytelling of ravens. (Look it up.) I distracted myself with animal group names as he drove because I couldn’t relax otherwise.
The Foreman paid so little attention to the road as he smoked and checked his phone that we were weaving back and forth over the two lanes. He had to recover the wheel twice just to keep us on that little country road. I was certain we were one blind curve away from veering off the road and tumbling his truck into a field. So, I tried to pay no attention to his driving. That made me less nervous. A group of wombats is called a wisdom.
The Foreman announced we weren’t just gonna go for a drive and smoke a bowl. He’d changed his mind. He wanted to go to his house because he had a bong. And he needed to get rid of a couch to make his wife happy. He wanted to throw it away in the dumpster in front of our construction site. His house was twenty miles away.
On the way, he told me the history of refinancing his house and all the ways the government failed him and fucked him. I just listened. And passed the pipe. He seemed shell-shocked, having just been through it. Talking about losing his home made him look older, more pinched. His natural boyishness slipped away.
When we got to his place, there was a woodpile out front and a tattered green couch facing the street. He backed his truck onto his yard and we got out. Following his lead, I helped shove the couch into the back of his truck. Then we loaded up his house trash and whatever his wife had collected and piled alongside the house. After we loaded his family’s trash, he wanted to go inside.
“Follow me,” he said. And I reminded myself I was at work. Maybe this is part of the test.
His home was pretty much as I expected. Working class mountain white people, like the ones who I grew up around, they tend to decorate their homes with similar touches, whether in Northern or Southern California. Especially, if they have kids. There’s always a television. The family room was dominated by the colorful, familiar covers of Disney movies. I checked their bookshelf. More movies. Some action titles for Dad. Romantic comedies and travel romances for Mom. Skateboard vids and teen romance epics like Twilight for the oldest daughter. The furniture was all ten years old, at least. The family pictures were proudly displayed in cheap frames. The dishes from Target were left on the dining room table with half-eaten breakfast left behind. It was all there. Even the striped Mexican blanket you buy on the side of the road. I felt very comfortable in his home.
The Foreman came out of what I assumed was his bedroom, carrying a bong and a locked gun case. I stopped feeling so comfortable. But I acted like everything was cool. We smoked a few rounds. And then he unlocked his gun case. Perfect. A murder of crows. A crash of rhinoceroses.
He was fully focused. “So … this is my new gun.”
“People clean their guns so much I can never tell if it’s new. It’s like the same as Jordans,” I said, trying to sound like I was making sense.
He wasn’t listening to me. He was alone with his powder black pistol. It was quiet in his house. It was him staring at his gun, and me, staring at him staring at his gun, and a small part of me was wondering if he was having a major nervous breakdown and if I should be worried. Was this crazy motherfucker gonna shoot me on my first day on the job?
In his truck he’d gotten emotional about how he almost lost his house to the bank. And he made a comment about how blacks were never in the position he was. Here he was doing the right things and he was fighting to keep his house. When he needed help the government didn’t help him. But they helped the banks who tried to take his house. And you know they would help him if he were black… That line of thinking had struck me when he first said it in his truck, and now, with him holding a gun, it seemed newly relevant since I’m not the government, but I am black.
He broke the silence, “It’s called the “Threat Ender. Isn’t that a great name? It’s manufactured by Beretta.”
Him holding a gun made me nervous. Something about how he said “threat ender” made it sound a lot like “The Final Solution.” That and he kept pointing the gun at me as he inspected how cool it is.
He pulled out the one bullet he kept in the case with his gun, and he saw me get tense. He ejected the empty magazine and slid his “lucky bullet” into it. Fuck. A troubling of goldfish. A collision of cheetahs. A puddle of platypus.
“You hear that action? So smooth?” he said, like a boy with a deadly toy.
I was now placing bets on whether I was watching a man fall apart right before he killed himself, or me. I had the odds at 4 to 1 against total homicidal freakout.
He held the gun, lovingly, “I’m not afraid to shoot anyone. They should be afraid of me. But that’s why we don’t get much trouble up here. People don’t stand for it.”
I nodded, and lowered the odds to 3 to 1.
He leaned over and handed me the magazine with the one bullet. I took it as fast as a hungry man snatches food. For the same reason, to avoid death.
“Those are the same kind the cops use. Hollow-point. They’re fucking awesome.”
I grew up around gun people, so I knew what to do. I pushed the bullet out of the magazine like I wanted to inspect it. I stared at the bullet and realized I was so fucking high, and so confused about why, on my first day, I was with my new boss in his dining room playing with his new gun. Shit. Is this what you have to do to get a job these days?
The door opened, surprising us both. It was his wife, home from shopping. She was nice. She was quick to use a well-practiced fake smile. I noticed her incisors. They were extraordinarily long and made her look like a white trash vampire. She put down the groceries in the kitchen. I handed my boss back his bullet. He put away his gun. And I raised the odds back to a conservative 11 to 1 against a freakout.
He offered me another bong load. I told him I was good. He shrugged and smoked it himself. His wife walked past us again, flashed her fake smile, and headed outside. She seemed super stoked to come home to her husband and some guy who looks like Bob Marley getting high in her dining room at seven-thirty in the morning. That’s when I saw the Book of Mormon with a study guide at the other end of the dining room table. Wait! For real?
“Hey, man. Are you … a Mormon?” I asked, assuming he’d say anything but what he said.
“…Yeah, that’s why my wife’s acting a little weird,” he sounded embarrassed.
When she reappeared with more groceries, I stood up, “Do you need help with your groceries?”
I also grew up around Mormon families, and I knew that when they go shopping, they don’t play.
She waved me off and half-apologized, explaining as politely as she could, “No, please. This is it. And I didn’t mean to be anti-social — it’s just that I quit smoking pot a few months back and coming home to a house filled with smoke is a little hard.”
“I completely understand. I’m sorry that you—” I started to say but she interrupted me.
“No, please. You’re a guest in my home,” she headed into the kitchen with the last of the groceries.
The Foreman looked at me, like he couldn’t figure me out. All I had done was offer to help his wife with the groceries. He was the pot-smoking, gun-loving, Mormon who hung out with dudes who looked like Rastafarian bass players, puffing tough in his dining room at seven-something in the morning — if anyone didn’t make sense it was him. I was the average American for once.
The Foreman got up and joined his wife in the kitchen. I heard snatches of a hushed conversation. I got up and eased on outside.
We were in the mountains. The air was fresh and biting. A hawk screamed as it circled above me.
A door slammed shut. Not out of anger — just because contractors are known to have half-finished projects all over their own homes. The hydraulic hinge for the front door was missing. His house boasted more than its fair share of half-finished projects. Like his roof with the blue tarp to cover damage from the latest windblown snowstorm.
The Foreman was in a mood, “She just warned me — this will not become an everyday thing.”
“You should be stoked, you have a good wife.” We got back in the truck.
On the way back, we passed the same obstinancy of buffalo. Again, I focused on them rather than the Foreman’s driving. All the pot had done little to improve it. A candle of anteaters. A destruction of lynxes. A zeal of zebras. When we got back to the job site, I helped him dump the green couch in the forty-yard dumpster. Then I went upstairs and started prepping the house to paint.
I heard him walk into the room and say, “I love it. This looks good. Nice. Okay you know what you’re doing. Get the place ready to go and I’ll try to get you some paint next week once I find the color chart.” And like that, he was gone. He got back in his truck and drove away.
In the moment, I was elated to have a job. Finally. Something solid to help make it through the lean times of the Great Recession. Of course, things change. Months later, that same Foreman asked me to fuck his wife while he watched. But for now, for that first day of a new job, I was happy to have employment. It meant I’d be able to stay in Los Angeles. I’d been pushing it hard into E, and I made it one more time, thanks to a pot-smoking, gun-loving, wife-swapping Mormon contractor. Which just goes to show: you often find the fuel to keep going where you least expect it. (Like, hiding behind a constellation of starfish.)