One Spring I went down to Beaumont, Texas. My grandfather was away at sea, nursing the big diesel engines of an oil tanker bound for India. He was due back in port before I had to start school again and I was looking forward to seeing him. I was greeted at the bus station by my grandmother.
First up we headed out to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store to stock up on things that a sprouting boy likes to eat and came back home with four big brown bags of vittles. After chowing down on a ham sandwich big enough to tie its own shoelaces, a can of spiced cling-stone peaches, an ice cold Pearl Beer and several Moon Pies, my grandma asked me out to the back-yard under her two big pecan trees.
She motioned toward the garage which stood silent and locked tight until her husband was back from overseas. The dull grey paint was a sixteenth of an inch thick and peeling away in big nasty flakes. The wood underneath was trying to turn to “punk-wood” which is only good for smudge pots and smoking hides. The galvanized corrugated roof was blossoming out into a half-dozen oxides new to science starting from the nail-holes.
The back side was also chipping and peeling badly. I was partly responsible. That was where I practised throwing knives when my grandfather was a few thousand nautical miles away. I knew the state of the interior from many long hours of “standing watch” while my grandfather performed Swedish magic on a wide variety of motors and other projects ranging from building rabbit cages to making fishing knives from old crosscut saws. I still have one of those knives.
The things I coveted inside that hallowed space were three in number. The first was an old twenty pound chunk of iron used as an anvil for striking hot metal on, which I tried each Summer to lift until I eventually could do it with one hand. The second was a beige and maroon Bakelite RCA radio tuned to KYKR that mysteriously played Tall Dark Stranger by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos every time you turned it on.
Right next to that radio was a RIGID PIPE TOOLS calendar with my older cousin, Deborah Kay on the cover wearing the cutest itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie, black and white, polka-dot bikini you ever saw and holding an exposed ratchet threader. I remember asking my grandmother at supper, the first time I saw that calendar, if folks could still marry with their cousins in Texas. She said it wasn't too usual no more nor all that necessary. My Stockholm grandfather cracked a silent smile behind his coffee cup.
The thought of scraping, sanding, priming and sloshing gallons of grey liquid while swatting mosquitoes and horseflies turned my mood sour. My grandmother told me she reckoned it was a big job and that my grandfather would pay me cash for it when he returned. She said I was only to do it if I clearly wanted to from my heart. I hated the chemical smell of paint to the point of nausea and I told her I clearly didn't, from my heart.
She then told me that my grandfather expected me to do something useful before he returned home, in order to earn my keep, and that I could figure out something else more suitable to my temperament. I looked over at their garden. They hadn't planted yet because of the rains and the whole big patch needed turning and weeding. I asked if I could do that instead and she said yes.
I was facing the same triple digit heat, the same stultifying humidity, the same skeeters, wasps and biting horseflies but a happier boy you never saw. The difference in my attitude was due to working with natural things and good old dirt instead of with chemicals. I chopped, forked and shovelled. In about two full days I was forming up the rows for the pintos, tomatoes, okras, crooked-neck squash, string beans, lettuces, carrots, green onions and such. My grandmother kept me fed like a King and when I was done, she showed me how to plant the seeds old-style.
My grandfather arrived at the Beaumont docks a few days later and when he got home he went straight to the back yard to see what I'd done before going into the house. He looked at the garage first and lingered quite awhile. My grandmother directed his attention to the garden. A big smile pulled across his face and he dug into his trouser pocket and gave me a ten dollar bill. That was just under a day's pay at the time. I walked a little taller that Summer.
About ten years later I was between employment, newly married and poor. I answered an ad in the North Shore News. It was for a painting job. According to the Boss on the phone, there was weeks and weeks of work piled up and if I was up to their standards, I would be only limited by how much work I wanted.
I met up with the Boss and his partner at an apartment address in Burnaby for an on the job orientation and training session. I had honestly told them that I had never painted commercially before. My new Bosses were surprisingly young and I figured that this was a lesson for me. If I applied myself properly, I reasoned that I too could be running an outfit someday instead of being only a hired hand.
We all got introduced and shook hands. I could hear from their accents that these fellows were from at least as far East as Alberta if not Saskatchewan. They showed me exactly how they wanted the jobs to be done. Everything removable from the walls was to be removed, the entire surfaces were to be washed with TSP and the fridges and stoves were to be pulled all the way out and the whole wall behind was to be painted.
The paint trays, various sized brushes for cutting-in, rollers, sponges, rags, drop-clothes, buckets, masking tape, long poles and the paint were all provided by the Boss. All I had to provide was my own step-ladder and my small hand tools. It was a real class act. The young entrepreneurs said they'd come back to check this first job and if it passed their muster, I would get more job addresses by phoning the Office number. Each new job would be already set up with the paint and supplies in advance of my arrival.
I scrubbed and painted like a deck-hand on a whaling ship. When I was done, I phoned the Office and the Boss came within half an hour and gave it the white glove inspection. He pointed out a few details that needed improvement but in the end he said that I had passed my probation and asked if I wanted to paint one bedroom or two bedroom apartments from then on. He quoted the piece-rate that he paid for each. I requested two bedroom units because they paid more. I already knew in my married man’s heart that I would manage three of those per day.
We shook hands on this arrangement and I humbly asked about the paydays. He said that the company paid their employees once a week on Saturdays. I was to phone the Office before-hand, verify all the addresses I had done that week and my cheque would be drawn up after the secretary squared it with their own records. I could then swing by the Office later in the afternoon and pick up the cheque. It was made clear that this first job was not to be counted as paid work because I had been in training.
He gave me two more Burnaby addresses for the balance of that first day. I set to work with gusto and by that night, reeling from the fumes, soaking sore arms in a hot bath, I figured I could paint as good as any man. Now I would work on my speed. I did three two bedroom apartments the second day and by the third day I was fast without being sloppy. I was addled from the fumes and needed much beer at days end to kill the lingering Crayola taste in my throat.
I started extra early on my first Friday so I could wrap up the last job during Office hours. Working without lunch to make that happen, I raced to my own apartment in Lynn Valley and showered up. I phoned the Office to read off my first week's list of jobs done. The telephone operator said that the number I had dialed was not in service. Suspecting that my eyes had been affected by the damned paint, I remembered that on my third day of painting I began to see other colours instead of the white that I was applying, as if my brain was trying to save itself from the monotony of a monochrome world.
I carefully dialed the Office number again and received the same notice as before. After several other calls I drove out to the Office address to have a little chat with the Boss. Halfway through a smoke in the middle of an empty lot that bore the address I sought, I allowed myself to fully realize that I had been well and truly diddled.
My subsequent inquiries at the RCMP detachment taught me that the gentlemen whom I had just painted thirteen apartments for, had started in Manitoba and had worked this scam all the way to Vancouver. It was expected that they would turn up on Vancouver Island within a week or two. They collected their cash in advance from the landlords and building managers, dropped off the paint and supplies and continued hustling new jobs. Once a week they changed towns.
There was nothing I could do and no words could frame the anger I both felt and suffered from having to swallow. I could have slapped a six foot six Greek Royal Palace Guard with my left hand and thrown his wooden shoes over a house with my right hand before he landed. At any rate, I lacked the healthy luxury of processing those negative emotions, I had a pretty wife to feed and a landlord with his hand outstretched.
A couple of wives and two decades later, I was renting half of a duplex from a man I worked with at the Post Office. It had become time to cheer the place up with some new paint. I had long ago emotionally buried the above described fiasco and had no conscious recollection of the event. However, my subconscious hadn't quite dropped the matter entirely. I didn't know exactly why, at the time, but I told my wife to take our children and go and stay with some friends for about two days while I painted.
This proved to be the right thing to do. About two hours in to the painting job and the full memory came flooding back in perfect detail. I cursed and swore and was not fit for the company of anything but a wolverine with a cactus stuck to its front pad. I saddled up the rage and turned it in to the best paint-job I'd done up to that time in my life. Two years later, I re-painted, this time with no need to send my loved ones away. I still hated the fumes, though.
I was talking to a Guatemalan commercial painter on my bus ride to work one morning. He had just finished painting a massive new laboratory at a local university where he claimed weird experiments were being conducted on animals trucked-in down a ramp to the underground facility so as not to alarm the public.
Before that job he had painted a huge old cathedral in the downtown area. He had painted for more than thirty years in several different countries. We chatted about different paints and different applications. He spoke of the particular chemicals that are in paints especially designed to coat metal surfaces.
He asked if I knew the average lifespan of a professional painter. I said I didn't and was told that they were lucky to make fifty-five years old. The lead compounds and other heavy metals build up in a man's system. I told him that when I was a pipe-fitter, I had been handling lead paste pipe joint compound on a daily basis.
It had been slowly working its way out of my hands for the past three years. I showed him one of the lesions and he regarded it with a knowing look. A true compadre, he leaned in close and whispered for to me to eat tons of fresh raw cilantro. He held out his hand and showed that it was smooth and unblemished.
A few weeks later I was clearing some brush in Lillooet with a Guatemalan machete and a man came from across the road. I had never met him but he had seen me out his window on several occasions. He was wiry, tough and sun-browned. Only his beard hinted at his age.
He introduced himself as Franklin, shook my hand and with no preamble of any sort said, “Every man is a bastard and every woman a bitch. And I love every single one of them.”
“I know exactly what you mean and my investigations up to this point in my life have yielded the same conclusion and a similar personal conviction,” I replied with no hesitation.
As he helped me lift a four-wheeled weed-whacker out of the back of my Suzuki and set it down, he looked at me and said, “I knew it! I knew it when I saw you the first time!”
“Ready?” He asked me just before raising his leathery face to the boundless blue and hollering, “God Bless Every Single One Of You Sons Of Bitches!”
We spent the balance of that afternoon swapping important dreams and him teaching me about the seven different kinds of choke-cherries. That night I happily completed a four year painting project on my trailer that I had been working on in my spare time.
fin