On the Job with Foss Construction.
Some of you may not realize that my life is not all late night TV and setting new sleep records. The truth is that despite being an unemployed loser, I have a job, sort of, with Foss Construction. I don't do it all the time, but when Foss has a job that he can't handle on his own I'm the second one he calls.
Some of you who do know that I work with Foss seem to think that through this I may have somehow acquired some skill and become handy, and maybe I can help you do something on your house. I offer the following account of a morning on the job to help dispel this notion.
A New Kind of Ditchdigger
by
Patrick Okell
I step up into the cab of Montana Louie’s truck and slam the door. It’s the kind you can slam as hard as you want; it makes the same deep, dull thud no matter what. The truck is huge – a diesel Ford “F”-something "Powerstroke". He hates driving it in the city, and I don’t blame him.
“Pat, how you doin’?”
“Good, Louie, you?”
“O.K., Pat, O.K.”
Louie looks like he might have tied one on last night. Sometimes just knowing I have to get up early is enough to make me not sleep, but I manage a fair bit of insomnia for other reasons too – none of them are very impressive. Last night there didn’t seem to be any point in sleeping, since I knew it would just lead to getting up to do this again.
Louie hunches over the wheel guiding the truck down the narrow side streets of the city toward the freeway. Once on the interstate, we both relax a little and listen to the news as we barrel north toward Camano Island and the job.
I like Louie, he’s a good egg. He’s actually from Buffalo, but moved out to Montana a few years ago having had enough of New York. A plumber by trade, he’s also working as a framer on this job. Tall, solid and handsome, with dark hair and a dark beard, in the right clothes he could be cast in a movie about peasants in fascist Italy. He gives me pointers on the job to help keep me from screwing up. We take smoke breaks together even though I don’t smoke.
The first day of the job I offered to give him money for gas on the way home. He told me not to worry about it, that the boss was giving him gas money, but he thanked me for offering, and said no one had ever done that before. In fact, he said, the “dickheads” he usually worked with would just say, “well you were going there anyway.” He shook his head, and I was glad to have raised myself up above the dickheads.
We talk about a lot of things in the truck. Louie is the only person I know who has taken oxycontin, or “hillbilly heroin,” recreationally. He got hooked on it after back surgery – the result of poor lifting technique, he tells me. When he ran out he asked his girlfriend to help get him some more, but she refused, and he put one of his meaty fists through a wall of quarter inch sheetrock. That was when he knew he had to quit. He has taken it since, but only for pain. His girlfriend used to be a crystal meth “tweaker”. She’s back in Montana working at a natural foods cooperative while Louie is here on the coast to make some money during the long Montana winter. But we are both tired this morning, and don’t say much other than him asking me to see if I can’t find him a cigarette in the heap of paper coffee cups and empty packs piled on the bench seat between us.
The damp air that floods the cab when he cracks the window to exhale smoke has a smooth, cool feel as it wraps around the ache of my head. It’s refreshing, but I try to resist it, hoping to catch some more sleep before we get there. Instead of opening my eyes, I pay attention to the radio – something happening in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. There has been a bloodless coup and a young, new leader has emerged. According to the correspondent, this guy is impressive, and, “a new kind of Georgian politician.” He mentions that he is a graduate of Columbia Law School.
I smile to myself as my head bounces against the passenger side window in time with the seams in the pavement. Louie looks over, the cigarette held in the corner of his mouth. He turns back toward the window, exhales a plume of blue smoke, and turns back to me. “What the fuck are you smiling about?”
I point to the radio.
He’s been listening too. “Is that where you went?”
I nod. We’ve been through the fact that I used to be a lawyer before, but the idea is fascinating to Louie. It’s true, I managed to parlay an Ivy League education and five years at a prestigious law firm into a job as a construction laborer.
“Did you know that guy?”
I shake my head.
“Does it make you want to go back to the law?” He pronounces “back” like a Long Islander, squeezing the “a” up against the roof of his mouth and holding it, which cracks me up.
“I don’t know, Louie, it makes me feel like a failure. But I don’t think it makes me want to go back.”
“But doesn’t this job make you want to?”
“No, man, it was nightmare. It’s a bad way to make a living”
“Yeah, but how much coin were you making?” We’ve been through this before too, but he can’t get over it. I can’t really get over it either.
“A lot.”
“One hundred and fifty G’s or some shit, right?” He smiles and shakes his head.
“Yeah, only at the end though.” I say this like an apology, an attempt to downplay the money.
“Jesus Christ, Pat, that is one hell of a lot of money.” He laughs, and I can’t help laughing with him.
“Yeah, I know. Trust me, it was more than I was worth. It’s more than anyone’s worth really.”
“Jeezus.”
“It was hell, Louie, I couldn’t stand it.”
“Oh, I believe it. Trust me, man, I’ve never had a job I didn’t hate.”
I nod – good point. It’s hard to convince someone who’s literally breaking his back in the mud and rain just how bad it was making $150,000 a year in a warm, dry office. It’s getting harder to convince myself now that I’m slogging in it for a tax-free twelve bucks an hour. I didn’t exactly walk away, but I ask myself if I couldn’t have tried harder, held on a little longer.
April first – a nice touch – of the year before last, the managing partner, came in and gave me an almost teary speech about how things weren’t working out and that he wanted to work with me to find a place that would be a good fit, where I would thrive. He said it wasn’t goodbye, or the end of our relationship, but the start of a new process. It was heartfelt and touching – and, in a way, I was touched – and that was the last time I ever spoke to him. I didn’t walk out and never look back; I hung around the office for weeks wringing out every last second of paid employment. He never came back to my side of the building.
It wasn’t really a shock. People had been disappearing from the office for months; it was like a disease stalking the halls. A colleague got the same speech about twenty minutes after I did. We went out and got bombed that afternoon after work.
I didn’t tell my girlfriend right away. First it was because I was bombed, then, much later that night, she had to go to the emergency room because of what turned out to be a minor, kidney infection. No longer drunk that I could tell, I drove her to the hospital and sat beside her bed while we waited for test results. We watched a rebroadcast of Conan O’Brien on the lousy hospital room TV, and I played with medical gadgets. Once we knew it wasn’t serious it was sort of fun; it felt dramatic, but not dangerous. She said that I should go home and sleep, she would take a cab home, but I told her not to worry about it, I would go into work late. What were they going to do, fire me? It felt brave to say that. Sitting in the hospital, I felt freer than I had in a long time, like my life was mine again. But I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her I lost my job while she was lying in the hospital.
I didn’t go in late. I wanted to – they couldn’t fire me again – but there was a meeting, and for some reason I wanted to be there. I wanted to hear what they were going to say, and maybe I was a little worried about what they might say if I wasn’t there. It ended up being a general ass-chewing of the associates by the managing partner. When he left the senior associates turned on the juniors. Something about needing to show commitment to the firm by canceling vacations at a moment’s notice. It didn’t make sense, business was so slow we were all surfing the net pretty much full time, but I decided not to ask.
One of the senior associates came to my office after and said that I showed “a lot of class” by being there. He knew I’d been sacked the day before. He told me it said a lot about my character, and that I was going to be fine. I didn’t tell him that I had shown up more or less out of curiosity. He said that he wanted to sit down with me and have a long discussion about my future soon, but that he “had a lot on his plate” that day. I told him not to worry about it, I was tired, had a rough night. He shot me a look and said that he understood. He didn’t understand, it wasn’t about losing my job – I was just short of ecstatic about that. I told him I’d had to take my girlfriend to the hospital. He asked if she was O.K.? I wanted to tell him she was dying and had been for a while now, but I couldn’t do it. She was fine, just a minor kidney thing. He promised that we would talk soon, that he considered me part of his family and that he would not forget me. I never saw him again either.
I went down to the parking garage and took a nap in my car. I don’t know how much class that showed, but it felt good. When I got back upstairs there were two voicemails and three emails from an annoying colleague. I had been working for her for the past month on a merger that had once kept me awake and in the office for three straight days and nights. She always wanted four different things done at once, and they all had to be done before lunch or the sun would explode or some shit. Her messages always ended with a remark about how if I didn’t think I could handle it, to let her know and that she would find someone who could. She sounded frantic, but that was normal. I replied that I couldn’t help her because I was swamped. Then I headed down the street to a café, picking up a newspaper on the way.
It was a beautiful spring day and I sat outside among a bunch of other paper-reading, coffee-sipping, nothing to do at ten in the morning types. The sun felt good on my face and my life seemed full of possibility again.
I remember it like it’s the last real thing that happened in my life. But it’s not: my dad had emergency heart surgery, I became an uncle, and my girlfriend became my wife. Still, I feel like I’m pretending, that time passing doesn’t count because I’m standing still. It occurs to me periodically – sneaks up when I’m standing on the top rung of a ladder or cutting something over my knee with the circular saw the way I’m not supposed to – this is my life, it’s all there is, and there probably isn’t as much of it as I think.
The days since that morning I walked out of my office and into the spring sunshine turned into weeks, then months and a year. Beyond that, I didn’t want to think about. As the time slipped away so did the feeling of possibility. Gradually it was replaced with an impossible busyness – tasks unrecognized by others that I could neither fully explain nor complete – until finally I couldn’t imagine how anyone had time for anything, let alone a job. When my old friend, Foss, asked if I could do some work for him, it wasn’t that I wanted to so much as I couldn’t explain why I was too busy.
“I don’t know why you want to do this, Pat.” Louie’s words bring me back. I don’t know why I want to do this either. I get paid, but it’s not much, and I need money, but I don’t need it quite yet. I squirreled away enough as a lawyer to live modestly for the rest of my life, as long as I die in the next year and a half.
We pull into the job site, a bluff overlooking the Puget Sound, and I climb down from the cab of the truck. It’s cold and I reach my arms up over my head in an attempt to stretch without letting the chill seep under my jacket. Inside the house we have now mostly built, Foss is already scratching his head about something. He bit off a lot on this job and has somehow held it together despite a less than optimal crew, cost constraints, and all the screw-ups that come on a big construction project. At least it looks like a house now – a house of plywood and two-by-sixes, the kind eleven year old boys would be happy to live in if they could. Two months ago it was a hole in the ground. I’m amazed at how much goes into building a house.
Foss greets us with a look up from the plans and, “You’re late, you’re fired – everybody’s fired. I need a real crew instead of you losers!” He’s not really mad, but he is a bit annoyed. This is typical and it doesn’t bother us. Sometimes I have to remind myself that, whatever I’m doing here, Foss is trying to make a living and provide for his family. It’s serious work even if we can joke around, and I respect him for running a business. He’s not getting rich; I think he’s barely getting by, but he is getting by and that’s admirable.
“What should I do, boss?” I enjoy calling my old friend ‘boss’. In fact we all do it now – a nod to Cool Hand Luke.
“Set up.” He stares at the plans.
The fact that the compressor isn’t humming or the air hoses attached means that Larry, the other member of our crew, hasn’t been here long either. All that is up and running is the beat radio blaring from on top of the lumber stack outside. This is the first piece of equipment to be plugged in each morning, and the person who does it gets to set the station. Larry has it on some classic butt-rock station, which, to be honest, isn’t that different from the classic alterna-rock stations anymore. The butt-rockers just take a little longer to adopt things.
He’s a guy from Foss’s soccer team, and lives north of the city, in Lynwood, with his sister in their mother’s old house, who I guess died a few years ago. I don’t know exactly what Larry was doing before this, but it doesn’t sound like he’s been doing much for years. He is a nationally ranked darts player. We don’t talk too much. From the moment he started on this job, he’s worked to climb what hierarchy there is to a position above me. I was really the only person he could rise above, and he’s succeeded. He works hard (when he’s not in jail), and he seems to know a bit more about this stuff than I do, but I don’t really need a supervisor when I’m moving lumber or stapling tar paper.
I run the power cords to the temporary service box and lug the air hoses over to the compressor in a semi-somnambulistic state. There is no need to wake up before I absolutely have to, and even walking around like a zombie seems to go just a little way in satisfying my desire to be asleep.
Whatever was bothering Foss ten minutes ago has passed, and when I go back inside he looks at me and yells, “go, go, go, Pat!” It’s a job site joke from last week when we rented a sixty pound jackhammer to chip out a forgotten vent in the foundation wall. It was a dirty, loud, muscle-cramping job that no one wanted to do, but I sort of enjoyed it.
“O.K., boss what do you want me to do?” I present myself at the table made of two sawhorses and a sheet of quarter inch plywood piled with plans, tools, chalkboxes, water bottles and coffee cups.
“You can work in here with Larry putting in blocking, the facia boards need to be put up on the garage, or, if you want, I can come up with some framing for you guys to do in the loft.” These aren’t bad jobs; they involve some hammering, which is fun, and also measuring and cutting, which can be entertaining, but I don’t feel like it this morning.
“I’m pretty beat, boss, I’d kind of rather just dig.”
He looks at me for a second and says, “OK.” “Some days I wish I could just dig.” He yells over his shoulder, “Larry, you do the blocking in here, Pat’s going to dig.”
Larry, who arrived moments ago, whoops like he’s won some kind of award.
“Just continue the ditch to where the gas comes into the house, and then dig out the holes for the deck pilings.”
“How deep?” He hates it when I ask a lot of questions.
“Until you hit hard pan.”
“What’s hard pan?”
“It’s hard. You’ll know when you hit it.”
He adds the last part before I can ask. I decide not to antagonize him and walk outside to find a shovel. The ditch is about twenty-five feet long and three feet deep. It was pretty tough digging, but I nearly finished it yesterday. The nice thing about digging is that you can think about whatever you want while you are doing it, because you don’t have to think much about digging. I work on finishing off the last few feet of the ditch. I am actually connecting two ditches, because I decided to start at each end and meet in the middle like the transcontinental railroad. It made yesterday more fun.
I think about gangster movies where they drive out into the country, pull spades from the trunks of Cadillacs and dig a grave to dump a body. The more I dig the more preposterous it seems. Digging is hard work. It would take those fat guys all night to dig a decent hole with those little shovels, and they wouldn’t be able to go out for breakfast afterwards, because their wiseguy suits would be filthy. I think about old time miners and the guys who built the trail I hiked in the Grand Canyon last year with my dad. That must have been some work.
The ditch complete and the Pacific and Atlantic railroads meeting with fanfare, I move on to the holes for the deck pilings. The earth was disturbed and then back-filled after the foundation was poured. This must be why we have to go down to hardpan. It is exactly the type of question I would normally go annoy Foss with, but I don’t feel like it right now, so I just dig. The hole was started by a backhoe at the time the back-filling was done. Why it wasn’t completed by the backhoe, I have no idea, and I’ll have to get to the bottom of that at lunchtime. It is about two and a half feet deep and four or five feet square. I put my foot on the back edge of the shovel and push the blade into the soft earth. It gives way easily without my having to put much weight on it. Taking my foot off, I turn up the blade and lift a heaping pile of dirt out of the hole.
I think about what I’m doing with my life, it seems suitable while digging a hole. I’ve applied for some fairly uninteresting sounding jobs, but none have come through. Disappointment at not getting them is coupled with – and ever so slightly overcome by – relief, all in the same deflating breath. My wife is understandably unimpressed. She doesn’t tell me, but I can tell. Most people in her position would have given up on me by now, and I wouldn’t blame her really.
This is the kind of digging the movie mobsters could handle. I think about being a gravedigger. In little time I am down another foot and a half. Off the bluff, an eagle holds what seems like a stationary position high above the gray water of the sound, riding the wind like a river eddy. He must be fishing. I would like to see one take a fish, but so far no luck. The radio is droning from on top of the lumber about fifteen feet away. As a tribute to Kurt Cobain on the tenth anniversary of his solving all his problems with a shotgun, they are playing a lot of Nirvana today, though it’s not like they don’t everyday, and, despite what everyone says, I’m not sure how well it holds up.
I lose track of time and my thoughts. The digging continues as if someone else is doing it, and I’m just watching – it’s kind of nice. Another thing about digging is that it can be the hardest single day of work you ever put in in your life, but when you get home you’re still an unemployed loser. You can’t brag about a hole you dug. I’ve tried, no one cares. I return to my body after a while and check my progress. It’s very good.
As I go deeper, it is getting harder to work the shovel to throw the dirt out. The soil is still soft, and I keep going. I can no longer see the radio, but I can hear it, and I keep throwing dirt up over my shoulder in its direction. Judging by my own height, the hole is now six feet, two inches deep and my shovel is still cutting through the bottom like butter. I have to continually scrape out the sides in order to give myself room to work. Dirt streams back into the hole as Larry walks by the rim in search of something. “Having fun yet, Pat?” he calls. “You diggin’ to China?”
“Shut up, Larry, you tool." I know he can’t hear me. Who the hell still says that? Channeling my irritation into the shovel, my head is soon a good couple of feet below ground level. I really have to heave the dirt up to get it out of the hole. Some of it rolls back in, but I’m still gaining on it.
Another thirty minutes of solid digging just to see how hard I can go, and I can no longer really throw the dirt out. I can’t even reach the surface. Everything above sounds muffled, and when I look up I see the sky framed in the hole as if from the bottom of a well. The walls tower up above me as I sit down in the bottom on the cool, damp earth and rest. It must be nine feet deep by now. I’m not even sure I can get out.
The compressor motor falls silent as the nail guns inside the house stop coughing. I can hear the radio softly; the ads repeat even more often than the songs. This is the depression ad for “Wellbutrin,” “Paxol,” or something:
“Are you having trouble sleeping? Are you sleeping too much? Are you not eating? Are you eating too much?” The symptoms cast a fairly wide net.
I remember a newspaper article last year about a construction worker in Ohio who was buried when the trench he was working in collapsed. The company’s owner expressed profound grief, but he was the third guy lost that way in five years, and they continued to ignore the OSHA regulations about trench boxes and safety equipment. With the radio going and everyone inside, it wouldn’t matter how loud I yelled, they wouldn’t realize I was gone until lunchtime if this thing caved in. I decide to sit there a little longer.
Using the shovel to stand on and get me started, I begin climbing out, putting my feet on one wall and my back on the other like I am going up a chimney.
The radio continues: “Does it seem like you are living your life in black and white?”
The dirt is soft and it sloughs off the sides sliding down into the bottom as I climb. The process is surprisingly difficult.
At the surface, the world seems new – sounds louder, the gray light brighter. I look out over the lead-colored water of the sound to the Olympic Mountains on the horizon for a color check. The stark white snow band is all that differentiates the gray of the sky from the water. The eagle continues to hang in the foreground.
Looking down into the pit I’ve dug, I feel strangely good. There is no real reason for it. I’m still not making any money, I’m wasting thousands of dollars worth of education and my life. My mom can’t tell friends about the hole I dug. But I don’t care right now. I never felt this satisfied falling into a cab home from the firm at three in the morning after the final turn of a document. I’m not thinking about doing what I love, or following my dreams, or even money. Working isn’t about money – well, it is sort of about money. I’m thinking about when I’ll be able to stop and get a beer.
Foss comes up behind me and peers into the hole. I have to admit, it’s impressive. “Jesus Christ, Pat how deep are you going to go?”
“Until I hit hardpan.”
“You still haven’t hit it?”
I shake my head.
“Well, forget it, we can’t go any deeper than that. We’ll just make the footings wider. How the hell deep is that, how did you get out?” These are questions he doesn’t want answers to.
Louie calls out from where he’s sitting on the roof, “Don’t fuck with Pat! Ain’t no president of Georgia – he’s a new kind of ditchdigger.”
I smile. I’m starving, it’ll be lunch soon.
