Sunday Essay #3: First Boss

I have been feeling crowded by poetry recently. I'll still put one out on Tuesdays but I want to go back and recall my decades of carpentry, see how they go down on the page as prose. Let me know.

The early years were hard going but what else can you expect? I didn't know much and everyone in my world needed to make money now. The urgency was pretty clear for all of us. After four or five years I began to run my own show, more or less and things smoothed out a bit. I’d like these stories to go down like James Herriot did the stories about being a veterinarian.

                                                         First Boss	

              I want to be writing about Delbert Rhoderick but I think I should start off with my first real boss, Jamey Martin.  I’ll put off Delbert for later because in all ways he was a bigger man and had an impact like a long slow meteor.  Jamey went to high school with my older brother, so that would have made him five years older than me. I never put that together during the 2 years I worked for him.  He always seemed so old, standing there on cold days with one hand in his jeans, the other on the phone or smoking a cigarette.  He had an old man’s squint which may have been from the smoke or from his back which he had busted up framing with that crazy West Virginia boy’s crew who worked in blazing flame all the time. 
            Jamey had a wife and a young daughter, maybe 5 years old, maybe a little older, so that meant he was married by at least 21 or so.  I was 22 when I started with him and didn’t even have a girlfriend. I told him I had some carpentry experience and so he started me off building a bulkhead around some ductwork in a garage, that would have been 1981.  After an hour he checked back in and said, “Well boy, I don’t know what the hell you got going on here but you don’t know shit about carpentry.  I’m pegging you at $5 an hour until you can swing a hammer and not make a god awful mess.”
	He was not unfriendly but like any carpenter with a young family to feed, he needed to make money and he needed to make it now.  There was always a sense of urgency, every year of my life as a carpenter.  He was the first of the many bosses I had and they all needed hustle.  I’d hire on and sometime during the first day they’d say something like, “You’ll do alright” or “I’ll see you tomorrow.”  When we finished Steve Crow’s house, after six months of ass cracking pace, Jamie busted out his guitar and we drank some and sang some Birds’ songs out on the new deck.  That deck was a big deal to me since it was the first thing I ever built on my own.  When we finished the framing, Jamey gave his back a rest and he gave me the deck to build and bumped me up to $6 an hour.  I was in heaven.  Working on my own, off a set of deck plans that Jamey drew up because Steve Crow didn’t give a shit one way or another how the deck went as long as he could step outside on an evening, have a drink and listen to the birds.  There was nothing to it.  Jamey came by in the morning to check me out, yelled at me around lunch and by four weeks I was done and his back was on the mend. We only had a few days to wait for the trades to finish the rough in and we were back inside hanging sheetrock for the month of November. 
           We never finished the walls, we had some West Virginians on that.  I was a passable tape and block man but finishing didn’t come to me for another ten years. Finishing drywall is a talent, some have it and some don’t.  Meanwhile, I was in love with framing.  Mark Petro used to say, “I rather frame than f**k.”  We started on the second of the three houses we built in the same cul de sac in Vienna, Virginia.  Jamey asked me to see if Mark wanted to jump in on this next house but Mark just didn’t like Jamey Martin. “I think he’s just a jumped up asshole.”  He said it with remarkably little malice, just like a passing small observation.  I told him he was dead wrong about Jamey but Mark was not a budging kind of man.  So few carpenters were really.  So many had hard and fast opinions, deeply held convictions, racisms, bigotries, mysterious gripes and grudges about this sub or that contractor or they couldn’t stand that “goddamned hillbilly inspector doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.” The construction world was absolutely filled with sociopaths and some psychopaths, some ego maniacs and a lot of tyrants.
	On the second house Jamey hired an Englishman for labor.  His name was Nick and he always wanted to stop, have a break and drink tea.  Damn, he made us laugh.  He was dating a local girl I knew growing up, a real beauty who, along with her gorgeous sisters, stayed far away from the Parker brothers.  Jamey tried to egg Nick on at lunch to tell us salacious details of his athletic sex life with our local gal.  All I can remember is that she liked to dress up as a maid and be interrupted in her dusting work by the “local” carpenter who was played by Nick.  For his role he wanted to borrow my nail pouch but I wouldn’t have that so Jamey offered up an old spare.  Nick was a first rate story teller.  We heard about a feather duster getting up to all sorts of activities.  There were stockings with a seam that ran from her heels straight up north with the young lady “wearing only the ratty old leather nail pouch and nothing else.”  A couple of days later Nick returned the old pouch and draped it over a sawhorse.  Jamey and I just looked at it, both of us a little stunned.   I, because I had no social life and Jamey because he was a married man with a young child, a bad back and a lot of debt.
	His business was called M & R construction or something like that.  The “R” had run off towards the end of the previous job with a bunch of money leaving Jamey to finish the house alone and deep in the hole.  Sometime during that angry job he blew out his back.  He told me something was herniated in his lower disks.  I could see the worry and pain slip off his face as Nick regaled us with a description of his gal prancing across the room, getting Jamey’s old nail pouch caught up in the drapes.  
        Jamey was a first rate framer who jammed into me what goes into a solid house.  No sweet endearing looks, no kindly avuncular, jocular joshing.   Plenty of “no, godammit, line ‘em flush with the plate before that first nail bites.”  Or it might be, “You better catch on quicker or I’m gonna dock you down to $4.  I never seen a header take that long.“  When I was done building the deck I went back to $5 an hour.  When I told him that Mark wasn’t going to join on for house number 2, he put me back to $6 and said, “Don’t fuck up any wood or I’ll back it out.”
	The second house was for a middle aged couple.  His name was Louis or Lewis but we called him Lou.  He was Czech or Yugoslav, not Russian though.  His wife was American.  Lou was a structural engineer and there is nothing for pain in the ass like working for an engineer.  They know some things, they know tables, they know loads, compression bearing stress and moments of plasticity and therefore they know everything about carpentry.  He came out one morning while we were framing up the first floor.  He wanted us to put 5 or 6 nails in each joist end.  Jamey put a hand up to me and I took a breather. “Lou, we’re not gonna do that.  You want that kind of crazy shit then we gotta have us a big sit down and we gotta rewrite the whole goddamn contract.  You got any more ideas like this?  Do you want 3 or 4 nails in the 2x4's?  How ‘bout the decking?  You gonna come out here and mark up the plywood so we load each sheet up with a bucket of goddamned eight pennies?”  Lou looked confused.  “We got codes here Lou, and we’re putting this thing up according to the codes and that’s what it says in our contract, that we will build this to code.  It doesn’t say we will build it any other way, not above and beyond.”  Lou was a stutterer and his English wasn’t solid anyway.  Jamey made it crystal clear.  “You want that super engineer stuff, it's going to add thousands of dollars.  You’ll need to specify exactly how you want the fastener schedule to go, I’ll price it out and then we’ll go back to work.  This’ll take days Lou.  If that’s what you want, fine, but it adds on to the completion date we got set in August.”
	That was an endless shit slog, that job, for every miserable reason there is.  The wife and Lou never had a chance, anyone could see that.  In the morning she came out to tell us to increase the interior size of the sunroom, where her sewing space would be but then Lou would show up in the afternoon and have us shift it six feet over so that his shop space would be bigger.  Jamey told me one Friday to pack everything up like we were done and out of here.  They had some big pow wow during that whole week and I went fishing and camping along the Shenandoah.  I drank a good bit and slept a good bit. When I got back Jamey told me that we were gonna get it under roof and tar paper, get that draw and then we were gone, done and off the job.  The odd thing was that we started house number three right next door while some other crew took over Lou’s place.  A couple months went by and we chatted over lunch with the new crew.  We learned that they were getting a divorce and the money was getting slow.  The new contractor had that look on his face, the one where you’re caught in a tight spot.  Jamey said something like, “He’s young, he’ll get over it.”

Next week I'll move on to Tim Bandyke and Joe Humeus.