I had to make some money for college stuff, so the old man got me my first paying summer job with Buzzard’s Brick and Block at minimum wage, a buck twenty-five an hour. I drove forty minutes both ways in my 50 Plymouth station wagon to an abandoned brick plant on the side of a canyon not far from the Pacific. I say abandoned because there was nobody there but me, the plant, and piles and piles of brick stacked more than 20 feet high.
My job was to unstack those brick and to restack them on pallets of a thousand brick each. Trucks came and picked these up and took them to the main yard for sale. I don’t know how I stood it all alone there stacking one brick after another that whole summer. But I had a little radio I listened to; the Stones were singing, “My, My, My said the spider to the fly.” And because my brain was still saturated with hormones I could sustain sexual fantasies for a good while, sometimes topped off by an assisted, open air ejaculation.
One day though I was told to start up the dump truck, load it with rock, and back it down to the gate and dump the rock to one side of the gate where it was still possible for a car to drive through. They must have been worried about some sort of liability thing with the abandoned brickyard. I was 19 and had never driven a dump truck; true, it was not huge, but it was a dump truck. And I had failed my driver’s test twice.
But I loaded it with rock and broken brick and backed it down and got the truck to dump right where it was supposed to. I guess I got over elated because when I tried to pull away from the gate, I lost control and the truck backed into the metal pipe to which the gate was appended. I bent the pipe pretty severely with the result that the gate stuck up in the air at about a 45 degree angle, so while a person could not drive around it, a person in a small car could drive directly under it.
I figured my ass was grass. But when one of the trucks came out to pick up stuff, the trucker said he would fix it and did by backing down his rig and pulling the metal post almost back to an upright position with a chain. The fork lift battery gave out. It was not a minimal forklift; seated in it I was a good six feet off the ground and I needed it to get down the highest brick so I could stack them on the pallets.
They sent out this weasel guy they used to do all the little bitty shit work. But failing to bring jumper cables, he decided we would push start the rig with his truck, even though the forklift was an automatic and I swear I have never heard of a way to push start an automatic with a dead battery. But there we were banging along over the rough ground hitting maybe 20 miles an hour when the ground just ran out and I had to make a turn. But I hit a bump and went flying, as the fork lift went on over the edge and sunk its blades completely into the opposing embankment.
I have gone flying a number of times, mostly head over heels over my bicycle handles, and each time, it’s funny. When I realize I am flying, I just sort of give up and go limp. I swear that the three of four times I have gone flying, including the fly from the forklift, may be among the most relaxed moments of my life. In any case, I was not injured.
These garages were big. Almost forty feet high. I was given the job one day of getting all the planks off the scaffolding. Usually I would just throw the 2 by 6 planks–what were they? 12 feet long maybe–onto the ground. But if you threw a plank that heavy from forty feet up you could crack it pretty easily. So instead, you had to walk out to the last layer of planks, bend over, pick up a plank and balance it on the two 2 by 6 that were left for you to walk on. After this naturally, things go more intense because you had to go out, bend over, pick up a plank, and walk back to dry land, on ONE 2 by 6 while balancing a 2 by 6. And this was forty feet up going straight down to the concrete floor of the amphibious craft garage.
My brothers had the rooms in the house, one just a kid, and the other in high school. So the old man decided to build me a room outside the house under the deck that extended from just outside the screen door to the dining room slash tv room. The deck was kept aloft by block on four sides. Down below there was a door that went under the deck. You entered and saw dirt and all kinds of crap thrown under there. The old man had in any case been thinking of putting in a bit of basement. So we dug out the leche and poured a footing on two sides and built up walls out of block. Then because the roof was a bit low, we dug out dirt from the bottom and poured a concrete floor that we painted with a green water retardant paint.
for my inability to sleep, my incessant fatigue, my constant desire to cry, my loss of interest in personal hygiene, the aches and pains in my joints, the electrical sensations that ran over my skin, or my weight loss. I was down to 135 and could count each rib easily. So she referred me to a psychiatrist.
Venice, CA, in the winter of 69 was not a pleasant place to walk. The canals stank. The place I went to wash my clothes looked like it had been bombed, with huge holes in the wall and armed rent-a-cops protecting the premises. Elderly Jews lived there and many minorities. As I walked I passed black men standing in vacant lots warming themselves over fires started in 20 gallon drums. Black Panthers leaned against the walls of establishments.
One morning in December I was up by 5 because I had been called by the army for a physical. I had to be there at 630; I got up so early because the windshield wipers on my car didn’t work, and it was raining. No way I could take the freeway, so I mapped out the trip on side streets. I drove very slowly sometimes sticking my head out in the rain to see what was in front of me and through a narrow space down on the left side of the windshield where the swilling water left a clear spot about the size of a stamp. I arrived on time a nervous wreck.
have little pieces of Velcro all over me and the old man just sticks to them. I pull off little pieces of him and I turn around and they are stuck to me all over again. Like those little thistles that used to get in my socks and I would pull them out, take two steps, and they would be right back. As if I had my own particular species of flea that lives only on me and won’t go away till I cease to exist as an environment.
As a good brick layer, the old man knew how to lay brick. He was a good technician and could read blue prints; most kkbricklayers can’t. On any job back then with more than three brick layers on it, one had to be made foreman by union contract. That was the old man. He would get the job going by building up the corners of the wall or whatever it was; if the corners aren’t built up properly the wall might lean one way or the other or simply fall over. He knew how to make the whole thing plum. On really big jobs a lot of his work was building up the corners.
