We set out and I learned what it would mean for Drew if his truck broke down under the strain. The vehicle was nearly paid for now, but his line of work depended on its ever-reliable strength and he'd be a ruined man if his capital blew a head gasket. The man's eyes were sky blue as if sun bleached, and his skin matched the color of my slightly creamed morning coffee. He gave a squint of perseverance as he drove, the fine wrinkles in that leathery, bristled skin setting into place as he spoke of business and his bad back. A sad, deep, and genuinely Southern voice told me that Drew had nothing better to do with his life than drive around in a truck and do odd jobs for people; he was a man who did a teenager’s favors in his late thirties with fancy equipment. It was listlessly beautiful because I don’t think he really cared.
As we lurched toward downtown, smog-obscured Houston, the trailer made structural iron groans at us, weary of its two-ton cargo of brick and stone. I heard the coal-black Dodge truck’s engine work harder and harder in dire fear of the spurred gas pedal. In order to stop at stoplights we had to begin braking hard at a few hundred feet, occasionally yanking at a smooth, worn-down emergency brake in between the two front seats. I imagined throbbing veins making themselves apparent on the hood of the vehicle, pumping the same imaginary oil that played optical tricks on us, dark puddles vanishing and manifesting themselves in the road. It had rained the night before but any tangible pool of water gave up on survival as soon as the sun rose. The humidity, the electric partial overcast still left over from the evening’s thunderstorm, razed through my hair.
The hill thrown in the back belonged to my neighbor. I was helping him move, and one of my chief tasks was to relocate his little private construction supply depot from his backyard to his driveway with the help of a rusty red wheelbarrow and leather gloves—he expected that the absence of this material would improve his chances for selling the house. I agreed for a hundred dollars. I did it in two days, and then was hired to work for Drew the Trashman for ten dollars an hour. We had to move this junk from the driveway into a trailer with a dirt-encrusted plywood gate by picking up individual bricks and hurling them on board, then driving to a class five construction waste dump and hurling the stuff right back off again. I noted that this was probably a pretty good example of that low-skill, low-income work that politicians talk about so often. Also increasing my ground-level awareness of political issues, I worked alongside more hired help, a sinewy illegal immigrant who was happy to have the job and communicated with me through a series of complex hand gestures. It amazed me what we got done in such a short time without verbal communication or injury—we literally threw basketball-sized chunks of concrete over each other’s heads for four hours without concussions or swear words. It was actually fun, but I quickly realized that it would not be so much fun to do for a living.
I think I became a little more down to earth that day, and at the same time a little further away from it. The dump we eventually arrived at was such a real place--it smelled of dust and dirt and motor oil—but my experience of it was all too fantastical for me to really still believe in its existence. After Drew pulled his truck away from the front entrance, a huge elevated weighing mechanism for incoming and outgoing commercial vehicles, our descent into what seemed like the earth’s underbelly reminded me of the works of M.C. Escher. As we rolled up and down the surface of the muddy gravel, towering organic skyscrapers of bricks and iron rods stared down the Dodge’s windshield with malice, as if threatening to extend a wet, rocky arm and push us over some manmade precipice into distant, wriggling nests of elephant-sized concrete earthworms. At one point during the unloading work it took me a full delirious minute to determine that a truck driver—not a gray-toothed, growling truck itself—was asking me for a light. I finally came to my senses and pointed to the worker who was heaving the seeds of a newborn rubbish-pile next to me. None of us had a light. We were already smoking the car exhaust and the humid, sunny atmosphere that we slipped and fumbled through in our mud-slick boots. Tobacco seemed a redundancy at this point.
After we had unloaded, the mysterious laborer swung closed the makeshift trailer door, and we left for my neighbor’s at greatly improved speed. Drew’s truck made those impressively manly horsepower noises that you hear from powerful, expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles never used for what they were intended. The Dodge was far from that status. It served a purpose; it would never be a 3,000 dollar riding lawnmower bought for a tiny patio home, or a 400 mile per hour backpack leaf blower used by some extravagant homeowner to clean up his driveway once a month. It would retire to the same junkyard it strived in with a broken back and ragtag Michelin tires. It would be given a hero’s funeral at 200,000 miles. There would be tears for that tool.
Upon arrival back in my sheltered part of the world, I remained a part of the crew in order to load up a ridiculously hoarded stash of some 200 gallons of paint. An old, still usable lawnmower went, along with a lot of shiny, finished lumber. Richard—my neighbor—was a retired painter. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time to keep the stuff around. Drew knew no legal way of disposing of the pigmented slop, and was still calling contacts in his business when the quiet one and I finished dislocating so many buckets of it. The contractor was obviously dissatisfied with the position he’d been put in as toxic waste middleman, but had to get rid of the stuff anyway. It was his job. I wiped my forehead and took off my leather gloves. Drew shook my hand, paid me in cash, and got my phone number to likely hire me again sometime. The two groaned off into the real world, out of the pleasant birdsong of my neighborhood. I could see smoke seeping its way out under the hood of the poor black tool. Nondisposable paint sloshed around in the trailer. He’d never get rid of that stuff; the only places accepting it were environmentalist recycling companies, and at five gallons at a time, for a fee.
I never heard from Drew again.
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