Of course I know the end of the job. But what was it that I had in mind to put in an application? Maybe I thought it would be like the Paddock Steak House. Where the parking lot was nearly always full of folks who wanted to dine and dance and be entertained.
That's the only thing I could possibly think of doing. That I'd be closer to my recently departed family.
*****,
Now for explanation. Below is just the first two chapters. I thought I had a few more on this latest book I'm going to put on here. But no, just that one chapter below. So below is the first chapter again, but then there's Chapter Two.
It’s Monday and I’m Working
Head Injury Survivor’s Final Windmill Attack
By Ron Hartnett
“No, we’ll follow you,” IBEW brother Doug said as we left the cafeteria at Pig Palace.
Ron Hartnett recounts one year of working as apprentice carpenter/apprentice electrician at the ripe old age of 52, taking early retirement from the teaching profession. (It’s what head injured folks do. If God gave ‘em a miracle, why shouldn’t they pay some dues to the good Lord?) After his last stint—apprentice electrician—he survives a “widow-maker” heart attack. This is not unlike his surviving a “widow-maker” construction fall—permit ironworker—30 years removed. This trade-jumping, Mr. Ed tale is told with humor, old-man angst, unexpected help from hardhat brethren—with a good dose of gonzo all along the way.
Chapter One Electrician’s Test
NOW I’VE BEEN SITTING ON MY RESPECTIVE keister, thumbing through an old Sports Illustrated, not taking advantage of all this current info, this current slog into the electrician’s world of the Unknown.
“No, you can’t be in there with him,” said one of the older personages at the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) Apprentice Training Center. Two elderly ladies looked like they were giving careful consideration to escorting their grandson into the thickly carpeted testing arena. We were the first ones there. I think I was the second car to pull up that Saturday morning to the new building where the first step to get in the E Local 22 Electricians was to pass an aptitude test. In front of the building, below freshly landscaped islands, a small compact car that was filled with a somewhat large man with a shaved head and indistinguishable tattoo on his arm. He didn’t get out of his car; I went on into the building’s second floor where the test was to be held. I noticed when he came in a little later, the large green-carpeted classroom nearly vacant, and sat by himself in the front of the room. He didn’t talk to or look at anyone.
The young boy, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and black hair that he had combed back and was on the wavy side, turned and looked at the two ladies wearing without comment. Dismissing them, he walked down the newly tiled corridor of the $3 million dollar building, hailed as the apprentice electrician’s new training center ready to meet the demands of a increasingly wired world, had been completed just months before. The slender youth pushed through a thick metal door where a two-hour aptitude test would be administered.
So then it was just the three of us almost twenty or so minutes early; but then, as the round clock on the front wall above the blackboard neared the 8:30 hour, the medium-sized room began to fill such that, to my surprise, looking up, there were almost 30 or so people coming quietly through the door and into the room and sitting down. I noticed that in center front, there was a guy of medium build who had an algebra book in front of him that he was looking over, as well as the day’s newspaper, which he wasn’t. I mentally kicked myself for not bringing along the study guide the hall had furnished for test prep.
Then the room really began to fill; newcomers had to look around for a place to sit. A couple gals came in: one looked like she was young and stout enough to maybe have been a discus thrower in her high school days but was pleasant-looking enough with something about a marathon on the back of her light blue short-sleeve shirt, the letters having faded out. I didn’t see exactly what it said, not caring to pry.
I thought again how I wish I ‘d prepped better. The electrician’s exam was the first order of business to become a union electrician. While not what you would call a “closed shop,” the Electrician’s Local 22 wasn’t an easy union to get into; usually you don’t get in unless you know someone. I therefore could feel a small tension envelop the room. I really wished I would have come across a study guide, looked harder for one, went over algebra more. But that wasn’t what totally consumed me; it was the spatial questions where you had to match a polygon-type figure with something spread out flat on a piece of paper. In the small prep manual that came with the application packet, I remember how I got all three-sample questions wrong. Moreover, I couldn’t really see why they were right, as opposed to being wrong, even with the book’s terse explanation. This would be the part of the test where I knew I’d fail. No, it didn’t look like there’d be anyway I’d pass the test as phase one of getting into the IBEW Local 22’s five-year apprenticeship program.
And really, I thought, calming myself down, refusing to get caught up in the tension of the room, being a journeyman electrician at the age of 58— now that’s a bit of a reach.
But the first part was 40 minutes and I think I did okay. I’m glad I had a chance to review, how to work with polynomials, the math section. Daughter Kaitlin, a high school senior, used the word “foil” to describe the operation to use. I’d also corrected a few of the Algebra II math assignments at Uta Halee. Using the teacher’s edition, I felt like I got the hang of it.
“I gotta pickle, you gotta pickle, I gotta pickle, and a hey hey hey.” Uta Halee Girl’s Home was the sub stint a few weeks before I was called to work with the carpenters as, in February, I had applied to the Carpenter’s Local 444 about the same time I applied to the IBEW’s Local 22. I didn’t think I could handle another sub teaching job from the Millard District. Regular teachers, I thought, feeling a wave of paranoia sweep over me when I stepped into the building, had seen me now for almost four years, coming in and out of respective buildings in West O. I could just hear them talk over the water cooler. Why isn’t he in the district, why isn’t he teaching? I thought he said he went to Columbia University? But no, I couldn’t break into the system. Even after four years of subbing, talking to teachers, to principals. Let me in, let me in. Finally, an Inner Voice yelling at me—high time to throw down the ole gauntlet. Enough of trying to be a ft teacher, The Voice said, with a tint of moxie, a bit of bedevilment, go into the trades. I then thought, Sure, I’ll show ‘em. I’ll be a union carpenter; better yet, I’ll be a union electrician. I’ll have a skill. I’d really have the know how to patch things up at my always-in-need-of-work Dundee abode.
At any rate, pre-test, six weeks of sub teaching at the girls’ home got me through the end part of the winter until carpenter work would start picking up. I remember how it was fairly simple to fill out the carpenter’s application then take the math test—that seemed to weigh a little heavy on the multiplication of fraction side—and score 83%. (Barb, the head secretary who graded it observed, “You must’ve been getting a little tired at the end.”) This score put me in the “Good enough” department. After ponying up $120 for processing and other fees and a thick textbook I was put on the work list. Barb said, with Apprentice President Bob Frank, short, square build, wearing glasses, standing in the background, as soon as a contractor called for an apprentice, I’d be called to go to work.
In addition, I was given a list of tools I had to have, recommended shoes to wear, gloves, etc. plus the various tests—CPR, license to operate Power Actuated Tools—I’d have to take. Barb and I looked out on a late February South Omaha street icy and snowpacked. It could be awhile.
Meanwhile, the Uta Halee gig had fallen into my lap after a phone call, called to work after teacher certification and credentials were received and duly recorded, application completed after I took a new tour through the poorer sections of town—North Omaha—only to dive beneath an I-680 overpass, climb hills for a few miles up a small narrow road, and then come across a finger spread of single-story log-cabin type buildings nestled into the woods, looking pleasant and appealing.
Uta Halee was usually filled with maybe 30 junior high and high school girls, all seeking to better themselves in a secure and locked environment. Some were runaways, others were throwaways; most were bright and able enough but had decided to ply their wild trade a little bit too much for either the parent(s), guardian(s) or the community to handle and thus were shipped off to a girl’s home. I took a teacher's place that had to undergo a month of recovery after shoulder surgery. While it was the science teacher whose place I was taking, a curriculum area I wasn’t too much predisposed to but felt could handle nonetheless—residential facilities, group homes and like places of temporary student storage not requiring anything too rigorous academically in any subject, a textbook one could suffer through would suffice—I also had the opportunity to sit in and help teach Algebra II classes. The teacher’s addition helped me figure out how to get past polynomials: maybe it was a section of the Electrician’s Exam I could pass.
And, at Halee, I found myself getting almost used to constantly locking and unlocking doors, carefully observing different age shape and size of girls who milled about a narrow carpeted corridor like a slow moving wave of shoulder-haired humanity up or down from one classroom to the next. Almost automatically recording, I told myself I’ve got to write that down I’ve got to write that down as I dove through and excused myself through the wave to the next room of the building where classes were held (Scott) or on a winding sidewalk within an easy stone’s throw away to the building (Kiewitt) where pre-cooked left-overs from the “Pantry”—aka Food Stamp program—that had been unloaded earlier in the day and which the staff sometimes complained almost bitterly about would be served. But any rate, this is what the girls would say. Over and over again. They sang it walking down narrow hallways of the Walter Scott Center: “I got a pickle, you gotta pickle, and a hey hey hey.” They said it lightly, sing song. Throughout the day.
Ole Walter Scott now, he was a big donor. He had his name on the building above the locked doorway in big black letters. I’d heard of Kiewitt Construction, world-wide, world renowned but I wondered if they’d built this wing of the girls’ home because ever and always there were a few buckets being placed beneath various sections of the building after a rain, water drip dripping through the roof, through the white ceiling tile discolored in spots from water wear. Other large donors earned their names on plaques on the walls of the other buildings that swooped around the main wing where the girls slept but because my travels as fill-in teacher didn’t take me there, I don’t know if the roofs leaked or not.
And Halee resident Monica, curious, wide-eyed, showing slight strains of Native American descent, and who managed to spend more time in time out than she did in the actual classroom said, as I exited stage right my last day on the job, looked up at me hopefully from her usual place in the small square time-out room. “You’re a good teacher.” A few of the older gals milling nearby did not address me with quite so measured aplomb but just went about their own affairs of getting pulled from their classrooms at day’s end, lining up at the locked door to march casually in non-file to their respective houses where they were secured for the evening, perhaps doing staff-generated activities and various Halee rituals. (I noticed in the paper a few months later how one of the girls had run away and quickly hooked up with a pimp in South O and began doing prostitution. This got a little bit of newspaper space, air play, and I just couldn't help but wonder which one of the 17-year-old girls had decided to take perhaps another walk on the wild side. Her name was emblazoned and for a time she’d be a star and the subject of much consternation and conversation.)
Lozier, Scott, Waneka, Kiewitt and a few others. A few named for the large contractors and corporations here in Omaha that, I ‘spose, have some degree of connection, have their names all over the place. Maybe these were large donations from deep pockets or something. I have a book I mistakenly took home from Halee that has all these short stories about people who overcame great obstacles, faced great hardships yet still carried on. Like a wheel chair individual participating in a marathon or a great athlete who’d made a comeback after surgery, after a period of decline, but my take was who were the publishers? How did their story get in print? I ran off copies at the copy machine in the main office/teacher plan area (a long table usually filled with books and papers and maybe a few donuts someone had brought) but discovered I’d not taken the book back to the “library” that is in Classroom 7. The library—three shelves of paperback books—has all the classics that deal with portraits of artists in incendiary and dramatic situations. I was more interested, of course, in seeing who the publishers were. How would I ever get the account of marginal teaching and ironwork I’d labored over for some time published? The days between completion and publication were growing ever more numerous. One wonders, What does it take, anyway?
And then I noticed in most of the books there was always a name inscribed in huge letters. Maybe it was a visiting speaker, or a guest who then, for closure, turned around and donated an inspirational tome. “Dedicated to young girls at Uta Halee by bla-bla-bla.” I saw it in some of the larger books that were in the section of the bookshelves adjacent to the window that looked out on a small mini-forest of pine and oak and ash and walnut that descended steeply through thick wood to a valley where at the bottom it looked like a large object—maybe smaller than a washing machine but white—had been tossed by someone some time ago and thus had taken up permanent residence, taking not a few years to recycle. I never saw any of the girls ever grabbing any of the books and flipping through them and thus gain inspiration.
And this is the section where there’d be snapshots of the 1980’s or 90’s, famous people and all. Celebrities, events, a veritable smorgasbord of smiles. And because long-term patient Deb—with brown hair pulled back in a pony tail and a few tiny freckles that lit up when she laughed, who always greeted me with a smile and demanded that I walk with her to and fro lunch, ever advanced the notion of Shakespeare and would chatter delightedly whenever we talked about the history plays, the comedies, the tragedies, her knowing a little bit about a couple, me knowing a little bit about a couple more—was always on book restriction. Like small crevices of the unusual in residential facilities, the quirks that inevitably develop, there were not a lot of surprises that had an air of beguiling strangeness.
I start talking Shakespeare to a room full of girls one day and then later one of the larger girls, who would sometimes almost bark out belches and rude comments almost unpronounced, stopped me and thanked me for my mention of Shakespeare.
It was in Classroom 3, where Mrs. Real taught English and I happened to fill in—the clear windows looking out to the small snow-covered forest primeval—I just launched into what I told the girls was perhaps some of the most beautiful writing that Shakespeare had ever done, the garden scene in Romeo and Juliet. This was just an overture to Wuthering Heights, the day’s assigned reading, but Jean, if that was her name, came up to me, almost timidly, at the end of class and said she liked what I had to say about Shakespeare. So I just had my Riverside edition that has been in and with our family for more than 12 or so years; daughter Allison had it in her bookcase in her topsy-turvy room and I’ve seen it around the house for a number of years: so I’d just turned it over to Halee. I wouldn’t have any special pronouncement announcing myself on the front cover in huge letters, like a flourish. I’d just sign my name and the date.
I’d be so nondescript. I felt that I was maybe giving them something much more meaningful. Secretly, I was proud of myself for not taking any credit, not make some glorious huge signature and little “Good luck girls” on the back of the front cover. Had I not two very interested readers? And then there was another gal, who listened to me evoke the first line of Ulysses and how, through bright red freckles and clear blue eyes, said that she was Irish also and would very much like to read it. So I got out my extra copy of Ulysses and, through the next running days, I’d say to her, “How are you and Joyce getting along?” She’d nod and smile and lower her head a little bit. “Pretty tough, isn’t it?” I’d say lightly, thinking of how it took such serious devotion to form and matter and glad she was able to handle it with aplomb. Though I wondered if she was reading it that seriously or, for that matter, like me, really understood it to any great degree.
But maybe she did. It just didn’t seem like she’d be the scholarly bookworm type who could pour into large tomes and digest like a full-course meal.
But this was the other book I left. I told Uta Halee Education Director Paul—tall, thin, engaging—who was always smiling when I approached him in his office in the back corner of the building behind Classroom 7 made me feel more sure of myself. He always said how glad he was that I could fill in for shoulder-surgery-science-teacher Bruno—who would traipse into the foyer at about 11:30 a.m. and teach the afternoon science class out of the same book I’d used in the morning. Bruno was quite witty and fun and had been at Halee for five years. He said he had to have his right rotator cup operated on and would wince slightly when he brought his right hand over to adjust the brace suspended over his Clavicle. Things were not going that well for him as he’d have his right arm in a sling and talk about the medication he was either taking or not taking—owing to the drowsiness it inflicted, the pain it was or wasn’t causing.
But Bruno had a quick easy laugh and it was not a surprise to learn that he’d been a salesman of some sort, hailing from Chicago, before logging ft into teaching in Omaha. So he’d go about, chatting easily, funny with quick wit and good repartee and connected honestly well with Mrs. Real. Even when teacher Lynn, doomed genetically to look like a female Ichabod Crane, raised her voice at him almost to a shout when Bruno was asking a point regarding confidentiality—all the names of the kids on the newsletter that comes out monthly are not unlike those of an AA meeting, i.e. just your first name only. Lynn, who’d been at Halee a couple years and had pain in her shoulders from being thrown by a bouncer at the Ice House a couple years ago, trying ways to lesson the pain in her upper neck, never did seem to be in the best of humors. But Bruno was not in any way taken aback by her curtness. He just shrugged his good shoulder and went forward with the day.
So that’s where I left the two books. And then Debra, when I went back to Halee a few days later, was just like before, coming up to me with a bright smile, throwing out her hands and saying, “Romeo.” Though I could tell the Halee staff thought she was overstepping her bounds, escorting me to lunch and back, no one ever said anything. Deb was still on book restriction; I saw how it was posted in the front office and in Classroom 7. It seems she’d take a book and not return it, cubby holing it in her room or something. They were all different paperback editions of famous novels of the Bronte’s and Dreiser and Cooper others that were dog-eared and torn so it wouldn't matter I would think how many of the books she had but for as long as I was there, Deb was always on “book restriction.” I should’ve asked her what that meant, why she was always on it, on our short trip to the cafeteria where the pre-packaged meals were served but by the time I remembered to formulate the questions, we’d reached our destination.
Lynn, who sat at the table with the other teachers, had a tendency to more or less talk out of the corner of her mouth, was good at lassoing those girls who were engaged in talking to students sitting at other tables.
“Don’t be leaving a mess like you did the other day,” Lynn said across our table upon which the teachers and staff sit. We’d continue eating our fairly bland meal and suddenly she’d call, “No talking across the tables.” The other young female teacher, Alisha, also would inveigh against the charges at their tables. While Lynn was single and did not want to be, at one point only allowing she went to the gym from time to time, had that incident at the Ice House, had a long face and looked quite interesting when she had her long wavy hair out and down around her shoulders but then when she made it into a long pony tail, it made her face even longer, her nose stick out even more. And then she went from interesting to homely and she then fell into the lines of those teachers I’ve come to know over the years who are single and, for the way the cards are dealt, usually will remain single and quickly fall into the spinster/old maid category. As mentioned, she bore in many ways a striking resemblance to what Ichabod Crane would look like if he magically were made into a female. Another words, she was a female Ichabod Crane. Or Crane’s younger sister.
Alisha, on the other hand, had pretty and engaging features. She had light brown hair just to her shoulders. She was also very interesting because she was from the farm, married a young man—also a farmer—and worked the folk’s farm part-time, raising Holstein calves. So she had a fresh outdoors look, nice figure and was very pleasant. She had her man and the farm and was raising and nurturing calves that spring were dotting the landscape, the cows starting to come in. Whatever could go wrong?
BUT THEN I COULD work for Halee no longer even though I was happy to give them two books and my time for a few weeks. Suddenly, early April—my teacher-without-contract cruelest month—there was a sudden call for carpenters. Holding to my throw-down-the-gauntlet-nuts-to-you-public- schools stance, I promptly went out and collected all the tools on the first-year apprentice carpenter list. With a degree of self-satisfaction, I made calls to the Millard District, internally gleeful when I announced to them that I would no longer be subbing—though I’m sure it didn’t matter one whit to them—to Halee that it was now time for me to leave. Carpenter head secretary Barb, large frame and friendly with a pleasant Texas accent, had called. Monday, she said, was the day. Carpenter’s Local 444, it seemed, was going to send me to the powerhouse in Cass County to build scaffolds. Did I know where that was at? I said I didn’t. But thought I could find it easy enough.
“Well,” Barb said, “it’s just off I-80 west of Sapp Brothers.”
“Oh, okay.” I was excited. It might be cold but now I could start. A Powerhouse? That usually meant overtime. But by the time Monday rolled around there was six or so inches of wet snow on the ground. Some schools were called off; many had late starts. A drying out period would push worker-call back a few days.
And by that time it was too late to return to Halee and “I’ve got a pickle, you’ve got a pickle, and a hey hey hey.” Not only was my two-week notice up but Bruno could cover mornings. I thought back on last Thursday, how surprised at the going away cake for me. I eat a couple bites of it; everyone chips in. Because teaching other days at public schools or locked facilities it was exit, stage right, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, my suspicions were lessoned, anger abated. Paul was always smiling; Mrs. Real was very honest—calling me Joseph the Carpenter—Bruno was always funny. And then Friday there was a card handed to me; now I was their butter. You can cut me any way you so choose, the kindness of stranger almost overwhelming. I quickly bent down so they wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes and stuffed the card in my duffel bag. I have yet to open it.
Nope, Halee couldn’t use me. I mentally crawled to the phone to give Millard a call. Don’t burn your bridges; don’t burn your bridges I always thought, yet usually did. “Sure, we’ll put your name back on the list.” Mentally, I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe I could sub until it dried up. Sure enough, Millard called late the next day; I swung in for an English gig and was able to make it through the coursework pretty fast, able to keep my finger on the students, the air of strictness and bird dogging possible malfeasance which was now part of my new ed mantle.
So all in all, I thought, this sure is a funny way to get into the Carpenter’s Union. And, while I was yet gung-ho, some of the luster was lost. I didn’t jump quite so fast when Barb called a week later to say, “We gotta job for you.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, now reluctant to pigeonhole teaching degrees.
So, I park my duffel bag, dig out my five-gallon bucket of tools, work boots and blue jeans, search everywhere for my old handsaw, the only list item I wouldn’t have save for the keyhole saw that, after a search at the nearby Westlake Hardware without luck, decided was, like the ironworker “beam stretcher,” a figment of the imagination, a cruel joke to play on the unsuspecting apprentice.
Now, my first carpenter job ever: I’m told to report to Patent Construction. I need to jump across the Muddy Mo to Council Bluffs. I drive a ways downtown to the industrial section of town. I have the address so I’m able to find Patent headquarters, located in a nondescript building midst a sea of equally nondescript metal two-story buildings. I climb a flight of stairs and in a small makeshift office fill out the application. One of the middle-aged guys, who said he was the owner, comes in. We shake hands. He notices my Trick or Trot shirt, which I wore for a 5-K Peak Performance sponsored run around Elmwood Park some years back. We begin a discussion about Peak Performance in general, running in specific. He said most days he’d get up early in the morning and run three miles. I told him running was something I hadn’t done for quite some time.
I knew this job was for the scaffold building at the city’s new convention center in downtown Omaha. What I didn’t know is that I’d be working the on the night shift. Sure, I could start right away, tomorrow’s night shift my carpenter debut. And so BA (Business Agent) Steve McKay from the Local 444 Carpenter’s called the next day; come fill out some paper work. He then said I had to get there early enough so that I could fill out the application and make it to work by four o’clock.
“Do you know where 10th St. is?”
I only had a vague idea.
But, all in all, I thought I could find my way.
“Oh yeah.”
“Good. You got ‘cher tools.”
Well, no, not exactly. No handsaw. No keyhole saw. “Yep.”
“Okay, that’s good,” Steve said. “Don’t be late.”
“Oh, ok,” I assured him. I was never late. It was just something that was not part of me, bein’ late on the job. “I won’t be.”
And then, for some reason, feeling cavalier the second day after building scaffolds, bright sunshine, lengthening days, I called Department Supervisor Dena at the business college to tell her say I couldn’t teach the evening Comp I class. Teaching part-time a business college had made me feel I was not a total teacher washout despite what the Omaha Public School critics said. Brain injury or no, I realized I could still teach English. I updated Dena, large frame, personable, on my night shift obligation. I couldn’t do the next go around at the college a couple weeks away. Did she possibly have any day slots available?
No, she didn’t think she did.
Drat. Well, I’d already pretty much tooled up for the carpenters. No going back now.
And really, like Halee, like early days of ironwork, the business college was a surprise plus. While just one or two classes, no longer did I see myself as being no better than a marginal teacher, pushed out the door at OPS, short-circuited at Millard on a long-term sub gig that pretty much put me out of the running, I thought, for ft employ. No, teaching Comp I at the business college was a definite booster shot to a pretty much failed ed career.
No, Dena—as large as a house with windows of high intelligence—had just hired someone that could do days. And then, a week later, when I realized scaffold building six stories in the air at midnight was not for me, and called her back, the night teaching slots were filled also. And really, I thought, who could blame her? One minute I’m there, the next I’m not. Always I had to wonder. Just what section of the roller coaster ride am I on now? Was I going up or was I going down? When would it be over?
Yep, too quick to jump. Something told me to hold off. Too late now. But no, I was gonna throw myself into carpentry mix no matter what. In four years I’d have a journeyman’s card; I could go anywhere in the country and build.
So I thought back on construction from years previous. Wouldn’t it be like ironwork where there’d be a quick catharsis? Give me a couple days and I’d fall in line, fall in with the ebb and flow of machines and men moving and shouting and shoving things around. Starting off, I’d be sort of in the background, staying safe; gradually skill my skill level would increase. Yet, my first job turned out to be way too high in the air, way too soon. Other workers were half my age. No way I could keep up. No way I could catch on.
Chapter Two No Midnight Rambler
I thought, waiting for the sub desk to call, waiting for my name on apprentice work list to climb several notches—nearly ten, Barb said—I know I really have to start keeping track. So in my diary, I note the following.
We quit.
Midnight: I’m tooled up—hammer, pouch, tri-square, level, tape measure. Trouble keeping my pants up. I climb the scaffold six flights. The stairs are grated metal. You can look down and see the ground move away from you as you ascend. I climb to the top rung; I feel like I stopping at every other level. Lately, I am surprised at how winded I get; I don’t realize until later that I’m like millions of Americans with mysterious chokeholds on their arteries. Nor do I, like millions more, know that my next trip to the hospital in ten months will be to the ER, nurses asking, “What made you come in?”
But I won’t get too far ahead of myself. It’s just that there were early signs. Like millions of Americans, I lived in a state of denial.
At any rate, it’s nighttime staging Day Three. No longer is it easy. While still fairly interesting, it’s also getting a little dangerous. I’ve never been this high off the ground. I don’t feel safe. Yes, I worked iron for six summers but this is at night and things don’t feel right. I keep looking at my watch. Any minute I’m ready to head down, walk off the job. Like the ironworker's say, “Pull the pin.”
I thought how I had taken the carpenter test with Angel in late February. He was a young Hispanic, also on the convention center staging job for Patent. Angel, slim, wiry, more than half my age, was like me—first-term, first-year apprentice. At break yesterday, just as the sun was dropping languidly below the city’s outskirts he said, to no one in particular, “I gotta get my tools.” We never saw him again. Man, I thought, climbing narrow stairs to the top, you’re a fool, you can’t hang, how are you ever gonna make it? But now this evening, I’m thinking how maybe Angel made the right call. Because now, near midnight, it’s like, are we gonna put up another tree? We were now almost to the top of the building, just one more bracket, brace, and pole away. Yes, we are. We most certainly are. Darrell, the foreman who said he hailed from Kansas City, ordered a basket—a wooden box that looked like a large square wooden bathtub—to be brought up. The one huge trouble light that illuminated the scene cast eerie shadows and it was tough to see.
I looked down; it looked like the crane’s boom was at full extension. I personally didn’t know, despite summers of working iron, that a crane boom could extend so high, get that far off the ground. Darrell signaled for the operator far below to drop the basket on the planks. Dutifully, like automatons, we pulled out poles and braces and clamps. The four of us, now down to two apprentice carpenters, Zack and me, the Foreman Darrel and Larry, a journeyman, lifted them out. The object, of course, was to walk the planks to the outside section and stick the tree, or pole, into the hole of the one below. Larry promptly picked a tree up and moved it to another section. Making quick insertion, he walked back. Foreman Darrel, who’d told me earlier in the evening, cueing on my palpable nervousness, said, “You’ll get the hang of it.” I watched as fellow apprentice Zack took one of the pieces and walked the plank to very edge of the scaffold on the other side. He was not tied off yet promptly stuck the tree in the round opening like it was nothing. It was now my turn. Fortunately, there were enough poles for that area. I didn’t have to walk out to the edge.
And then I thought of several things. Joe Reed, Sioux City’s Local 184 Ironworker who fell 400 feet in Detroit with a wet plank in his hand and with whom I’d worked but a couple years before at the Powerhouse. He was smiling and waving to me in the background, calling to me through the night. I kept looking west uphill where 20 blocks away usually I could see the twin spires of St. Catherine’s Cathedral high in the air but tonight I didn’t see them and this slightly unnerved me but aside from Joe Reed’s and Stu Doran’s—Omaha’s Local 21 Ironworker with whom I worked and fell, hitting on his head on concrete—died instantly—their voices tellin’ me to be careful careful. I thought how Zack, the fellow apprentice half my age, had said that if you go down you don’t get hurt, you get killed. He said (and I already knew it, but it was good to hear anyway), “Don’t look down.” So only a couple times did I find myself looking down and then I thought about the folks at Creighton University who were maybe dead and long gone—Father Labia, Frank Sheepers—and had expelled me for smoking home-grown cannabis and who would have the last laugh. Now I’m dead I never did make anything of myself, just like they thought. Then the Dorsey’s with whom I argued with years and years past would laugh and dance gleeful as well as McKinney’s who raised my oldest son in California. They’d be sad but secretly glad. They won won won, were right all along, that I couldn’t make it, wouldn’t amount to much, a mere cipher of a man. And then my four children would have to look at me. Or maybe I’d be like Joe and not have an open casket, buried with a plank stuck through me. And then go to the funeral. It’d be so sad sad.
And then when Larry said, “Take it west,” I didn’t have a plank to get me there and had the tree—a twenty foot metal pole—in my hand, not tied off, didn’t know where to go or how to proceed and my left foot went in the crevice between the pole and the plank. I pulled it out immediately but the look from the workers in back of me must’ve been a shock. “Yeah, my heart jumped when I saw that,” both Zack and Larry said. Then Darrel grew a little testier in general. Now we had one of the apprentice carpenters on the job who might get hurt and the light role of humor that has to prevail to make the work at least bearable took on a different edge, the night a different hue.
But we were able to clamber down for break and things eased up a bit. Darrel said later, mysteriously appearing from out of nowhere, was able to one minute be up on the top of the building, the actual structure; the next minute he was down right next to me and together we unloaded trees from the basket.
“I thought you said you was an ironworker,” he said a short time later, a young serious face curving into a half smile. I knew, like so many others in the past, from school administration and teaching to rod busting and bolting up beams, he was experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance. I read the question in his pale blue eyes: what kind of creature was now in front of him? And really, I think it was a way of letting off some of the tension.
“Oh yeah.” I reached for a teaching-tool, a pull-out-of-your-back-pocket moment, and the classroom nearing bedlam. “It just takes me a little while.”
But now they were watching. I was told not to lean and put too much weight on the large wooden box upon which braces and trees and supports were loaded then flown up. I then noticed that the metal pole outside the plank only went a certain ways. If I stepped a little further, I’d once again be out in thin air, the basket obeying the laws of gravity.
So I just remember, after climbing up another level, and helped pull out the trees and braces, we wouldn’t finish the top level, no overtime, that I never felt so good, so happy I was almost shaking when at midnight I climbed down. My body agreed with my mind’s decision; for the first time ever working construction, I walked off the job never to return to staging at the convention center. I’d go home and hug my wife and children.
I thought how I could wait for another scaffold job, one that didn’t go up so fast. But now I had to let Jim and Barb know I quit. No, I said, I didn’t have the course work for building scaffolds at the training center like Zack. Maybe that would’ve helped.
“Well,” Barb said, “I’ll have to put you at the bottom of the list. You’ll have to wait ‘til a contractor calls.”
“O.k.”
I kicked myself for giving up the night stint at the business college. Now I’d have to resort to sub teaching. Of course, this was probably yet another list I was at the bottom of. But, I thought, I was probably on the bottom of their list, too.
And now, mid-May, the IBEW card turned face up. I had to get test prepped. Unlike the carpenter’s local, the electrician’s application required a lot more paper work. Yes, I’d submitted my high school diploma. Yes, it showed I had at least one semester of Algebra. College degrees, eh? Well, that doesn’t count. Yes, here is my birth certificate. Several times, I thought the heck with this. I’ll just keep being a sub teacher. I can do this at least until June. And then I can start umpiring baseball games.
Yet the family, in a couple months, would be sans health insurance. Wife Kath had jumped to a new job. We thought, hey, by that time, as we thought, after 90 days as carpenter, insurance would kick in when Kath’s ran out. Thus, I had to hold up my end of the deal--my call to get back in the construction groove increased. You’ve already gone this far into the application process. You might as well take the test.
And then, right before 9 a.m. test time, I couldn’t believe all the people that were there. The room was full. All walks and talks of life, mostly educated looking white folk who, from a friend or relative decided to try to get into the electrician’s union. Because only 15% made it, because it really helped to know someone in the trade, which I didn’t, I thought my chances were slim and none. That really, I was wasting my time.
As I left the training center after two hours of testing, no spatial problems showing up such that I felt that while maybe I had a good a chance as any, I realized I was 52-years-old. My balance wasn’t very good, my stamina not near what I thought it should be, remembering how winded I was when I climbed six floors of the scaffold, having to stop and catch my breath. And Barb had me at the bottom of her list.
It looked like it was going to be a long hot summer.
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