And the ss that garnered 2nd prize at the writing contest from Briar Cliff. No, they don't have a copy: I'd called last year. Or so. Maybe I thought, when I become a famous writer, they'll look high and low for that two or three paragraph essay about Emory and his chains up and down the small highway, taking the load to the Powerhouse.
And, I remember I was paid $10 for second place.
And now, onto Chp. 11:
Chapter 11 I heard you’re good with the Caulk
Fire breathing, fire caulking
Suddenly, I was no longer with Bob. And then I got teamed up with tall Tad. Another thing that seemed to be happening is that the tool check assignment formerly held by Zack or Jeremy (Zack and Jeremy, Jeremy or Zack, Jeremy and Zack?) was henceforth turned over forthwith to me.
Well, Bob and I had more or less finished off running conduit for the air exchanges. 12/24/2006 9:13:55 AM sometimes Tim Bauer would come up the stairway and look around. While he didn’t say much, his hands in the pockets of his blue hooded sweathshirt, looking up at, say, Bob fastening a coupling connector between two conduits as we punched through the wall and on out to the stairway, which seemed to take us that much longer, how many air exchanges we’d get done per day. And there were three of them per floor. So, if you started at 12, when would you make you way up to 20? Paul Lueke at the end of the day, sometimes, would ask what floor were we on? We’d tell him. This is after Bob open up his notes and tell Tim how much conduit we’d used.
We’d tell him.
O.k., he’d say.
Actually, it was all so casual I didn’t really think it was that big of a deal. Just when, I was first working with Bob and watched him work on the mechanical bender, that had to be set up for the right measurement to make an offset bend (when an obstruction requires a change of plane)
Bob would grimace and growl, more or less sayin’ complaining about this simple stuff he was doing. “I ran some jobs, too,” Bob said. “I know what Paul Leuke is doing.” 12/9/2006 4:57 AM Of course, there’s was no doubt Bob his thick curly hair protruding from his Hiller hardhat, he did or could. While he Bob still may have had the former junior high school radical about him, the one who was, as he said, always in detention, there was little or no doubt that Bob could do more complicated tasks. For me, it was all well and good just to make sure I had the conduit size measured out, the 90 degrees I would have to subtract for the “take-up” as the conduit came down, bent around the corner, bent back out to be drop down to the alarm box. Indeed, I was happy to be able could do to see which conduit went through which wall—going through the wall and then out to the stairway
This would be in contrast with his also, saying, “Today I’m gonna get two checks.” This is the lingo for that’s your last day on the job. Finished. Kaput. Like the ironworkers I remembered always said, when the rebar was lined up with the template, with the other bar, “I got endos.” In fact, you are paid right up to the moment you’re done working—in full, by scale. But no, a couple three weeks after rehab, it was I that got two checks from Hiller. As it turned out, working the trades, twice in a row. I was so amazed, looking at my two checks, at how this was the same thing when I was run off the job at the Powerhouse…two checks. Back then, That bright spring day, I couldn’t believe how much money that was. I promptly when out and got drunk. (I remember buying a round of drinks at the Midway Bar for the Ironworkers. After all, hadn’t they loaded me on the ambulance, pushed the stuck ambulance out of the sand?)
March Madness Redux
March 3 I can’t believe we are now in the March madness era.
Who knows what will portend? It’s a daily slog downtown. I go by the TAC Building. It’s early yet, so no teacher/administrative cars are parked there, save a few that are near the front I take as security. Maybe Dr. Mackiel has already made it in; or maybe he went to the gym. Well, now he’s the school superintendent, highly regarded while I’m an apprentice electrician, not so.
Let’s see, I’m usually there behind Sol’s at 6:35. Then I hustle my little ass a 6 blocks (I sorely miss the rides to UP from Bob or Jon those warm summer days last year, I think, as pound my way through snow banks, the wind whistling through Jobber Canyon, noticing the bank finally took down their Christmas greenery just before St. Patty's day) and then through the large wooden door of the UP building where I walk into the north face of the building building, through a door, wooden, of course, and then turn right to wooden electrician door. I’m usually, save for Tim Bauer, the first one there. 12/24/2006 10:14:39 AM I think there was one time, a partic snowy and blustery morning, that I did get there and the shack was locked. So, as usual, I set my red lunch box down and sat on it. I didn’t wait too much longer before Tim showed up with “you’re here pretty early. I also noticed he quit wearing the IBEW stocking cap as I started waring mine)
Then I just go sit in the corner. Let’s be more specific. I sit between the two stacks of screws and washers and nuts on one side, different sizes and all and the other side which has a few other boxes of lubricants and grease guns and other stuff. This is where I sit, a little bit away from the madding crowd. is something I’ve been doing now for three or so months with electricians, four months before with the carpenters. I think, like dad said about Tom Jones who would get drunk at the bar and the horse would know it’s way home, that I’m sure my pickup truck would know how to get me to work.
But March into spring is truly mad. I’m moving through the NJATC DC Theory Textbook. Another NJATC Text Book is BLUEPRINT READING (I love the symbol IBEW NECA at the top. APPRENTICESHIP & TRAINING at the bottom of the circle. Inside, another circle that has ATTITUDE/SKILL/KNOWLEDGE at the top FOR THE ELECTRICAL INDUSTRY at the bottom. I am able to get the assignments done. And then when I’m called onto write my answer on the chalkboard, this is what I can do fairly quickly easily. Well, not that easily. Sometimes I guess I’m making progress there but, on the job, I’m going in the other direction. It’s really embarrassing, when I think about it. Even Tim Oliver said to me, one morning, you’ve got to stop wearing a dress. He was fairly incensed that I was doing cleanup labor work while the two young dudes, who weren’t even in the union, were running wire.
But I thought how my current state of affairs union-wise, was getting. When I thought about it, it was quite embarrassing. I’m the tool runner. I’m the fire-caulk man. Of course, I’m slated as “inside wireman” as opposed to Jeremy and Zack who are with Hank and “low voltage.” Still, that doesn’t do me no good. But I really didn’t know what I could do, how I could get around it.
….TODAY was slogging through the mud. I’m pulling 2-inch conduit out of the mud. I have to wash them up later. For the moment, I can pile the clean ones
Jeremy is up on the lift, stringing wire. He and Zack aren’t even in the union yet they got me carrying pipe and caulking and a tool list.
Steve oliver has pointed this out to me a couple times and then young Jim Paladino also weighed in (yes, President Jim has his boy on the job…who is very nice, self-effacing. He also looked at me like, “why are those kids doing your work) but I talked to Bob right away, catching him as he walked to his black Mustang parked just outside the UP building.
In fact, he was, as usual, fairly quick. “I know where you’re comin’ from. Just do what they tell you to do.” Clyde, who pumps and Golds as is pretty stout, more or less mentally waved me away..”this is what happens when you get in the union, you do what they tell ya…”
I still had to know. I thought I’d ask teacher Clyde. Along with Tony, the weight-lifting dialogue, story-sharing moves me to another level of camaraderie. Plus, I’m about their age. They been in the union for not a few years and I’m a first year apprentice. It’s silly silly, when you get right down to it.
Plus I think WE ARE GETTING SO CLOSE TO THE END the UP building. We’re getting higher and higher. I had to help transport materials from the 17th floor to the 19th. we were getting crowded out.
I proudly, however, climbed the stairs. I’d look out the window at snow landing on the wet pavement below, the traffic busying itself to work in downtown Omaha. First I was at the building level then suddenly, as I moved up the floors, some of the shorter buildings I could see the roof tops.
Always, no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I always found myself stopping on floor 13 to catch my breath. UP didn’t adhere to the statuse of the 40-story where there was no 13th floor, superstition filtering into the trades. : IT’S like a bathtub filling full of water and just yesterday I didn’t know it but TAD WHO DON’T LET ME DO NUTHIN’ (see, with Bob, at least he’d let me bend conduit. But this conduit was 1 inch conduit and it took all of Tad’s might to crimp it, to get the offset. With Bob, it was just ½ inch conduit. And it wasn’t so much exposed whereas Tad’s was like a glittering lights of a Broadway performance, the glittering marque. All electricians would look at it and know, and they’d look at it forever.
was pulled down to where Tom from Kansas City was working and who went onto the job in Fremont—the Hormel plant is expanding, the material finally came in and now there’s “a call to the hall for two workers.”
But I bumped ACROSS BOB ON 17 kinda redoing the air exchange area and I was bringin’ up two inch pipe. That’s what I was assigned to do. It was really quite an involved affair. While the boys were wiring, our apprentice was cleaning up the conduit and shunting them up to respective floors. Bob just pretty much said hello, but kept his eyes upward on the work he was doing.
Bob always said, today I’m gonna get two checks.
*******
Today WAS A BUSY CRAZY DAY. Slowly as the building fills with workers and they work themselves out of a job, you are gradually pushed to the end. That is, a former shack area you’d grown comfortable with was now where the finished carpenters resided and you, rough carpenters, were pushed out. Such that you we were now in the basement. And it got to where the end materials were collected and brought down and stacked…which I did my last day there…while only the essential stuff that was needed was taken up the respective correct floor. For instance, a string of conduit was on Floor 3, a few boxes of smokes on Floor 5, a few ladders on 7. I was so into using the stairs never did I hardly ever wait for the buckhoist. So my last day there I stacked everything in a corner near the edge of the building where the various trades did their work. See, in that respect, there wasn’t much left to do for the ironworkers—just a few beams to put up or take down, responding to a few changes in blue print. The same was true with the rough grade carpenters—most of the drywall was up, the large doors hung securely, the ceiling tile mounted and set in place, the forces pushing from the center and to the upper crust and the lower half.
But I had some things to get done today, aside from getting conduit and other pieces down. I knew where there were a couple fissures on the stairway area that the conduit ran through that needed to be fire-caulked. But Head Foreman PAUL inputs to me after I inputted to him that there’d be some caulking that needed to be done. Fine, we’ll go do that. Then Partner Tad, coming down from the Penthouse where we’d been putting up conduits along the wall—and I got in Tad’s good stead when I brought a couple bags of sunflower seeds he would put in his mouth and chew on and spit. At first I declined the invitation but found myself putting a small handful in my mouth and then spitting out the shell. I got further into closeness with Tad a few weeks before: he was pretty much ordering me around, it seemed, telling me to move this, clean up that. Bob happened to be behind us, also putting up conduit on a different side and behind us, working in the room where the big furnaces sat that would heat the building and I heard him say something like “You shouldn’t have your apprentice do that.” Somehow, it was falling in the labor category. That fine line to this day I really can’t make heads nor tails of when you step in the labor category. Actually, it was virtually impossible to do it much of anyway as the general contractor, Holder, did not hire laborers through the hall. There were some day laborers that filled huge mobile trashcans that were like plastic wheelbarrows to the buckhoist and then on out the door. But the trades pretty much had to do the clean up end themselves. Bob thought perhaps it was a tad stepping over the line by Tad. I didn’t mind. It was all the same to me. I’d do whatever it took to get the job done. But Tad was fairly sharp and bossy type of commands. It got to be where he would rap my on the hardhat with his pliers. “You see,” he’d say, “that’s how you gotta do it.” Or something like that. However, it got a little more frequent one day. It was almost like a bang bang on my hardhat and I could feel the back of my neck bristle. I promptly grabbed my pliers and extended my right arm and was quickly on him and “bap bap” hit the top of his hardhart, Tad’s eyes closing and him backing away. I just did it by instinct but from that day foreword their were no hardhat taps by Tad. There was more of a we’re-working-together-brother attiude. But no, we’d pretty much finished the penthouse. Tad laced me aside and said I had to help him get down to 1 with the ladder and his tools.
In other words, the fire The caulking was put on hold. I thought how Yesterday, I HAD TO GIT UP AND GIT STUFF FOR JOHN AND VIC. They were on the 19th Floor. I had to stop my caulking duties and respond to their command, their directive to bring up some ½ inch conduit which, by this time, was all one the ground floor. I don’t know why they just don’t send Vic—a third year apprentice whose group had the Christmas Party and the gifts for the lucky few of the brothers whose name was drawn were able to get more than their fare share of sex toys a gag that, for me, grew stale after the third or fourth guffaw—and get down and get it but that’s more economically feasible to have me do it. Meanwhile Jeremy spiriting away with 4th year apprentice Steve Oliver on the lift, running wire. And I don’t know how to do a thing about it. IT SOMEHOW MUST GRATE young chain-smoking Jeremy HIM that he’s not in the union. It grates me that I am but he’s doing my work.
So I’m big and BAD ENOUGH TO THE BONES to find out that Steve Oliver had already taken some pipe up there. Meanwhile I get all my caulking stuff together then it’s a call to get more the pipe up there and in the pouring drizzle I pull out of the mud 2” conduit: go south buck hoist. I tell myself. Yes I do. I’m The eyelevel with the street the traffic passes me by, each oblivious to the other as I pulled the load over the gravel. The conduit It’d been unceremoniously dropped off there maybe months ago, largely forgotten. A pile of conduit outside the UP building’s south face. With the softening earth, frost rising up from same, much of ten or so bottom portion was buried in the mud. So I’m big and BAD ENOUGH TO THE BONES to forget about these small slights, these small slings and marshal my respective mental and physical forces to not only get it all up there, expeditiously, you know, but have it cleaned up.
No, I don’t. I round the corner with my load. A truck’s in the way. So I rekindle my forces, get a head of steam up, and push the contraption to the west buckhoist only to be intercepted by Paul and Tim carrying a 13-foot stepladder into the building. “Boy, that got pretty muddy” Paul observed. “You can’t take it up there like that,” Tim said, hands in his blue hoody, looking down at the mud-coated conduit before him. He spit out a sunflower seed. “Can you get a bucket of water and clean it off?”
I looked at him. I think What the hell, am I gonna say no? Here’s the brass, tellin’ me what to do. Of course I’ll clean it out. I thought, I mean, what choice do I got?
The conduit, on the make shift dolly, not only had to be re-routed, it had to be cleaned off!
This required travail to 3rd floor where, in the initial Phase II proceedings back in August, there were a row of porta-potties but the outhouses have been removed. It’s hard to tell where they go anymore. One minute they’re there, the next minute gone. I mean, for awhile, it was portapotie on every odd number floor to 12 which hadn’t been closed in yet. By March, the porta were above the penthouse, out on a ledge, or a makeshift one in a room on 17 and 15. a\And then they brought ones that required an unloosening of the appendage practically in broad daylight. The reason I was looking for the shit houses was that I knew that’s where the clean up folks had faucet and a sink. Grapping a five-gallon bucket of water, to wash down the dull white content, the 10 foot 2 inch conduits, scarred with mud and gravel and assorted outdoors-unprotected grime, I thought would be a task which I could easily expedite. Yet, thumping up a trip to third floor found no latrines or faucets available. Nor on the fifth. Or on the seventh. No, not only were no potties anywhere in site, there were no faucets.
Like the material, the trash, the saws, it was exit, stage right for the latrines.
Now where in the heck am I gonna get some water? I thought. Where am I ‘sposed to get a bucket? I head for another section where I know there’s maybe something I can use. Looking furtively around, So I just find manage to find this scrub bucket with a little bit of soap in it. I grab that, run out, somehow expecting to find a hydrant somehow sticking out of the new dark swirled marble that was now the lower face of the building.
Carrying the empty bucket like a fool, I then manage to get downstairs where the downstairs Capitol electrician’s break room—who were in charge or wiring the building-and, after some help from a young man whose blue jacket said CSB on it, tracing the garden hose I noticed n the floor that lead me to the water, and then finding the water, I was able to find water where I could fill but then used some dish soap so the third bucket (a blue trash can I took from our shanty) didn’t work because there was the film of suds all over the place.
So that required another trip—for a clean bucket of water.
I’M RUNNIN SHORT AS I HAVE TO STUDY AND I BROUGHT THIS NOTEBOOK HOME WHICH I WAS ABLE TO PROFER SOME NOTES
Because it’s March madness, that means we can scribe whatever we see or happen to come across
---2/10—Ron tells me about Russell, you how he got laid off. Why?
--he was workin’ on 8 and he said to Fred “You finish this, it’s too noisy in here for me.” They got rid of him.
--his habits: yeah at 8 o’clock he’s got his micro out then his knapkins for lunch at 10:30 he’d start getting’ ready
“there’s too many people here. I’m goin’ up you can finish this. Jon Lipincott ran him off.”
--well calm down.
I’d blocked entrance to the small closet space the carpenters I noted were putting up studs. We were on the 19th Floor. We had to drill through to run conduit and then bring our JLG over so we could sky high to the top this blocked the carpenters from doing their task.
Randy was inflamed. What am I ‘sposed to do, stick my hands in my ass?
--yeah
--Randy walked away
3/3/04
I was nearing the end of completing my assignment of getting the pipe in the building.
“bet you miss the carpenters.” It’s Roger, with just a half finger on one index finger has been runnin’ the job for Davis. Puttin’ up the structure. Ellis and Darrell and Charley are there for another subcontractor. And Roger has been there since at least July when I was initially there and was told by him “our BA said there’s gonna be 200 IW for the powerhouse in March’
Well, it’s March and the newsletter from the electricians say, “The powerhouse won’t save us.” Which means it’s being pushed back to July is the latest thing I heard from Dallas who snarled at me a couple months ago when I swept things on him. Later I dumped water on him and his partner. I said sorry, “I’m just clumsy.” Here’s what happened. For the caulking operation, it helped to have a bucket of water on hand. And I’m climbing the stairs and I stumble, falling forward. I catch myself sticking out my left hand, much stronger and more reliable that the right as, from the ironwork fall now 30 years before, is weaker than my left. The injury to my left head weakened my right side.
My middle finger of my left hand hurt for a couple weeks, at least.
I looked at Foreman Ironworker Roger. ”Well, I’m missin’ aspects of it but the labor,” I said.
“Don’t get so beat up.”
I grew excited. “That’s it exactly,” I found myself almost exclaiming.
“Beat up like an old ironworker.”
“no, you’re lookin’ great. And he was. He had the square shoulders, the big hands and muscular upper bodt.
--electrician talking…another case where the guy that designed the system werent’ here.”
Bathroom scrawls”
Greg’s the greatest.
Just ask me.
I’m the greatest cocksucher there ever was!!!
Dave O.
Hey Rob Shelly, why are you always wearing girls’ jeans? He likes queers to look at his chick pants.
3/6/2004 5:50 AM
WE CONTINUE THE MARCHMADNESS AS I WAS ABLE TO AS I ALWAYS DO (like the cut through the bank drive-in through on the way to work—it’s a walk, very unlike Joyce’s tour of Dublin on Bloomsday: always, I say, as I park the pickup then cut behind Sol’s pawn shop where I bought youngest son Brendan a bright yellow bike and over the alleyway where now I can smell the morning air is mingled with the smell of rich pastry and there is usually a square empty delivery truck in the alleyway which I skirt and dodge between the wall and the truck not too far from the overpass from which traffic is heard but not seen. Always, as I walk, I tell myself to remember the names of the streets and quiz myself each and every morning yet fail.
And now I take the other side of the street (like a cow following the path up the hill) when I walk to work how I always point at the electrician’s door with my left hand, my gloved left hand this winter months (I remember today how I left my leather-type gloves that the Holder folks wear in the bucket upon 18th floor where we’ve had our staging area these past 6 weeks or so, having moved up from 16th floor and they were going to have me caulk. But then the order came to get the 2 inch conduit pipe ready for the floors from 11 to 19. and this required me to go out and pull it out of the South side of the building .
THIS WAS TUESDAY AND IT WAS A RAINY WEEK; THIS LAST ONE WAS. TUFTS OF snow spitting from the skies.
But at any rate, back to moving the now cleaned like with the ragman on the Bowery who would try to come up to your car window at the red light and, with a dirty rag, begin to wipe your windshield, a beard and wild eyes, and look at you with their hand out. and so it was with a similar rag I wiped the conduit down, as best I could and then loaded them on the cart.
And thus it was completed and all loaded on. Yet, I couldn’t decide where to push my cart to. There was maybe 14 or so sticks on there. And this would be through the mud and uneven gravel and concrete and so there was harder than heck to move through. So before I decided to go south I checked it out. Yet, as I said above, there as an 18-wheeler parked there. I thought of pushing it downhill on the other side of the 18-wheeler but realized there was not a forklift that could wing it up on the dock. The forklift was up on the other side.
The other ploy, of course, was to unload all the pieces and set them on the dock then pull the iron cart up the three steps of stairway. But the dock was wet and this would go against my having to get them more clean.
And I’d seen them how muddy there were and let them fall and slam against the red metal scaffold leg that was prone on the edge of road that the 18 wheeler was backed up against.
It was crudded with mud and gravel mixture and I pulled it vertical and let it fall horizontal with a bang (and now I’m thinking all the tin tracks that clang and bang so much like tin upon tin and because they’re so thin they fall into a discordant pile like they’re easily twisted and so straight and level they are twisted only a step or two above aluminum foil). It was the only way to do it. Just hand it up to the temporary ledge that circled about the platform where the hardhatted men and a few women sat ready to get on the one of two buckhoists and go to their respective floors, a good share of the work now taking placer on the high floors. In fact, the left buck hoist was, by this time, for material purposes only. Such that one might have to wait for a good halfhour before he or she could wait for the buck hoist to come down, discharge its passengers, some of them pushing
I loaded it back on the cart and thus was able to get all the way up to the 19th floor so that they could continue to run conduit.
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