Night Job

“So, what’s our schedule for tomorrow lookin’ like, boss?” I asked.

“We got nothin’ tomorrow. You know what that means,” BJ said.

“Fuck…we got another night job?”

“Yes sir. Hope you weren’t planning on getting much sleep. And on top of that we gotta go all the way up to AJ.”

AJ was the colloquial abbreviation for the city in Arizona named Apache Junction – a genuine shit hole compared to where we’d been working today – building a dock for some douchebag whose house was built on one of those artificial lakes. And it was over an hour away, meaning an eight hour shift would really be about ten hours – following the ten hour one we’d just worked.

“Shit. Alright then. You gonna pick me up again?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. ‘Bout eleven work for you?”

“No. But I’ll be outside.”

“Alright,” BJ said. “I’ll see you then.”

---

I’d just started working on the crew over summer. Most of my friends were doing some internship over summer, working in a nice, air-conditioned office building, but not me. I wanted to work with my hands, see what it was like working at the lowest level of everything, with guys just trying to make enough money to get what their families needed.

The crew knew I wouldn’t be working like this forever – something they never stopped reminding me of, calling me “jefecito” – little boss – all damn day because of my father, who was the “big boss”.

My father owned a big restaurant chain in Arizona. My dad asked me facetiously if I would rather be on a construction crew than in an office – an offer which I couldn’t help but take. So he went to his general contractor, Don, and asked if he’d take me on for the summer, and of course he wasn’t going to refuse him either.

And that was how I ended up on the crew.

Don is a regular steak-eating, milk-drinking, gun-toting, boot-wearing, horse-riding cattle rancher cowboy turned contractor. He is also one of the friendliest, most honest and dependable men I know, and as soon as I met the guy, I knew it was going to be a good time working with him. Don and I are both talkers. My ‘interview’ was supposed to take thirty minutes; it ended up taking an hour and a half, plus a trip to the nearest construction site so Don could show me what they were working on. He could give you his thoughts on just about anything at any time, and he has a way about him that makes you want to just sit down and listen to him. He’s jovial, intent, deliberate, and kind-hearted –with a hard edge he learned from working on farms most of his life. He gave me one new piece of advice every day on everything from rattlesnakes to childrearing and it was all gold. I knew I had to impress this man.

I could tell the other guys on the crew – Enrique, Noe, and Luis – weren’t expecting much from me, a gringo pulling up to job sites in a BMW wearing the wrong kind of work boots. I didn’t

know a goddamn thing about construction. I could barely use a drill, and I didn’t know the difference between sanded and un-sanded grout, what a wrench and a ratchet was, how to mix cement or any of the other things they’d done their whole working lives. But what I was most terrified about was that they were going to prove to me that I actually was what I’d always been afraid of – another spoiled-ass rich kid who’d never learn how to work because I’d never need to. That fear motivated me, and I eventually got them on my side, despite my propensity for self-injury and utter lack of knowledge.

Enrique was “the finisher”. He was about forty-one, was a father of three, been on the crew for fifteen years and needed very little management, other than the general plan of what we needed to do. The wealth of knowledge he had was simply staggering to me. He always knew

exactly how many screws we would need, how many pieces of wood it would take to build a foundation, and how much tile we’d need to do a floor. He had expertise with more equipment and tools than I’ve ever even seen. He taught me more by showing rather than telling, which was better for my retention, and worse for speed. But, considering how difficult it was for us to communicate, it was the most viable option. He’d never actually fully learned English – all he learned was what he’d picked up on the job, which, considering how much Spanish I heard for two months, contrasted with how much I actually remember, is fairly amazing. He was a good man. He didn’t mock me, at least not like the other guys, except for when I fucked something up due to excessive enthusiasm – like, for example, the time I tried to carry two ninety lb. bags of concrete mix, only to drop them and make them split open on the ground. Even when he was annoyed with something I’d done, he merely showed me how I could do it better and fixed it. Enrique was also the master of cement pours – an arduous and backbreaking job – and according to Don, he could do the work of four or five guys by himself. A perfect example for Enrique’s character came from a job that was just me and him; we had to paint stucco on the wall of a barbecue pit we’d just built – which takes hours, made worse by the 115 degree heat and furnace-like, swirling walls of burning wind. I couldn’t do it right and got frustrated with

myself for not being able to keep up with him.

“Es no big deal, jefecito,” Enrique said.

“I can’t fucking get it right man. I don’t understand,” I answered.

Enrique merely pointed at me. “Two weeks.” He then pointed back to himself. “Fifteen years.” He then came over, and clapped me on the back.

“Let’s go jefecito,” he said. And we went and finished the job.

Luis was probably one of the most boisterous, loud and language-barrier-crossing-funny motherfuckers you’ll ever meet. The rapidity with which he spoke was matched only by the

emphatic expression of his words. Even though he spoke even less English than Enrique, he still managed to have my crying with laughter on multiple occasions. I mean, this is a guy who will pick up scorpions by the tail and chase you with it (so long as you’re an arachnophobe like me and BJ) – but he’d also make sure a bug never actually got to you. And it was Luis who first brought up some of the first discussions on inequity I’d heard from the crew, despite the fact that it was rather crude.

“Eh, why is he always get to tell us what to do, huh BJ?” Noe translated Luis’ postulation.

“Cuz’ you’re the laborers and I’m the superintendent,” BJ responded, with a mock sense of superiority.

After Noe translated, Luis looked back at BJ, eyes wide open.

“We es trabajador? No, no, no, no, no. BJ es laborer!”

With his perpetual grin, BJ replied again, “Yo soy el superindentente!”

“Superindentente? BJ is ‘Superfaggot!’” Luis said, holding out the ‘u’ and the ‘a’, and placing his gloved hands on his hips to give a more heroic demonstration of what he’d said.

He then marched around the job site like this, going up to Enrique, Noe, BJ and myself, ass stuck out, back hunched over, pointing at various equipment and speaking at an unfathomable speed in Spanish, clearing giving his impression of what a “superindentente” looks like. Of course, we were all laughing hysterically—and that was the odd thing. Luis and the other guys weren’t upset that they weren’t the superintendent or that they’d likely be working as day laborers for most of their lives – they just thought it was funny. But it bothered me. Not because BJ didn’t deserve the job – he was creative, knowledgeable, and a natural leader – but because even if they did want it, they couldn’t get it.

Anyways, the last guy on the crew, Noe, was closest to me in age, although he was already in his late twenties and had been doing this kind of work for three or four years. Noe had a distinct advantage having been born in the United States, but he’d gotten in trouble a few years back for moving some marijuana for a cousin and he got picked up by one of Arizona’s overzealous officers during one of Arpaio’s famous ‘round-ups’, looking for an alien, who threatened him with jail time - although, I can’t exactly fault him on that, what with the bag of weed in the back seat. So, when he was supposed to appear in court (someone who hadn’t been born in the U.S. likely would have been arrested on the spot), he went to Mexico for a few years, fixing cars with his uncle in Mexico City. Eventually, he got tired of living down south, came back across the border, turned himself in and took the three year sentence. He got out, came to Don and asked for a job. Don said, “As long as you work hard, and you never get mixed up in that shit again, you can work for us.” Noe probably teased me the most, although it might have just been that he did it in English more often than the others, being that he was fluent. But it was also nice being able to talk to somebody else so easily, so I didn’t mind too much. He could be, however, rather terse.

I once asked him, “What was it like living in Mexico?” Noe responded with “Shit.” Noe gave me the most shit, but it just made me work harder. He also brought a radio to the jobs, which constantly blared traditional Spanish music, which I initially resented. Now though, I’ll occasionally drive with it on in my car.

BJ though, he was always alright to me. BJ was the superintendent for the crew and he’d only been there about a month before me, so he knew it was tough getting adjusted to a bunch of heckling bastards having you drag everything around for them just because they could. He realized how badly I wanted to learn.

I had said to him on the first day “I don’t know jack-shit. But you show me how to do something and I’ll do my best.” He responded with “Deal.” And with that, we were fast friends. I’d follow him around, waiting for him to give me something to do, and while I was doing it, he’d ask me about college and business shit I was learning. It was a good exchange, information traded over cigarette breaks, car rides, and lunch - the practical for the theoretical.

And even though those night jobs were a pain in the ass, I couldn’t help but get excited to go drive out to the middle of nowhere - which is pretty easy to find in Arizona - with somebody I

looked up to.

Arizona is beautiful in its starkness. It’s like standing on the surface of some distant planet with the expansive sky above, striking in its enormity. The amethyst peaks of faraway, ancient mountains lording over the land like wise old men looking back on their lives – it made you feel very young indeed. Driving on the highway, no one else for miles, windows rolled down, Circle K coffee and cigarettes, shootin’ the shit about cars BJ had built, or classes I’d taken, or some other such thing, with the otherworldly beauty of monsoon season – rain was pattering down, lightning flashing above and a deep, rumbling thunder roiling around us like a wave – those were great nights.

---

So, after working from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. and figuring out the plan for later that night, I left the sickeningly atrocious man-made lake and went home to sleep for a while.

What was strange, though, was that I ended up hating going home most days. Sitting on a big comfortable couch, with a great meal prepared by my mother, flat-screen TVs and nice guitars and everything else – it started to make me uncomfortable. When the other guys had seen my house for the first time, they stared wide-eyed at it – at its excessiveness. What was worse was that there wasn’t a hint of jealousy or anger – I’d gotten that before. They just saw it and loved it, and that shamed me. My family, despite our current wealth, came from humble beginnings. It was only by the sweat on my parents’ brows that we got to where we were, and so I had been raised with a mantra of determination, of earning my own keep, the idea that “a man stands on his own, or not at all.” Let me put it like this: I didn’t feel embarrassed for my parents – there was no doubt in my mind that they’d earned all they had. I was shamed by them seeing how much of a better start in life I’d been given, by the apparentness of my advantages, and how I’d really done nothing to earn it other than be born to loving, motivated people.

I remember BJ saying, “It’s like a fuckin’ Greek mansion or some shit”, with a smile and a chuckle, before spitting out the window of his truck and Enrique simply asking, “This is your house?” in his somewhat broken English. I thought of Enrique’s house, a rather old condo on a back alley in the middle of Mesa, of how he had more people to fit in and less space to do it with, and I imagined them crowding together, watching a soccer game on an old TV, Enrique bright with excitement. And then I thought of how often my parents and I were all in separate rooms, all doing our own thing. Suddenly the place I’d always thought wasn’t as nice as some of my friend’s houses felt exorbitant. The grass is always greener, I guess.

I always wanted to be heading back out on a job.

---

On this particular night, I woke up at about 10 p.m. so I could get some “breakfast” before going to work. Waking up at ten after going to bed at five is hard, and it was made even harder after working a full day before. So I was lethargic, aggravated, and not feeling particularly enthused. After I got ready, I called BJ to see where he was and to let him know I’d be waiting out front.

You see a lot more stars in Arizona, especially when you’re forty-five minutes outside Phoenix. Whenever jobs were as far away as tonight’s was, we tried to carpool to save gas money. I’d often just stand out there, looking up, waiting for BJ to pick me up, wondering if there was anything else out there – if we were insignificant in the grandness of the universe or made all the more important as a result of it.

I heard the oscillating sound of a diesel engine roaring down the street and sure enough it was BJ who, for the first time, hadn’t needed to ask for the gate code. He stopped in front of the house and popped the hood on the truck.

“What’s wrong with it this time?” I asked.

“Same fuckin thing as always, man. Carburetor’s shittin’ out,” he said.

I nodded as if I had a concept of what that meant. I couldn’t stand the reality that I knew nothing about cars, at least around BJ, but sometimes I could make my complete lack of knowledge on the topic a little less obvious.

“Oh yeah. Well, what do you do about that?” I said, slick as ever.

“You get a new fuckin’ truck. It’ll cost more to fix that than the truck’s worth at this point. But you know Don, right?”

Don was notoriously frugal, to the point that it was a constant joke. When something would get broken, and one of the laborers brought it up with Don, he would react in disbelief, saying it had been bought just the other day.

“Oh yeah,” I said, “We all know. ‘Necessito reparlo? No! Es nuevo!’”

“Es 2001, but es Nuevo!” BJ said, at which we both started laughing.

“Well, it’ll be alright for tonight, right?” I asked.

“Shit. Yeah, let’s go.”

“Alright.”

As we were getting into the car, BJ asked, “You got smokes on ya? Or do we gotta get some?”

“Shit man. I got four, that’s not enough.”

“Hey. Hey. Calm down. Calm down alright. We’ll get some,” BJ said in his stuttering way, when he was chuckling while speaking.

I laughed and started exhaling rapidly to display my “panic”.

“Ok man. Oh God just get me my fix. Please,” I said.

“Alright, alright, alright, we good,” BJ answered as we pulled into the Circle K right by the 60 – the freeway you can take pretty much anywhere in Phoenix.

We pulled up to a pump and went into the store to get some coffee, cigarettes, and water, and although I constantly complained about it, BJ always insisted on paying for me, saying, when I protested, he said, “Whatchu think I don’t got my own money, millionaire?” He laughed at my discomfort with it. With our supplies purchased, we hopped back into the truck and onto the freeway, with freshly lit Marlboro Silvers in hand, windows down, and music blaring – Top 40 stuff, mostly.

“Hey boss,” I said, “You mind if I put on some of the music I like for a while?”

“No problem. I just need the radio on to stay awake.”

I flipped it to 89.5, KBAQ, the classical music station. BJ whipped his head around to stare at me with wide eyes.

“What the fuck is this shit? What’s this like, Machiavelli or some shit?” BJ asked, grin cracking on his face.

“You know that was an author, right, jackass? This is probably Chopin or something,” I responded.

“Yeah I know who Machiavelli is, he wrote ‘The Queen’ or some bullshit.”

“You mean ‘The Prince’?” I said.

BJ snapped his fingers and pointed. “Well goddamn, I was close.”

We continued driving on like that for a while. BJ pretended to enjoy the music, I think, for my sake. Apache Junction was almost an hour away, and we’d only been on the road for twenty minutes. Although I was still exhausted, I knew I couldn’t sleep, because it’d be a thousand times worse waking up to find you’re already on the job site. The fact that the job was in one of the sketchiest cities in Arizona didn’t help set my nerves at ease either.

“You don’t think anything will happen in AJ, do you?” I asked BJ.

“Are you worried about it?” He asked back.

“I don’t know man,” I sighed, “It’s a pretty scary neighborhood. Aren’t there lots of junkies and shit?”

“Oh yeah, we gotta be careful ‘bout it too. They’ll come up and steal our shit and take right off, sell it for a dimebag.”

What’d he’d said bothered me even more. “Are you serious?” I asked, incredulously. “You’re just fucking with me right?”

He looked over and realized I was worried.

“Well yeah, but they won’t come anywhere near if they see us. If we’re back in the kitchen and we leave the tools outside, that’s when they’ll steal ‘em. Plus, Enrique is meeting us there so there’ll be three of us.”

“Alright,” I said, although I wasn’t particularly relieved.

The more we drove the more I relaxed about our destination. I figured no one would mess with a bunch of construction guys or that maybe they would respect the fact we were hard workers or something. Either way, BJ and I bullshitted for the rest of the ride and soon enough we were in AJ.

Apache Junction is part Rez, part massive trailer park, and part low-income tract homes trying to make ends meet – with a lot of drug addicts in between. It also happened to be (or perhaps was intimately linked to why) the location of one of my father’s most profitable restaurants. We pulled up in the parking lot with Don, Jimmy (the other superintendent, whom I hardly ever saw, but whom was always referred to as Don’s “bulldog”), Enrique, Luis and Noe.

“’Bout time, ya fuckin’ slow pokes,” Don said as we got out of the car. “Did you stop and get your hair did on the way here?”

It was so stereotypical that it seemed it was said only because it needed to be said, but as usual, the expression Don brought into his words made whatever he was saying moderately, if not completely, hilarious.

“Yeah, we stopped at your favorite barber shop on the way over, but we didn’t have time to get to your favorite nail salon too,” BJ responded. Some of his retorts didn’t land as well as others.

Noe hopped in too, “Yeah, Don has to make sure he’s real pretty so he gets all the bids. And his nails get so fucked up riding around in the truck all day.”

We all started laughing, Don included, and I remembered something he’d told me once before:

“It’s about the other guys on the crew. If you don’t enjoy the people you’re working with, you won’t enjoy the work. Be on good terms with them. If you have a problem, settle it; that’s how a man handles things. But always be honest, always treat everybody like they’re your own, and always respect yourself. That’s the most important part. Don’t waste your time trying to make everybody like you. ‘Cause they can like you and not respect you. If they respect you, they might not always like you, but they’ll treat you the way you want to be treated.”

Thinking about Don’s words made me feel something, and I suppose it must have been guilt. I did respect these guys – they were good men. And odd as it may seem, all I wanted was to have them respect me too. I didn’t care about the pay, I didn’t mind the long rides and even the night jobs. Somehow the opinions of these six men mattered more than any other group of people’s had, so far as I could recall.

“Alright guys,” Jimmy said, “’Nuff of the chit chat. Let’s get movin’.”

Luis, Noe, and Jimmy were going to a store a few miles up the road, while, as BJ had said earlier, himself, Enrique and I stayed at this one. Don would be running equipment from crew to crew so we wouldn’t lose time driving back and forth. We started unloading all the gear: ladders, drills, boxes of screws, table and hand saws, and all the lumber, cement board, drywall and paint we’d need to repair a wall.

“Hey, BJ?” I began.

“Yessir?” He asked in response.

“I’ve been doing ok, right? Like, you guys are happy with me, yeah?”

“’Course bro. Whya askin’ that?”

“I don’t know. I just want to know I’ve actually done well.”

“Hey, ‘Rique!” BJ called inside the store. He received an amorphous, questioning grunt from the kitchen, indicating Enrique’s attention, but lack of interest.

“You think jefecito’s a good worker?”

Enrique walked out of the store, and looked at BJ with uncertainty. “Si, por que?”

“Collin here thinks were disappointed in him,” BJ answered.

Enrique answered with a laugh and swatted my chest with the back of his hand. “He no like that he beginner!”

“No,” I said, “It’s not that. It’s just...” I sighed, not sure what it was I was even trying to say, or ask. “I don’t know. It’s weird to me. I’m spending so much fucking money on school. I’m worried I don’t actually know how to work.”

“He’s gettin’ all philosophical or some shit on us ‘Rique; look at little college boy here!” BJ stated, with his trademark grin.

“College is how much?” Enrique asked.

I didn’t want to tell him. Telling him seemed rude, arrogant even, that I should be worth so much money. To lie would be worse though, like I was protecting a man who’d mentored me.

“About two hundred grand,” I said, “maybe two fifty?”

Enrique’s eyes were wide, and I averted mine, ashamed.

“I’ll never see that in my life,” he said, “Worth it?”

BJ responded before I could.

“You’re goddamn right it’s worth it. Don’t let millionaire here tell you different. He’s all embarrassed and shit.” He turned and looked at me. “But he shouldn’t be. Cuz he ain’t gonna waste it. Right?”

“Fuck no,” I said. I was floored by what he’d said, by his way of blending incredibly accurate observations with such a plain, perfunctory mode of speech.

“Alright then little boss. Let’s go work.”

“Alright,” I said, “Thanks, BJ.”

“For what?” He asked.

“Nothin’,” I answered, grinning.

I loved those night jobs.