Act II

On July 1, 1991, I quit a job that I had no idea would be the last easy thing to happen to me for twenty-five years. It didn’t seem like much at the time; I was just the Division Secretary for the fourteen locations of the Southern California Rent-A-Center franchise. I answered phones, wrote correspondence, and tracked bank deposits by the various Branch Managers. Not to mention drying the tears of a bunch of deadbeats renting TVs and couches by the week. The part-time schedule was perfect for my Freshman and Sophomore years at City College; giving me enough money to pay for school and get into just enough—but not too much—trouble. I hated to leave, but parted good terms with my boss, Patti Sarro. Alas, I had to follow my parents into the wilds of rural Washington where they had recently moved, because the job wasn’t enough to pay for my life in SoCal without them.

I thought I wouldn’t be gone that long, maybe a year. I’d pick up my schooling in Washington and finish my AA in Psychology to keep my degree rolling along. Maybe find another part-time job to save money for the move back to good ol’ Long Beach when I was ready to transfer to Cal State. Right away, I hit two major roadblocks that derailed my plan. My life, really.

First, the cost of community college for out-of-staters was literally twenty times the rate I’d been paying in California. So I decided to wait a year to establish residency and work to save money for school. It seemed reasonable, especially since I had no other choice. Community college credits just can’t be $300 a pop. Not in 1991, anyway. Little did I know that my school career didn’t have a year’s shelf-life left in it. By the time the year was up I was a drug addict with a super-hot girlfriend and no interest in going back to school. Go figure.

Second, despite a glowing recommendation from Patti, and beating my competitors at the typing test by an embarrassing margin, my Californian citizenship apparently made me ineligible for every office job I applied for. So I spent the first four months of that residency year looking for a job—any job—sans friends or money, only to discover that I was also apparently unsuited to tear tickets at the movie theater, flip burgers at Carl’s Jr., or clean out cages at the pet store (although I also had nine months experience doing exactly that). It turns out that I was marginally qualified to mop up lakes of diarrhea in the locked dementia wards of an Alzheimer's care facility 45 minutes from my house. I say ‘marginally’ because of how many times I had to call on the supervisor to land an interview, and again subsequently to actually get hired. All things being equal, I should have been a slam-dunk hire, and I absolutely was not. 

And thus began my love affair with manual labor. And drugs. And crazy women (OK, I may have already had a jump-start on that last one). Eventually I kicked the latter two habits, but the first was a sonuvabitch to shake. I cleaned toilets for almost two years, just getting high and partying every available minute. I waited tables for another year after that, then followed my crazy-hot girlfriend to Eugene, Oregon, and went to work for her hardcase dad, Doug, doing construction. Eventually I ditched the crazy chick, and made a couple of stabs at getting back into school, earning ersatz AA’s in a two of fields of study: Theology and Hypnotherapy. 

So, technically I was qualified to become ordained as a minister, but I’d figured out that I hate people and religion, so I just kept right on building houses, driving trucks, running forklifts, and digging ditches instead. At one point, I actually made a short go of using hypnosis to help people quit smoking and lose weight, but then I met and started dating the least crazy woman I’d ever known, and she thought hypnosis was of the Devil. So I weighed the value of a nascent career against the likelihood of me meeting another super-hot-but-not-too-crazy girl, and then went back to building houses, driving trucks, running forklifts, and digging ditches for another seventeen years. But I married the girl, so… Score!

The construction industry is made up one third of outright crooks who have been or should be in jail, but are working in your house instead. Dumbasses, dilettantes, and delinquents, who can’t actually do the work because they aren't talented enough to master the high-wire act of logistics, diplomacy, and trigonometry actually required, but are otherwise earnest enough people who mean you no harm. And finally, that leaves just a third of the total number to be filled by intelligent, talented, people of integrity. The odds are bad, and I met and worked with every kind along the way, finding work with far too many of the first third. But it’s a young man’s game, and if you don’t have an exit strategy by the time you’re forty—at the very latest—you’re gonna have a bad time. So by forty-five, I was definitely having a bad time.

Looking to break out of hammer-swinging and into the management side had quite a few stops-and-starts, numerous misfires, and crushing setbacks. I was beginning to despair when Lindsay came across a job opening at the University of Oregon. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for the prospect because, in this area, the University is the gold-standard of employers. As such, I found myself in a pool of applicants two-hundred deep, ranging from in-house University employees to the manager of the local mall. Not to mention every unqualified working-stiff just reaching out for the brass ring in Hail-Mary fashion, like me.

So no one was more surprised than me when they emailed me, having failed to get me on my cell a half-dozen times. Apparently, my dumb ass had transposed two of the digits in my number on my resume; somehow they still wanted to interview me, though. I killed at the first interview, which has always been a gift for me. Hell, even twenty-five years earlier, Patti had said that she had no earthly reason to hire me. Aside from being able to type, at eighteen I had no skills or experience to speak of. But that interview with her was a mix of charm and pure moxie, so hire me she did. And despite the dead-eyed guy on the panel of interviewers at the University—who clearly loathed me and saw right through the camouflage of my freshly-purchased khakis and polo-shirt—I brazened and bullshitted my way through to a second interview.

It took the University forever to set up the next round of interviews, and by the time they did, two hundred applicants had been winnowed to two; it was just me and the manager of the mall. Between the day that they called to set it up and the actual day of the interview, one week had passed. On day three of that week, The Almighty stepped in. What I couldn’t know walking into that second interview—heart in hands at the possible escape from the serfdom of manual labor—was that the University had suffered a major flood in one of the buildings that the successful candidate would be managing. So the second interview took place almost entirely at the site of this flood. Steve, the Manager of the department, had only one question: “Say you’re the guy that opens the door on Monday morning and the flood water comes rushing out over your feet. What do you do? Annnnnd…Go!”

What he couldn’t know then—and I couldn’t believe—was that my whole job for the previous fifteen years had been specializing in insurance restoration of buildings damaged by fires and… floods. I’d literally been doing exactly that kind of work all day, right up to the minute I took the afternoon off to go to the interview. I’d say the scenario presented was slow-pitch softball for me, but it was more of a stationary target like T-Ball, and I knocked that shit out of the park. Yellowstone Park, that is.

It didn’t hurt that the woman whose retirement was creating the vacancy—and who had literally invented the job—Michelle, had favored me from the very beginning. Although other candidates had more experience in commercial property management, she recognized a diplomatic quality in me that would actually be of more value in the day-to-day duties of the job. So she went toe-to-toe with her boss Steve and, like the Center just picking up the Running Back—ball and all—Michelle straight-up carried me into the end-zone.  

Once I had the job and learned the whole back-story of all the things that went wrong on my end (including some attempted-sabotage by one of the clients at my previous job), and all the things that went incredibly right for me on their end, I couldn’t do anything but laugh. I came in with all the standard worries about a new job: a new boss, a new crew of guys, being part of a Union. In spite of all that, I had the sense that everything was going to be OK. More than OK, even. The circumstances and events surrounding me couldn’t have been more tailor-made if I’d contrived it as a plot device myself. Somehow I had the unshakable sense that that’s exactly what it was. Just not one written by me. Deus ex machina. 

The transition over the past year has been strange. I write the work orders, issue assignments, and inspect the work after it’s done, but literally never touch a tool. I’m actually forbidden to do so by Union rules. Every time I even pick up a screwdriver to tighten a screw in my office I’m taking my career into my hands, so I start singing the Judas Priest song “Breaking the Law,” like Beavis and Butthead. After being here for the better part of a year, I finally sold my giant Sprinter van, Vanadu. That was a tough one to let go, finally surrendering the last vestiges of an identity that had defined me for so long. I still miss the sawdust and drywall smell of that old warhorse every morning when I get into my new truck. New-Car-smell is nice, but there’s no substitute for that comforting aroma of world-building. 
Alas.

On the other hand, not being covered in cuts, bruises, bandages, and blackened fingernails every single day does have its charms. Having money to travel to see friends, or just buy the odd song on iTunes or cup of fancy coffee if I feel like it is pretty great. It also turns out that without the back-breaking labor of my average day, I have way more energy and a better attitude towards life. Lindsay says I’m like a new man. I concur.

And the job has turned out to be the easiest thing to happen to me in twenty-five years. At the end of the first week, my predecessor Michelle asked me if I was feeling overwhelmed by the work. I couldn’t help but laugh aloud. I told her that everything the job entails in a week I used to do on any given Tuesday, with a phone on my shoulder while I single-handedly hung a sheet of drywall over my head. I may be given to hyperbole, but that isn’t an example of it. Actually, learning the alphabet soup of University acronyms has been the hardest part.

My predecessor and benefactor, Michelle, front and center. My boss Steve behind her and to the right. 

The crew here is fantastic, which was a big worry, since I’ve always had good luck with that in my career and didn’t want to land anywhere that I was stuck with a bunch of dickheads who couldn’t be fired because of the Union. In a bizarre turn of events, the last client I worked for before leaving construction behind was a guy named Richard, who is on the crew of guys I now supervise here at the University. Another fella turned out to be the cousin of an old friend and co-worker from my truck driving days. And the dead-eyed guy on the hiring board at my first interview? He turned out to be one of the best guys in the whole department, he just happens to have Resting Bastard Face is all.

The big boss, Steve, is terrific. Absolutely the best manager since Patti Sarro, and our leadership styles dovetail perfectly. Turns out he’s from Long Beach, too. Though he’s fifteen years my senior, we both grew up having bonfires at Bolsa Chica and Huntington Beach, hot-rodding down Shell Hill, and binging on hash browns over at Hof’s Hut. We even moved out of Long Beach the same year, ’91. He was a Millikan guy, but I don’t hold it against him. In fact, I like to remind him that every time he comes to work in UO Duck colors, first and foremost he’s wearing Long Beach Poly colors. I waited till I was fully vested in the Union before I opened my big mouth about that though. I mean, I may have been a toilet-scrubbing-ditch-digging-truck-driving-drug-addict, a two pack-a-day smoker, and a small-time drug-dealer and money-launderer, but I’m not a fucking moron.

Patti Sarro and husband Tom, back in the day

All things considered, this is the best job I’ve had since sweet-talking Patti into giving a cocky punk a chance somewhere he had no earthly business being. And as long as I don’t mind drying the tears of Millennials and PhDs for the foreseeable future, I could easily slide into home from here. Who says there are no second acts in American lives? OK, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald. That’s pretty good…

Ehhh, fuck that guy. What does he know?