A little more than a decade ago, toward the end of another unpopular president’s tenure, I found myself working on a construction crew in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. I liked the job for all the reasons you’re supposed to hate one: I liked that it was dirty, and difficult, and that the only thing I wanted to do at the end of the day was slug a beer and fall asleep. I liked the guys I worked with, guys who acted exactly nothing like construction workers do on TV. They didn’t take their lunches balanced on a scaffolding, their feet swinging precariously over great heights. They didn’t whistle after pretty women in the street, or drink beer on the job, and they only cursed if they dropped an expensive piece of equipment. They smoked carefully, considerately, rubbing the embers of their rollies against their boots before slipping them into a cargo pocket.
My foreman was this guy Tim. Tim came from some tiny-ass Ohio River valley town and spoke with the gentle, twangy lilt of a Confederate general in a made-for-TV movie. In that way, he was Colorado writ small: a hundred-fifty-or-so years earlier, people who talked like Tim had come West to build the railroads and dig in the pits. They’d worked alongside Swedish, Chinese, and Italian immigrants, alongside Freedmen who were, like them (although for markedly different reasons), fleeing the wreckage of the South.
I don’t speak hyperbole when I say that Tim was a genius: a dude capable of acts of imagination I literally couldn’t conceive of. I remember him standing with Eric, our boss, frowning for whole minutes over the architect’s blueprints — there was something wrong with the roof’s cricket, whatever that meant — and then Tim snapped his fingers.
“Believe I’ll cut it to six degrees,” he said.
“Yeah,” Eric answered after a while, nodding his head. “Good idea.”
I stood there, mystified. Cut what? Six degrees of what? With Tim, I was always just along for the ride. He worked efficiently, quietly, proudly — the way people do when they are being paid to perform a job they love. Like a summer cold, his enthusiasm sometimes spread to me. What had been a simple frame at the end of June was now buttoned up with microlam by middle of July. After we cut the fireproofing, the roofing crew would come, and the drywallers before them. It would be a house, all of a sudden — a big, beautiful house — and we would be the ones who’d built it.
But apart from the work, and the guys I worked with, I must’ve liked that job because it spoke to a powerful sense of unbelonging. In truth, I’d never been completely at ease in my quaint little mountain town. Boulder, in spite of its reputation as some bastion of progressivism, was a strange place to grow up when your parents were just this side of middle class. I’d gone to “nice” schools with kids who occupied such spaces without a second thought, inherited their old jackets and jeans, their old soccer cleats, their t-shirts port-wined with bleach.
It makes a certain sense that I should sometimes feel more at ease in Summersville, the little Podunk town in Missouri where my dad grew up and where I’d spent my summers as a kid. Dad’s mother had worked at the Angelica Uniform Factory in Summersville for forty years, nearly as long as it took the Angelica to close and relocate to Central America. My dad’s cousins, and their kids, and their kids’ kids are still out there, working jobs in lumberyards, cattle farms, road crews, framing crews.
My summer job delighted my father. I’d come home covered in sawdust, my arms limp as old rubber, my ears still ringing from the jumping-jack, and Dad would burst into song: “A working class hero is something to BE!” He had come to Boulder back when it was still a funky college town full of refugees from the sixties: Beat poets, Dead Heads, dope farmers. Like my mother, he was baffled to find an occupying army patrolling the streets of his town in Ugg boots and North Face puffers. Fucking carpetbaggers.
Me, I’d spent my whole life trying to join the ranks of the upper-middle class. I’d gone to good schools, worked hard, padding my resume with “service learning” experiences at Head Start, where my mom worked, and the Native American Rights Fund. Four years earlier, while my nation was slouching off to war, I’d applied to all those colleges whose names you imagine some silver-haired lady pronouncing as she fiddles with a pearl necklace: Bowdoin, Amherst, Vanderbilt, Pepperdine. But I never got in.
And it occurs to me to wonder if Tim suspected what I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt: that my enthusiasm for the work was a temporary and fleeting one. I remember that skeptical look he gave me, the day I thought aloud about just staying put — staying in Boulder, that is, and working construction. For a career. Tim just shrugged after a moment of quiet. Construction, he said, was a dead-end. Case in point, he was getting paid now, in 2005, the same amount he’d been paid back in the late ’80s, when he made foreman: sixty, seventy grand a year. The money was in contracting, he said, but the contractor’s test was expensive, and who had time to study?
Tim was talking, in other words, about wage stagnation. The reasons Tim’s income had flat-lined were many and varied, probably — troughs in the housing market, the rise in the costs of raw material, plus he’d never gotten his contracting license. But some of the cause must surely have been a surfeit of cheap, skilled labor. It isn’t complicated, of course: since it operates on a contract basis, construction is one of the few lines of work available to people who live in America without documentation. And the least among us can understand how it might happen, how a guy like Tim might hunt around for somebody to blame, and turn not to the real estate developers or the politicians they help put in office, but to the drywall crew. And maybe what I remember best about that job is the way Tim sat watching them that afternoon, the usual unuttered protests on his lips. Maybe what I remember best is their music polka-stepping from a boombox in a far corner of the lot, the beat as steady as the fall and rise of a spike maul, as steady as the words of an old gospel song borrowed beyond recognition:
When John Henry was a little baby
Sitting on his daddy’s knee
Picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
Said hammer’ll be the death of me, lord, lord,
Hammer will be the death of me.
Tim was no fool; he knew the score. When the guy whose deck you are building declines to learn your name — when he doesn’t seem even to notice you particularly, when he seems actually unaware of your existence until the morning he finds the rear fender of your Honda CRX is blocking his driveway — you obtain a powerful sense of where you belong in the world, economically speaking. You belong under him. It doesn’t matter if you can smell weed wafting from his sunroom, or if he left his house wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, and it doesn’t matter that he’s a monthly donor to the community radio station. He is paying the contractor, and the contractor pays you. So move your damned car out the way.
And I suppose all this is by way of saying that Tim had been right to doubt me. When the cold months came and the contracts dried up, I moved to Seattle. And I remember the Puget Sound from the airplane window, spooling like blue ink from a gazillion leaking pens, and I remember thinking to myself something like, At last, real life can begin!
•••
JP Gritton’s novel Wyoming, a Kirkus best book of 2019, is out with Tin House. His awards include a Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellowship, the Meringoff Award for Fiction, and the Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the department of English at Duke University.