Odd jobs in The Emerald City – Crosscut

My new co-workers seemed less stable and more desperate than the men at the boatyard. One had been an addict, but now he was clean, or rather hed switched his allegiance to caffeine and nicotine. At that time Starbucks had free refills, so he got a venti on his way to work and returned with his empty cup periodically throughout the day. He took smoke breaks several times an hour. Another kid he seemed young told me how a few years back hed killed a woman with his car when she leaned her head too far into the road from the sidewalk; it was gruesome, her head basically exploded, but he was cleared of any wrongdoing. He seemed scarred by that experience, or by something.

The foreman was a half-Mexican, half-Ecuadorian named Edgardo. When he first arrived in this country, he told me, he worked his way up doing yard work and odd jobs for homeowners, carting his equipment and tools around on the bus because he had no vehicle. Occasionally he would leave the worksite in the early afternoon, telling us all that he had to go act in a porn film. Soft-core porn, he assured us. Latin lover was definitely the persona he was trying to cultivate, and I was the only woman around to impress. Green Lake, he said, was the place to pick up women; you just had to borrow someones dog to walk. Every day midmorning he drove to Starbucks to buy himself coffee, and brought back a pastry for me. The differential treatment was unsettling but I got a lot of free calories.

I loved the work: demolition, framing, drywall and mudding, installing trim, caulking, texturing and painting. But the shadiness of the operation was a little startling. In some of the bathrooms, the ceilings and walls had water damage; there were slow leaks in the pipes. Johann didnt want to bring in a plumber. Just repair the plaster, he told us. Make it look nice. He didnt buy us ladders. When we needed extra height, we stood on overturned buckets. If we wanted safety equipment, we had to provide it ourselves, and some people didnt bother. PTSD kid walked out of an apartment one day, his hair, eyes and mouth thickly caked in a white dust. Hed been sanding a repair on the ceiling, his unprotected, upturned face directly in the line of fire. I felt happy for him when he quit after he found a job as a busboy in the restaurant at the top of the Columbia Tower. He needed to get out of there.

Morale was not high. Unscrupulous himself, Johann easily grew suspicious of others. He was always looking for the person he could trust to report what everyone else was doing and saying when he wasnt around. Edgardo was losing patience with Johann, who he said was lying to us. Once when Johann claimed to be at Home Depot picking up supplies, Edgardo put him on speaker phone so I could listen in, and thought up a specific item to ask for. When Johann said he couldnt find it, Edgardo responded with meticulously phony instructions: Go to Aisle 8, where the power tools are. Did he see the drills? Yes, there they were, he was standing right in front of them. Now keep going, around the corner, past the electrical outlet covers, just a little further. Did he see it? Oh yes, there it was. But they were all out. Yeah, right. Edgardo glared at his phone, disgusted.

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Odd jobs in The Emerald City - Crosscut