Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey (7 page)

I asked how fast they could get it done, and he said by five that evening, or I could pick it up the following morning at six. I handed him the keys and told him I’d more than likely pick it up in the morning.

S
everal hours later I was about to hop over a chain-link fence to go explore this tall abandoned cement building over by the
Wyoming Tribune
to see what was inside, perhaps take some arty pictures, when my cell phone started to vibrate. Since it was a 306 area code, I picked up. It was the lady from the labor temp agency; she had a job for me to go out on, if I was interested. I told her I was, and asked what kind of work it was. She told me, “Demolition work.”

I lied and told her I could get there in about fifteen minutes or less. She said that was perfect, ending the call, “See you soon.”

The only way I could get to the location in fifteen would be by driving, and since the Caliente was in the shop, that wasn’t an option. My other options were to hitchhike, like Kerouac, or take a cab. Since Cheyenne is not downtown San Francisco, where you could track down a cab relatively easily, my best bet was to run or walk as fast as I could, on the side of the road, with my thumb out, hoping some kind soul would give me a lift. This never happened. What happened was, everybody passed by me. Desperate not to lose this job, I decided to stop at a Kum & Go gas station, where two guys were standing out in front, smoking. One looked like an employee having a smoke break, the other like an automobile owner. When I asked the guy who looked like an automobile owner whether he would be willing to give me a ride for a couple bucks, he told me that he couldn’t because he didn’t own a car. The guy manning the store told me that I could use the phone inside to call a cab, and that they’re usually pretty fast about showing up. So I did, and the dispatcher told me that it’d take about ten minutes for the cab to arrive.

Standing by the pay phones, waiting for my cab, I set my backpack on the ground, leaned up against the wall, and lit a cigarette—I was feeling good, minutes away from being employed. A station wagon slowly pulled into the parking lot, and two early-twenties hipster-looking girls got out. They both looked straight out of an Urban Outfitters catalog, one with an SLR digital camera around her neck, kind of hot, in that arty-farty kind of way. I thought this was slightly odd for Cheyenne, but didn’t think much about it as I quickly went back to daydreaming about how cool it was that I got a job doing demolition work. Just like in
Good Will Hunting
!

The two girls chatted for a second, and I could tell the one with the camera really wanted to say something. Finally, she did. She even used the word
please.
She asked if she could take a picture of me.

I looked up and down at what I was wearing, wondering if there was something wrong or funny going on, since that’s the only time, really, I ever want to take a photo of someone I don’t know. I was wearing low-top Chuck Taylors, white socks, thrashed gray Dickies, and a vintage early-1960s Pendleton flannel shirt. Accessories: knockoff Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Taking a drag, I told her, “Um, yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

The girl snapped a couple quick snapshots of me, and then thanked me. She hesitated, debating whether to add anything more to that statement, finally going ahead and saying, “You look like you’re going somewhere.”

I smiled.

I
was informed I needed three items for this job: work boots, work gloves, and safety glasses. When I showed the lady my sunglasses, she thought about it for a second, then decided they would be sufficient. Since I didn’t have boots and gloves, I was issued a set, just like in the military. The first pair of work gloves were free, she told me, but after that, I’d have to pay fifty cents per pair. Just like toilet paper at the hotel. The work boots were loaners, which I had to sign for and return at the end of the day.

I brought the boots over to one of the white plastic chairs, removing my scuffed-up Chucks, inserting my feet into the boots. These boots were dark brown, kind of like the old desert tan ones I had in Iraq, with my blood type written in Sharpie on the side. There’s a certain technique to tying up the laces to your boots in the military: you loop the lace around, tie it off, and tuck it in. I instinctively did the same thing with these boots.

I soon found myself sitting in the back seat of a shitty Mitsubishi, while the two guys seated in the front seats discussed global warming. The guy giving us a ride to the job site worked for the company; the guy seated in the front passenger seat was a redheaded fortysomething with a thick midwestern accent, and we’d be working together. I quickly found that he liked to use the words
fuck
and
shit
in every sentence at least once or twice. Like, “Fuck this shit.” And he went on and on telling the driver, who was agreeing with him, that global warming is just a bunch of bullshit, and that what he doesn’t understand is that if carbon dioxide is actually good for plants, then the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more plants will grow. Guy talked like he was a scientist, but I didn’t think he was.

Back in San Francisco, words like
Walmart
,
Starbucks
,
nonrecyclable
,
corporation
,
SUV
, etc. are all considered dirty words, but what I’m noticing is that the closer you get to Middle America, the less you hear about those being the dirty words. Here, words such as
environmentalists
,
Obama
,
socialism
,
light beer
, and
fat-free
are the dirty ones.

F
or whatever reason, Safeway had decided to postpone building a new Safeway. That’s fine, but since Safeway had already purchased this lot with several abandoned houses sitting on it, our job was to help clean up the area, board up all the windows and doors of all the houses and trim the trees. They wanted the lot, and the vacant houses, to look somewhat decent so as to not bring down the property values of the surrounding homes.

When we got to the job site, a pickup with Colorado plates was parked in the middle of the lot, where two guys were already hard at work sawing sheets of plywood. There was a Mexican guy in his forties, perfect English, and a twentysomething named Tyrone. Tyrone was the first Tyrone I’d ever met who was not black. We shake hands, and the Mexican guy, who is in charge of this operation, takes both me and the other guy I’m working with all around the lot, explaining the job to us. To me, this is not demolition work at all, but more mortuary affairs for the six turn-of-the-century homes that now sit vacant on the lot, waiting to one day be cremated to make way for a bigger, better Super Safeway.

As the guy in charge walks us around, I noticed that one of the houses had
EAST SIDE
spray-painted on the side, another, the word
CRIP
in blue. Why is it that the two jobs I’ve gotten on this trip so far have both been in neighborhoods with gang graffiti? Also, I don’t even know, but isn’t it supposed to be Crips, not Crip? Is there only one Crip here in Cheyenne, Wyoming?

It had been a while since I took wood shop in high school, so I was going to go ahead and offer to do the gardening, but since the guy I was working with made a beeline straight to the woodcutting and paint, I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. I decided I was indeed in charge of cutting down all the shrubbery and trees. I wondered if he did that on purpose because he knew how much of a fucking pain in the ass it was doing that kind of work. I told the guy in charge that I’d go ahead and start on the greenery. He said, “Great,” and handed me a chain saw.

Chain saws are easy, right? You just pull the cord and it starts up, just like in
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
, right? After about twenty or thirty pulls on the cord, I started to realize that I was doing something wrong, probably missing a step or two in getting this thing on. I didn’t want to go over to where the other guys were and ask them how to start it up, for fear of being laughed at, so I pulled out my iPhone and called the 800 number on top of the chain saw, provided in case you have any questions. I figured if that didn’t work, there had to be some sort of eHow.com article on the subject.

It seems there was a plastic bubble on top of the chain saw that I was supposed to press to allow fuel in. After I did that a few times, it fired right up. Loud.

With my brand-new work gloves on, handling a gas-powered chain saw spewing toxic carbon dioxide into the Wyoming atmosphere, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D Minor playing in my head, I immediately felt at one with the saw as I started cutting down every single fucking thing that was green, throwing the saw passionately left and right, up and down. With each violent swing of the saw, a cloud of green leaves, branches, and twigs exploded in all directions around me. It was beautiful.

With the sun burning my skin, I can feel sweat pouring down my face, and my arms feel like they’re turning into lead weights. I keep on going. A couple times I have to take a break since sweat mixed with dirt is stinging my eyes. I use my T-shirt to wipe myself off, and get straight back to work.

I was working off pure adrenaline, sawing, cutting, swinging, chomping, branch by branch, twig by twig, every now and then a piece of branch backfiring, piercing my skin, drawing blood. I would exact my revenge, no green left behind.

The boss finally came out to see my work, commenting, “Wow. You took down all those trees nicely.” He bought us all pizza, and during our break, we stood around under the shade of a house eating. I found out the two guys from Colorado travel all over, wherever the jobs are, and live at a motel packed with other people who come here for work. The one guy tells me that a lot of people in Cheyenne are from Michigan. He said he feels sorry for a few that he knows because they’ve been away from home for a while, stuck in Cheyenne while their families stay in Michigan.

After that, it was back to work. They had a huge steel Dumpster set up in the middle of the lot, and my job for the next several hours, as well as the next several days, should I so choose, was to pile all the clippings I had created into a wheelbarrow, roll it over to the Dumpster, dump it, repeat.

Singing, “Sixteen Tons,” by Merle Travis, I kept on loading, and by the end of the day, I felt like I had loaded sixteen tons into that Dumpster. I had no idea that deforestation work could be so demanding. But before I could go home for the day, there was one last task. I had to destroy the white picket fence surrounding one of the houses.

Exhausted, my white undershirt no longer white, my skin a shade more olive than when I began, I stood there in front of the white picket fence with my work gloves on, cigarette dangling from my sweaty lips. I thought for a second about what tools I was going to use, and how I was going to tear this thing down.

I decided to go hand-to-hand on the fucker. It’s a far more intimate way to destroy something than by using fancy machinery or tools. I flicked my smoke to the side and went animalistic on the fence, armed with nothing but brute force and willpower, work gloves and combat boots—I mean work boots. While I was on the ground, tearing it apart, grunting, I looked up to see a kid on a bicycle staring at me with his head cocked to the side, kind of how a dog does when he’s confused. I wanted to tell the kid that this is what happens when you don’t go to college, but he just gave me a perplexed look and pedaled off. I went back to what I was doing, and when I was finished, there was nothing but slivers and bits of the white fence scattered all over the ground around me, like bones scattered after a pack of wolves have angrily devoured something big. Maybe a moose.

Now that the workday was over, a different guy from the labor agency came by to pick us up. I sat down in the back seat, way too exhausted to pay any attention to the two guys seated in the front, who talked to each other the whole way back. I just smoked, staring out the window blankly, not really thinking about anything. I was too drained to think.

After handing in our time sheets, I returned my boots and was offered the option of getting paid by check or by cash. The guy I had been working with selected cash, as did I, and a couple minutes later we were handed sheets of paper with a series of numbers to enter into the ATM-like machine in the back. He went first. The machine dispensed his money; he counted it, placed the cash in his jeans, and went to the restroom to take a piss. I went over, typed in my digits, and while I was waiting for the money to shoot out of it, I saw a sign above reminding us to please pay our drivers. After I got my money, all $34.63 of it, I just kind of stood there, wondering if there was more money to come, but nothing else came out. The machine worked perfectly fine. When I turned around to ask about the “Please Pay Your Driver” sign, I was informed that for each ride to or from work, you have to pay that driver $2 in cash. I paid the guy who drove me back, which left me with a hard-earned $32.63 for the day. Only $390 more, and I’d have my radiator all paid off.

We both walked out at the same time, saying “See you tomorrow” to each other. The sun was about to set, and I watched as he limped east on foot while holding his flannel shirt over his right shoulder. I limped west, my flannel shirt over my right shoulder, too.

B
ack at the hotel, a really pale, skinny, shirtless guy stopped me once I got to the top of the stairs. He was holding a miniature electric fan, asking if I was interested in purchasing it off him. I told him no, not today. Limping to my room, exhausted, I opened the door, glad to see that nobody had broken into it to steal any of my shit. I lit a smoke, cracked open another bottle of wine, turned on the television, sat back in the old chair. Beat, I drank the wine straight out of the bottle, catching up on today’s news with CNN. Before passing out, I set the alarm on my cell phone to 5:45 a.m.

W
hen I woke up, I grabbed my complimentary roll of toilet paper and walked over to the “gentlemen’s” toilet down the hall, half asleep and fully hung over. I took a shit, and returned to my room. I was still dressed, so I grabbed my pack of smokes and my work gloves up from the red carpet, and left. While walking toward the stairs, I found myself fixated on the old dusty American flag hung in the hallway. As I approached, it kind of woke me up, reminding me again what it is like to be an American: no health care, long hours of hard work, shit pay, and nothing to show for it while you make other people in air-conditioned offices richer and richer. As I went down the two flights of stairs, a guy sitting in a chair at the bottom just silently stared.