One tolerable, humid yet cloudless July morning in the late 60s, the apparent aim was to relocate a buttload of ugly, undistinguished rocks — are stones bigger? to call them “boulders” would be hyperbolic — from several locations where they didn’t seem to be in anybody's way to an alternate nearby spot where they probably weren't going to cause much bother either.
Can't recollect what legal employment age held sway in those days — which activities were or weren’t in contravention of the lengthy, venerable list of once-progressive child labor laws.
Maybe you couldn’t be under 16; that sounded right. Since I was 14, or 15 at most, I’d had to apply for and secure what were called “working papers,” documents legitimizing (and, by extension, endorsing) exploitation of minor youth.
My papers were processed. School was out, and nobody to whom I was even a distant blood relation had Dime One. In short order my supervisor was not head of any academic department, but rather the Hispanic superintendent of a dilapidated apartment complex, fewer than 20 miles north of Times Square in New York.
If memory serves, minimum wage then hovered slightly above a dollar an hour, so you could bust your ass the whole way through an eight-hour shift, and earn what? A sawbuck, before taxes? Impressive.
But a summer job had been mandated, and this was the one I ended up with. Maintenance lackey, second class.
The super greeted me; not in a hostile manner, but as one might take notice of a lesser form of life. Even at 15, I absorbed the curious, role-reversing nature of our circumstances.
Pale-faced Anglo, residing in a marginally less seedy suburb, I’d nonetheless been made contractual servant to a tan immigrant, his exaggerated accent extracted from some nightclub comedian’s knock-off Ricky Ricardo routine.
To the super, I represented current cheap help, not a solid bet to stick around for very long, nothing more.
He glanced at my documentation, while I snuck a look at a gray, sleeveless, ribbed muscle shirt, the hefty gold crucifix suspended on a chain around his neck. He asked if I had any disabilities (though the forms guaranteed I didn’t). Then we went out to where the rocks were. My new boss’s name was Guillermo, but he told me “the boys” found it casier to call him “G.”
We stopped next before a wheelbarrow holding a flatbladed shovel. There were many 20 to 40 pound rocks, deposited eons earlier by glaciers, broadcast about the packed-dirt area behind the building. G pointed to them, one by one.
“All these.” he said, “mus’ get put over there,” indicating a corner of the back lot.
“In a pile? In a row?” I asked, thinking Cairo, Stonchenge.
“Don’ matter,” he replied.
The shovel was of some use dislodging the rocks, but wasn’t worth a shit for lifting them into the wheelbarrow. That was a minor impediment compared to the lamentable fact that I hadn’t enough foresight to come equipped with work gloves.
Palms carved up from a dozen or so lacerating hauls, I sought out G. I found him updating a tenant listing on the lobby directory, using one of those plastic pressure labelers.
“Are there some gloves around that I could borrow?”
He shook his head, not implying “no,” but simply to confirm how green a specimen he'd gotten. We went over to a small shed. He tossed me a stiff pair that surely had been greased, boiled, bloodied, buried, and none-too-recently exhumed.
The remainder of the rock relocation project occupied several more hours. G checked on my progress once and I hooked up with him again about 45 minutes shy of quitting ume.
After mopping the front hallway, I could go. A zinc-toned bucket awaited, bearing a ration of steaming dilute chemical fluid, worn wooden-handled squeezing device at its top.
I dunked the fat, frayed Medusa strands, soaked and slung and slathered them across every inch of linoleum, fumes flaming in my nostrils, thinking some people did this their whole lives. G came back, sighed, let me know I'd left the floor too wet.
If someone slipped and killed themselves, he’d get the blame. I performed a dry-mop, once I found out what that was.
G also mentioned my failure to return shovel and wheelbarrow to where they’d come from, a violation of a basic rule.
On the bus home I wondered when payday was, and if I'd make it that far. Swabbing tile and barrowing stones?
G did seem somewhat shocked by my return next morning, but that led him to pause only momentarily before doling out trash-collection and leaf-raking responsibilities.
Thoughts began to float through my head that were entirely different from those that came up when I was just hanging out, or studying, or talking to a friend. Sometimes, oddly, there were almost no thoughts at all. I was unsure of how that felt.
In the course of policing the grounds, alongside copious quantities of garbage, I uncovered a golfball, a miniature toy car, and an ornate cufflink, and held them out later to G.
“Keep ’em,” he said, not raising a hand, fixing me with an assessing glare. Might have thought I was being a smart-ass.
Chipping hedges, the afternoon’s chore, was best yet, though that was faint praise. “Even. Top ’specially. Not too short,” G directed, like I'd been trained as a barber. Grease your blades now and then, or they'll stick on you, he added.
He gave a not altogether disapproving nod when I was finished. Me, I thought the trimmed topiary were works of art, perfectly flat on top and angled discreetly inward on their sides.
Each of 72 individual wooden apartment doors in the complex got dusted, then wiped with a lubricant-saturated cloth once a week, as did the interior walls of the two elevators.
Six-foot fluorescent tubes in the garage and lightbulbs in halls and stairways were always burning out. Carpeted areas got the treatment from world’s oldest, heaviest, and loudest vacuum. Weeds. windows, brass fixtures: routines like what I'd heard about bridge painters. Soon as they reached one end of the span, it was time to go back to the other and begin again. The Sisyphus parallel did not occur to me, my rocky debut notwithstanding.
First. payday, G tugged loose a wad of bills and casually counted cash, Turned out my position was “off the books.”
As a brilliant. unsung songsmith once exulted, “my pockets were heavy with loot.”
Per plan. if against all odds, I slaved at the building unul two weeks before school was to start again. Place had never looked better, but it was time for me to leave.
G laid on a few bonus bucks, granted the last day off, told me I “did good.” Then muttered, “better’n I ’spected,” a tepid compliment at best but one that filled me with pride.
Just a temporary teenage summer job, a decidedly lowly one by any yardstick. Decades later though — with G likely long retired or expired, the building itself no doubt razed — a pebble loosened from that rock garden rolled free in an unexpected way. Investigating Zen, wrestling with empty mind concepts, a ghostly dredge hoisted the foreign-feeling thoughtful thoughtlessness I’d first experienced — had crept up on me unawares — toiling under the summer sun like a government mule, executing tasks whose purposes I had not been hired to discern.
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