Working and not working, page 2






david hadn't paid much attention to this, engaged as he was that winter in his work.  Besides, he'd thought, it had taken almost a year for this manager to get around to fixing a small repair in David's apartment.  How long would it take him to consider the big job of the roof?  So spring came and then summer, that year unduly hot and dry.  By then he had gone dreadfully and fruitlessly to the studio every clear day for weeks.


The roofers arrived without warning.  Early in the morning on a sunny Monday, they woke him up, clomping across the ceiling of his third-floor apartment.  From the sound of it, they'd already begun their demolition on the roof.  David dressed and ran up.  The roofers hadn't bothered to come through the front door, instead simply setting up their ladders on the street and climbing to the roof via the fire escape.  By the time he got up there still more of them were climbing over the edge with knives in their black hands, like pirates boarding a ship.  The first ones to arrive had already taken out the picket fence, that old wood, many times painted, simply disintegrating beneath the blunt ends of their axes.


The crew boss, a tall thin man with a gray pony tail and a scowl, pointed at David's plants.  "Gotta move 'em," he said.


David noticed that the plants had been already been disarrayed.  One of the big cactuses had a broken stem.


"Found it like that," said the crew boss.


David felt then that he should get the plants out of harm's way immediately, and so, without coffee even, he started working, hauling each of heavy pots to the safety of the neighboring roof, as the demolition continued.


The crew boss instructed the workers, barking Spanish at them.  Most of the workers wore baseball caps and sweatshirts emblazoned in English with commercial emblems.  "Reno," "The Gap," "Raging Waters," read their grimy shirts.  These roofers worked incredibly hard.  Some were already removing the old roof, cutting into it with square shovels, then peeling back the ripped tar and plywood with their bare hands.  David had put on his gardening gloves, even to move the pots.


The crew boss spoke in English to one guy, who had on a buttoned shirt blackened with tar.  This guy might have been the buddy of the boss.  The two of them looked like surfers.  Maybe they'd been high school friends, these guys who were by then in their thirties.  David imagined that this other guy, who was short and slight and blond and balding, had fallen on hard times.  Maybe whatever he'd tried to do after high school hadn't worked out, and he'd had to go back to this crew boss, his old high school buddy, a guy whom no one could like as an adult, to ask for a job.  So he worked with them, though he worked apart from the others.  Doug, the crew boss called him.  Doug seemed miserable.


Two of the largest cactuses stood in a concrete tub — the old doubled wash basin from the laundry shed.  When he had moved all the other plants into the blistering sun, David turned his attention to this tub, but he couldn't move it.  "It must weigh three hundred pounds," he told the crew boss.


"I'd say six hundred," he said.  "It's gotta go."


So David returned to struggle with the tub.  Some of the other workers, one in a Michoacan baseball hat, came over to lend a hand, though even the four of them could only slide this tub of dirt and five-foot San Pedros off the deck onto the roof proper.  From there it wasn't going anywhere.


"Probably have to bust it up," suggested the crew boss, leaning on his shovel.  "It's gotta go before noon, though."


His day shot by then anyway, David drove to a garden supply store and bought two big plastic pots, then returned to the roof with them and a hammer and set to work smashing the big basin apart.  It took some time, and in his mood he worked on it with grim enthusiasm.  The workers watched a little and then went back to their own labor.  The roof rang with the din of things being destroyed.


In this way the writer came to work among the roofing crew for a while.  The crew boss sang a little song, apparently to amuse them.  "My name it is Pancho," he sang.  "I come from the rancho."  He had a girl named Lucy who was juicy.


The roofer called Doug worked by himself, over at the edge of the roof, where he was pulling up the metal trim.  The crew boss went over to instruct him, telling him that it might work better if he ripped the tar back first.  The flashing will come off easier after that, he said.


At that point one of the other workers hurt himself.  He was throwing some debris over his shoulder when one of the jagged edges caught his ear.  He stamped in pain, holding the ear and swearing in Spanish.  The crew boss went over and threw an arm around the smaller man's shoulders.


"Dios mio," he said, "I know how that hurts.  Saw a guy tear his whole ear off like that one time."


The worker did not appear to be comforted by this.


"You didn't even cuss much," said the crew boss.  "Doug here — you should've heard him cuss last week when he blistered himself.  Didn't stop for half an hour, did you, Doug?"  Doug himself didn't look up.


David laid off battering his basin.  He'd broken down its walls by then, and the two big cactuses now stood in clumpy footings of dirt.  When he'd heard about this guy Doug, swearing and hurt, David was sure that he knew him.  Doug had failed at something.  He'd gone through his twenties with a dream of some kind — maybe he'd been a musician.  But now it had come to nothing.


David was sure he could see this, just looking at the man.  Now Doug was thirty-four or so, all but middle-aged, and doing this job, working for this guy, to whom he'd always felt superior, and who was now his boss.  When, on top of all this, he'd been injured — maybe he'd slopped hot tar down his neck — it had been too much.  All that fury, the hurt from years of fruitless effort, had come pouring out.  So he had sworn and sworn, and jumped up and down, stamping on the black debris and swearing, impressing even this indomitable hard case of a crew boss.


Just then, Doug was proceeding to tear at the tar on the edge of the roof, hacking into it with his own square shovel.  He'd abandoned the flashing, as he'd been told.  Some part of him seemed absolutely still in the midst of this work, and his dirty sunburned face appeared as an impassive mask, behind which David could surely see Doug's failure, and his own.  He was Doug, he thought.


The guy in the Michoacan cap offered to help him with the delicate, difficult job of lifting the cactuses on their heavy root balls into the new pots.  Then, after he'd finished the transplanting, David went down to his apartment and showered and went out.  Working up there, with all that going on, was out of the question.  So he took a book and went to a cafe.


That day turned out to be the worst one for the roofers.  They had to rip up the roof and clear the debris, tossing it down their orange chute into a dump truck, which they filled several times.  When they were done, they swept the exposed boards of the roof, pink redwood planks that hadn't seen the sun for fifty years.  And by that evening they'd spread the new tar, shining and seamless from edge to edge.  Its door sill two feet higher with the surrounding platform gone, the little hut stood like a stranded vessel in that fuming black expanse.



The next morning David was already in the hut when just the crew boss and Doug showed up to finish the job, to hood the chimneys, install the last of the new flashing and spread white gravel over the tar.  Doug himself nailed a shiny apron of aluminum onto the hut's newly-exposed lower walls.


David came out to watch.  Doug was banging on the walls of this box he had worked in, although at that point it felt good to have a concrete reason not to work.  Really, he thought, he couldn't care any longer. What was so special about writing, anyway?  It was like polishing a stone with your hand, just taking that time and doing that work.  Maybe he'd write again, maybe he wouldn't.  Fuck it.


In this frame of mind, David stood around watching the roofer do his job.  Doug knelt at the flashing, overlapping the sheets and swinging his hammer easily and exactly down on the flat-headed nails.  That day Doug seemed different.  Maybe it was just that this part of his job was clean and required care.  Doug was installing this stuff expertly enough, as if he'd been a roofer forever.  Suddenly David doubted the little history he'd assigned to the roofer.  Today Doug's silence seemed simply studious, workaday, even a little dull.


Without pausing at the hammer, Doug asked, "You live here?"


"No," said David, "I just work here.  I'm a writer."


"That's good," Doug said, not seeming too interested, "because it's kind of small."


Doug and the crew boss spread the white gravel over the tar, this work done delicately enough.  After that, the crew boss came over to tell him, formally, that the hut might have to go, too.


"We'll just have to see," he said, "when it rains."


Then they left, through the door like gentlemen at last and down the elevator.  David stood at the hut's seemingly raised threshold, looking out for a time like a sailor underway.  The new, inviolate and undoubtedly desolate white expanse stretched away between him and the far edges of the roof and gave him a funny feeling, empty but not altogether unpleasant.  He turned back into the shade of the little hut, which was still his, if only for the moment.  Work to do, he thought, considering the litter of his paper and pens.  By then he knew he'd do it, even if he didn't.