18
The carpet-layer.
His name is Randy. Tall and lanky. He has shoulder length hair. His trucker cap brims down low over his eyes. His nose is long and big, crooked, maybe broken before.
Whether he’s from Alabama or Tennessee, I only half-listen, but he says he drove up to the Northeast to make a higher wage. Once he gets some money saved he’s going back to his wife and kids, down in the lower-earning South.
He works a few nights a week, after daylight, once it’s dark, so no other workers get in his way.
I stand in the corner while he crawls around on his knee pads. I watch him slam his knee into a carpet knee-kicker, used for wedging the carpet in tight, where the wall meets the floor.
The condo is visibly wavy with 100 degree heat, since there are portable industrial heaters in the basement, speeding up the drywall process, melting my face.
Many of his verbal expressions contain a reference to farm animals, starting most sentences with, “Faster than a hen on a hot tin roof . . . ”
A boombox in the kitchen plays radio, low volume, a classic hard rock station, which fills the void of our sometimes long, quiet pauses.
“You got a girl of your own?” he wants to know, without looking at me.
I tell him about my true desire for Jordan Shamshack, how she still rejects me.
In the shifty waves of rising heat, to the sound of his constant knee slams, I tell him I’ve been trying to get arrested for a girl.
“Trying?” he says, disbelieving. “To get arrested? Trying?”
Jordan still has a boyfriend from years ago, I say, Brock Tisdale. But he’s currently doing prison time. I tell the carpet layer that Jordan lets a jealous me read the prison letters, detailing how when Brock gets released, he’ll dig up the bank robbery loot he buried somewhere, travel the world with her. In each letter, written with spelling errors, Brock signs off with the promise to be her partner in crime for life.
All along, I tell Randy, I’ve been trying to get arrested for a beautiful girl. Over the past few years, I been trying to break the law, get arrested, in the slim hope Jordan will see my worthy wild side, and I will somehow become her new bad boy interest. I add one more thing. The judges always let me off easy because I wear a tie to court, look clean cut, presentable.
“Well, that’s not the smartest thing I’ve ever heard someone do,” Randy says, still not looking at me. “No girl is worth getting in that much trouble for. Let me guess, she has you wanting to get a tattoo and ride a Harley?”
I think about my monster truck. Then I change the subject. I tell him some of my radical views on technology, the extreme threats now posed to our world society.
“It’s just a phase you’re going through,” he says, ramming his knee. “Your rebel twenties. That time in life when all your friends start getting political. It will pass. You might lose some of those friends. But It’ll pass.”
“What will?”
“That whole rant and rail and rave against the system phase. It will pass. You can’t get off the grid. Nobody can. We’re all connected. And that’s not a bad thing.”
“I don’t know if it will pass,” I say. “I protest pretty strongly.”
“Trust me,” he says, knee pounding. “It’ll pass. You’ll calm down with age. Me, I was a hell raiser back in my day. Whooping and a’hollerin. Now I’m a family man.”
I wonder what Randy will think of Carl Busby, so I say, “I know this guy. Carl Busby. He’s like this guy who was a millionaire, but he gave away all his money. Just gave it away. Then he got into a car wreck. The airbag didn’t deploy. Now he’s got some brain damage. And the nerve endings in his face got destroyed, so all he does is smile, even when he’s talking deadly serious. His knee got messed up, too. Real bad. So he stopped driving forever. Slowed his life right down to a hobble. You might see him downtown sometime, walking with a limp. That eccentric downtown limp. He’ll play dumb and tell you about his pet rock or his clay horses or the sunshine on his precious little neck, but really—”
“Why are you telling me any of this?” Randy asks.
I can hear the frustration in his question, that Randy isn’t catching my drift, feeling my buzz, so I don’t continue on that track.
Instead, like a turning point in my fine young rebel thoughts, I say, “Short story even shorter, I’m a neo-luddite.”
Randy says, “I don’t know what that is. But you’re wasting your time.”
I change the subject again. I tell him I think Frank Benzino is a English mobster with dark ties to the Italian Mafia.
Randy finally looks at me, lifting his cap brim. His forehead is plastered with sweat.
Looking at me stern, with bloodshot eyes, he tells me, “Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Do you tell other people you think that?”
“No. Just you.”
“Good,” he says, clicking his box-cutter. He climbs over a carpet roll, mounting it, bucking a little, like he’s riding a horse. Once more, he turns away from me.
Without any eye contact, he says, “Play your cards right, Kingman will send you to college. Anywhere you want to go in the state. That includes Harvard. Heck, he bought me super bowl tickets.”
I change the subject yet again. I tell him about Rockaway, where I live. I tell him I grew up there during the whole Rodney King trial. The LA riots. How racial tensions were high where I lived, not just on the West Coast. How I had to deal with racism for being the one cracker-ass, honky, gringo, whiteboy.
Making tape-measurements, Randy says, “Everybody thinks they have a unique background. One time I had this guy complaining to me that his parents got divorced. I told him my father killed my mother while I lay in my baby crib, with a shotgun. That was the first sound I remember in life. A shotgun blast. And this guy responds to that by repeating how the divorce really affected him, how he had to move out from his childhood home and leave a dog behind.”
If Randy had been looking at me, he would see my eyes go wide with horror.
I want to tell him about Gary Lee Vickers. How I alone know where the psycho sleeps. Right here. But I worry Randy won’t be able to keep that secret. After all, reward money for convict capture has just been announced by federal law enforcement at a press conference. So my mouth starts to open, but then it screws shut.
Randy makes light of every issue I have, and I hate him for it, but I also admire his straight talk.
He tells me he has some weed in his jacket pocket. If I break up the weed, he says he’ll roll us a joint. I’ve been sober for three full days. That’s the funny thing about drug addiction. When I want drugs, everything about it is a terrible hassle. But when I want to quit drugs, people offer it to me for free.
I crumble the weed up, small, green, and pungent. Randy takes a work break to smoke with me.
We go outside, away from the heavy dry wall heat.
I suppose because I catch him looking at the stars, I ask him if he believes in God.
“Yes and no,” he says. “Not the Bible version anyway. I don’t really talk about it. Talking about it is a breach of my actual faith. I’m more interested in aliens. Sometimes I wonder if aliens a long time ago had sex with monkeys.”
I had never considered that type of evolution before, so it enters my mind like a whirlwind. The idea cools my blood. I can hear the rip roaring furnaces in the basement, once toasty, drop a degree, then return with a whoosh to its original octave.
Randy’s the first person I’ve had a real conversation with for over a month.
He cracks open a beer bottle, then he grabs the neck of the bottle with just two fingers, tipping it back, sipping. He says, “Ah! Now that’s called a Tennessee side-swig.”
We go back inside. He reminds me to wipe my muddy boots before I step on his freshly installed carpet. Then he asks me if I want to try the knee kicker.
I do.
I bend down on all four of my rubbery limbs. Thinking of Busby and his bum leg, I make my knee jam hard, hammer-pound the cushion of the kicker tool.
It’s the first real work I’ve done in a year.
I start to sweat, dizzy with heat, breathing in a fresh pocket of floor level air.
It feels great. Like I just became his fourth-level apprentice.