Summertime is the time for making money. Sophomore year of college was a good one, but in that summer of 2003, there was a void in my bank account that needed to be filled before I was properly funded for a good Junior year. Being an underclassman, and an English/Poly Sci major, there were no useful and certainly no profitable internships available to me, so I headed home and picked up the same job I had worked the previous summer: working as an apprentice carpenter for a local remodeling contractor. There was plenty of work and I had established myself as capable and available, so they paired me up with a lead carpenter by the name of Jimmy, and away we went.
I liked Jimmy from day one. He stood about 5'7”, had close cropped blonde hair, and the permanent red-tan skin of a man who works outdoors. He walked with a certain swagger that is characteristic of all experienced framers, spoke with a loud clear voice, and used plenty of colorful language. He was a former military man and had racked up his carpentry experience working for engineering crews in the Army. When the boss introduced me to him as 'Stu', Jimmy immediately laughed and shouted, “like Disco Stu from the Simpsons!” I was “Disco” for the rest of the summer. He seemed to take a liking to me; I think Jimmy saw my curiosity and work ethic and knew I was someone he could work with.
We quickly became the framing team. We would walk on to a job with fresh concrete and a pile of lumber on Monday and walk away from a fully framed, neat, and clean addition on Friday. I'm not sure how many we did that summer, but that pattern was the rule, with a few filler projects mixed in to keep us busy when the Project Managers couldn't get their schedules lined up quick enough for our ferocious pace. Framing is hard work; lifting heavy beams, hauling piles of lumber to locations with challenging access, and throwing sheets of 5/8” plywood onto roofs; all under the relentless summer sun. There's no shade when you are building a house; the project you're working on is the very shelter that you wish you had. But physical work has its own set of humble rewards, and when you added in the smell of the green lumber as it shredded into sawdust under the scream of the saws, the pop of the nail guns, the grind of the compressor, and of course, some mix of Alan Jackson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Guns'N”Roses, and Garth Brooks (and plenty of off-key singing) soaring over the top of our zealous industry, it created a captivating summer cocktail. I drank deeply.
There's a sacred camaraderie that naturally forms when folks cooperatively engage in a physical undertaking. If you sweat together for long enough, you are family. Under that hot summer sun, Jimmy and I became a team; we hooted and hollered, laughed, and sang, and above all, we worked. On one occasion, the Project Manager brought us to the building site that we would be framing in a week or two. At the moment, the site was occupied by several hundred square feet of concrete driveway that needed to come up. He gave us a digging bar and a twelve-pound sledgehammer and told us to get started while he went to the yard to pick up a jackhammer. Project Managers always take much longer to run errands than they say, and by the time he showed back up at the job site two hours later with the jackhammer, we had all the concrete busted up and half of it loaded into the roll off dumpster. Jimmy and I took a moment to mock the Project Manager for thinking we needed a jackhammer in the first place, quipping that we'd of busted that concrete up with our fists if we needed to. We were invincible.
Eventually, September came, and on the day of my final paycheck, the boss took Jimmy and I out to a big lunch. That final paycheck was quite a bit larger than the average check, and I think it is safe to say that he had done as well by us as we had done by him that summer. Carpenters are not known for sentimentality or an ability to express complex emotion in words, so my farewell from Jimmy was brief, a colorful joke, and an awkward handshake.
Three weeks later in my campus apartment, my phone rang while I was ploughing my way through Kant's relentless sentences, and Jimmy's jovial shout blasted through the earpiece at me. “Disco! What's your address? I got something for you!” A few days later, there was five-foot-tall tube waiting for me at the mail center. I opened it up to find a massive poster of Johnny Cash, middle finger raised to the camera. The note inside was a torn off corner of a yellow legal pad, the weapon of choice in the construction industry, and simply said, “Have a great year Disco.”
Another couple of weeks went by and out of the blue I got a call from my former boss. “Hey Stu, you haven't seen Jimmy at all have you?” I certainly hadn't, why would I? “Well... he didn't show up for work last week, and a couple days later, the sheriff came by. It turns out he and his brother had half an acre's worth of pot plants growing in their back yard and were selling all manner of drugs to folks all over the county. We also learned that he got kicked out of the military years ago for brewing heroin in storage closets, along with several other drug-related charges. For whatever reason they think he's headed to Mexico. Just thought I'd tell you, with you guys being buddies and all, and you being in San Diego. You might want to keep your distance.”
It's no great surprise that I never saw or heard from Jimmy again, but I do think about him from time to time. It's simultaneously fearful and wonderful that someone can all at once be a great hand, a great buddy, and an agent for better in the maturation process of a young man, yet at the same time be a crook and a drug peddler. Still, you can bet that if I ever hear “Disco!” hollered at me from across the lumber yard (or maybe across a market in Ensenada), there will be a big grin on my face when I turn around.