Fifty Bucks

September 12, 2008

On one of those brilliant, picture-perfect days you only read about in books, a young firefighter came over and purchased the lawnmower I’d found on my bike ride. He’d just bought a house in the city, and was pleased with how the attractive machine worked, and how smartly it fired up when the rope starter was pulled. I ran it across the grass a few times, demonstrating its great mowing powers. It’s at times like this that I feel I have put on a fake moustache and dark, curly wig—have become the caricature of a foreign broker of used and discarded things, talking rapidly, moving closer to the unsuspecting purchaser, exuding a mélange of tobacco smoke, cheap cologne and some other, more mysterious odors—possibly of middle-eastern origin. I would say things like this:
“Sir! This machine—is it not attractive? Would you not look proudly over a lawn beclipped with this capable little chopper? In my country we are crazy about these things, it is all we talk about; and now you can have one for yourself!” I would give him a gentle push, “Go and try its magnificent power, you will want it immediately for your take-home!”

We loaded the little mower into the back of his economical Toyota, and I bade him good luck with the mowing and the new house.

With fifty dollars in my pocket, I was confident about the future. With fifty bucks, anything was possible. I could saunter into the local Rite-Aid, casually eye the display case of men’s fragrances, then say to the counter girl, “No, not today; I’ll have to think about it.” Reaching far into my pocket, I would reassure myself with the feel of the crisp bills I’d stowed away there. I would waste another minute or two, idling away the time, the stuff of life I’d never get back, look at the stacked cases of Coke, mentally figure how many I could buy with fifty dollars, and leave the store with the smug satisfaction of being a big-shot in this penny-ante little town. Glancing over at the bored cashier, chewing with disinterest on an open bag of Doritos, I would toss this over my shoulder: “See ya around, toots.” Fifty bucks can do that to you.

Then there were three of us, down on the kitchen floor, taking out nails one at a time from the ancient wood. The work of this day was mostly finished, but—as the boss—I had to think fast, had to come up with a project that could be accomplished in an hour or two, and that was of some importance to me. So I had my helpers clear the kitchen, get the scrap lumber and trash moved into another room in preparation for our work there. We were going to pull out the hundreds of staples that had fastened a floor to the old pine boards many years in the past, during the course of one of the several renovations the house had witnessed. I knew that the old pine underneath was attractive and could be brought back to life, could be stripped of the layers of add-ons that people—in their misguided quest for modernity—had applied.

We set to it, Big J.O., Eduardo, and I—with Latin music playing lively tempos from the bathroom, where Eduardo had recently installed big squares of ceramic tile around the tub and shower. Things were coming together, and he was showing his skill at the different home improvement trades. Our routine in the kitchen was fairly simple: Take a pair of pliers, grab at a protruding staple in the floor, and yank it out. Repeat as needed. I reflected on my usual way of doing jobs like this, which is to tackle them by myself. I was more than grateful to have the company, as the job progressed at least three times as fast as if I’d done it on my own—and probably much faster, since I am nothing if not slow. So I used my position as supervisor and employer to impose some conversation on our little band, to set the tone. I didn’t want to be seen as just a source of never-ending drudgery, the person to go to if you want to be assigned yet another thankless job. I wanted to be a swell guy, to instill some bonhomie into our kneeling trio.

So I spoke of the most inane things imaginable: How I’d seen a big tractor at the salvage yard toss whole cars around like they were toys, turning them over and stabbing at their underbellies to skewer the gasoline tanks and eviscerate them of the potentially explosive parts. The cars could not go into the crusher like that, I explained. They needed to be freed of their fuel tanks. The man at the controls of the enormous tractor would toss the cars into the air, and let them smash to the ground, which I found enjoyable to watch. On that occasion, I was there to drop off yet more of the metal that the house was giving up in the course of its current transformation. Eduardo, whose English is just short of excellent, showed some interest in this, asked where I’d witnessed this thing. He uses American idioms confidently, and there is little he cannot express outside his native language of Peru. So we talked of salvage yards, of the music that played on his Spanish-speaking station, and other home improvement projects he’d worked on. He said that one lady was having a large addition put on the house, and that she had a pool where the workers were invited to swim at the end of the workday. I felt that a pool was something that I might enjoy having sometime in my life, but that I would not have it here, would want to be in another place before I had the pool. Everyone agreed that having a pool in another place would be better. “Not here,” Big J.O. said; “Some other place.”

With the very last staple extracted from the old wooden floor, it was exactly quitting time. I’d not looked at the clock until now, and was surprised at how well-timed the whole business was, and how painless it had been with the three of us working away at it. I congratulated myself, reached into my pocket to feel again for the fifty dollars, and was immediately reassured. I fingered the money, was lost momentarily in a reverie of self-importance and a vague feeling of goodwill towards all men. I paid my helpers and was finished for the day.