I called Rex the next morning and secured the job. It was a dream job that lasted two months. We built a second story on the house he and his wife and their baby lived in. He taught me carpentry. He only paid me eight dollars an hour, (same as Robert Malone) and only employed me three or four days a week, but that was perfect. With Dale gone that met my financial needs and I wanted all the time off I could get, to think and reflect and sit in that soft chair. Rex and I became great friends. as he taught me carpentry tricks which I truly appreciated. We discussed books and life together, all day long, working at an unhurried pace.
Rex was about ten years older than me, in many ways like me, a kind, soft-spoken man and excellent craftsman who took pride in his work, and he loved to teach. He made a good living outside the frenzied pace of most construction work sites by buying a modest house once or twice a year in the right neighborhood and mostly by himself doubling it in size and selling it for double the price. He needed help for foundations and framing, and I was it. The trim and painting he did by himself. His wife and child lived in the old structure downstairs, sometimes inviting me to dinner when we worked late. He started and stopped work whenever he wanted. He had money in the bank and few worries. He could play with his child on a whim and build the house to his taste. In every way he was his own boss. If this isn’t the perfect life, what is?
He gave me one more shining example of what independence meant, how any bright person can fashion a business for themselves and live free and untethered to ugly, profit based, employee abusing companies. My books taught me the rhetoric to defend my own human dignity. My bohemian days made me comfortable in contemning money or status in society. I never had an employer whom I couldn’t trim in an instant, demean and shame them for the pathetic tools they were, threatening to fire us slaves, holding the whip, and all for the corrupt and greedy corporations that gave them nothing in return except a pittance of pay above our own, ruining their loveless lives at work and by extension, at home. In my long career this scene happened only a few times with especially bad foremen. He gave me one more proof, and more confidence that I could walk away from any job at the drop of a pin, for any reason, and that only good would come of it.
So I was happy at work, and with three or four days off each week my readings and journals profited equally. I felt alive to the world again and noticed others with fresh curiosity as I’d walk to the Med. Here are some jottings just weeks after she left, on the very next pages of my notebook:
“As I was walking down the street I saw a rather obese woman gesticulating violently. I thought she was angry at a skinny man walking with her. But as I got closer, I perceived that she was only telling a story with fervor. Then it dawned on me that our speech is far more limited than our minds, that we feel a range of emotions limited to narrow channels of expression. We cry in happiness and sadness, shout in all sorts of situations, smile for a thousand reasons, but always the same smile and our eyes convey at most only the intensity of our feelings, not the feelings themselves. They can only be understood from other circumstances than what our looks convey”.
“These old bohemians (in their late 30’s and 40’s) that I see in this coffee shop are admirable characters, like centurions of old, so many battles have they gone through and so many scars do they show. They wear their old clothes and odd costumes like uniforms. That’s all they own, but I mean to say, they wear them with a pride equal to uniforms. The scoffs and reproaches from other people have long ceased to vex them. They are settled and confirmed in their characters.
Most are a wretched looking lot yet with a dignity visible in their poise and deportment. The elements that ravaged their faces strengthened their souls. And what artistic aspirations or original misfortunes threw them into this bohemian world, only strength of character and stubborn resolve allowed them to continue. For the weak fall out, recant and adopt unidea’d, bourgeois lives, for the greater security of their morning coffee and nightly rest”.
One the next page I write: “Earn a life, not a living”.
I was my old self again and with that confidence I could think about her philosophically. One thorn that I felt in our love affair was my lack of money and not able to treat her in a way that I thought she deserved (and had long been used to). My broken-down car, my place a little dark den, a former garage, my clothes shabby, while she was a polished, elegant, southern belle from an affluent family, a world traveler with refined, exquisite tastes.
The irony of my poverty alongside my rich education, just like my dog-eared collection of books, the finest set of classical authors, Cicero, Livy, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus and Tacitus in such tattered volumes, some missing their covers, others with broken bindings and browning pages, (which any housekeeper might throw in the garbage), same with my record collection, once again the best compositions yet all without covers (from the fire sale), in an old garage apartment, spelled a strange contrast in my worldly condition.
