Bob's wife
Just as I was settling into this new abode, the very first week there, I was unexpectedly offered the job which began my electrical career.
A few months earlier Bones hooked up with a Jewish fellow, Bob G., who had a contractor’s license. He’d just broken up with his older partner in the trade who had become so enamored with the Apple II computer that he spent a year in a bedroom with it, (a strange love affair) and quit working. Bob inherited all their clients and partnered up with Bones to finish the work in hand, a few residential projects, so many they needed help and they chose me for an apprentice. We jumped in Bob’s truck one Monday morning and drove to a supply house where they bought me a tool belt and a few tools, then to a six-unit residence just being framed up in a poor section of Oakland, handed me a large Milwaukee drill with a long augur bit in it, and there I was transformed from an idle, daydreaming bohemian into a member of the construction trade.
And the pay was great, unlike all my previous jobs. They started me out at eight dollars an hour, but I showed such an enthusiasm and liking for the work and drilled so many holes and pulled so much wire that the second week they raised it to ten.
I discovered my love of great literature at eighteen, starting with an English translation of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, (in the penguin edition), picked up one night in Moe’s bookstore within the first days of my discovering that wonderfully rich store, picked out and bought because something attracted me about the green cover and his strange, bald head. I had no idea what treasures lay inside. But in a few days I was reading it curiously, sitting at my dorm room desk, a book that had no relation to any classes I was taking.
Just a few weeks before my twenty-eighth birthday, ten years later, I discovered the second great passion of my life, working with my hands, that very first day, drilling holes. The drill was so powerful that when you hit a nail it would catch and wrench your arms around it, painfully. I did hit a few that day but kept going and quickly learned to look out for them. But I drilled my holes fast and in very straight lines, using my knee as a guide. Most electricians drill their holes anywhere, up and down, because the wire is buried away once the sheet rock is up. But this sense of neatness was a part of me, and the look of the wire pulled from point to point impressed them. Thus my raise. I’ve long considered myself fortunate in being able to pass half my time in manual skills and the other half with books. It strikes the perfect balance of body and mind. The parts of the brain that control dexterity, hand-eye coordination and visual skills (that discriminate where things will fit and match) and the cognitive skills they involve compliment one’s intellectual side, to form a complete human being, body and mind.
I also found that I liked the labor itself, the physical exercise, often in the sun, and not too strenuous but healthy, tired at the end of the day but not aching. And what a lucky and rare thing that is to have two careers, each complimenting one another, one the mind, the other the body.
But most important, it was fun. The three of us were constantly laughing and joking while we worked. The contractors of our first job were two Christian brothers (of the serious type), a few years older than us, who did most of the carpentry themselves, belts on all day. They never touched alcohol and never swore. But they drank so much Coca-Cola during the day that by mid-afternoon they were ditsy from the caffeine and sugar, rushing about, bumping into each other, a comic sight to see. On my first day at that job site, with my bright, white, leather tool belt in hand, as introductions were made, one of them asked to see it. I handed it over, he threw it in the dirt, jumped on it several times then handed it back, saying: ‘there, that’s better’. This type of comradery and joking around was constant throughout the day. I’d never equated work and fun, until then.
Now Bob was not like Bones or me. He didn’t do drugs or play poker with us and rarely drank a beer. His wife was a very Jewish woman, with long curly black hair, a large nose but pretty, angular face and large, dark, watery eyes, a sexy hourglass form, a shrill, often complaining tongue and a lap dog that enjoyed more of her lap than Bob ever did. Once she had a sesame seed party with all her many friends and the three of us. Rumor had it that if you ate enough sesame seeds you’d feel a mild hallucinogenic effect. That didn’t happen and we felt very out of place, especially Bob, more uncomfortable than ever, with us, his friends there and seeing his home life for the first time. She ruled the manor. Everything was her way. She had a strong case of ‘Jewish American Princess’ syndrome. They’d been married about a year by their parents’ connivance. What started out as him thinking he had a fine trophy wife was quickly turned around by her, her more dominant personality and her much larger flock of friends into making him a trophy husband, treated with far less respect than her little, often yelping lap-dog, licking its paws coyly in her lap and barking at him whenever he approached.
After this one-day glance into their lives Bones and I convinced him to divorce her, and he did, right away, not with the usual build-up of angst and recriminations, but in a quick matter of fact way, totally in agreement with our suggestion, packing his bags that week and leaving. It was easy because affections were never a part of the equation.
