Our ghetto job
The jobs we had in those first three months were various and provided me an excellent education in the electrical field. The jobs ranged from mansions in the hills of Oakland to Section 8 housing in the worst slums. It covered new construction, renovations, add-ons, trouble shooting and upgrading a five-story hotel and restaurant owned by Indians, called ‘Passands’.
The slum job was a complete rewire of a beat-up apartment in the ghetto, the walls stripped bare, government subsidized work. Some of the tenants had to be evicted by force, by police. They had no money and nowhere to go. The job was so dangerous, with a few of the tenants refusing to leave, that the short plumber carried a loaded gun in his tool pouch at all times. I’d never seen that before or since. We couldn’t leave a tool out of hand’s reach or it would be stolen in a minute, as these people would loiter a few feet away from us and watch us work.
During this same period we took a few days off from it each week to wire up a kitchen expansion in an expensive mansion in the hills of Oakland, a house owned by a rich doctor. We had to hang an eight-thousand dollar chandelier in the dining room, careful not to smudge the huge, immovable twenty-thousand dollar dining room table imported from Italy, which we needed to stand on to do the job. The doctor’s beautiful wife was always there, and prepared for us excellent deli sandwiches each noon, with various sides and a list of sodas to choose from.
It was my food stamp experience all over again, to be in the cool hills feasting amid beauty and luxury one day, and in the sweltering slums the next, toiling and fearing for my life. But the first job paid a lot more and the work was much easier and never rushed.
The best way to radicalize a young person, man or woman, about the insane injustice and crime of income inequality, would not be to harangue or lecture them, but simply transport them one day to hard, sweaty labor in the worst slums for five dollars an hour, and the next to a fine mansion in the cool hills, for similar electrical work but at an unhurried pace for double the wage and a free, fine lunch served by a beautiful hostess. After several weeks of this juxtaposition you’ll have the most die-hard revolutionary leveler you’ve ever met.
Before I leave off our fair doctor’s wife I have one incident to mention, which to my fledgling apprentice eyes was a salutary lesson I’ll never forget. Bones and I were working on the addition of her kitchen one morning and she was in the finished part, just ten feet away, at the counter, cleaning up after breakfast. Now beauty doesn’t solely reside in the face, and in her particular case there seemed to be a great deal of it in her backside, which we were continually glancing at and admiring as we worked.
It chanced just as both of us were glancing that she touched with one outstretched arm her electric kettle and with the other hand the water running in the sink. She received a jolt, a major shock and we saw her whole back quiver, as she let out a shriek and almost fell to the ground. We ran to her, set her on a chair, comforted her, and luckily, in five minutes, she felt recovered. We checked the plug of the kettle and sure enough it was wired backwards, what we call a hot-neutral reverse, causing the casing of the kettle to be live 120 volts and her other hand in the water a perfect ground, causing the electricity to flow right through her body to its easiest ground, as it always does. We immediately fixed that faulty wiring and checked the whole house for other mistakes. She thanked us as if we’d just saved her life. She might have died if it had lasted longer, but the jolt pushed her from the water right away breaking the path. She made us an extra fine lunch that day, praised us to her husband when he came home and I think we got a bonus for it. For me, the sight was an edifying lesson in the dangers of electricity, the best way to learn, through someone else’s shock. But I was far more cautious from then on. In the almost forty years since then in this profession, I’ve never gotten a jolt that bad.
Soon after this work dried up. Neither Bob nor Bones advertised their company, so they took a break. But I’d been given a foot in the door and found work with other local electricians right away, within days. I met another contractor, Steve G. hardly older than me, and worked with him a few months for the same wage, ten an hour, which, in a forty-hour week could almost pay all my expenses for a month. My bank account grew along with my confidence. I finally felt like I’d arrived at a complete independence, with a trade and a life to live and steer I wanted.
