Parched

My father all but abandoned me to run a construction site with nearly a hundred employees. At the time we had a crew of ten laborers, twenty framers, thirty vinyl siders, and twenty or more craftsmen doing a variety of other miscellaneous tasks. It was both exhilarating and overwhelming.

It was the first time in my life that I was called "Boss." Suddenly my friends and erstwhile coworkers looked at me different, some with suspicion, some fawning like schoolgirls with a crush. Never have I felt so alone as I did then. My office was a stream of people with a variety of sad stories, begging for advances or time off. I hired a secretary to help with the payroll, which was a desperate situation every week, struggling to get paid by the general contractor for completed work in order to cover the paychecks we wrote. Even she began to get cozy, once bringing her daughter into work for me to meet. She was a poor single mother, abandoned by some quick draw McGraw to raise his child without any support.

Being an RA in college was similar in many aspects. Whenever I stopped into a dorm room to say hello, the conversations were normally terse, especially if the faint aroma of pot lingered in the air. Or the opposite, where my every utterance was met with gales of laughter, as if I were Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy rolled into one.

The corner room at the end of my hall was a suite, which was a common area containing a television, refridgerator and couches, surrounded by four bedrooms and a bathroom. Basically these were the party palaces, where the din of loud music and voices erupted on weekends.

I caught people walking to and from the suite with gargantuan beer cups several times on the first occasion, so I pulled their leader into my room the next day.

"Mark, I couldn't help but notice that you guys had a keg party last night."

He looked at me sheepishly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Man, didn't you hear anything I said at our meeting?" He looked down at the floor. "I don't care if you are partying or not, but sneaking a keg into your room and then parading in the hallways with thirsty-two ouncer cups is being a little obvious, don't you think?"

"Yeah, well, I tried to talk the guys out of it, but they won't listen."

"Listen, stop with the keg parties and stick with a coolers and half cases. You're going to get caught and I'm going to be in a spot."

"Ok."

But the next week it was the same thing.

I walked into the party and stood like Clint Eastwood in a gunfight. Somebody killed the music and everyone turned to stare at me, their smiles slowly melting from their faces. Waiting.

I felt like the terminator as possible next-things-to-say scrolled through my mind. I wanted to do a good job while balancing the peace, but this group wasn't going to play along. I was forced to make a choice.

"It's been a really long day people," I said slowly, "and I could really use a beer."

Party Pass

In order to work for the Ricks boys, I had to gain admission into the carpenter's union, which had a great many advantages. The most obvious was the wage, which blew Davis Bacon out of the water. The one I took advantage of, was a fund that my employers had to pay into, a dollar for each hour I worked that could only be collected on for medical emergencies, or college. I don't remember how much had accumulated, but it was enough to pay for my tuition for the year and a half I needed to complete my schooling that I started and failed out of at Washington State.

For me, a person who had become addicted to working hard and fast, long time union members were a dunk in glacier water. These sloths placed all their emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble, doing the minimum amount of work to actually qualify as work in a court of law, and never missed a break, no matter how behind the job was.

One guy in particular, I'll call him ordinary Joe, came on board in the same capacity as myself. He was small and soft, and the only detail for which I can remember him was his bountiful, capacious lunchbox. Having him around was like packing a hundred pound flounder on my back; getting work done was a bad dream of a long hallway where the end keeps stretching.

"Break time," he would say.

"Joe, we just got started, can't we take a break after we've actually done some work?"

"Scott, you got it all wrong," he said like Foghorn Leghorn, "You have to learn to relax."

"I'll relax tonight over a cold one, ok? We've got work to do right now."

"You don't seem to get it," he chided, "You are in the carpenters union, no?"

"Yeah, yeah, but that isn't a license to fuck off."

"Well, you're either in the union or you're out."

"I'm out alright? Now get up and move your ass!" It was times like these that I felt close kinship to my father.

I left that all behind to go back to school, but money was a big problem. I had enough for tuition, but nothing for room and board. My dad and new step-mother Diana offered that I come stay with them, and somebody, either one of them or her sons would take me back and forth every day. I had no alternative, and begrudgingly accepted.

And what a nightmare it turned out to be.

She had three sons, each ironically named for the saints, Michael, Matthew and Mark. We lived in a small town thirty miles from Potsdam College, where the boys had grown up all their lives. The town, which shall remain anonymous, was a blight, and all it's residents were dark and sardonic, and the longer I stayed there the more I needed to escape lest I be swallowed whole and spit out a pile of bones.

The boys all had girlfriends, but in the loosest definition of the word, that they called their bitches, sluts, cunts, pigs, and whores. Girls in town all had degrading monikers, like Easy Edith, or Hand Jobala. The boys themselves were the stars of the town, with reputations built on the subjugation of women and through fisticuffs with their peers. My first semester was a series of days spent in dread anticipation of returning to the pressure cooker, where one day it would be me and my father against the devils of this town.

In my second semester, I applied for unemployment, which paid enough to purchase a meal pass at the school cafeteria. To pay for my room, I applied for and was accepted as a resident adviser, which is basically a cop installed on every dormitory floor on campus, a person who is always shunned and feared, and represents the school authority. My basic job was to make sure kids didn't drink or smoke pot, two of my favorite pastimes, causing me a severe moral dilemma. I've never been a hypocrite, and I wasn't about to start, but a case could be made that I took a job and should have done it as I promised to, but I counter that nothing I did was going to stop it, and would only serve to slap a few wrists and make me into the bad guy.

I called my first floor meeting in a lounge on a landing between our floor and the girls floor above us. My chargees were scattered about the floor, some paying rapt attention, some being the ass kissers, while others the schmoozers, and others scrutinized the patterns in the walls and carpet, completely indifferent.

"Ok, this is going to be short and sweet. I'm just a guy like everyone here, and I'm not going to pretend that behind closed doors, half of you won't be smoking a joint or doing upside down tap hits from a keg in an iced filled tub in your bathrooms."

I might as well have been a drill sergeant for all the attention I was commanding now.

"My director says that I need to have this kind of meeting every week, but this is the first and only meeting we are going to have. I don't think any of you needs a parent looking over your shoulder, but if you need me for any reason, you know where to find me, and the door is always open. So, here are the only rules that you need concern yourself with. If and when you smoke pot, open your windows and put a towel under the door. If I smell it from the hall, that means my director can smell it, and I will write you up."

Laughter, head scratching, looks of awe.

"Do not carry beer in the hallways, nor should you carry any evidence thereof, like the telltale plastic beer cup, even it is empty. Sneak it into the room. Don't put me in an awkward position, and I'll look the other way. Capiche?"

Everyone nodded absently, trying to absorb this unexpected turn.

"This is a good thing, so don't fuck it up. Meeting adjourned."