The Job Pirate Page 7

  I began thinking of different ways that I could surreptitiously tell the old man this without either Pedro catching on. Then, for some strange reason, I started thinking about what the Pedros would buy with their $900 apiece. A new nightgown for Maria, a pitcher’s mitt for little Julio, Dodgers tickets, schoolbooks, perhaps some new fire decals for the open-hooded Camaros permanently parked in their driveways. Then I started thinking about what I would buy for myself if I got an extra $900 on my weekly paycheck. I’d definitely buy a new television and replace my VCR with a laserdisc player or one of those new DVD devices. I thought of how cool I’d look showing up at a client’s house in a tailored blazer and silk scarf. I could treat myself to a month of steak dinners at Musso & Frank; take every other month off from the job to work on a novel; take a vacation in Italy. Italy.

  What would the Italian plumbers of yesteryear do in this situation? Would the Romans screw over their fellow countrymen for a profit? Of course they would. I glanced back to the old man, who was now staring off into the clouds, probably mentally subtracting the cost of this plumbing job from the dwindling savings he was surviving on. He shook his head repeatedly.

  “You have a beautiful home, sir.” I told him.

  It took him a few seconds before he replied. “Thank you. It didn’t always look like this. You should have seen it when we first moved in … just a shack standing here.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your wife.”

  He nodded his head and continued staring off into the blue sky. But his wife’s passing was not the most important factor running through his mind at the moment. “Does $10,000 seem right to you? That seems really high to me.”

  “I just started this job,” I answered. “I’m in training. I’m not too sure about how much things cost yet.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I suppose I’m just from a different generation when things didn’t seem to cost that much.”

  “Don’t you have a neighbor that can come over and take a look … maybe they might have some insight.”

  “My neighbors? Oh, no, no, no. The people who live around here are all movie producers and stuff—bunch of rich people. They don’t know anything. Besides, those guys you’re with are professionals, right? You guys work for a big company. I see the vans everywhere.”

  He had opened up another perfect opportunity for me to tell him to get a second opinion, but something inside me prevented my mouth from saying anything. I had a rush of thoughts about my own self-preservation now that I was without my union job. I had my whole life ahead of me to worry about. This moment would be the turning point in my life—the period where I shed the empathetic feelings of youth and became a man—a man who put his own self-interests above the feelings of others—a man who wouldn’t disgrace his father’s good name because he couldn’t bear not to smoke a joint with friends the night before his big drug test. Today I would grow up, no matter how painful it would be for me, or for others. Today I would grow up.

  “Arlene always said I was too trusting. But what kind of life is it if you can’t trust people?”

  The Pedros were on their way back to us, and I knew that all I had to do was keep my mouth shut for a few more seconds and I’d be home free. I glanced back to the old man but saw my father standing there instead, telling me to come by on Sunday and see mom. It felt like one of those moments in a political thriller when the protagonist had to let one innocent man die so that a million other innocent people would be spared. I couldn’t bear to look at him again, but I did—I had to. But when I saw the old man this time, I saw capitalism embodied and not my father. I saw the way business worked; I witnessed how success worked. Then it spun around and I saw myself in him. I saw that I was very much like this old man in that I was too trusting and didn’t question what I should have questioned. I wanted to punish myself for letting my father down and humiliating him in front of the people he had spent half his life working with. I wanted to teach this old man what happened when you let down your guard and trusted a fat plumber like Pedro, or a 20-something plumber’s assistant with little moral direction. I wanted to be mean to make the shame dissipate inside me. I wanted my heart to callous over and bury the empathy under layers of uncaring, inhuman selfishness.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do what Pedro and Pedro could do. I couldn’t kill one innocent man to spare the lives of a million others. I just couldn’t. I didn’t have a family to feed, or children to put through school, or a mortgage on a house. I didn’t possess those fundamentals that produce a triumphant, successful man who’s willing to do almost anything for a buck. I only had a handful of blossoming morals and some jaded decency to build a career upon. And as jaded and blossoming as they were, they were all I had.

  I looked back up at the old man to find him still staring, waiting for me to put words to the gaping mouth below my confused eyes. But the words didn’t come out. The caveat never came. Then I felt Pedro standing beside me. He was happy and smiling, and he patted my shoulder proudly. Pedro looked the way my father had looked on my first day at C.F.I., before I got fired. He was proud; proud of the big job he had negotiated; proud of himself for doing it; and proud of me for being a part of it. I smiled back at him because I knew that was what he wanted to see—and maybe that was what I wanted to see. I couldn’t bring myself to look back at the old man after that. That part of me was now over.

  The small bulldozer and day laborers arrived about 35 minutes later. Big Pedro and I left after the old man disappeared into the house and 50 feet of his garden had been torn up. Back at the main office, Pedro recounted the story of the overpriced plumbing job to several coworkers, including the branch manager, and several cans of congratulatory Budweiser were then handed around. Pedro patted me on the back again and explained to his fellow beer-sipping plumbers how I had helped swindle the old man out of a small fortune, even though I was still in training—that I was a born plumber.

  As I punched my timecard for the day, the branch manager handed me another half-filled plastic cup of beer and said, “Great job, kid. You’ve passed your training. Pedro said you’re ready for your own van. You keep this up and you could make a lot of money. How about we send you out on your own tomorrow? Commission on whatever you do! How’s that sound?”

  “Yeah, that would be nice.”

  After he patted me on the back, I walked into the bathroom and poured my beer into the toilet. I would not celebrate this moment. I was a bigger sucker than the old man for letting this happen. Before returning my timecard to the wall, I wrote above my typed name: I QUIT. PLEASE MAIL PAYCHECK TO ADDRESS ON FILE. And I left. I went by the folks’ house on Sunday and stayed for dinner, but things just weren’t the same as they were before either of those two jobs. I had learned some things about myself over that three-week period, things that I didn’t know were in me. But they were out now, alive and functioning on their own. I vowed to be a better man from that day forward, but it took a few more years and a few more disappointments before it really sank in.

  LITTLE GENERALS

  JOB #39

  I had been living next door to Scott for longer than most marriages lasted. We’d been friends since high school and sort of gravitated together when the adult years found us. And when a vacancy came up in his sleepy apartment complex on a dead-end street in North Hollywood, I had naturally grabbed it regardless of the crazy white trash family in the house across the way. Seeing each other every day kept us both young, grounded, tethered to immaturity like two brothers constantly racing for the front seat. No matter how many years passed us by, or how far high school stretched behind us, seeing Scott jingling his keys into his door from across the woodsy courtyard at night made me feel like my teenage self was always handy in my back pocket.

  Like any two fully grown, teenage-minded men, Scott and I made a competition out of everything. It started with chess, then Scrabble, then Gin Rummy. Then watching Jeopardy on TV, where the competition evolved into keeping wagers and scores on writing tablets. From there
we competed with women we slept with, amounts we spent on dates, quickness of hand-eye reflexes, names of actors in movies, and home furnishings. But it wasn’t until about my fourth year at the complex when the competition took a perilous turn.

  I’m not too sure which one of us bought the first BB gun, or even why, but the fourth year at the complex found us both with CO2 compressed air pistols, itchy trigger fingers, and keen eyes. The warzone was our U-shaped two-story complex, where a 10-foot by 30-foot courtyard of dense fig trees and foliage separated our two sides of the battleground. I’m not sure really why it was, but I remember taking the first innocent shot at him as I watched him sorting through his mail on his way up the stairs. From the vantage of my second-floor balcony, I was nearly hidden from sight. The fig trees between us were enormous, and their massive, flopping leaves practically walled me in. I could make out each step his black slacks took through patches between the large leaves, and once he reached the top step I released the safety on my pistol and fired. It was only a leg shot, but I heard a loud yelp just before his screen door slammed open and he jumped inside his apartment, slamming the door behind him. I couldn’t help but laugh harder than I’d ever laughed before, which I’m certain reverberated within the U-shape of our serene complex and carried itself straight into Scott’s front window to console him as he rubbed out the sting in his thigh.

  I felt a great sense of accomplishment, and I lit another cigarette on the balcony as I waited for the impending phone call asking why I had taken up arms during such a peaceful time. But that phone call never came. Ten minutes had passed since that first shot rang out, and as the sun slowly set on our little Gaza Strip I couldn’t help but wonder why Scott hadn’t called to either chew me out or demand a truce. But a silently slid-open window and a tiny, noiseless tear in his screen soon quelled my concerns. A BB zipped by me and into the wall exactly one second before another pinged me in the shoulder. The elusive bastard had been watching me, and because he didn’t have a balcony of his own he improvised and sniped me through a window. I got to my knees and crawled into the apartment, slid the drapes closed, and assessed my wound. He had gotten a good shot in, and it stung like the dickens. A welt was beginning to grow right below the deltoid. Another BB hit my balcony screen before I returned fire with a pop at his front door. It went on like this for another 40 minutes or so, until the night came and took away our vision. But I knew that he was watching, waiting for me to let down my guard and take my customary drive to Del Taco for dinner. I knew he’d be standing at his window with his gun drawn, ready to spray down copper rain at the back of my head when I ran to my car. And he knew that I’d do the same to him if he dared try. We could have called a truce, but we never did. We just both went hungry that night and learned to pick up our drive-thru dinners on the way home from work.

  That taste of combat had sparked awake some type of warfare gene inside me, and I began romanticizing the hell out of my BB gun. I spent my evenings with the pistol tucked into the back of my pants, even as I cleaned dishes, watched TV, and did my push-ups. And every day at work I’d miss that cold metal feel of it jabbing me in the lower back. Luckily, the days passed by rather quickly at Dales Jr. Mini-Market, and before I knew it I was back home again each evening—gun in the back of my pants and cabernet breathing on the kitchen cabinet, eagerly awaiting the first shelling of the night.

  It was that next Thursday that changed the course of the war for me. It was a typical day at work, stocking the beer and wine shelves then jumping behind the register when a customer came in. Dales Jr. was a small liquor-store-turned-market that specialized in European beers and kitschy local wines as well as basic grocery necessities and lotto tickets. The majority of people who came in walked there from any one of the hundreds of nearby apartment complexes, and most were semiworking TV actors with a few musicians and alcoholic deadbeats thrown in.

  It was Studio City and everybody knew everybody by name, except for the 300-pound black man who walked up to my register with a single can of Budweiser on that day. He gave me $2 and asked for a little bag to put his beer in. Upon giving him the folded bag, he opened it, returned it to me, and calmly said, “Now fill it.” My blank stare must have been enough for him to realize I hadn’t seen the silver .38-caliber pistol pointing at me from under the cuff of his shirt, so he wiggled it for me. I saw it then.

  “Put the money in the bag,” he calmly said again, glancing anxiously over his shoulder at the two women in line behind him.

  My own safety didn’t register right away; my initial concern was that I hadn’t deposited the majority of the cash in the drawer into the drop-vault under the register, which I was supposed to have done every time the tally reached $200. And as I grabbed handfuls of bills from the drawer and shoved them into that little brown bag, I realized that this son of a bitch had come at the perfect time and robbed the perfect employee, because he was going to be walking away with close to $600—about $400 more than he should have been, had I been doing my job correctly.

  Strangely, he said thank you before walking casually out the door. As I hammered the silent alarm button beside the register, the 40-something woman who was next in line placed a four-pack of wine coolers onto the counter and cupped the mouthpiece of her cell phone.

  “Just that,” she said and went back to her call.

  The adrenaline finally kicked in when I realized she hadn’t seen a thing, and my heart began to race at the thought of coming that close—unnoticeably—to getting a .38-caliber bullet in my stomach. As I plucked a wine cooler from the four-pack on the counter, I thought it peculiar that the entire robbery had happened so coolly and only now, a full 10 seconds later, was I beginning to feel the galvanizing energy of the adrenal glands kicking in. And as I charged out the front doors with the glass wine cooler bottle in my right hand, I could feel my rational mind constricting and the animalist, adrenaline-fueled rage beginning to take over. I owe the terrible aim of that hurled wine cooler to the adrenaline fury, but its startling velocity and blazing impact against the concrete wall beside the getaway car somehow made up for it. The 300-pound assailant glanced at the wet explosion then at me before crawling into the passenger seat of that little Corolla and speeding out of the parking lot.

  The police came about 20 minutes later and filed a report. My boss came 30 minutes after they left and demanded I finish the remaining three hours of my shift, which I did before stealing $25 of my own plus Canadian cigarettes and a bottle of Polish vodka. That was my compensation for nearly losing my life for $8 an hour.

  When I got home, I brought the vodka and a two-liter of Coke out onto the balcony and chain-smoked cigarettes until I was good and drunk. Scott’s lights were still off and I assumed he was out on a date somewhere, most likely spending more on dinner than I ever had, just so he could spite me. I wanted nothing more than to tell him about the day I’d had, and how I had come closer to dying than he ever had—and how I had won this particular competition. I laughed a little out loud and accidentally splashed my drink onto the plastic patio table beside me, where the BB gun still laid from last night. My eyes instantly fixated on the weapon, and I saw it differently than I ever had before. What was the allure of a weapon like this? Why were combat and crime and causing harm so inherent to human nature? I wondered if the 300-pound robber ever sat on his balcony with a vodka and Coke and his pistol sitting next to him on a table. Did he think about stuff like this? Did he question himself? Did he question his ability to take another life? Would he really have killed me if I hadn’t given him the money? Did he play with guns as a boy? Did every boy play with guns growing up? How could a species be so indifferent to death and hope to function? How could a species survive with this sort of nonchalant mentality toward taking a life?

  Headlights then appeared from the driveway before extinguishing into the courtyard of fig trees. A car door opened and shut. Black slacks began to walk up the steps to the second floor, illuminated in the midnight ambiance by a yellowed over
head floodlight. I had every intention of reaching for the phone to call Scott and tell him of the robbery the moment he walked in his front door, but I picked up the BB gun and shot him in the thigh instead.

  THE GRILLED CHEESE EPIPHANY

  JOB #28

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Ruby positioned her nipples above the bra cups instead of inside them. It wasn’t for any seductive or provocative reason; she just didn’t know any better. But there they sat all day, every day: two brown, knobby silver dollars behind gossamer cotton, resting atop buckling bra fabric that bulged out almost as far as her small, perched breasts. She was a mousy Vietnamese woman with a thick accent and an online bachelor’s degree in business management, and she sat facing me in the desk five feet from mine. Somehow, at the age of early-30-something, she had never received proper instructions on wearing a bra.

  There were two older women who worked in the small office with us, and neither of them had ever tried to correct our accountant’s camisole disclosure. And I knew they had noticed too; I could see them glancing at her visible nipples almost as frequently as I did. And I think the only reason they didn’t say anything to her was because our office didn’t receive any outside people—no clients, no customers, no walk-ins of any kind. It was just the four of us in that room, and they didn’t want to deal with an awkward situation like that if they didn’t have to. Or perhaps they thought it to be some type of Vietnamese couture.