The house that Amber had rented for us was just a few blocks from Melanie’s home. It was actually the second floor apartment of a two family unit, a white colonial with a two story front and back porch. The house was far from modern in its finish with its beige paint and its plaster and plastic tiled walls both in the kitchen and the bathroom, not to mention the old white painted cupboards in the kitchen, but the rent was cheap (four hundred dollars a month) and the neighborhood was safe enough. The floors were oak and cold to the bottom of our feet in the mornings and the bathroom tub was a squat, but deep, claw-foot cast-iron antique, but Sarah loved the tub because she could fill it to her neck and almost swim in it. For me it was too short and caused me to bump my knees to my chin when I sat, but as there was no shower I resigned myself to get used to this little discomfort.
The apartment came furnished with beds and dressers and the drabbest of plaid living room furniture which we were welcome to replace if we wished so long as we didn’t discard the old (but rather stored it in the basement). As funds were dwindling and I had not yet found a cash-paying job I resigned myself to the poverty of our situation indefinitely.
We celebrated that Christmas at Melanie’s house as well. Sarah helped Melanie in the kitchen while I sat lazily in the living room watching holiday movies in between stoking the fire. Amber had promised to stop by, but as I expected she failed to show and once again I felt like the forlorn lover. But with Melanie at my side and Sarah sandwiched between us we almost seemed like a family. Melanie’s actual family had discarded her as the black sheep after she left what she described as an abusive home life as soon as she turned eighteen. She had no family to speak of except for the dysfunctional fraternity of girls with which she danced, and of course
Amber. So the holiday was a bit melancholy for all of us as Sarah and I mourned our first Christmas without Catherine. By the end of the night, filled with a glorious turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and cheese covered cauliflower and too much spiked eggnog, I fell asleep with my head on Melanie’s lap, her fingers stroking and combing through the hair on my head, and Sarah asleep on my lap; the three lost shepherds.
After the holidays I began to look for work. I wondered what sort of work I would be able to find with my undocumented status. I was worth little more than an illegal immigrant. I had no skills to speak of when it came to manual labor. Sure I had assisted my father while he did electrical wiring when I was a boy but I had learned very little besides pulling wire and installing receptacles. Furthermore, it was such hard and grueling work and I watched my father get zapped with electrical current on many occasions and although he took it like a man I could tell by his grimace that the experience was not a pleasant one. But truthfully there were few options. I could go back to guarding Melanie but that whole affair was a time bomb waiting to explode.
I scoured the newspaper for labor ads and called one after another from the house phone that Melanie had put in her name (the apartment was also leased in her name as were the other utilities). As I phoned potential employers I disregarded all of the companies that had receptionists to answer their phones. I knew that those companies were too big to consider paying me under the table. When I ran out of ads from the newspaper I scoured the phone directory. I dialed number after number until I heard a grungy sounding workman-like voice.
“Tony’s Electric.” It sounded to me as if I had called him on his cell phone as I heard noises in the background (the shrill high pitched squeal of a circular saw and the pounding of a hammer) that indicated that he was at a construction site.
“Are you hiring?”
I heard an extended breath, “I might need a laborer.” He said with a Bostonian sounding accent.
“How much does it pay?”
“How many years have you worked in the trade?”
“Four summers…with my father.” “Maybe ten bucks an hour for the right person.”
“Can you pay cash?”
“Are you from the labor department? No, I can’t pay cash.”
“I really need the job.”
“When can you meet me? I gotta see if you got what it takes.”
“What does it take?”
“Hard work. Show up on time. Don’t ask, just do. That’s what it takes!”
I met Tony at a fast-food restaurant about twenty minutes from my house. He was a large hulking Italian man with a wide squat nose and a broad bull face. He had dark skin and a husky build. I was immediately intimidated by him. My interview consisted of Tony grabbing my wrists and looking at my “pussy” hands and telling me that I wasn’t cut out for the kind of labor he needed; to which I replied with a tone of desperation:
“I need the job.”
“What are you, like forty? You said you worked two summers with your old man. I thought you was a kid. Don’t you have nothing you know how to do at your age?”
“Four summers…and I’ve been away.” “Ohhh no! I don’t hire ex-cons!” He said, rolling his eyes, and he abruptly stood up and started to walk away.
I reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. When he turned back toward me I thought he was going to clump me on the head. I timidly spoke, “I wasn’t in prison.” He brushed my hand from his back like he was shooing away a fly, “I’m an alcoholic. I was drunk for most of the last twenty years but I’ve been sober for over a year.” I felt bad for telling such a blatant lie, but I couldn’t very well tell him the truth.
“Why do you want to get paid under the table?”
“I got an ex-wife who will garnish my wages for alimony if she finds me. At ten bucks an hour I’ll barely make enough money to feed myself.”
“I got one a those too!” he said pursing his lips and furrowing his brow in an exaggerated sympathetic frown.
“A what?”
“A ex-wife.” He shook his thick head indicating that he thought he was about to make a huge mistake, “In cash the job pays eight-fifty an hour. If you can’t make it to work on time I’ll can ya. If you’re lazy I’ll can ya too. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you tomorrow at seven in the morning with an address. I start at eight. Don’t be late. And no drinkin. I smell alcohol on your breath and I’ll can ya too.”
He turned and left and that was the end of my interview. I was so giddy that I had landed a job and that I could continue to survive that I hurried home and I took Sarah out for an ice-cream sundae, the first splurge since we had arrived in Kansas.
The work-days were long and the work was hard but I made enough money to pay my bills. And Tony, despite his direct and hardnosed approach, was a nice guy. He said that he had worked by himself for ten years until I called him. “You caught me on the right day.” He said. He had received a few dozen phone calls a year from people looking for work but I was the first he had hired. He didn’t want to run a company, he said, he just wanted to do what he knew how to do and get paid for it.
He hadn’t initially intended to teach me anything. He figured he would just use me to run for tools and to be an extra set of hands, and by the looks of his hands, hard and course and nicked and scarred in so many places, he needed an extra set of hands; but he took a liking to me and he started to show me how to fish wire with fiberglass rods; that is long plastic sticks the thickness of a pencil screwed together. We would drill a hole in the floor and shove the rods into the wall and then we would cut a box out where a receptacle would eventually go and we would retrieve the rods and pull the wire up to our opening.