Summer Jobs
Golden
spoon? What’s that? In my circle, the only golden spoon was a shovel, and you
dug with it. And you dug, and dug, and dug until either the shovel broke or
your lower back broke. Few in my neighborhood had the luxury of wiling away our
summers at the beach or lounging about at a parents second home in the country.
My first
paying job was a paper-route delivery boy at age fourteen. You got up at five
o’clock in the morning, rode your bicycle to the distribution center, picked up
your papers, and shoved them into the basket located on your handlebars. Then
you delivered them to the customer, got home at seven, bathed, and prepared to
go to school.
I always had
some form of job. At a very early age, my sister and I were assigned various
cleaning assignments around the house we had to complete each day, both before
and after school. However, several jobs I had will forever stick out in my
mind.
One summer,
I got a job with Ebasco Engineering Consultants. I thought with the lofty
company name, I would be assisting some high priced engineer with his intricate
calculations. Instead, on my first day, I was assigned as a ditch digger at a
power plant construction site in Norco, Louisiana, a small community next to
the Mississippi River. It was me and twelve African-Americans digging ditches
all over this construction site from ‘caint see to caint see.’ That is, from
dawn to dusk.
One day I
heard a particularly perplexed superintendent ask his subordinate, “Where are
they?” He was peering into a space I assume we were supposed to dig, and
hadn’t.
“Where’s
who?” asked the redoubtable subordinate.
“Jesus and
the Twelve Apostles; that’s who.” the superintendent shouted back at him. He
was deadly serious. I guess it’s what the upper level employees called our
ditch-digging team.
Another
time, as summer rapidly approached, I realized I had not yet located a job and
the best ones offered in my neighborhood were already taken by more aggressive
youths. I panicked and sought out work wherever I could. Unfortunately, work
was scarcer than hen’s teeth and I spent most of my time begging merchants for
any type of job. Finally, one of my friends suggested he knew of a job as a
swimming instructor at a summer camp populated by the offspring of the
well-healed residents of our city. The only glitch was, an applicant had to
have passed the Red Cross Swimming Instructors examination, something I had not
done, primarily because I could barely swim without consuming great quantities
of a pool’s chlorine water, and would sink like a stone shortly thereafter.
But I really
needed a job, so off to the Red Cross office I trotted to try and obtain an
instructors license without having to undergo either the written or the
in-the-pool swimming examinations. In reality, I didn’t know a swimming stroke
from a cerebral stroke. When I got to the office, for once in my life, my luck
held. I knew I needed an instructor’s manual and the only way the Red Cross
would part with one, was to pass the requisite tests. As I said, I had no time
to study the materials and also, no time to learn how to swim.
The young
lady at the desk was very nice to me and I chatted her up, telling her how much
I needed this job at the rich-kid’s camp. I spied a small pile of instructor’s
manuals sitting atop a credenza behind her desk and knew I had to have one of
those in order to compete for the swimming instructor’s job. Finally, she
excused herself and left her post. I swiped the top manual. Yep; I stole the
damn thing and darted out of the Red Cross building as fast as I could. My
father photostatted the manual for me and the next day I returned the original
to the kind lady saying, “I had found this copy of the instructor’s manual on
the pavement outside your building. Someone must have lost it.”
She looked
at me suspiciously and finally said, “If you had asked, I would have given it
to you.” My first stab at thievery was a total failure.
In the
interim I found out not only did I need the manual, but also I needed merit badges
to bestow on those erstwhile Michael Phelps types who, in my esteemed judgment,
passed the minimal Red Cross requirements for competitive swimming. Back to the
Red Cross I go, this time to get the badges, by any means necessary. The kind
lady at the desk totally surprised me by giving me a whole bunch of the badges
and made me promise to never again come into her office or she would call the
police.
I am quite
sure I am the only ‘certified’ Red Cross swimming instructor who conducted all
of his classes from the side of the pool, never once getting wet, and who
passed out merit badges like ham sandwiches.
The jury, passing on the
prisoner’s life,
Many in the sworn twelve have a
thief or two
Guiltier than them they try.
Shakespeare – Measure for Measure
The final
summer job I will relate to you is not one for the faint of heart. To this day,
when I think of it, I cringe. Apparently, the Sewerage & Water Department
of the City of New Orleans wanted to know the rate of flow of water through
their subsurface sewerage pipes located throughout the city. They contracted
with a company to produce those figures for them, and I was hired by the
successful bidder as the lowest level Indian on the totem pole. The job began
at eight o’clock at night and ended at five in the morning.
When I
showed up for my first night on the job, I immediately noticed a great sigh of
relief on the faces of the other three crew members. I soon discovered why. The
lowest man on the totem pole, unfortunately it was me, had to open up the
man-hole cover located in the middle of a street, climb inside, go down the
iron bars they called steps, and wait at the bottom near the water flow to hear
a second colleague yell at me, “Okay.” He was relaying a signal to me because a
third man had opened a man-hole at the opposite end of the street and was
pouring a red dye into his sewer hole.
When I heard
the “Okay,” I would shine my flashlight into the water, and upon a first
sighting of the red dye flowing past me, I would look up and scream a
responsive, “Okay.” The fourth, and oldest member of the crew, would record the
time between “Okays,” and this procedure determined the rate of flow between
those two points. I would think the City of New Orleans Sewerage Department
could have asked a Sherpa climbing the side of Mount Everest what he thought
the rate of flow was in the sewers of New Orleans, versus the method we used,
and my money is on the Sherpa, every time.
If this were
the end, it makes a nice little story. But it ain’t. When I climbed down into
the sewer for the first time, I had my light pointed straight down at the water
running at the bottom of the steps. The immediate thing that got my attention
was the smell. I almost threw up the first time down, but I held my breath for
as long as I could, and survived. Thereafter, the smell became tolerable as my
breath-holding capacity improved.
Also on that
first time down, I noticed my hands and head began to itch like crazy while
waiting for the appearance of the red dye. After calling out the obligatory
“Okay,” I began my ascent and looked at my hands and arms. They were covered
with dirty, grimy, disgusting, ROACHES.
I couldn’t take my hands off of the iron ladder, lest I would fall into the
muck below. So I climbed out of the sewer pipe as quickly as possible, and
began swatting at those filthy beasts scurrying all over my body. That scene
replicated itself every fifteen minutes during the night.
I now know
why the sigh of relief was on the other three faces when I showed up the first
night. One of us, unfortunately me, had to climb down into a three-foot wide
sewer pipe every fifteen minutes, while roaches defiled my body in every
conceivable place. I’m not talking about a little brown roach that scurries
across your path and gives your heart a tiny flutter. I’m talking about the
mother of all roaches that thrive in low, swampy, humid environments. The New
Orleans variety is about two inches long, fat and black, and when you least
expect it, can fly across a room like a hummingbird. It lurks along every
street in the city and will drop on an unsuspecting passerby from the
overhanging oak trees lining the city’s avenues.
Why in the
world would Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville in 1718, establish New
Orleans at this God-forsaken location? He did it so France could control the
entire North American interior, and this was the ideal site he chose. What he
didn’t take into account was the intolerable weather, the low swampy land, the
annual flooding of the Mississippi River, hurricanes that decimate all
structures, and for damn sure, he didn’t take into account those bloody
roaches.
At the end
of my job with the Sewerage Department, I looked like an astronaut ready for
flight, with all of the clothes I had on. I could barely squeeze my body down
the three-foot sewer pipe. Of course, it was ninety-something degree
temperature with the humidity approaching one hundred percent. Many times I
would yell out “Okay,” long before the red dye had reached me.
I attribute
the fact New Orleans tends to flood every time a bird urinates, or possibly
when it has a hard rain, to the total inaccuracy of the study done during the
summer of my youth. One day the entire city will probably float away into the
Gulf of Mexico, but I’ll bet a dollar to a donut the three hundred million year
old cockroach will survive.
