Summer Jobs

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.