Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

by J. R. Helton

  Later, though, I was painting the outside of the bathroom cabinets, and those magazines were staring me in the face. I took down one of Mr. Abernathy’s Hustlers and shut the bathroom door. I looked at the magazine, found some nice shots of a long-haired brunette with a big round ass, and I stood in front of the mirror and masturbated slowly. After a few minutes, I came in their fake marble sink. I looked at myself there, in my painter’s uniform, for several seconds. I wiped off then, put up the magazine, and started painting again.

  * * *

  I was working in a large custom home on Cat Mountain. The wealthy owner was an old tall German named Karl who followed us around all day watching every move we made. I was in a closet, on my knees, stoned, listlessly painting a baseboard. Karl came into the bedroom and started taking down the red curtains. He began to talk about the current administration and how much he admired it. When he praised our then–attorney general, Ed Meese, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Ed Meese is a Nazi,” I said.

  “Young man,” he said sternly and looked at me, narrowing his eyes. He was standing on a chair, the bloodred curtain draped over his arm. A lock of straight blond hair fell down over one of his eyes. He raised his chin, and the wrinkles disappeared from his neck. “You are talking to a former Nazi,” he said proudly.

  “Oh, uh, I’m sorry.”

  “I was forced to join if only to get a pair of pants. I was a member of the Hitler Youth, and there were many good things about the Youth that you won’t see in your lying history books. Let me tell you, young man, Hitler made us feel good again. He gave Germany something to be proud about. All you know is what you have been taught in your little American schools with your little history books, which is to say, nothing. Hitler tried to make Germany great again and he almost succeeded, so the next time you say your words you should think about them and who you are saying them to.”

  I sat in the closet looking up at Karl on his chair. “Yessir,” I said.

  “Don’t get any more paint on my carpet either. I see it everywhere.”

  “Yessir, I won’t.”

  He strode out of the room, and I went back to painting the baseboard, carefully.

  * * *

  The Synott house was a large Tudor-style home in an older neighborhood. Mr. Synott, an emaciated stick of a man, worked all night at the 3M plant, while his wife, who conversely resembled a right tackle, worked nights at the Brackenridge Hospital downtown. During the day they watched us paint, sat at their kitchen table, and smoked. They smoked so much their ceilings were yellow and brown with tar. All the walls, cabinets, doors, and windows were covered in brown tar. Trash overflowed out of closets, sinks, under beds, over couches, and their eleven–year-old son seemed to run the house. He was fat and wore the same black pants and a dirty Pac-Man T-shirt every day. He ordered his mother or father to fix him a TV dinner and a Pepsi while he sat there transfixed by the television screen, playing video games. That’s all I ever saw the family eat: TV dinners and Pepsis. They had an ancient woman they bullied around and kept holed up in a back room. She was the little boy’s grandmother, the skinny husband’s poor mother.

  Every once in a while they’d let the old woman out, and she’d hobble around the house talking to me. There was something wrong with her back, and she had a huge gut she had to hold up with one hand like a sack of grain. She held a cane in her other hand. Her nose was a long fleshy knob that hung down over her mouth. She made a humming and snorting noise through it, and Jay and I could hear her coming from around corners. She’d ask her daughter-in-law over and over: “Diet Pepsi, please. Can I have a Pepsi? Diet Pepsi, please.”

  The daughter-in-law sat there and smoked and would yell at her husband. He was smoking and playing a video game with the boy on the floor. “Get her a glass of water, dammit! No Pepsi, Grandma!”

  “Diet Pepsi, please.”

  “You can only have water and Fibersol right now.”

  “Oh thank you, a Pepsi please.”

  The grandma had a strong Swedish accent, which she explained to me one day.

  “I’m from New Sweeny. Do you know New Sweeny?”

  I was wiping tar off the den paneling with some toxic chemical. “No ma’am.”

  “It’s out in the country, uh-hmmm, I’m Swedish, mostly Swedes, uh-hmmm, I had a farm but they rent it now, I had a farm, uh-hmmm, maybe a turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, hmmm? I used to work it. I built a wall, an’ the inspector said, uh-hmmm, that’s the best wall he ever seen, yes, hmmm. It don’t go no more. Nice sweet family, my boy rents it, but it’s my farm still, uh-hmmm, up in New Sweeny. You know New Sweeny?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “I ain’t seen it inna long time, no. They wanted me to build a road, county said, you gotta build a new road, an’ I said okay, an’ I built it. Cost me a lotta money, uh-hmm, yes, but I built it. I farmed there all my life. I helped build the walls, my boys help me. He used to fish, you like to fish?”

  “Yes ma’am, I like to fish.”

  The daughter-in-law called out: “Granny, you leave those men alone!”

  “Oh yes, uh-hmmm, oh yes, we gotta tank. We made that tank an’ put fish in it. It don’t go no more. My boy, he just like his daddy. My husband, you know, he was crazy. That’s not right. He beat me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Granny, leave the painters alone!”

  “Uh-hmmm, he beat me all the time, yes. He broke my nose he did. Three times. He was crazy. I don’t know what to do. I work so hard all the time, four children an’ the farm an’ the house an’ the tank, an’ he still beat me. An’ he beat the children too, uh-hmmm, an’ I told the church, an’ I don’t go to no church but they know ’cuz I told ’em, an’ they took him away, an’ you know, he died? Right later, uh-hmmm, he died. Something broke in his head.”

  The daughter-in-law came up and told Granny to go back to her room. “I told you to leave them alone.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “She’s not bothering us,” Jay said.

  The woman insisted. “She has to go back.”

  “Okay, yes, uh-hmmm,” Granny said. She started hobbling down the hall, trying to step over the trash. I let her hold on to my arm and helped her to the back of the house.

  “It don’t go no more. I’m sorry. I can’t work no more. I work all my life. I run that farm all by myself an’ raised the boys.” She looked at me. I saw she had blue eyes deep down in her face. “I’m sorry, I work all my life. It don’t go no more.”

  “It’s all right, Granny.”

  I opened the door to her back room. A strong fecal smell hit me in the face. There was no light. A small plastic toilet on wheels sat in the middle of the room surrounded by wads of stained toilet paper. The carpet was littered with trash, TV dinners, cans of Fibersol. As I helped the old woman to her bed I noticed quite a few beer cans piled near her headboard.

  “You like to have a beer every now and then?”

  “Oh yes, uh-hmmm, my grandson will give me one, a Diet Pepsi. I’m sorry, it don’t go no more. Will you paint my room?”

  “We’ll paint it tomorrow.”

  She turned her head to the wall. I stepped over the trash and shut the door quietly behind me. I walked out of the house and to the LTD at the street. I left my paintbrushes there, my little tool bag full of putty knives and mud blades. I didn’t even say good-bye to Jay.

  * * *

  I figured Susan would be pissed that I quit my job, but as it turned out, she wanted to quit her job also, and it was sort of my fault. I knew she hated selling classifieds at the paper and was miserable there. I was the one who had been encouraging her to use her family connections through her mother or her uncle Martin to maybe try to get a job in the film business. If not as an actress, I figured they could at least get her on a crew, a real paying job on a real movie, as the business was just starting to take off in Austin. I suggested she ask Betty Sue to ask Martin, and eventually, apparently, she had
. I shouldn’t have been surprised or pissed but I was both, especially when she told me she could get on a show but she was not going to get paid after all, that she was quitting the Austin Times-Tribune to work as an intern on a pilot for a TV series that Martin had written for CBS.

  I shook my head. “Susan, you can’t work for free. This sounds like Dwayne Coleridge and his crappy art-house-indie-movie bullshit.”

  “No,” she said, adamant. “That is not it at all. This is how you get into the real film business. Martin works on real movies, or, mostly real TV, but he said television sometimes pays even better. And if you can get just one movie, just one TV show on your résumé, then you’re in and start getting paid, maybe even on the same movie, halfway into it, if they see you working, if you make yourself indispensable.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t even get a decent car or pay the rent for this little playhouse. How the hell can we afford for you to be an intern on some TV show?”

  “Well . . .” she hesitated, “you know my mom was staying in Martin’s backhouse but she’s moving back to Cypress. Martin just said we could move in there now though, for a while. He’s got this cute little cottage behind his house, and he said we could stay there for free.”

  “I am not gonna sponge off that guy.”

  Her mouth tightened. “It’s not sponging,” she said, and then her voice softened. “Besides, he likes you, Jake. Martin likes you. He gave you all of those nice jackets of his, that camel hair coat.”

  “They didn’t fit.”

  “Maybe he could even help you get an agent or something. In fact I know he could help you get an agent.”

  “I don’t need his help.”

  “I know you don’t, but it’s just . . . he’s a real writer like my dad was and—”

  “So I’m not a real writer now?”

  “Come on, you know that’s not what I meant. You know I love your stuff. But seriously, he’s rich. He’s a well-published screenwriter and a producer. He’s connected. He could really help you. He could help both of us. Okay?” She sounded a little desperate. “He has that beautiful house in Westlake, and my mother already works for him.” She looked around our little roach-filled one-room efficiency cabin. “We could get out of this fucking place.”

  I glanced about the room. It was better than the El Madrid apartment but still pretty grim, and even smaller. I thought about it, all of it, long and hard. I lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t think so.” This was the wrong answer, and I could see she was getting pissed, which just made me angry also. “I think I’m gonna hit the road. And listen, I’m gonna take the LTD. I’m sure your mother, or that real writer ‘Uncle Martin,’ can help you get around now, if you wanna go live with him.”

  “Fine,” she said. “You can have that piece-of-shit car.”

  I packed a little canvas laundry bag, right then, and Susan started crying, and I drove away. My grand gesture didn’t get me very far, though. The odometer, and many other things, had stopped working years ago on the ’72 LTD. The two-door behemoth had a 400 V-8 in it that drank and leaked so much oil I didn’t even bother to change it anymore. The black fluid poured out from beneath the car as I drove. Whenever I parked, so much oil dripped out that I had to put a fresh piece of cardboard under the engine at almost every house I’d ever painted so as not to soil the street or driveway in front of any customer’s home. I always kept at least two cans of 10W-30 motor oil in the backseat and would pour one in regularly, pulling the dipstick and checking it every other day I drove that car. I must have forgotten to pour in a can though, here or there—two or three cans—something happened. I made it only ten miles, just above North Austin off the Highway 360 loop, before the LTD threw a rod and finally died.

  There were many fly-by-night, one- or two-man businesses on the outer edges of cities in Texas that often sprang up along the main freeways, I-10 cutting through San Antonio from east to west, or the I-35 corridor running into Austin from south to north. Most of these men sold raw materials from the surrounding countryside or articles shipped in cheap on trucks from Mexico. There were flagstone businesses that were nothing other than a dozen large piles of carefully stacked white and yellow limestone not twenty yards off the freeway access road with a handpainted sign on a four-by-eight-foot piece of plywood that read “Mike’s Rocks.” Most of them also had at least one small construction trailer or a mobile home along with whatever their material was—say, ten large conical piles of dark-brown soil next to a dump truck, one small bulldozer, and another sign, “Bert’s Dirts.”

  Some only had a large tent as an “office,” and they were surrounded by dozens of poorly executed wooden chainsaw sculptures of bears, eagles, and other animals carved quickly out of large logs of cedar or cypress. Or someone had cut dozens of leaning-cowboy silhouettes, large lone stars, or the shape of the state of Texas out of steel with a blowtorch and painted them black or red, white, and blue, and they were selling them, right next to another business of concrete lawn figures and fountains and a metal prefab building that had a crew of undocumented Mexican workers in it, cranking them out of a concrete mixer and molds with one white guy ordering them around who had hired them all for peanuts. The businesses that had at least graduated to a building, whether sheet metal or wooden, sometimes became more established and stuck around, but most of these operations tore themselves down, packed up, and disappeared as fast as they had arrived.

  This business was called Danny’s Grass and Wood. It was in the northern part of Austin, off the 360 Loop, past 183. It consisted primarily of a few large hills of unstacked cut live-oak firewood and two, long, parallel rows of St. Augustine grass on pallets, with a new white construction trailer out front, right off the freeway, and a smaller, dingy mobile home behind it. The proprietor’s name was—Danny. He was about forty-two, forty-three, and, he told me, an official born-again Christian.

  “You get a lot more business being born-again,” Danny said. “I’ve been looking through the Christian yellow pages, and there’s this whole network of Christian businesses you can hook up with.”

  We sat in his office, the little trailer off the freeway. Danny told me about his life while we smoked a joint. He’d been a welder for most of it in South Texas. Ten years before, he smuggled dope in trucks into New Mexico. “I got into a fight one day in Santa Rosa with a bunch of Indians. One of them took a brick and knocked my whole jaw off. See, I’ve had reconstructive surgery. They had to rebuild my entire jaw. These aren’t my real teeth either.” He turned his head and showed me where they’d stitched him together. I could see the pink scars. His face had a plastic, rubbery shine to it and moved in the wrong directions whenever he talked. “They took a bunch of skin off of the back of my legs and used it on my face,” he said.

  He took me behind his office and showed me the old mobile home. “You can stay in here.” We went inside. It was a one-room place with a cot, a hotplate, a card table, and a fold-out chair. A tiny old TV with a long antenna sat on top of a crate in a corner. The whole place smelled like beer vomit. “I’ll pay you five-fifty an hour.”

  * * *

  It was October. Danny said he usually sold St. Augustine grass and firewood, but he was going to try pumpkins for Halloween. A truck and trailer pulled in one day and backed up to the yard. Danny had just hired another worker named Vicente. He was young, from Guatemala, and spoke no English.

  “He lives somewhere around the corner, I think,” Danny said to me. “It’s great ’cuz he can walk to work. The cash I give him is a lot of money in his country.”

  We worked all day on unloading the pumpkins. There were many rotten ones that broke and reeked. Once we were through, Vicente had to go around and pick up all the rotten pumpkins, throw the orange-and-black goop into a wheelbarrow, and dump it in the backyard. Danny said he had a special job for me.

  “I want you to go down to Smithville Grass and Wood.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “They’re my main competitors
, and they’re bastards. Everything they sell is at the lowest possible price. They’re just a bunch of cedar choppers, and they’ll act like they’re dumb, but don’t let the old man trick you. He’s a tough businessman. I want you to go down there and tell him you want to buy a pumpkin and get their prices. Be real casual.”

  I got in one of the two flatbed trucks Danny owned and drove up 183 to Smithville Grass and Wood. It was definitely a more permanent, storelike operation, with a long metal three-sided warehouse behind it filled with all their stacked firewood and green grass ready to go on pallets. They even had a large wooden one-story cabin up front that served as an office and some sort of general store that sold mostly red-white-and-blue caps, T-shirts, more leaning metal cowboys and lone stars, the standard cheap Texana bullshit. They also already had many neatly stacked piles of pumpkins for sale. A skinny old hillbilly, Mr. Smithville, came out smiling and greeted me personally. He showed me his pumpkins proudly. I asked a few questions as if ready to buy but then said I had to bring my kids back to pick out the pumpkins they wanted. The smile dropped off his face. He thanked me and walked away. I drove back to Danny’s Grass and Wood.

  “He’s charging fifteen cents a pound.”

  “Fifteen cents!? Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t get it wrong?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Fifteen cents.”

  “Well, shit. I can’t charge that low. Go check out the prices at the Tom Thumb grocery.”

  I got back in the truck, drove to the store, found out the prices, and came back.

  “Thirteen cents a pound.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch! Are you sure?” He looked at me suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re not wrong? Huh?”

  “No, I’m not wrong.”

  “I can’t beat that. I’m gonna have to charge twenty cents to make a decent profit. What do you think of that? You think that’s good?”