Saturday December 18, 2004 - Working for the Old Man

Saturday December 18, 2004 - Working for the Old Man

Tacoma, Washington in the summer of 1962 was about 650 miles from where I wanted to be, which was San Francisco, California. But downtown Tacoma was where I was with my folks. My dad, a sergeant in the Army, had been transferred from Ft Bliss near El Paso Texas to Ft. Lewis near Tacoma and we had arrived the first week of June. In the process, my dad had driven our 1951 Oldsmobile carrying the six of us, my three sisters, mom and me, on the 1900-mile journey to our destination. We spent a day and night in Barstow, California visiting Aunt IM and Uncle R. Another day of travel up California 99, the north-south freeway that parallels Interstate 5. Both take you to Sacramento, where we were heading to visit Uncle B and his family, a young daughter and wife with her two sons from a previous marriage. Both sons were a bit older than me, the older very serious and studious and the younger easy going and gregarious. A day and night later and we were off again—I had almost convinced my dad to let me stay with Uncle B but I think Uncle B and his wife were relieved my dad had insisted I come along to Tacoma.

You reconcile yourself to the inevitable and what it turned out to be was an old residential hotel near the heart of downtown Tacoma. Our flat had a couple of bedrooms—one for my mom and dad, a second for my sisters, a living room—where I slept, and a kitchen. Each floor shared a bathroom and toilet—why to this day I don’t like hotel rooms without a bath and toilet. We camped out there for almost two months waiting for housing on Ft. Lewis, about 15 miles south of Tacoma. Back then, bored and missing the familiar routine of El Paso, I read hard-nosed detective novels among other books I purchased at a used book downtown. When I wasn’t reading or hanging out at the Tacoma Public Library on Tacoma Avenue South, I walked the streets of Tacoma, looking for something. What? I have no idea—maybe I was looking for who I was. In the process, I got to know the city but I can’t remember any of the street names or city landmarks—to this day, I love walking all over any city I’m in. Perhaps, most of the time I was walking those streets I was daydreaming about being in California and what I would be doing there. I had a radio that would receive San Francisco stations late at night and I would listen to talk radio and music stations until I fell asleep.

The hotel was run by an older woman in her late forties, early fifties and her husband, who was partially disabled. He did a modest amount of work around the hotel but would get winded easily and she would be on him about exerting himself too much. The two of them seemed to really care for one another and it impressed me. Living there for such a long stretch we got to know the owners and they help find me a part time job working for a friend of theirs who salvaged copper and aluminum wire from electric utilities all over the state of Washington. He had this white 12-foot long flatbed truck with a cab resembling a box with driver and passenger above a gasoline engine. He would pick me up at the hotel while it was still dark outside and I’d climb up into the cab and we’d be off. The old guy was in his sixties and wore bib overalls. He was a big guy over six feet tall with a barrel chest and a midsection spread, all resting on a big frame. He wore a train engineers cap, smoked like a chimney, and loved to talk about everything, where we were going, what we had just past, how the scrap business worked.

Nearly every job was a day trip, after he’d picked me up, we’d put some miles between us and Tacoma, and the sun had begun to rise, he would find a roadside restaurant with a pretty full parking lot and we’d go in and have a great breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, home fried potatoes, and white toast, all served with endless cups of coffee. These meals all came on platters and I would eat my fill. The old man would always remark on how much I could eat and how skinny I was, 28-inch waist and barely 130 pounds, but I was pretty sturdy with strong legs from all my walking and arms that could go awhile without tiring. We would typically come upon the job at a utility power station. I’d wait in the truck and the old man would walk off to find the guy in charge. They would haggle and the old man would return to the truck and drive to a place on lot with a pile of cut up aluminum wire and coiled bunches of insulated copper wire. This is when I would earn my keep. With gloved hands, I’d begin pitching the wire up onto the back of the flatbed with the old man directing my work. The truck bed had removable wooden sides that slotted into metal sockets that ringed the bed..

I’d load the insulated copper wire first, then the aluminum. By the time all the wire was loaded the bed was stacked high and the old man had straps he used to secure the load and ensure none of it fell off on the return trip. If there was still time when we got back to the Seattle-Tacoma area, we’d drive to the scrap metal yard, which I think was in Seattle, anyway somewhere near the water. The old man drove the truck in and it was weighed. I’d unload the aluminum and he drove the truck out and it was weighed again. He picked up a ticket with the amount of aluminum he had dumped in pounds and the yard paid him at daily dollar-per-pound rate for scrap aluminum. We would then drive back to his place, which was located on a hill overlooking Tacoma. He had a pretty good-sized piece of property, which had a nice house and a pretty wife, as well as a large weather-beaten work shed. I liked his wife though she was quiet and at least twenty years younger than he was. In the yard was a collection of things, an old car, an old white washing machine—the round kind with the ringers that resembled two rolling pins on top, among other large items.

Access to the old man’s fenced-off property was up a dirt road. With the copper wire in back he’d pull up to a large metal drum set well back from the house and downwind. The drum was about six foot or more in diameter and it had been sliced on a bias so that it resembled a giant scoop missing a handle. The scoop was cradled in a metal frame and my job was to throw the insulated copper wire into the scoop. Once all the wire was off the truck and in the scoop, the old man would park the truck in the driveway between the house and the shed and he would return. I had doused the insulated wire in the scoop with oil from a 50-gallon drum. The oil was also recycled. The old man would ignite the wire and Tacoma would get a blast of black smoke. I was always amazed by the amount of black smoke that the insulation produce, which was probably toxic as well, but of no consequence now.

After the fire died down, the old man would hit the wire with a high-pressure stream of cold water that would knock the bulk of the insulation from the copper. I would do the rest and then load it back onto the bed of the truck. If there was time we would drive the wire up to a scrap metal dealer—copper returned more per pound than the aluminum. He would drop me off back at the hotel. One weekend I came up to help him at his place. There was a lot of copper wire to be burned and he had a couple of other older men working for him doing other jobs at the house. I saw their car parked at the house when my dad dropped me off. It was a 1950s gray Chevrolet that had the appearance of being heavily used and little cared for. The two workers were brothers, an older, gregarious one—in his early thirties and a quieter twenty-something younger man, with an ever-present smile. For them this was the kind of work that paid their way in the world, but they were industrious and seemed to enjoy working for the old man. We had lunch of soup and sandwiches that the old man’s wife prepared and served for the four of us. The older man would try to engage the woman in conversation but she would smile and reply with short brief answers. She touched the old man’s shoulder when she came by the table to ensure we had everything we needed.

At the end of the day, the old man asked the two men to drop me off at my hotel after he paid us our wages—all the old man’s financial transaction were done in cash from a wad of bills in the pocket of his overalls that he had in a money clip. On the way home, the older man kept talking, much like the old man gabbing about everything with the younger man and me listening. Somewhere during his outpouring he mentioned the old man’s wife by name and asked if I knew anything about her. I said no and the older man began to tell me her story. She had been a drugged out prostitute on the streets of Tacoma when somehow the old man took her in. Since then she’d gotten off drugs, stopped hooking, and settled down to marry the old man. You could see the older man was a bit envious of the old man. When we reached the hotel, it was still too early for dinner so I decide to take a walk before going in to clean up for dinner.

I thought about the old man and his place and I realized that he not only collected things that were no longer wanted, he also collected people—the old man’s wife and the two workers—who saw themselves discarded and forgotten. A few weeks later we moved from the hotel to our housing on the base. I worked one more job for the old man after that and then I never saw him again. I often wonder what became of the four of them.