For a minute there I thought it was gone. If so, it all would’ve been gone.
Yeah, I know the Public Storage that we built is still standing, looming over the Austin Chronicle. Over the course of a few months, alternative journalists and regular construction workers looked over their shoulders, each worried that the other was gonna report them for smoking pot.
But after two dozen years, a building becomes just a building. You don’t clearly recall the brooms and dust, taco trucks and dirty jokes. Where did we carry that Port-A-Potty again? Never has shit been moved so literally and delicately. What was the name of that asshole kid from Manor who ruined a thousand-dollar door trying to install a hydraulic closer? Must’ve drilled 40 holes in that son of a bitch. Some days I drive by without thinking about it at all.
No the last bit was the Congress Mobile Home Park, where a leathery old ex-miner named Colorado climbed under my ‘82 Chevy truck and sawed off the catalytic converter, in exchange for a steady stream of Busch beer.
Well, he probably did it for the company, what with Brian being in jail and all.
I drove by again. I took a good look.
Nah, the trailer park is still there, at least for now. The future is settling in just north of it. New construction — condos and coffee shops. It’ll feel just like home to asshole kids from Indianapolis.
This story takes place between the beginning of October and the middle of December in 1996. It was just about 10 weeks.
I’m pushing 50 and these days, 10 weeks are gone before you turn around. The years go almost as fast, memories vanishing under a roiling wake of stress and responsibility. A quarter-century ago, I had equal parts nothing and nothing to lose.
And I remember.
* * * * *My clothes were clean.
I had driven from Hyde Park to South First and Oltorf, unshaven and hungover. I walked into the day labor hall at 5 a.m. in worn jeans and old flannel. Labor Ready was crowded with broke men — those broken by circumstance and those broken by hard living. There was only one guy in there who could and did walk away from successful journalism job. Still, with the right attitude and my quiet nature, I figured I’d be just another guy looking for work. It took me most of an hour to understand why I still stood out.
By then I’d been selected for a work crew cleaning up a construction site at East 41st and Interstate 35. I had a truck and so I was driving two coworkers back north — one of them was Max.
* * * * *I can’t write about Max. Not and get away with it. He was a young black man who delighted in teaching me the ways of the day labor hall. It took him all of half a minute to figure out I wasn’t really just another hard-up guy.
(Apparently, having a bunch of silver change in the truck console was a dead giveaway. If you haven’t paid for a tallboy with a bunch of dimes and nickels, you’re not really broke.)
I didn’t talk about who I was, though he didn’t stop trying to solve the mystery the whole time. “Why you on skid row?” he asked me daily. He was curious and gregarious and a source of nonstop energy — for talk and mischief, at least. Yet the man was a walking black caricature of himself. He spoke in stereotypes, with the speech patterns and subject matter you’d find in the most unabashedly racist material.
(Max had a sweatshirt with a prominent cross on the chest that he wore sometimes. “Lawd, this is my panhandlin’ shirt,” he told me. Then he demonstrated the Uncle Remus-meets-black preacher routine he said would always get him money — and he was convincing.)
Maybe Max was a hell of an actor. Maybe he was messing with my head. At one point he asked me to scoot a trashcan his way and I literally said “shit, that motherfucker be full” before recoiling in realization that I was imitating his speech. I waited for him to call me out, to give me shit, but he didn’t seem to notice.
I eventually found out his real name was Marvin. I didn’t tease him, instead, I called him “Mad Max.” He never understood the reference, though he seemed to enjoy the notoriety. One day he called me a “95% white boy,” and to my regret I never asked if that was good or bad or what the other five percent was.
I don’t know if he was looking out for me or working the long con. If I had to choose, I’d say Max was my friend.
* * * * *The other guy in the truck, more often than not, was a Hispanic guy named Johnny. Johnny C was a lovable goofball who was just smart enough to not think twice about hiding in a storage unit and pulling a jump scare on a black guy with a wooden broomstick in his hand. He didn’t get hit — but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Johnny C was the sort who physically shrank from me when I yelled at him for smoking pot in my truck while Max and I ate lunch at the H-E-B at the Hancock Center. (Max had to tell me, I was too naive to figure it out.)
Johnny R was a short, quiet guy who had blue ink prison tattoos featuring spider webs and tear drops. Nobody asked him much and he seemed to deeply prefer it that way. Johnny R was the sort who if I had yelled at him for anything they probably would have found my body a few days later in a field in Dove Springs. (Max didn’t have to tell me, I figured that out on my own.)
We had guest stars sometimes. The tall lanky guy whose body was missing something terribly and worked so little and so ineffectively that Max used him as a prop to educate me in the different ways of passing the work day. I remember “Cadillacking” (working steadily but at a snail’s pace) and “Posting Up” (just leaning on the broom everytime the boss wasn’t in sight).
Then there was the country boy from Manor who thought he knew how to do everything. He figured he could worm his way into the ranks of the real construction workers from the day laborers and ended up being the only guy I saw just get outright fired — after the thousand-dollar door incident.
* * * * *
So that was us. The unskilled labor. Most of the time we swept up dust and debris and wiped down walls, starting at the top, which had windows and a view of I-35, and working our way down to the first floor, which was lit like a scene from “Alien.”
We worked from 6 a.m until 3 p.m., taking a half-hour break when the taco truck came at 10 a.m. and another half-hour for lunch at noon. Well, we got paid until 3, but most work petered out about 2 and it was usually about 2:40-something when we eased on out of there.
Still, we were better than the average day labor crew. One Johnny or the other would work hard about half the day. Me, the undiagnosed asthmatic, would happily spend the day in the broom-stirred dust singing Johnny Cash songs. And Max would be here and there, trying to hustle an electrician out of sandwich or something.
At some point, the site management decided that, with a little leadership, we could do more. So we were joined by a second car — Brian and Colorado.
* * * * *Colorado was tall and lanky and craggy, as true a vision of Lonesome Dove’s Pea Eye as I’ve ever seen. He’d been a miner in Colorado during his younger days, thus the nickname.
Brian was a little guy who was just waiting for you to tell him about it. Our new leader was middle-aged and skilled, but had seen some sort of trouble that made it hard for him to get better work.
Two white guys with experience and skill, Brian and Colorado (you just generally said their names together when they weren’t around) were the inseparable stars of the day labor hall. They didn’t have to take a passenger when they went to the job site. They got to pick where they went. When the day was over, they’d go back to the trailer they shared on Far South Congress and drink cans of cold beer, maybe eat something if it’d been a good day.
The work got more interesting after that. There was still plenty of sweeping and cleaning, but it was always interrupted by something the site managers had told Brian to get done. We moved the port-a-potty from one end of the parking lot to the other — the guy with the shakes got to stand and watch on this job. We hauled materials from the parking lot to the lower floors. We did small repairs and installations, sometimes under Brian’s supervision and sometimes not (the kid from Manor and the door).
Hell, we were a unit. For a few weeks, we were the best damn paid-daily team around.
Then one day Colorado drove up by himself.
* * * * *Brian had been arrested on a criminal trespassing charge. And that was all we got. Max pressed for details, Colorado offered none. The four of us stood there. Then Max looked at me. “You the boss man now.”
I looked at Colorado. He just shook his head. This 50-something experienced worker was willing to defer to me if it meant he didn’t have to talk to management. And so it was at 25 years old, I spent a few weeks in charge of the best day labor crew in Austin.
Colorado hung around with us after that, and a few days in, he overheard a running argument I had with Max — I would drive down the I-35 access road for a ways on the way back to the hall, rather than risking the short entrance ramps on the lower deck. My old ‘82 Chevy just didn’t have much acceleration. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I couldn’t trust it to get up to speed.
“Catalytic converter is clogged,” Colorado said.
“The what?” I was not and have never been a car guy.
“Come on over to the trailer tonight,” he said. “I’ll fix you up. Won’t take too long. You buy the beer and I’ll help you out.”
* * * * *
The Congress Mobile Home Park existed then in a swath of Austin that was home to junkyards, tire shops, ramshackle houses and seedy bars. Hill’s Cafe, not too far to the north, was probably the southern edge of respectability. Beverly’s, a few miles south, was the point of no return.
Colorado was sprawled out on the porch of his trailer when I got there at 4 p.m.
“Let me drive her to the store,” he said. And he listened to the engine tell things only he could hear as we chugged back through the park and up Congress Avenue to a convenience store where he was greeted by name.
Colorado retrieved two six-packs of Busch tallboys, set ‘em on the counter and nodded at me. About $10 with tax — or 25% of my take-home pay for the day. He climbed into the truck and poured two of them into a large insulated mug and drank deeply.
I asked him what his plan was.
“I’m going to drink this beer and saw that catalytic converter off.”
“Is that legal?”
“Well, don’t run over any cops and they won’t notice.”
“OK.”
And that’s what happened. He climbed under Old Red with a hacksaw and went to it, emerging every once in awhile to tell a story and take large, cartoonish drinks from his mug. When he got tired, I got under the truck for a little sawing and law-breaking of my own.
Finally, about the time it got too dark to continue, the saw broke through the second side and the clogged converter fell with a clank. Colorado emerged, dirty and grinning.
“There you go, boss.”
I thought about the effort he had put in. “Hell, let me pay you some money.”
“Nah,” he said, eyeing the surviving half of my six-pack. “You gonna take those with you?”
“No, you need them. I’m good.”
* * * * *The rest of my day labor career would unravel over the next couple weeks. I would decide to go visit my parents for Christmas before returning to the journalism world in Southeast Texas. It was good timing — the storage building job was done and they were going to send us to work at some place called “Sun City” next. I would say goodbye to Colorado and I gave Max one of my nicer L.L. Bean jackets to augment his panhandling shirt.
(And, predictably, for the next four years, getting my truck inspected involved asking around until I found somewhere that didn’t lean too hard on the “inspecting” part.)
But at that moment, the night was cool as Old Red rumbled freshly out of the Congress Mobile Home Park and then accelerated up Interstate 35 like a scalded dog.
At the moment, the night was young. I had $30 left in my pocket. There were bars up north. With a little help from a leathery old ex-miner, I was gonna get there fast.