Getting Your Money's Worth - July 3, 2007
"Come on, BC, time to go." Dressed in dirty jeans, a ripped t-shirt, and old work boots, my father was the antithesis of relaxation. In fact, he looked like the incarnation of hard physical labor.
Defiantly turning the television back on with the remote control, I said, "I don't have to be anywhere today." Emphasizing this point, I gulped a disgusting amount of grape soda and stared insolently.
"We're going to pull weeds at the saw mill to raise money for your senior class party."
Agitated that I was going to miss a morning of made-for-television movies, and growing suspicious that all I was going to do was pull weeds, I grunted, "The kids don't raise money for the party." It was a tradition unbroken for decades.
"Nope, everyone is going to be there, kids too. Dude's coming." A mental image of my childhood friend Dude, bent over in a dirt patch pulling weeds out of the ground, settled in my mind about as comfortably as an image of me in a loving stable relationship with a beautiful woman. It was a scientific impossibility.
"Dude's coming? Now I know you're lying." Back when we were seven or eight, Dude had briefly thought about working, but then had decided the effort was too much trouble.
"BC, don't be a pussy." My father stared at me like an experienced hostage negotiator, waiting for what my next move would say about me in his grand strategy.
I put my hands to my face and groaned. I looked at the ceiling and asked myself, "When will I learn?" I slammed the mason jar on a nearby coffee table, transformed my recliner back into a seat with the efficiency of Optimus Prime, stood up and muttered, "God I fucking hate you." Shuffling to the door, and pulling my shoes onto my feet with as much visible effort as I could muster, I called out, "Did you put the rakes in the back of the truck yet?"
"Not yet."
Under my breath I said something which sounded suspiciously like "cock-sucker" but which my father correctly interpreted to mean that I would get the tools from the garage and put them into the truck. As soon as I got outside, I realized I was still wearing pajama pants and went back inside to change.
The mill at which my father has worked for the past thirty some odd years is less than four miles from my house. In the ten minutes it took to get there, I prepared myself for the arduous day ahead. Having been in the habit of roofing with my father since the age of thirteen, I could only imagine what kind of charity work he had volunteered me for. At least I hadn't been wearing a nice shirt.
The clock turning nine just shortly after we arrived, I saw Dude's mother already in the mill parking lot. Dude was nowhere to be seen. Shaking my head, I opened up the truck door and got out. "Dude's not coming, is he?" I asked.
Dude's mother shook her head perplexedly. "Of course not... parents always raise the money for the senior all-night party." I was not surprised.
Grabbing a shovel and a rake from the back of the truck, I said, "Not this year."
"Okay guys, let's get to it. The other parent volunteers aren't showing up till eleven." Since focusing his will on making life simpler would make too much sense, my father often likes to go out of his way to make tasks more difficult. This generally includes refusing to use cheaper, more modern, methods of doing work and ignoring brief instructions aimed at eliminating trial and error. Sometimes this includes a simple refusal to work the same paltry amount of hours as everyone else. Once when I was a child buying shingles with him for a roof we were going to put on, I stumbled across an invention in the warehouse called a Hurricane Bar. A Hurricane Bar, designed to remove old roofs in a fraction of the time it took to tear them off with a flat-bladed shovel, cost approximately twenty dollars. When I brought this marvelous invention to my father and told him about all the man hours we could save on our upcoming job, and how this simple piece of metal could save us thousands of dollars in the course of years, he cordially invited me to check and see if perhaps my little boy pussy wasn't bleeding all over the place. An hour later I had found myself on a wooden shingle roof, choking on old dust, using a regular flat blade shovel as a pry bar.
Due in part to decades of neglect, several chemicals from the wood planer no one really likes to talk about, and the general evil of my hometown Aberdeen, the weeds outside the mill had been hideously transformed into small, stalwart trees. While my plan to uproot these weeds had previously been to dig around them in a circle and then pry them over with a shovel, my father soon challenged the masculinity of this task. In a matter of a few minutes, I found myself squatting down, bear-hugging weeds the size of mutated hobbits, and then pulling upwards with every tendon on my spine with the fury of Conan. To keep pace, my father worked on a row of weeds directly across from me, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, and encouraged me not to be a "little fucking girl."
Drenched in sweat, and pulling weeds out of the ground like we were warriors from Middle-Earth hell-bent on destroying an evil species of Ent, my father and I made a wonderful impression on the parents who arrived some two hours later. Calling out "watch it, buddy" to the vice principal standing behind me, I threw another tree-like weed high into the air so it landed on a pile behind me.
"Um... Mr. Woods?" My father grunted in acknowledgement, his eyes locked on mine like a bull on a matador. My eyes took in his fury and dared him to bring on more. Neither of us could be compelled to stop pulling.
Standing at a safe distance, watching my father and I pull, grunt and scream, the vice principal said, "Well... umm... the parents volunteers and I are here to pitch in." The vice principal smiled expectantly. Pushing forward with my all, I wrapped my bear hands around the spines of two weeds and pulled. Having reached the end of a small garden section, though there were many sections left to work on, my father was forced to admit defeat.
"Fuck!" my dad kicked a loose bit of shrubbery, in defeat. Unable to see the suddenly frightened look on the face of the vice principal my father continued, "Yeah, okay we'll go talk to Tammy in the front office. She'll check you guys in." As I had predicted, Dale Trevin's mother had come, as had Zach Mervin's and roughly six or seven others... but not their children. I was the only senior who was going to contribute to the senior all-night party. Leaving the weeds up front, my father announced our new agenda.
"Come on everybody, there's a bunch of goddamn thorn bushes by the log ramp."
"Oh my!" said Mrs. Trevin. "I don't know if I dressed appropriately for thorn bushes." These pleas were directed to my father, who in the fashion of a true leader of men, was already in the front office grabbing hard hats for everyone.
Handing out what looked like half-skulls made from hard yellow plastic, my father told everyone what they needed to know to be safe on the mill grounds. "Okay everybody, we're going to go ahead and skip the regular safety talk since we don't have much time." Several people confessed that they did, in fact, have plenty of time, so my father decided to allay their fears with a brief safety chat. "Just don't stand in front of a forklift or nothin' dumb like that, and you'll be fine." Several questions about falling loads or restricted areas were met with the command to "just follow me."
As the weeds in front of the mill had been mutated by time, chemicals, and the mysterious force of small backwater town evil, so too had the thorn bushes. The thorn-forest under the log ramp extended fifteen feet from the river that bordered the mill, and ran the course of nearly a quarter mile along the riverbed. The thorns themselves were nearly half an inch long and gleamed like polished steel.
"Okay, Mr. Woods," said the vice principal trying to put on a reassuring smile that barely hid his total fear, "if you could just show us where we could find some weed whackers we'd be happy to get started on this job."
"Ah hell, you don't need a weed whacker, just watch." Bending down low, and crawling into the vines of twisting knives like a soldier under barbed wire, my father grabbed a bush by its roots. His hand dribbled with blood as he pulled it free from the earth. "See?" he held it high for all to see. Mrs. Trevin gulped.
After several failed attempts to do what my father had done, in which the parents cautiously approached a given branch, tugged on it, and drew back their hand in pain, my father finally conceded that they could all wear gloves. After the gloves were awarded, I calculated that given the depth and length of the thorn bush patch, it would take a mere month and a half for our crew to completely clear out the brush, were we to work eight hours a day, seven days a week.
At times, lost in a forest of sharp branches, smelling only the stench of my own sweat, I could almost swear I heard Mrs. Trevin crying softly in a nearby patch. However, I could not be certain since the thundering of my heart tended to drown out all other sound. Once, I think someone let a branch snap backward without meaning to, and it decapitated the person behind them... or I could just be imagining things.
As the sun approached noon, Mrs. Trevin finally went mad. Covered with dirt, grime, and several of the aforementioned planer chemicals, Mrs. Trevin looked at her watch and began to jump up and down like a cartoon ape with a banana. "It's 12:30!" she cried out. "It's 12:30!" Laughing as though she had snapped under heavy torture, she shook her bleeding arms high in the air above her. "12:30 is lunchtime, I have to go. Don't you see? I have to go. It's lunchtime, and I have errands to run for the rest of the day. I couldn't possibly stay. Nope. I have to go. It's lunchtime." She looked at all the parents, smiling too widely, with irises bordered by an endless ocean of white.
Not bothering to say anything, my father harrumphed contemptuously in the bushes.
I put my arm around Dale's mother. "It's okay now, Mrs. Trevin... he can't hurt you anymore."
"You just see... it's 12:30. I have to go. It's 12:30." Like the Angel of Death, I led her out of the mill, through the front gates, and told her to step into the welcoming light that was her neon red Ford Taurus.
The parents back at the work site had fallen into a state of depression shared only by victims of the Holocaust, or the slaves of ancient Egypt. "I don't know Mr. Woods... there sure is a lot of stuff to clear here... I've got a family to get back to."
"Well, we'll just have to come back for another weekend then," my father offered.
"Oh jeez... I don't know if I can do that, my wife and I have plans to go to the beach next weekend."
"Well, I just think it would be a damn shame if these kids didn't have their party." My father was so good at lying none of the other parents realized it. The charity event wasn't about the party. It was about my father showing all of the assembled volunteers that he was stronger than they were.
For another two hours, the parent volunteers held out, until physical exhaustion finally set in. "Listen, Mr. Woods...your dedication is great and all but we didn't sign up for this. We just wanted to wash cars or something like that. We have to go." They trudged off into the distance like zombies.
It was seven in the evening before my father and I followed suit. We were covered in dirt from head to toe, our legs and arms trembled from the exertion, and we found it hard to focus enough to speak. "How many more weekends you reckon we're going to be doing this, Dad?" I asked.
"About three, I figure." I nodded, knowing that by my father's figuring three meant at least five.
"You know the others aren't coming back, right?" My father grunted his acknowledgement.
We were in the car before I thought to ask the most important question. "How much are they paying you for this anyway? Six grand?" The number was a bit high, but I figured the mill was willing to pitch it in, since it was a charity event and all.
"Five hundred dollars," my father mumbled.
I chuckled, too tired to do anything but be amused at my father. "So, after they get about one hundred and fifty man hours out of us and those parents, we're going to get five-hundred dollars?" I whistled out the window. Say what you will, but my father is one-of-a-kind.
Two months later, when the mill decided they didn't particularly feel like spending money on a weed killer, no one could have ever told that we had been there.
Posted by BC Woods at 12:35 AM
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Your story brings back not-so-fond memories of working with my father during a fund raiser where high school students and their parents paint, cut grass, and perform other easy menial tasks around the grounds of this factory for something like a $10k donation. The first year we participate my father had me limbing trees and digging drainage trenches from 7 AM to 7PM even though none of it was on work list. All the other kids got to show up, splash some paint on a wall for an hour, drink some soda and go home by noon.
Posted by: Guy Fawkes at July 3, 2007 10:55 AM
There is nothing anyone can say to defend "Don't be a pussy". Job well done.
Posted by: SomeGuyNamedMark at July 3, 2007 01:14 PM
Hahaha!
Now I wonder how you spent your 4th of July holidays.
Posted by: Scrybe at July 3, 2007 01:26 PM
Roofing shovels are worth their weight in gold. When we striped our house(last one in a long line of shingle jobs in my youth) we found 1 layer of regular shingle, three layers of roll roofing, and cedar shakes. Oh, and kitchen linoleum over the burn hole by the chimney.
Good times...
Posted by: jowanderlust at July 3, 2007 02:56 PM
I don't know how you kept from murdering both of your parents before you turned 18.
Posted by: BigChops at July 3, 2007 03:36 PM
You know what's a good defense for "don't be a pussy"? A jab to the face. Just to keep him guessing, give him a few straights, then an uppercut in his frilly man-womb. While he's on the ground, urinate on him -- he'll think twice about questioning whether you're a genital inny or outty, won't he?
Posted by: Jake at July 5, 2007 02:07 AM
Don't be a pussy, a little hard work never hurt anyone.
Posted by: Chris at July 5, 2007 12:21 PM
Don't be a pussy, a little hard work never hurt anyone.
Posted by: Chris at July 5, 2007 12:21 PM
If he didn't do anything for your senior class party, you'd be complaining that he didn't give a shit.
BC: Hmm? No, I just think he's funny. That was the point of it: the way he goes about things.
Posted by: Amy at July 8, 2007 11:22 PM
Having contemplated it a lot, I have concluded that vitually the only reason I have done well academically/professionaly is the hard work I had to put in when I was a child. My dad CONSTANTLY had me do shit like this with him, and I was no stranger to working 12 hour days doing grunt labor (my dad is a contractor but works most of the time as a carpenter) at the age of 10 or 11.
You are capable of doing the same, obviously, and in that sense you are lucky you have had many of the fucked up experiences you have had.
PS. For a long time, I was extremely bitter about various things, but I have learned that what a given thing becomes in your mind is based almost entirely on how you choose to approach it mentally. I can think "life is so unfair my dad was a fucking slave master" or I can think "what a good experience, I am thankful for it." Which is more useful? Which will make me happier and more successful in life? I would reccommend thinking about *USEFUL* ways you can think about your mother and various other things that may trouble you.
If you didn't look like an oger, perhaps you would be shallow and vapid like people you hate :)
BC: Did this sound bitter? It was not supposed to, at all.
Posted by: Former Roommate Kevin at July 11, 2007 02:28 PM
Wow, seems like a lot of people really misinterpreted your story. I laughed my ass off. Aberdeen huh? Isn't that where Kurt Cobain grew up?
BC: It is indeed.
Posted by: Horus at July 17, 2007 04:00 PM
What I don't understand is why you are all so willing to go along with your father's stupidity (no offense). When you wanted to use that Hurricane Bar, and he told you were a pussy, why didn't you just say "fuck you, if you want my help, I'm going to be using this." Or for this, you could've pulled the weeds out the normal way or gone out to get a weed whacker. Instead, you play your father's game which, while I can tell you to be much smarter than your father, makes you seem to be no smarter than him.
BC: I never said I was smart.
Posted by: K at August 5, 2007 03:25 PM
Awesome story, it sucks you had to do all that, though. I was surprised to read that you're from Aberdeen... I live just a little ways south.
Posted by: Joseph at September 19, 2007 02:45 AM
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