By Jim Hagarty
How well I remember my first job.
My mother had a cousin who owned a bridge construction company and after a brief phone call, I was hired during the summer of 1967 to build a bridge. In retrospect, I wish my mother had had a cousin who owned a company which inspected bikinis at the beach, but that was the luck of the draw. I do not remember being consulted in the matter.
I was 16 and blessed with the maturity level of an eight year old. I was a reluctant hire. I just wanted to spend the summer riding around our farm on a tractor, which had always been my happy fate.
The job site was 40 miles from my home so a boarding house in the city was found for me. A wonderful inner city house I shared with 11 other guys, all grown men. The landlady was German and sauerkraut and other ethnic delights were served at every meal. I hated absolutely every single morsel she presented for our consumption but it wouldn’t have mattered if anything had appealed to me. Those 11 big hungry men stripped that gigantic table cleaner and quicker than a pride of lions laying waste to a poor wildebeest. So I starved every day for two months. I also starved every night. There were no fast food restaurants just around the corner.
I shared a bedroom with a certifiably insane individual named Clarence who pissed me off 24/7. I also worked with him at the construction job and one day I couldn’t take it any more. I removed my hard hat in the construction shack and whacked him on the bare head with it as hard as I could. This had the effect of unleashing the considerable boxing skills of madman Clarence and I regretted the hard hat decision immediately.
However, money has a way of curing a lot of ills and I was pulling down a handsome $1.65 an hour to compensate me for my amazing work ethic. A good portion of that windfall was used to pay for the privilege of sharing a bedroom with wily boxer Clarence.
We started each day at 7 a.m. and worked till 5 p.m. unless we were pouring concrete in which case we worked till dark. I worked twice as hard as I had ever worked which turned to be half as hard as my boss thought I should work. Every minute was like an hour so basically, I worked 600 hours a day.
We built a freeway overpass and these days, almost 50 years later, whenever I happen to drive under that very same structure, I remember one other feature of my first summer job.
I cried myself to sleep most nights.
Especially after Clarence my roommate and sometimes boxing opponent got mad at a bird chirping in a tree outside our bedroom window one morning and wisely threw his workboot right through the window to clobber the bird, forgetting, of course, to open the window first. To punish us, the landlady refused to replace the glass. The August nights that summer were unusually chilly. Our blankets were blankets in name only. More like one sheer curtain each.
I froze my sorry butt off.
The same ass Clarence kicked after the famous hard hat incident.
When he was a young teenager, my son got a summer job washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant, putting in a 12-hour shift on his first day.
When I picked him up after work, I asked him how things had gone. He turned and looked at me with the same face I used to see staring back at me from the mirror in the boarding house bathroom.
“Why don’t you just quit?” I asked him.
He looked at me as he might have looked a doctor who just said to him, “Well, we were successful at removing the cancerous growth and you can look forward to a long, healthy life.”
When we got home, he ran to the phone, called the restaurant and quit.
I’m glad he did.
Life’s too short.
The fewer Clarences we meet along the way, the better.
