Sunday, November 1, 2015

Sheets


Somewhere on 23th street I first unloaded sheetrock from a truck where the driver kept strictly to his assignment which was to bring the truck to the address and to unload the slabs onto the sidewalk where I, a boy fourteen years old stood waiting to receive those double slabs, because really sheetrock is delivered in two sheets of gypsum larger than any man and certainly this boy, received each parcel and carried them on front of my chest, as if they were precious glass ready to break. I had never seen sheetrock before and it seemed brittle despite its weight, as if it might break if bent the wrong way, thus I carried it cautiously and clumsily before my chest so that I could always keep an eye on it, and because I had no idea how men carried great weights since the pyramids of Babylon. Only when I finally had the first load down by the freight elevator did the black guy running the thing have mercy on me and ask my why in hell was I carrying the sheets on my chest when everyone else carried them on their back. His tone expressed more a matter of surprise that a white boy, unschooled in the work place, should be made to labor unguided as I did. Was it my ignorance or my youth that disappointed him, a thing that a man from the outer boroughs, accustomed to the ways of the construction site should not have found troubling but somehow he was not used to child labor. Anonymously I loaded the first pile of sheet rock onto the freight elevator, following the operator’s instructions on how to carry each weight, and right he was—the burden was a dozen time easier on your back than across your chest, but who was I to know, the foolish fourteen-year old apprentice of a first-time general contractor. All my life it has been safely assumed that I will figure it out as I go along, from algebra to sheetrock lifting—what if I failed to get it right, no matter, you are doing fine, working man’s encouragement from those around. So there I had received the first lesson, to put the burden on your back, to lean over, bend your knees (that came most naturally) and walk forward swiftly. That indeed is the lesson and the lad has taken to it swiftly.