After leaving VISTA, I experienced hunger for the first time in my life. I was unemployed, broke, owed money on a pick-up truck, and was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the plywood floor, and without a bathroom except for the back yard for emergencies. I did go swimming for exercise and relaxation at the free local swimming pool. Then Kelly Rolling gave me the keys to an apartment where his workers were doing some work. It had a very nice completed bathroom and only a block away. I was still just out of college then.
I spent a month looking for work close by with no success, the economy was down. My only expenses were food, gasoline, morning coffee, and one beer at night, but when the little money left from three months of VISTA ran out, it was getting serious. I stepped up to the plate, took a hammer, borrowed a good tool belt, and I went looking for construction work.
At least Tucson was expanding in all directions. No house was taller than two stories, so as not to take the view of the mountains away from the neighbor, and the desert land was cheap. The second day I found work by driving up to an apartment complex in the beginning stage of construction full of fresh wood smelling piles of 2x4’s, 4x4’s, and 2x6’s
“I am looking for work.”
The foreman barely looked at me. I had a beard and long hair.
“How much experience in carpentry do you have?”
“Three years,” I lied a little. I have cut wood and nailed many nails in my life, but not more of a few months of continuous woodwork anywhere.
He sent me to Paul, who sent me to Raul “over there.”
I didn’t know it then, but he wanted to get rid of me. The guy over there was one of the meanest looking assholes I had ever encountered. I knew there were other construction sites in the City I could go to, but I walked over to the ‘guy over there’ who was leaning over making quick marks with a fat pencil on the edges of 2x4’s slapped together. He had a hard hat that had seen better days, dirty, stained, white, banged up. Plus, heavy duty clothes that had not seen soap water for weeks, a second fat pencil behind his left ear, a wedding ring on his left hand, and a missing finger on his right hand.
“Can you do carpentry?” He asked me without looking up.
“Barely.”
I stood beside him for a few seconds. He didn’t look at me, but then the moment he moved to the next group of 2x4’s, I jumped ahead of him, slapped two of them together and handed them to him. Instead, he chose three different pieces.
“Tomorrow, you must bring a hard hat. Today, we are not even off the ground yet, so no need for one, nothing can fall on your head except yourself,” he replied without looking at me.
I could tell Raul didn’t like me either. He made sure to point out my ignorance, and he was used to ignorant people. It didn’t faze him, but he was not used to the next five hours during which I never left his side, never went for lunch, just like he didn’t, never complained a single time, never rested, never stopped doing things and asking questions, and by the end of the day I was on my own doing many of the things he had been doing by himself. I had asked a thousand questions which at first, he refused to answer, but as time went on he did, as he saw I understood and followed his expertise.
One time he said, “I am not a carpenter. I am an electrician, but my friend over there needed help in a hurry and he called me.” He knew carpentry, and if he was as good with electricity as he was with the power saw, he was a savvy man, finger or no finger. I didn’t work with him again since the next day the foreman assigned me to work with another person. The day after that a different one again.
Soon, I was placed at the head of a small crew whose role was to go back and correct other people’s mistakes. I thought it demeaning, a role no one wanted, they must be ready to kick me out. Then I realized that one of the members of my crew was a lazy old timer, family member of the owner, who did nothing while I did most everything. However, he could point out the mistakes and what to do to fix them, and I realized I was doing a lot of accelerated learning from him.
I would go swimming at Carrillo swimming pool with all the neighborhood kids. Although my muscles were sore, every day I would try to work even harder. My hands were aching and blistered, my arms exhausted, my legs giving me cramps. In two months, I had received three pay raises
To tell you the truth, at that time I never thought of why Jerry, Jose, and friends never showed interest in building things up.
“Yes Sir, no Sir, right away Sir,” was my common replies to everything, but I was driven. I had stamina, curiosity, and eagerness. I quickly learned new things, even if to me it seemed that it was taking too long. At the end of two months, with bigger muscles, calluses on my hands, and seven hundred dollars to my name, I quit. That would last me six months or more, for I had found another thing to do.
“Don’t quit!” the foreman told me. “Do you realize that after you quit, we don’t hire a person a second time?” Famous last words that didn’t hold up, since he rehired me later, in fact several times.
I never reached a full year of carpentry experience, but I gained a sharp eye for picking out mistakes. Another job I was lucky to get was in the polyurethane insulation business with owner Garth Nelson, gaining knowledge on roofing and the containment of heat transfer. That job included a cold tar application on the acres and acres of roofing for IBM for which I was made the General Manager.
The reason I quit in between all these jobs was that by then a series of events had gotten me to start in volunteer basis for the Tucson Barrio Association, which took much of my time.
The culprit was a flyer.
The City of Tucson made a public announcement about a public meeting that would affect the future of the Barrio. How many times does this happens in any person’s life? Their intent was to extend the new convention center past La Plazita Village by bulldozing the rest of the Barrio, however that is not how the flyer was worded. They had done the same thing ten years earlier, and many families remember how their houses or their parent’s houses were destroyed through Eminent Domain to build the freeway and the community center. None of it concerned me. It made sense in the progress of a city, the collective good must supersede the individual comfort, and surviving property values would go up, but not for my benefit, since the house I was working on would be impacted by demolition making further work by me mute.
This was one of the many things that at first, I really did not want to do, to go to any meetings.
“But they didn’t pay enough,” people said. “They run down a place so that they can then buy it cheaper.” Who is the “they” these people were referring to? Little did I know that shortly thereafter, I would temporarily be arguing the other side. I had just heard one reason why many neighborhoods get run down. Are there really people who encourage drugs and crime to fester in certain places for their own self-serving future in real estate values? Over many years, I graduated from one answer to the next answer over again to find a different and deeper answer. This happens when you don’t look deep enough to start with. A very common illness. First, I was told it was the banks doing redlining, a practice declared illegal. Then it was the private insurances companies doing the redlining and therefore, if not insurable, the banks would not give loans. Then it was the Federal Insurance that was withdrawn followed by Republican businessmen or a wealthy landlord, not necessarily Republicans, with political influence. All of it caused depreciating value for future assemblage purposes. Moreover, the Democrats were looking for popular votes from depressed areas in exchange for promises of handouts, depressed areas never improved, while people feared losing the handouts already in existence if they didn’t vote for those offering them. Finally, by poverty pimps now involved in fertile territory. They all contributed to exploiting poverty.
But why? The fact is that slums are sometimes intentionally promoted, and not just by the wealthy, but frequently government people are also involved. This happens worldwide. I am getting ahead of myself. For the longest time, none of it made sense to me. I saw all this poverty that needn’t be. Articles were written and speeches by politicians were given on what to do about poverty, but poverty remained, or even increased, despite piles of money thrown at it. Obviously, I had much to learn, but little did I care, until I was part of it and in due time what I did learn came neither easily nor painlessly. I did learn that things are seldom what they seemed to be, nor what other people tell you they are. It all goes deeper.
By that time, I had become a regular at Cushing Street Bar, three blocks away from my house. People from the Barrio seldom went there. I found out that the information I got from the people at the bar about the purpose of this meeting, and the news I got from my neighbors in the Barrio, were not the same. The words you read in the newspapers and those written in books and magazines held little similarity to the eyewitness you got from the people living their full lives on the said site. Media news are seldom real or accurate. We will see plenty of that.