FROM BOY TO MAN

FROM BOY TO MAN(L DOUGLAS ST OURS) FROM BOY TO MAN

During the summers of 1966 and 67
I hoped and strived for a toughening up
as I pushed and bruised my body
shedding sweat and spilling blood
digging gritty ditches,
pouring heavy cement,
grading dark basements,
insulating stifling attics,
parching cinderblock foundations,
swabbing boiling tar,
assembling masonry scaffolding,
connecting sewer pipe sections,
constructing support beams,
carrying hod and hoisting steel,
setting concrete lintels,
lifting shingle stacks,
chalking saw lines,
leveling door jams,
plumbing partitions,
laying oak flooring,
flushing wall plates,
nailing down trusses,
ripping plywood,
cutting studs and tacking 4 x 8s
smashing my left thumb,
breaking my index finger,
suffering shoulder bursitis,
gagging on sawdust,
dying of thirst and dodging debris.

The rest of my teenage peers,
who needed summer jobs, opted for retail,
but I had no interest kowtowing and waiting on grumpy people
while earning less pay than I'd make in a real man's job.

All the fatigue, filth, hazards, close calls, and confrontations
offered me enough links in the chain of growing up
to pull myself from boy to man.

Initially unskilled and tentative with a shovel,
I learned fast thanks to the coarse camaraderie
and at first indecipherable lingo
of the older, illiterate, and wiser black laborers stooped and yet strong.
I was one week from turning sixteen the day I started
with the labor gang whose cackling and blabbering
turned to stunned silence as disbelieving eyes
sized up this skinny white boy about to share in their toil.

Skinny Jim broke the ice and babbled an effusively unintelligible greeting.
As I watched his lips move, he pulled from his torn and soiled pocket
and then offered me his melted peanut chew, I couldn't say no thanks.
As our body odors blended I got acclimated to the stink
and after a week or so I even understood enough
of what they were saying to join them in their dialogue.

Skinny Jim would constantly ridicule the dire situations
and peculiar personality traits of the other men as trivial tripe.
To him nothing was sacred whether it was Billy Mouth's bitter resentments,
Big Bob's ex-con swagger, Smilin Joe's pork pie hat,
Shot Man's shakes, or Snake Man's fear of snakes.

While chipping stone and moving dirt,
the black laborers' competing, clamoring gabfest
revealed and made me respect the lives
of dropouts, jailbirds, drunkards, and womanizers.
Why Skinny Jim claimed to have sired nineteen children
by sixteen different women and he was only thirty-five.
The one woman he had yet to seduce and most set his heart on was Diana Ross of the Supremes.
She was out of reach, though he said if getting her meant walking to Detroit, he'd do so in a heartbeat.

With the exception of Billy Mouth, the youngest,
all the men at some point in their lives witnessed
and hesitated describing to me the terror of a lynching.

At twenty-three Billy Mouth was intensely angry and full of bluster over his station in life.
After he figured I was not a spy or a threat, he'd bitch and cuss
over all the breaks the whites enjoyed while
glaring at me as if it was my fault.
When he carried his grievances too far,
Shot Man, the oldest, would warn Billy to
"knock off that shit before Jackie gets wind of your shit and cans your mothaf**kin ass."

They took their pay in cash and couldn't tell a check from toilet paper.
Shot and Snake were so illiterate they could neither read nor sign their own names.
I remember bringing up the subject of banks
and Skinny Jim laughed and retorted that the only banks
he believed in were the ones you could fish from.

Once Shot Man needed to take a measurement of a trench's depth
and asked Skinny Jim for a ruler and Jim burst into a loud guffaw
and said "A ruler? You want me to give you a king? You mean a rule?"
And Shot Man angrily shot back "Just gimme that mothaf**kin ruler
before I whup your mothaf**kin ass."

The blacks were segregated and relegated to the inferior, menial, and lowest paying jobs.
In the construction industry...in the south they were the designated beasts of burden
stuck on the bottom and denied access to the skilled trades.

Teamster, painter, plumber, electrician, drywall men, carpenter, and bricklayer positions
were reserved for white men and most of them were unrepentant rednecks
who made sport tormenting "the coloreds" by purposely dropping nails, nuts,
screws, washers, and scraps, not to wound but to rub in
from the upper floors, their privileged perches literally on top.

No females were allowed on the job site which could make things dicey for me.
At that youthful age I was relatively hairless and on the dog days wore shorts
inciting Big Bob, a hardened parolee, to tell me to put on my "high heel sneakers."

"what?"

It was oddly funny until he got so depraved
I had to fend off Big Bob's sodomite cravings
with the threat that if he so much as touched me
I'd put the claw end of my hammer into his skull.
Eventually he got the message and left me alone
to my immense relief because he was three times my strength.

I recall Big Bob telling Skinny Jim to watch out
cause some of those desirable girls could be dudes in drag.
Skinny Jim just laughed and said
"Bob if that was ever the case, I'd just flip em over."

When ever I worked with the whites,
I'd hear the redundant cheating heart
okie twang honky-tonk country music
often spiced with the static emission of their transistor radios.
They hated them disrespectful of Jesus Beatles
so I kept my mouth shut regarding my music preferences.
Fist fights were so common among the whites,
it was like getting stuck in the middle of a hockey match without the ice.

Nothing made me hungrier than grueling physical labor especially on a hundred degree day.
On one sweltering afternoon
I devoured three bologna and cheese sandwiches, a banana, a coke, and a couple of cupcakes.
Right after that mega-lunch I was swinging eight foot plywood sheets
from a flatbed truck up to the carpenters on a three story roof.
I had to keep up with four framers tacking the sheets to rafters
but I was getting progressively weaker and dizzy
when after clearing the truck, I had to climb up on the roof to drag sheets from the front to the steeper pitch rear.
I reluctantly informed Jackie that I was about to faint.
Jackie told me to sit a spell on the peak and advised me
in the future lay off heavy lunches in the middle of a heat wave.

We neither owned nor deployed cranes,
instead the two races mixed and combined our power
when lifting balky trusses on to the wall plates,
a third of us out on the truck relaying to a third inside
and they then lifting to the third manning the walls,
a designated guy strong like Big Bob used a forked stud
for the final lifts...shoulder and head injuries were commonplace.

The toughest task to master and the one I liked the most
was laying tongue and groove oak flooring.
Unlike soft pine, you couldn't hammer and nail hard oak.
After the shell was under roof but prior to partitioning the interior,
I'd bend my back all day setting slats and kicking them flush
with the heel of my boot then pounding them in place
with the rubber end of a three pound mallet.

Then I'd position a heavy and tracked percussion contraption
with a plunger and a spring and a slot in which I'd feed a bandolier of metal spikes.
I'd flip the mallet to its steel hammer head and then swing it as hard as I could
striking the plunger and diagonally driving and completely imbedding the three inch spikes
again and again like human machine gun securing the oak to the subfloor and joists.

It was a royal pain if you slipped and didn't catch it right, you'd have to stop,
drop the equipment, yank the spike, reset the oak or if splintered replace it.
One day I was partnered with Clete, a sullen 26 year old veteran of frame
and trim carpentry who was at the time smoldering and bitter over
getting stuck paying for his old man's burial.

Clete covered the west side of the house while I covered the east.
Now Clete swung a mean hammer but every fifteen minutes
he'd drop his tools and indulge in a cigarette break.
In the mean time I laid rows relentlessly, furiously humping
and pumping surging well ahead of Clete's production.
By early that afternoon I had an impressive twenty line lead on him.

We had an hour till quitting time
Clete paused and leaned against an unframed window
and started into his third pack of smokes.
We were deep in the woods
so when Clete said "Hey kid! Come here! Ya wanna see a deer?"
Whitetails were rare then so I let go of my tools.
"Sure! Where?" as I leaned out the window
Clete pulled a switchblade and stuck it to my throat
and swore he'd slice me ear to ear
if I didn't let him catch up. I did.

Threats, injuries, and harassments all came with the turf
but I never gave in. I never quit.
By the end of the second summer
I could by myself carry and shoulder
a load bearing lintel that normally took four men to tote waist high coffin style.
I only tried that once on a bet and it cut into my bone
through two shirts but I won the bet.

I didn't realize it then but breathing all that sawdust, fiber glass, tar fumes,
and asbestos probably wreaked havoc on my lungs. It wasn't until my second year
that Lyndon Johnson's O.S.H.A. legislation got enacted. It's enforcement caused Jackie
to cuss up a storm over "guhmint's" interference in a man's business...that was when Jackie
was compelled by the new law to buy us helmets, face masks, and crush proof boots.

I was so proud the day
I could consistently sink
with one lick of my 22 ounce hammer
sixteen penny commons into a ceiling beam of milled two by twelves.

By L DOUGLAS ST OURS
April 2010