Carpenter

     (I have worked as a wood butcher several times, rolling logs to the head works in an Idaho sawmill, for a contractor who was obsessed with hunting geese, and as a handydude-remodeler in California and Hawaii. During lunch breaks, while the carpenters were chatty, the drywallers coughed and the painters stared into the distance, I gnawed on my Spam sandwiches and gathered some of their stories. Here is an example from Idaho.)

    “Joe Bung and I and were framing tract houses in Boise for an old-timer who believed that job radios slowed things down. He would not let us have tunes except at lunchtime, which was not included in our hourly pay. He was wrong. Anybody who has ever swung a hammer at a sixteen-penny sinker knows that music is absolutely necessary for the sanity of a person who does the same thing day after day after day. 

    One payday, Joe and I invested in a big ghetto blaster transistor radio when they were new to the market. It had a powerful set of speakers and operated on house current or four D-cell batteries. We strung a cord from the temporary power pole to the middle of one of the living rooms in a two-story duplex we were building, plugged it in and cranked it up, figuring that if the boss showed we would have enough time to shut things down.

     One mid-morning, we were up high toenailing trusses when, sure enough, here came the old dude in his Buick, sliding to a stop on the muddy road. There was no way to climb down to the radio. He came through the cheapo door into the house just as Jimi Hendrix launched into “Purple Haze” at full volume.

Purple haze all in my brain

Lately things, they don’t seem the same

Acting funny, but I don’t know why

‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky

    The old dude stood there for a while, switching his glare from the radio to us up in the rafters, then tromped over to the radio and jerked its power cord it from the splitter. The batteries took over from there.  Jimi never missed a beat.

Purple haze all around
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me

    We looked at each other, figuring on getting fired for sure. The boss stood there staring at the radio that was playing without power, scratching his head. Finally, he looked up at us, kinda grinned and said “Well, he is a stout enough boy anyway,” walked back to the station wagon and drove away. We had a job radio from then on.”