Slightly more dilapidated

My first car was a Triumph TR7. I wanted a TR6 because my friend’s dad had one that I’d never seen run, but always admired. My budget (sub $500) ruled out the running TR6s listed in the Want ADvertiser in 1986.

“Surely the [...]]]>

Slightly more dilapidated

My first car was a Triumph TR7. I wanted a TR6 because my friend’s dad had one that I’d never seen run, but always admired. My budget (sub $500) ruled out the running TR6s listed in the Want ADvertiser in 1986.

“Surely the TR7 must be an improvement on the TR6!” I thought… So I found myself buying a TR7 from a Quebecois chef on the South Shore of Massachusetts for $480 or so.

It ran… he said the brakes were new… I had a car… Off I went!

Off I went with a push, that is… the starter motor was either missing or kaput, I never found out which… I didn’t have time.

I must have waved a quick bye-bye to the fellow backwards as I adjusted the driver’s side mirror and saw him regaining his height having pushed that hateful vehicle out of his driveway for the last time…

That was the defining characteristic of that car, the absence of a starter motor, or a functioning one. I drove that car for months and never knew if there was one! The state of tune on the twin side draft carburetors was such that with a bit of bump it would fire up just sweet. That was the other defining characteristic of the car;  once it was fired up it ran full tilt boogie until you shut it off.

The bump-start procedure necessitated that I either park on a hill or have a strong passenger. It was a community building car… I had to have a friend willing to ride with me if I was going to go anywhere flat, and that passenger had to be willing to do something they didn’t quite understand the purpose of, but were happy to reap the benefits. My job was to make it worth their while to push my car.

The kid whose dad had a TR6 in the driveway went for a ride with me in the TR7 during a drunken teenage party. He kept swearing that this was what his dad had, and I kept trying to point out the differences, and how what I really wanted was a TR6 like his dad’s, or at least a drop top… then we went airborne off a crest on Thornberry Hill.

Then we drove in a civilized manner back to the party waiting for our puckered anuses to relax. Haven’t heard from the fellow since, but I trust him with my life.

It’s redundant to say that nothing electrical worked reliably on the TR7. In one shining moment at about 5:02 P.M. on a Friday every single electrical system on the chassis sang harmony and I knew this was the moment God had provided me to pass inspection in Massachusetts. I engaged my new-found left directional and swerved enthusiastically into the nearest inspection station, only to find that Lucas’ God, being Anglican, was a few hours off from Puritan time, and I was welcome to come back for another try on Monday.

The electrics were the inciting factor for the demise of the TR7. After the bump start, the temperature gauge would flounder about for a bit, gather its strength, and head unfaltering into the high end of the scale. This took ten seconds. Ten seconds to raise three gallons of water to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. I never trusted it to tell the truth or a lie, and so I never knew if the thing was overheating or not. Sure, in the first few minutes it was obviously not overheating, nothing could. But after fifteen minutes of driving the reading started to enter the realm of possibility! It would have been better if there had been no temperature gauge at all, just an idiot light like they had on American cars; simple one or zero… but not this constant wavering between anticipation and relief.

So one Wednesday morning found me and my passenger, Kevin, on our way into Boston from our suburban town, two daring artists on our way to see Jenny Hozler at the Museum Of Fine Arts, skipping school. Skipping school and merging into traffic. Merging into traffic, temp gauge pinned hot, goosing it for a breath of clean air and hitting the brakes a bit too enthusiastically… locking up the rear, fishtailing… spinning around counterclockwise.

Accidents happen quickly, but ask anyone who has been in one and they’ll tell you they happen very lucidly, pedantically, and in a dilated time signature. As I lost control of the TR7 I feared a collision with the merging traffic on my left. As the TR7 spun around backwards I looked over at Kevin to see what he thought about the traffic now approaching his side of the car. I gave him a smirk to signify that I had done my part in creating this chaos and now it was his problem to deal with, and he gave me a smirk as if to say thanks for nothing. Then every knob on the dashboard and a few speaker grilles jumped simultaneously into the space between our smirking faces and all hell broke loose.

At the end of the excitement the TR7 was parked ass end into the Jersey Barrier between the West- and Eastbound lanes of Storrow Drive. We had crossed three lanes of rush hour traffic while turning 270 degrees and no one had bothered to touch us. (We weren’t going to make the show.) The traffic I had been merging into was coming up out of a dark tunnel and my driver’s side door was broadside too them… Kevin gave me a frown… I made a tactical exit from the TR7 and went around the back (over, more than around) to Kevin’s door.

“Does your door work?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t tried it.”

“You might want to get out…”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is there’s cars coming up out of a dark tunnel in the fast lane and they’re gonna hit you!”

Kevin had a keen understanding of existentialism and Da-Da Surrealism, and a bitchin’ collection of Prog Rock records, and I really looked up to him and consider him to this day to be an inspiration in my formative years, but in that instant I think my animal sense of self preservation might have served the better part. (As I write this I’m confused as to whether I might have preserved myself alone or why I made the effort to preserve Kevin, who was philosophically happy to let things happen absurdly.)

We were in an absurd position. The TR7 was in an absurd attitude. We sat our asses down on the Jersey barrier behind the TR7 and waited for the next thing to happen; we couldn’t get across the lanes of traffic, couldn’t do nothin’. Wished for a bottle of ketchup to put on a gory scene, something to draw attention to our moment. Nothing. Just the one headlight, dislocated and hanging over the stupid black rubber bumper (more animated by the crash than it ever was by electromagnetism.) Until a siren came screaming out of the tunnel… an ambulance! The driver slammed it to a halt in front of us, looked us in the eye, said, “I’ll call somebody!” and roared off to deliver whatever half dead passenger he had on board.

As we sat I remembered someone telling me if my car ever got towed I should remove everything of value from it because the tow yard guys would steal everything. The only thing of value I had was a unicycle my friend Tim had lent me, so I removed it from the trunk and returned to sitting with Kevin on the Jersey barrier. We agreed that a unicycle was way more surreal than ketchup gore and so we were happy to sit there now, two suburban high school kids in the middle of Storrow Drive with a unicycle and a bashed up English sports car. Surely Jenny Hozler would excuse our absence from her performance. About a thousand years later an MDC patrol in a Chevy Suburban lazily pulled over on the far curb and arranged for our extraction from the rush hour traffic.

In the early days of this job I worked the flats out in the Richmond [...]]]> Not much has struck me as interesting in day-to-day events on the job. It would be so much better if there were one thing every day that’s worthy of publishing here, but that’s just not the way it works.

In the early days of this job I worked the flats out in the Richmond district. I was just getting my legs under me when I was assigned a territory that included all of the highest hills in the center of San Francisco. “Punishing” is the word that pops to mind when I think of that time. Not that I was being punished by anyone (everyone rides this sector of the city now and again), but that the terrain was so unforgiving that any weakness in my self or equipment would be punished for failure.

That hill is a failure point for me. I bonked on a ride up that hill when I was unemployed because I didn’t eat enough food during the ride. On this job, I broke a chain a hundred yards from the giant radio tower that crowns San Francisco. This was an equipment failure, and I had the equipment to repair it; but still, the location became associated with failure, and punishment.

Later that day I had to go over a lesser hill on the way back to base, and I ended up talking to a fellow who was working a construction site that happened to be on top of one of the catch basins I needed to inspect. (There’s a peculiar fellowship among people that wear neon yellow safety vests as a part of their day to day jobs. The vest includes you in a club. You’re here to get a job done, or else why would you be wearing such a ridiculous outfit, right?) He called out to me as I was spray painting my green dot on the curb, “You puttin’ that mosquito packet down there?”, and instantly I knew he had run across a MAC Team Rider before. I’m allowed a ten minute break each afternoon so I decided to relax and talk to this guy. Most of the other yellowjackets (maybe somewhere in Italy they call the The Vestpa) just want to make sure you’re not going to get in their way, but this guy had such a convivial, friendly air about him I couldn’t resist the chance for a conversation. (Spend all day combing the gutters all by yourself, you’ll understand.)

I learned that he lives in my neighborhood, his name is Myron, and that he’s a really chatty fellow. He conveyed a contented, happy-go-lucky satisfaction with life that was so forceful that I wondered if it wasn’t a bit annoying to the guys that had to spend all day with him. But in a ten minute dose? Like manna from heaven.

A month or so later I was working the Inner Sunset. It’s a beautiful sector in that it includes the Strybing Arboretum, but also a challenging terrain around Golden Gate Heights. I forgot my wallet, couldn’t buy myself lunch, and ended up the day ratcheting up that hill over and over again on an empty stomach. I was stronger than my rookie month, but not strong enough to thrash out a whole day on one bowl of cheerios and a hard boiled egg. A merciful fellow in a market around 8th and Judah let me buy the King Size Snicker Bar (the 500 calorie two-pack versus the pathetically anemic 275 calorie ones you normal humans eat as a ’snack’) for whatever I had in pocket change around two in the afternoon. I felt comfortable with a few more runs up the hill before the (so satisfying) dash back to base.

My last run up the hill I hit a snag. Construction. Okay,  I’m wearing the yellow vest, I can come through. Obstacle overcome (I really don’t want to come back to this hill on Monday.) Who is that there diverting traffic at the bottom of the hill? Myron! And it’s the end of another trying day so I’m primed to spend a few minutes shooting the breeze with this guy. Not much happens in the conversation but the idea that there’s only so many people involved in your job,that here just aren’t that many yellowjackets hits home. Myron… mid conversation, sees his long lost cousin parking his truck and that’s the end of our talk.

Another month later and I’m just spanking the opposite side of that hill. The Eureka Valley. Lunch on Castro and Market, afternoon snack on Mars. Whatever, I’m 15 pounds lighter and have Bobby Hull’s legs and an indecent amount of carbohydrates in my saddle bags. I work my way into another construction site and smile apologetically at the least preoccupied yellow jacketed fellow standing there. Along up the incline, carrying a sheet of plywood on his back, comes Myron with a big ‘hello!’

“Every time I climb my way to the top of a great big hill, you’re there!”, I said.

“I’m on top of it all!”, said Myron.

This distinction, in my view, comes down to the level of free will versus determination. A ‘class’ is something you are born into, or fall into, or are grouped into; it is pre-determined by others.  [...]]]> I do not want to ever be referred to as ‘Working Class’. I refer to myself as ‘Blue Collar’.

This distinction, in my view, comes down to the level of free will versus determination. A ‘class’ is something you are born into, or fall into, or are grouped into; it is pre-determined by others.  ‘Class’ implies a classist society, and I still hold onto those old American dreams of a class-less society.

‘Blue Collar’ is such a wonderful term! It’s a collar; not in the sense of something that you put on a horse to get him to go where you want him to go, but in that very human sense that it’s something you put on yourself (when your neighbors are putting on their ‘White Collars’) because you are a naked ape, an ape with no choice about whether to put on clothes, but an ape with a choice about which clothes to put on.

“Give me half a chance / and I’ll be taking off my clothes / and living in the trees, / just like an Ape Man”

“…and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear…”

Catching [...]]]> Today I saw the most interesting thing of the day at about 8:15 A.M. on my way to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. You would think a day spent creeping around in restricted areas of the park would contain many interesting things, and it did. But frankly, this beat everything.

Catching up to another cyclist I was puzzled by the overlarge, bulky backpack he wore. It was shaped a bit like an old radio or Wurlitzer juke box, and evidently lightweight from the way it bounced around. I got up next to the guy and peered through the mesh fabric it was made of and was stunned to find a small raven peering back at me, standing on a branch inside a birdcage.

“Hey! Is that a crow or a raven?!”

“Both! It’s a hybrid of African Brown Necked Raven and Crow.”

“Nifty. Where you going with it?”

“To work.”

At that point I had to turn off, but I did learn he had bought it from a breeder in the American south.

I’ve never made a whole lot of money. At least, not so much that I couldn’t find a way to spend it all before the next tax year. (In 1998, I made $30,500, it was the high point of my earnings until 2010, when I made over $30K even [...]]]>

I’ve never made a whole lot of money. At least, not so much that I couldn’t find a way to spend it all before the next tax year. (In 1998, I made $30,500, it was the high point of my earnings until 2010, when I made over $30K even though nearly half the year was spent collecting unemployment. Inflation.) This may be because I tend to take jobs that have a ‘funk factor’ appeal for me. Not the highest paying, but rewarding enough socially and intellectually to make up the difference.

Recently a job prospect came up and I told my girlf that if I ended up in that job I would be obligated to write up a tale of my life in interesting jobs. I reasoned that if I was never going to make much money working, I might be able to make a million telling the story about why I never made much money.

Because, you know, writers rake it in. Right? No, they don’t; on average. But neither do punk rockers (on average), and the first rule of writing punk lyrics is write about what you know. So I’ll do that.

The most recent interesting job, the inciting incident, the straw that broke the camel’s bank? I’m a “Mosquito Abatement Courier”.

Just roll that off your tongue a couple times.  “Mosquito Abatement Courier.” What do those three words have to do with each other? If you found an envelope on the street and all it said on it was “Mosquito Abatement Courier”, how would you find the owner? Luckily, you have someone like me in your life to explain these exponents of trivial tasks.

I’m not only a Mosquito Abatement Courier, I’m a member of the M.A.C. Team! There’s a bunch of us. ‘Mosquito Abatement’ is the wholesale extermination of mosquitoes by the most efficient means possible. I am the most efficient means, in that I can ride a bicycle loaded with insecticide (and all of the Material Safety Data Sheets and Centers For Disease Control documentation pertinent to the insecticide) from the mosquito abatement headquarters (exterminator’s shop) to the places where mosquitoes are likely to be hanging around waiting to be abated (sewers) (exterminated). That’s my job; ride a bicycle from one sewer, or ‘catch basin’, to every other  in a defined area of  San Francisco (where else in the world would this be a job?), determine whether the threat of mosquito breeding grounds exists in each, and take appropriate action…i.e., drop larvicidal bacteria in there and move on. There’s about eight of us, and the city is arbitrarily divided into sections based on, from what I can tell, projecting a map of S.F. on the wall and pasting 11 x 14″ sheets of paper into it and saying, “Here you go, this is your section.” As with the way San Francisco was originally laid out,  consideration for changes in altitude has been disregarded in favor of traveling in straight lines.

I didn’t just happen upon this job. I have known more than a couple of Mosquito Abatement Couriers. A girl that lived in my house was a MAC Team rider. While on the annual 49 Mile Ride that some S.F. cyclists do every year I ran into a guy that not only rode on the team, but had an obscure ’90s bike messenger T-shirt that I recognized, and was a friend of a guy I worked with. He carried a tape recorder on his front rack, and I gave him a portable reel-to-reel recorder that another housemate of mine had given to me simply because I expressed an interest in them. While installing custom architectural metal fabrications in Pacific Heights mansions I would occasionally see a Mosquito Abatement Courier and wonder to myself, as interesting as this job I’m doing is, wouldn’t that one be just as much fun?

I knew, because I knew a girl who did the job, that the MAC Team didn’t just treat the catch basins, but that they used GPS enabled cell phones to record the location and condition of each catch basin. I also knew, because I once fell in love with a marine geophysicist, that that meant someone was, or should be, creating a ‘data layer’, or a database of information tied to specific geographical locations, that could be displayed as a ‘layer’ of a map generated by Georaphic Information System (GIS)  software (which the marine geophysicist just happened to leave a Beta testing version of on my desktop). I didn’t see the MAC Team courier as some putz that hauled his fershlugginer ass around from one shit hole to another handling toxic substances, kneeling on the ground shining a flashlight under someone’s BMW down into the sewer… but as a technologically equipped agent of data acquisition, a latter-day Lewis or Clark drawing a more accurate map, making safe the west, and having some high-adventure experience along the way.

As it turns out, I got canned from the custom metal fabrication job, and through a concatenated series of hirings and firings, ended up as a Mosquito Abatement Courier. But first I had to do my time a s a Mythbuster.