As my grandfather said many times, ‘the world needs ditch diggers as much as it needs doctors.”
I wonder if he would be proud that my sole occupation nowadays is couch cushion down presser.
I have not always been unemployed.
I started working when I was 13 years old. It was at a lawn care company pushing a lawnmower and swinging a weed whacker. I was illegal labor. It was a dream come true. I wanted to work even earlier, but the Publix grocery store up the street wouldn’t allow me the opportunity, though I never asked anyone other than my mom.
My parents divorced when I was nine. She moved me and my brother and sister to Florida. For the first few months or weeks or days we lived with my grandparents. Time stopped as me and my bro chased salamanders and tried to see how close we could get to the gators that lived in the runoff ponds all around the Tanglewood estates trailer park. I really don’t know how I am alive today, I really don’t. Maybe in memory the gators were bigger than they really were, but fuck I bet they would hurt if they took hold of one of us and did that death roll thing I have seen so many times on Discovery.
I guess a normal ten year old doesn’t think about work. I never even gave the concept of money all that much thought.
Until I overheard my mom telling my grandpa that my father was holding back his child support payments. She didn’t know how she was going to pay bills or have an apartment or a car or anything.
I remember her crying. Bursting into tears. The sadness streaming from her face into her upward turned hands.
My heart broke. I could not figure it out. My little brain was not able to comprehend what I just heard. I was sure what I heard meant something else. Something had to be wrong; my dad would never do anything like that, he loved us, or at least I thought he did at the time. I saw him cry when we last saw him right after he mowed the lawn for the first and last time at the rental place we had off base in Wurzburg, Germany, maybe it was for the loss of life style the divorce would mean to him.
My grandfather just sat there. If I had been older I probably would have seen a cynical look on his face like he didn’t believe the emotions being displayed. Maybe money had been borrowed before. Maybe he just hated the idea of reaching deep.
And deep he reached.
Before my mom finally found a job at the New Port Richey Public library, and we could have Pizza Hut once every two weeks my grandparent would treat us to Rax, or Arby's, or McDonalds.
My Grandmother was a coupon clipper and somehow always had a way to get bunch of free anythings.
I remember one summer we had a freezer full of McDonalds cheese burgers. They cost something like a nickel a piece. My Grandparents were very generous with stuff that cost almost nothing. By the end of that summer though, the freezer was filled with yellow wrappers with nary a burger in sight.
The genetics of having two sons.
This time he bought my mom a Datsun and helped us move into a two bedroom apartment. The apartment was cool for the sole fact that it sat on stilts and me and my brother would challenge each other to see who could climb the furthest underneath without being freaked out by spiders and snakes, this was Florida after all and I am pretty positive, now, that everything we might have spotted under those building would have been poisonous.
I wonder in thirty years will I look back on myself now and shake my head as vigorously as I am at the kid willing to do the things I did then.
I remember the cypress grooves and dry runoff lakes. From playing World War II in Germany we played Christopher Columbus here, until we met civilian kids and I saved a little boy from getting his head smashed in by a giant rock.
I took the rock from the other little boy who was about to throw it and told him, “don’t do that.”
For some reason he listened to me. I felt like a hero. The boy I saved had a trail of blood leaking for a wound over his eye. I took a closer look at it. "Go home" I told him and he ran off. I tried to talk to the other kids and they just looked at me like I had done something impressive.
There was a girl there, in a year I would meet her doppelganger, and be secretly enthralled for decades.
I hadn’t learned the politics of being a kid in Pasco County yet. I would get harsh lessons in it later, but today I saved a life, or so I like to think. Maybe they were just playing catch the rock with your face.
Who knows.
Maybe both.
After moving into this apartment complex I wanted to help pay the rent. Or maybe make some money to buy fireballs those candy balls of cinnamon that hurt so good. If my dad wasn’t going to step up, at ten I felt like I was the man of the house anyway so I asked my mom, “Could I go to Publix and collect the buggies?”
“Probably.”
I thought about it for a second, sometimes I had to be very literal with my mom, “and get paid?”
She laughed before answering, “probably not.”
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