In honor of today and tomorrow (i.e., moving days), I decided I’d post a third essay that I wrote in Creative Non-Fiction in the spring of 2008. If I had to rate it, I’d say it’s not quite my best work, and I’m not quite sure it really does justice to the job I had in the summer of 2007, working for a professional moving company. But, it is what it is, so here you go. Enjoy!
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Doing it Manly
Moving can be a stressful process. There is the tedium of packing and labeling, the worry that every meaningful possession will be irreparably damaged, and there is the anxiety of acclimating to a new residence. These are things I could have empathized with at one point. Then I spent a summer working for a moving company.
My coworkers at the company were drawn from two main demographics: college and Romania. Many of the college students were football players, looking for a summer job which suited their specific (jock) skill set. The Romanian contingent was provided by some strange agreement the moving company had with some unknown organization (the Romanian government, perhaps). A rotating group of Romanian immigrants in their twenties came to Watertown, MA, worked as movers as much as possible for two or three years, and then took their earnings back home and presumably started a family. To this day, I question the legality of the agreement, but by all indications, it was quite amenable to both sides. I was somewhere in the middle of the two groups; I did not speak Romanian and I was not there to make enough money to start a life in a developing country, but I also did not follow every adjective with the phrase, “as fuck,” and did not spend most of the days talking about drinking, sports and sex.
I was ready for a tough day when I first started, but the sheer physicality of the work was something I could not have expected. In addition, there were a number of skills which I had no knowledge of. I was shown very early on how to wrap a chair in a moving pad. But, after trying my hand at it, I reached an unspoken agreement with the other members of the crew. Anything which required more finesse than lifting a box was out of the question. I was much more efficient doing the real grunt work. This ‘agreement’ came back to haunt me, as I attempted to carry a hope chest with another worker. I should have known to let someone else carry it when he asked, “How’s your strength?” But, in a fit of masculine pride, I told him it was okay and I’d be fine. I was wrong, and as we shuffled onto the truck, I dropped my end of the chest, barely missing my feet and the mess that would have come along if I had broken the furniture. All told, we worked for twelve hours, climbed copious stairs and received a nice tip. After driving home, I collapsed onto my couch, put my legs up and just sat for an hour or so, staring at the ceiling, hoping I would not be called in to work the next day. Of course, I was.
In a lot of ways, the second day was not as bad as the first. The job was estimated to take four hours, and was in a condominium complex with an elevator. We loaded furniture and boxes into large cardboard bins, put those bins on dollies and wheeled them to the elevator. Compared with the stairs and heavy lifting of the first day, it was a breeze. The challenge lay in dealing with my coworkers. The foreman that day was Dorel, a seven-foot mammoth who was rumored to have played for the Olympic volleyball team in Romania. The third member of the group that day was another Romanian named Liviu. He didn’t say much, but I gathered that Liviu loved pop music as he sang along, word-for-word, with Maroon 5’s most recent single.
Dorel was abrasive at first, assuming that I was privileged and lazy and told me, bluntly, when I was not doing things correctly. I tried my best to prove him wrong by keeping my mouth shut and doing whatever he asked of me. I knew from word-of-mouth that these were the things Dorel respected most in his fellow workers. The rumors must have been true, because Dorel eventually warmed up to me. At a point late in the day, we were both in the truck, and Dorel told me what it meant to be a professional mover. In a thick accent he explained, “You get paid well, 13, 14 dollars, but you have to work hard.” As he picked up a couch by himself, he told me that if I stuck with it, I’d be able to carry things like that no problem. I wanted to remind him that I was not the Romanian equivalent of Andre the Giant, but I refrained. Then he taught me how to properly tape a cardboard box. I tried to replicate his demonstration as he loomed over me, saying, “Do it manly!” I was not exactly sure what that meant, but apparently I did a satisfactory job. The rest of that second day was uneventful, and after a harrowing ride back to the warehouse, Dorel told me, “Not bad, for your second day.” If that’s not a stamp of approval, I don’t know what is.
For a while, the job became somewhat regular after those first two days. Sure, there were long hours full of heavy lifting in the summer heat and there were early wake-up calls, but it seemed natural and predictable. I noticed that every customer was different. There were people overwrought by the potential for the slightest mishap, like the guy who didn’t want the refrigerator rolled over the kitchen floor because it might dent the wood (he and his wife hadn’t sold the house yet). There were people who were calm and laid back, like the young couple who bought us lunch and spoke German with the Romanian foreman. There were idiosyncratic people too, such as the overly nice woman who was continually amazed by our performance of the most ordinary feats and her silent husband who shook my calloused hands with a light grip and limp wrist.
Sometime toward the end of the summer, I was working in a group with my high school friend Bill and the South African foreman, Tendi. The customers, Susie and her husband, lived in the wealthy, suburban town which neighbors the middle-class city which I call home. The husband, maybe his name was Gary, left at 6:30 in the morning to go to work. It became clear early on that the houses we would be doing work in were just temporary for Susie and Gary. They had normally lived in an even wealthier suburban town, but were having work done on their house, and so moved out for the year while the construction was completed. Susie sold life insurance out of her home and I supposed it did make some sense that she couldn’t do that easily with construction going on nearby. She presented that information in a slightly condescending way, saying, “You don’t know what it’s like to run your own business from home.”
Though I saw her as slightly demeaning and ostentatious, I decided to give Susie the benefit of the doubt, at least for a little while. Early in the morning, Bill and I tried to move her queen-sized box spring down the stairs, but the ceiling was too low and it would not fit. Bill asked Susie if she remembered how they brought the box-spring in, since we knew it wasn’t going to go easily down the stairs. She said, “Up the stairs, of course,” with a tone that implied Bill was a half-wit. So, we tried the stairs again, and in the process, slightly damaged the ceiling, though it was nothing a bit of sheetrock and a touch of paint couldn’t fix in about five minutes. We realized shortly afterwards that we could, very easily, lower the box-spring from a second-floor porch. As we were lowering it, Susie remembered, “Yeah, that’s how they brought it in.”
She never said anything directly to Bill and me about the damage to the ceiling, but later in the day, Bill overheard her talking to someone, presumably the husband and she was saying, “Yeah, well, that’s what you get when you have a bunch of idiots up there jerking things around.” When I first heard that, I almost lost it completely. I ran through the scenarios in my head and out loud with Bill. I could run up to her and punch her in the face and then walk home, because I lived in the next town over. Or, this would be much more satisfying, I could walk up to her and calmly explain to her that she probably had the smartest moving team in history—Bill and I graduated third and fourth in our high school class, we both attended prestigious liberal arts colleges and Tendi came from a family of South African bureaucrats—and then punch her in the face and tell her to buy some sheetrock and a sense of decency. As time passed, I thought it more prudent to do and say nothing, but to remember that no matter what my life was like in the future, it is, in no way, OK to be like Susie.
The day was full of snide comments from her, but I made it through relatively unscathed. At about 7 in the evening, about 12 hours after we had arrived, Gary, the husband, made his way to his new home, just in time to complain about the ceiling damage the box-spring had caused. In the meantime, Bill and I sat in the cab of the truck discussing the day’s events when a man walked over to the truck and said something into the open window.
“What?” I replied.
“Did you guys park the truck on the grass earlier?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a brand new lawn, what did you do that for?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t do it, you’ll have to go ask our boss. He’s inside.” I spoke curtly. I had deduced that the man was the landlord of Susie’s new rental house, but I was in no mood to discuss the details of our decision to park on the grass. Instead I spat the answers back at him, full of the teenage attitude and the venom that comes from spending 12 hours doing manual labor and being subjected to under-the-breath verbal assaults all day. Maybe it was justifiable to be like Susie once in a while.
When Tendi came back out, we asked him if the husband had complained (he had) and we asked him if the landlord gave him a hard time (he had). Bill and I drove together from the warehouse to our hometown and discussed the day’s events. We talked about how Tendi seemed a little more sensitive than most of the foremen, and how he took the verbal abuse more personally than many others would have. Then we recounted all the enraging moments of the day and it became abundantly clear that both of us had also taken Susie’s behavior personally. There was almost no way to avoid it.
After dropping Bill off, I drove home. My parents and my sister were on the back porch, having a beer and enjoying the warm, summer night. They were a perfect audience. I launched into a thirty-minute tirade about Susie and Gary and about the job in general. When I had thoroughly vented, I took a shower and realized something which surprised me. Sure, people like Susie suck to deal with and sure there were some very nice customers over the summer, but none of that mattered. They weren’t worth getting worked up over. It was impossible to control who you worked for. The only thing under your control is yourself. You have to do it manly.
In my humble opinion, this is one of the best entries you’ve posted.
“Do it manly” has a nice ring to it, and I intend to bring this into my classroom this year.