Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(70)

Blue-collar customers were always my favorite. They don’t treat you like a servant. They don’t tell you, “We like the help to use the side door.” They don’t assume you’re an idiot just because you wear a name tag to work and your hands are calloused. The books on their shelves aren’t bound in leather. But the spines are cracked. Most of them, when you turn on the TV, it’s not set to Fox. They’re the only customers who tip, and the only customers who won’t fuck you for accepting one.

We weren’t allowed to take tips. But every so often, a favor like setting up surround sound or an especially hard job like wrapping a house in cable line to get to a back bedroom or extra time in an attic could pay off. Not always. Take a tip from the wrong asshole and they’ll mention it when they call in a complaint because they forgot which input their cable’s connected to, and, well, that’s why you’re not allowed to take tips.

   Maybe the next job I had to climb into an attic. Maybe it was above 90 outside and 160 up there. I’d sweat out half my body weight, and my skin would itch like hives from the insulation the rest of the day. At some point, I’d blow something black out of my nose. You have to work fast in an attic. You don’t come down, not all of these customers would even bother to see if you’re at medium rare yet. If the customer had a shred of humanity, you could ask to reschedule for the morning.

Humanity is rarer than I imagined when I first took the job. One woman wanted me to shimmy down into a crawl space that held three feet of water and about a foot to spare under her floorboards. A snake swam past the opening. She said it wasn’t a copperhead. Like I fucking cared.

We had a blizzard one year—a few, really. Snowmaggedon and Snowverkill and Snowmygod, I think WTOP named them. We had to work. I went to one call where the problem was dead batteries on a remote. They didn’t think batteries were their responsibility. The next, they wanted me to replace a downed line. Yes, that’s the power line in the tree too. Well, sure the telephone pole’s lying in the street, but we figured you could do something. I didn’t explain why I didn’t get out of my van. I took a picture and sent it to my supervisor with “Bullshit.”

Most of the streets were blocked. Thirty-five inches is a lot of snow. A state trooper told me to get the fuck off the road. My supervisor said, “We can’t. We do phone, so we’re considered emergency service.” I didn’t have any phone jobs. No one else I talked to did either.

   The supervisors made a good show of pretending to care that we made it to jobs. The dispatchers canceled everything they could. The techs, we didn’t talk much. Every so often someone would mic their Nextel to scream: “This is bullshit! They’re going to get us fucking killed!” And someone else would say, “They don’t care, man. They won’t have to pay anyway. They’ll piss-test your corpse and say you were high. Motherfuckers.”

“They’ll fucking care when I plow my van through the front of their building.”

“Dude, I’m gonna ram the next little Ford Ranger I see.” Supervisors drove Rangers.

“Fuck that. I’m ramming a cop.”

“Bitch, how you gonna know what you’re ramming? Can’t fucking see the snowplow in front of me.”

I couldn’t respond. My voice would stand out. We had to hope for the humanity of others, the customers, because corporate didn’t care. They didn’t have to drive through a blizzard. The blizzards, I remember.

The other days, they all blended together. Let’s go back to imaginary day. Maybe next I had the woman with the bullmastiff named Otto. I don’t remember much about her because I like bullmastiffs with their giant stupid heads. I told her I needed to get to her basement. She said, “Do you really? It’s just it’s a mess.” (That’s never why.) I explained the signal behind her television was crap. The signal outside her house was great. With only one line going through the cinder block wall, there was probably a splitter. She was taller than I am. That’s something I remember because, like I said, I’m tall. Height was probably a useful trait for her considering what I found next. I told her what I told everyone who balked about their privacy being invaded: “Unless you have a kid in a cage, I don’t fucking care.” Kids in cages were an unimaginable horror then. A good place to draw a line.



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   This is a good time to say, if you’re planning on growing massive quantities of marijuana, look, I respect it. But don’t use a three-dollar splitter from CVS when you run your own cable line. Sooner or later, you’ll have a cable tech in your basement. And you’ll feel the need to give them a freezer bag full of pot to relieve your paranoia. Which is appreciated, don’t get me wrong. Stoners, I adore you. I mean it. You never yell. I can ask to use your bathroom because you’re stoned. You never call in complaints. But maybe behind the television isn’t the most effective place to hide your bong when the cable guy’s coming over.

Anyway, Otto’s mom laughed and said, “Not a kid.” It took me a second. She went down to get his permission. And I was allowed down into a dungeon where she had a man in a cage. I don’t remember if she had a bad splitter. So that was probably early on. After a few years, not even a dungeon was interesting. Sex workers tip, though. Not that it’s always obvious.