Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(72)

There were a lot of those. Those I never forgot. They seep into your skin like cat piss. But you can’t shower them off. It’s part of why I didn’t mind most people assuming I was a man. Each time I had to calculate the odds of something worse against the odds of getting back to my van.

Once it was an El Salvadoran guy in a tiny two-bedroom apartment full of El Salvadoran guys. Those apartments were common. Day laborers crowded into apartments to save money to send back home or pay off coyotes. Their pallets folded against the walls. Cheap Walmart steel-toes piled by the door. The kind of boots that break down within a month. A saint and prayer candles above the television. The apartment smelled like sweat and tortillas. I liked those apartments. The buildings were roach-infested shitholes. But the day laborer bunk rooms, they usually helped tack down the lines I had to run from the single living room outlet to the bedrooms.

That time, the guys heard me yelling and barged in. Their roommate had copped a feel, ran his hand between my legs while I was bent over the television. I had him pinned against the wall. One of them, the English speaker, took charge. He said they’d take care of it. A couple guys dragged him to the back room. The foreman said, “Please, no police. We will make him stop this, yes?” I liked the look in his eye. I needed the points for the job anyway.

   They helped finish the install. The foreman offered me a beer. I turned him down. He helped me carry my tools and step ladder back to my van. He said he was saving money for his wife and his daughter to come. They were safe. But only for so long. He showed me a picture of his daughter. I knew he was showing me why I shouldn’t call the police. If I had, it would’ve been the first time. No one deserves what our government will do to them—the guys who helped me, who were just trying to survive, who no one minds hiring for jobs we wouldn’t lower ourselves to do, who our leaders happily vilify so you don’t notice they’re fucking you too. But I worry even telling this story, if you’re an asshole, you think they’re all the same.

The foreman promised me again he’d take care of it. I believed him. We shook on it.

One of those creeps, his suit cost more than my car. I can’t fathom what his smile cost. He had an elevator in his three-story McMansion. Maybe he thought he owned me too. I broke his nose with my linesman’s pliers. Nice heft to those linesman’s pliers. He’d called me a dyke. I hope I ruined his suit. I lost the points.

I made it back to my van. My van became my home, my office, my dining room. I was safe in my van. In my van, I could pull off near a park for a few minutes, smoke a cigarette, read the news, check Facebook, breathe until I stopped shaking, until I stopped crying. That’s only if there was someplace to pull over, preferably in the shade. We were monitored by GPS. But if I stayed close enough to the route, I could always claim traffic. This was Northern Virginia. There was always traffic.

   Maybe that’s why I was running late to the next job, and my dispatcher, my supervisor, another dispatcher, and the dispatch supervisor called to ask my ETA. No, that job canceled.

“Irate” doesn’t always mean irate. Sometimes it just means he’s had three techs out to fix his Internet and not one has listened to him. They said it was fixed. He was bidding last night on a train. It was a special piece. He’d seen only one on eBay in five years. One. He showed me his collection. His garage was the size of my high school gym. But his sensible Toyota commuter box was parked out front. His garage was for the trains. He had the Old West to the west. And Switzerland to the east. But the train he wanted went to someone in Ohio because his Internet went out again and he lost the auction. He wasn’t irate. He was heartbroken, and no one would listen.

I remember he started clicking a dog-training clicker when I said the signal was good behind the modem. He said he was sorry. The clicker helped when he was feeling overwhelmed. I said I should probably try it. My dentist didn’t like the way I clenched my teeth. He said, “They all come here and say it’s okay, but it goes out again.”

   This was probably around the time my supervisor realized I was pretty good at fixing the jobs the guys couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And really good with the customers who’d had enough. The guys looked at cable as a science. Name a channel, they’d tell you the frequency. They could tell you the attenuation per hundred feet of any brand of cable. The customers were just idiots who didn’t know bitrate errors from packet loss. I looked at cable like plumbing, or something like that. I like fixing things. Some customers were idiots. Most just wanted things to work the way they were promised. This guy’s plumbing had a leak. I didn’t pay attention in class when they explained why interference could be worse at night, or I forgot it soon after the test. I knew it was, though. So when he said the problem only happened at night, I started looking for a leak. One bad fitting outside. Three guys missed it because they didn’t want to listen to him. Because he was different. Because he was a customer. And customers are all idiots.

I remember training a guy around the time I was six years in. He’d been hired at five dollars more an hour than I was making, 31 percent more. I asked around. We weren’t allowed to discuss pay. But we weren’t allowed to smoke pot and most of us did. We weren’t allowed to work on opiates either. We were all working hurt. I can’t handle opiates. But if I’d wanted them, there were plenty of guys stealing them from customers’ bathrooms. I could’ve bought what I needed after any team meeting.