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The One Thing Money Can’t Buy by Doniphan Blair
The author working on the building where he was re-introduced to the art of house painting. photo: D. Blair
POVERTY IS NOT FOR SISSIES, TO PARA-
phrase the actress Bette Davis (1908-89).
I discovered this basic fact during the FIRST five minutes of my first day back at work as a house painter, after a 35-year detour through filmmaking, graphic design and publishing—the latter two very much desk jobs.
My car had been stolen the night before, so I was making my way to the straw boss’ house by bicycle at the ungodly hour of eight. Barely zombie awake—I had been at a San Francisco police station filing stolen vehicle reports until almost midnight, I didn't notice the leaden, overcast sky, standard to the El Niño storm season, until it was dumping a deluge of golf-ball size drops.
Soaked in minutes, I thought, “This is going to be an uncomfortable day at work,” although, at that point, I really didn't know "uncomfortable."
I started painting houses in the late-‘70s under the tutelage of a short, stocky Jewish guy named Bill with enormous forearms, "from masturbation," he said. Bill’s business was backbreaking and toxic, from the paint fumes we didn’t have good gear for, but it billed ten dollars an hour, a small fortune at the time.
35 years later, I would be billing twenty and, bicycling in the rain, I did the math. A decent used car is about two thousand dollars, meaning 100 hours just to get back to where I was yesterday.
The self-pity that soon followed astounded even me.
Shooting films can be exhausting but, unless you’re covering a riot with a heavy camera, it's not rolling ceilings. When your painter’s pole is extended to eight feet and your roller's loaded with the new, high-tech paint, which is thick and heavy, rolling ceilings will have even the most gymed-up arms aching in about an hour, necks krinking in two.
“Epsom salts,” suggested the straw boss, Jerry McDaniel.
A local actor and filmmaker, McDaniel starred in one of the best indie feature films out of Oakland in the last decade, “Everything Strange and New” (2009), written, directed and shot by Frazier Bradshaw, Jerry's across-the-street neighbor (see cineSOURCE article). It concerns a down-on-his-luck carpenter and his attempts to maintain family, job and sex life.
Now living the part, McDaniel left me little room to complain. Indeed, I was heart-warmed to meet the rest of the crew, some 30 years my junior, and hear that, at the end of the day, they were just as wasted, if not as alienated, as I was.
This being Oakland, they were all artists, from the one woman, studying to become a video editor, to the token Mexican, who was actually from El Salvador and painted beautifully, oils on canvas, not to mention yet another publisher of an indie magazine, Anarchy: Desire Armed, the graphic novelist or the Stanford art professor.
“They forgot to schedule my class,” he told me, “I have a kid and another on the way.”
Jerry has four kids, as does another friend of mine. A few weeks before I started back house painting that friend entered a deep depression, due to difficulties at his job, and was institutionalized.
After they let him out, heavily medicated, I started calling everyday and dropping by to go to the basketball court or supermarket—he was getting scarily skinny.
When he asked me why I persisted, given he often wouldn't return my calls and was always late, I said, "You are going to have to do this for me when I go crazy."
Painting the kitchen's extremely large and hard-to-reach lower cabinets, a secret door was discovered. photo: D. Blair
I am blessed with but one child, well on her way at 36, but as I entered career catastrophe, bankruptcy litigation and impending eviction, I noticed that my father-figure, authority personae became increasingly difficult to conjure.
Jobs are about children, both supporting them and not being one, ie evolving beyond your adolescence. Along with death, getting a job is the defining feature of being human: paying the sweat-time tribute to some sort of boss.
Indeed, my self-pity centered precisely on that: 62 years old and yet to find a boss on the planet who considered my work good enough to exchange for cash.
On the other hand, being considered a failure by family, friends and foes alike was fantastically liberating. With no expectations, the options are endless.
The boss on this job was a lovely woman, the owner of the house being painted, the dozen-roomed, five-bathed mini-mansion in the Berkeley hills where she grew up.
I met her that first morning, still dripping, sitting among the buckets and paint in the back of Jerry’s 30 year-old Ford Econoline, beneath which he had to crawl, in the pouring rain, in front of the client no less, to bang with a hammer to start.
When she mentioned that her own life work was professional theater training and that she had an unpublished manuscript by the radical Russian thespian Konstantin Stanislavsky, a precursor to his "My Life in Art" (1924), I thought, “Oh my god, this would be perfect for an article.”
Over my nine years publishing cineSOURCE and interviewing filmmakers, I had noted six different acting systems: classical, method, character, naïve, improv and celebrity. I was curious how this categorization jibed with her analysis, which one she favored, could they be combined, etc.
I was about to ask the boss if she would be interested in sitting for an interview when my phone rang. It was an editor with a story about local comics and filmmakers making a comedy series to be released on the web. I got two more article leads that week.
Alas, it was my first week back house painting and I didn't dare to appear flaky in front of the straw boss.
And who would want to miss the opportunity to study "uncomfortable" up close, lying on the kitchen floor, painting the insides of its cavernous cabinets, for hours? Crawling in and twisting around to reach the very back of a cabinet—which no one would ever see but had to be painted properly to satisfy the inner checklist, I didn't feel good.
That evening, barely able to stand erect, all I could manage was an Epson salts bath, a massive meal and a crash on the couch with Netflix. As the week wore on, I attempted to keep going on a few personal projects but exhaustion atrophies inspiration as well as energy. (I eventually did do the aforementioned interview, however, see "Activist Web Comedy Explodes Out of Oakland".)
At work, on the other hand, my thoughts were percolating, popping even, almost constantly.
When you work in the intellectual realms, your mind soon fills with industry standards and issues but hard labor provides plenty of free mental time along with elevated endorphins, which combine nicely to stimulate neurons.
In house painting, a typical straw boss assignment is: “Paint this room,” meaning mud and sand, final prep and drop cloth, prime and final coat, and touch up and clean up, which can take up to three days if it is a kitchen with extra cabinets. That is one long and solitary meditation.
Once I would get rolling, literally and figuratively, ideas, sentences, full-blown treatises even, would begin blossoming with abandon across my frontal cortex.
After a decade of bankruptcy, being stiffed by clients, and ageist firings, the author was happy to have work. photo: D. Blair
After wondering, "What am I supposed to do with this?" for a few hours, I adjourned to the bathroom to scribble in my pocket calendar. A week later, I was surreptitiously whispering into my phone.
By that time, I no longer needed coffee, I was astounded to note, after years of increasing addiction. Running late on Tuesday of week two, I skipped breakfast, assuming Jerry would allow an on-route pit stop.
Although I generally require a couple of cups, a couple of times a day, bringing me to four or five—OK, six is my limit, Jerry seemed stressed and, again, I didn't want to appear flaky, the bad crew member, the weak link in the chain. Thankfully, I soon realized, it didn’t matter: You're not going to fall asleep rolling ceilings.
Around that time I noticed I was eating like a horse and indiscriminately.
Ordering and eating lunch together is a central crew ritual, also standard in filmmaking. But after a few days of Berkeley-style foodie sandwiches, from the fancy deli a few blocks away, I started bringing my own and was regaled by yet another pleasant surprise:
A peanut butter, jelly AND cheddar cheese sandwich tastes fantastic when you're RAVENOUSLY hungry!
Plus the prep is fast and you don’t need a drink, if you add an apple, although I required a quart of water daily and half that again upon return home. A week later, I added a banana but was still losing weight!
Abstaining from the crew lunch was regrettable. Indeed, being on a physical labor work crew, not a lily-livered “team” with whom you've shared a group hug but a squad of compadres who labor together like dogs and fully felt what that meant, was immensely pleasurable.
Statistically, the professions that will kill you the fastest are logging, fishing, flying and roofing, but house painting is up there: the chemicals if you are working indoors, the falls if out, which elevates camaraderie.
After years working at home, often alone, I was overjoyed to be there, talking art, politics, even pussy, on rare occasion, if the female colleague was absent, and playing their music on various phones—much entirely new to me, since they were so much younger. Solidarity evaporates at the end of the gig, admittedly, but having a family for the duration is lovely and stabilizing.
After painting every last square inch of the inside of our building, which was on a hill and rose four stories off the garden, we started on part of the exterior. I worked only one story up but Eric was on the 30 foot ladder. He looked relaxed and confident as I watched him through the living room window, evidently not afflicted with acrophobia.
Money can not buy poverty, the quality of life that accompanies it, which is not diminished simply by the level of cash. Although many options are, by comparison, limited, others are opened.
This simple realization can be especially painful for rich kids, obliged to sleep down the hall, alone in their room, where no one can hear them crying. Hiking through the outback of Bolivia, I noticed that the kids slept in the same room, and often the same bed, as their parents, and that they seemed very happy.
Jim Osterberg, AKA Iggy Pop, who enjoyed growing up in close quarters with parents who tolerated him, continues to perform at 70. photo: courtesy I. Pop
“I was so lucky to live at close quarters in a simple environment with my parents,” notes no less an expert than Jim Osterberg, AKA Iggy Pop, in Jim Jarmush’s recent, rather straight-forward documentary “Gimmie Danger” (2016), produced by Netflix. Pop grew up in a trailer with parents so tolerant they turned over to him their master bedroom so he could practice drums. “I got to know my parents—that’s a real treasure,” he adds.
"The big difference," a once-poor person once told to me, "was between being absolutely broke, where starvation is the issue, and poor." Conversely, a graphics client once told me, "I have the same money worries as you, just extra zeros."
For 35 years, I have been bringing this and other research back to New York City, my home town, which I had come to assume had assigned me to travel the world and ferret out unique information. Perhaps not surprisingly, I have yet to uncover anything of interest to them, let alone that they were willing to pay for.
Undaunted, I decided to try my "Money can't buy poverty" postulate when I was in New York over the winter holidays and having a drink with an old friend, a film editor, who now edits video installations at the Whitney Museum and indie features, among other projects.
"That's absurd, if not insane," she said, waiving her hand, vigorously.
"But haven't you heard of Twain’s 'The Prince and the Pauper' [1881] or the similar story in '1001 Arabian Nights' [800, approx]?" I inquired.
We settled back to more routine discussions, including the price of real estate in Manhattan's West Village, where she owned an apartment, which probably made her a millionaire, and the price of food, specifically my two beers compared to her one glass of wine.
Having a car is essential in California, I have always felt, especially in my home 'hood of West Oakland, where public transit is not ideal.
Nevertheless, not having one came to be rather pleasant. It woke me up to all the things in my neighborhood I had previously whizzed by: the drug corner a block behind my place had moved a half-a-block back; 20 blocks up, an art collective had moved into a premier storefront, as I learned, stopping by on my bike to chat one rare sunny morning.
Two and a half weeks back at house painting, I got a call from the police. They had found my car, about ten blocks from where it had been stolen in the Mission District of San Francisco. Indeed, that was another good thing about the robbery: it happened in an area in San Francisco I could now avoid, in lieu of in front of my house, which I could not.
The author's erstwhile, once-again vehicle, a 1997 Honda Accord, the fifth Accord he has owned. photo: D. Blair
It was raining and already dark, after a full day of house painting, when I rode my bike to the BART train, crossed under the bay to San Francisco, and biked to one police station, to get the paper work, and then to another, to get the car.
There were only a few folks ahead of me on the impound line, which was nice, although two were in a tizzy, outraged at the towing and storage charges, which start around four hundred dollars and go up—way up—from there. When it got to me, however, I was overjoyed to find the cops comped those fees for stolen cars.
The officer and I searched up and down the irregular rows of towed cars, which stretched into a spooky labyrinth under the freeway, until we found my 1997 Honda Accord. It was littered with garbage, stinking of cigarettes, and had a full trunk, I noticed, as I tried to shoehorn in my bicycle and tie down the overflowing mess to drive home.
"Why would anyone steal a 20 year-old beater," I asked the officer.
"Honda parts are hard to get," he told me, "and the Asian gangbangers steal them for parts."
The "bum" key "my thief" had hammered into the ignition could not be removed but the engine turned over and I drove away, gingerly, distrustful of a vehicle I no longer knew as my own.
The cop was wrong about my thief, I realized the next morning, when I got up early to empty the trunk and go to the car wash for a half an hour vacuuming. Although the smoke smell did not dissipate, I did drive to the site with gusto, luxuriating in my rejoining of the middleclass after 12 days of biking, rain and circuitous rides jammed in the back of Jerry's van.
When I examined my car's trunk, I found it crammed with two loads of still-wet laundry, lots of kids' stuff (skate boards, knee pads, toys), electronic bits and some books, all of which I dumped into my building's freebox—except the books.
Being a bit of a bibliophile, and now not a little curious, I couldn't toss the books: a fantasy novel, a history of California and two notebooks. A week later, I opened one at random.
“Pimp’n ain’t easy/Pimp’n never died/If a nigga get caught/I tell a bitch an alibi/Sell dem hoes dreams, feed dem ‘beezy’/Hella lies/Ain’t no hard feelings/nut’n like dem other guys,” was one entry, appearing to suggest my thief was a pimp.
Other writings indicated he was also a loving father and husband and a dedicated song writer. Indeed, there were dozens of tunes: ‘It’s Friday night, it’s been a long week; Got some stress, I need to release” (a nice stretch rhyme); or “I came across your picture, a couple of days ago; It brought back sweet memories, of a love I used to know.“
A love note from one of the two notebooks left in the trunk of the author's recovered stolen car. illo: courtesy 'The Car Thief'
Not the world's greatest wordsmithing, perhaps, I still grew duly impressed: my thief had an intellectual life as well as family, if not two, and wrote extensively, from diary entries to songs and love notes, even philosophy.
These notebooks were a lot of work, in fact, which my thief lost, on top of the clothes, toys and tools, when his stolen car was, in turn, taken from him.
In fact, the car's fuel cap lock was busted, indicating my thief had a thief of his own, trying to siphon gas.
"Should I return the writings?" I wondered, thinking of authorial oblige. "If so, should I ask him to cover my costs: $350 to replace the ignition?" But, even if I wanted to, "How would I find him?"
Or is that the beauty of thieves, they find you?
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .