Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  When we got to the job site, a pickup with Colorado plates was parked in the middle of the lot, where two guys were already hard at work sawing sheets of plywood. There was a Mexican guy in his forties, perfect English, and a twentysomething named Tyrone. Tyrone was the first Tyrone I’d ever met who was not black. We shake hands, and the Mexican guy, who is in charge of this operation, takes both me and the other guy I’m working with all around the lot, explaining the job to us. To me, this is not demolition work at all, but more mortuary affairs for the six turn-of-the-century homes that now sit vacant on the lot, waiting to one day be cremated to make way for a bigger, better Super Safeway.

  As the guy in charge walks us around, I noticed that one of the houses had EAST SIDE spray-painted on the side, another, the word CRIP in blue. Why is it that the two jobs I’ve gotten on this trip so far have both been in neighborhoods with gang graffiti? Also, I don’t even know, but isn’t it supposed to be Crips, not Crip? Is there only one Crip here in Cheyenne, Wyoming?

  It had been a while since I took wood shop in high school, so I was going to go ahead and offer to do the gardening, but since the guy I was working with made a beeline straight to the woodcutting and paint, I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. I decided I was indeed in charge of cutting down all the shrubbery and trees. I wondered if he did that on purpose because he knew how much of a fucking pain in the ass it was doing that kind of work. I told the guy in charge that I’d go ahead and start on the greenery. He said, “Great,” and handed me a chain saw.

  Chain saws are easy, right? You just pull the cord and it starts up, just like in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, right? After about twenty or thirty pulls on the cord, I started to realize that I was doing something wrong, probably missing a step or two in getting this thing on. I didn’t want to go over to where the other guys were and ask them how to start it up, for fear of being laughed at, so I pulled out my iPhone and called the 800 number on top of the chain saw, provided in case you have any questions. I figured if that didn’t work, there had to be some sort of eHow.com article on the subject.

  It seems there was a plastic bubble on top of the chain saw that I was supposed to press to allow fuel in. After I did that a few times, it fired right up. Loud.

  With my brand-new work gloves on, handling a gas-powered chain saw spewing toxic carbon dioxide into the Wyoming atmosphere, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D Minor playing in my head, I immediately felt at one with the saw as I started cutting down every single fucking thing that was green, throwing the saw passionately left and right, up and down. With each violent swing of the saw, a cloud of green leaves, branches, and twigs exploded in all directions around me. It was beautiful.

  With the sun burning my skin, I can feel sweat pouring down my face, and my arms feel like they’re turning into lead weights. I keep on going. A couple times I have to take a break since sweat mixed with dirt is stinging my eyes. I use my T-shirt to wipe myself off, and get straight back to work.

  I was working off pure adrenaline, sawing, cutting, swinging, chomping, branch by branch, twig by twig, every now and then a piece of branch backfiring, piercing my skin, drawing blood. I would exact my revenge, no green left behind.

  The boss finally came out to see my work, commenting, “Wow. You took down all those trees nicely.” He bought us all pizza, and during our break, we stood around under the shade of a house eating. I found out the two guys from Colorado travel all over, wherever the jobs are, and live at a motel packed with other people who come here for work. The one guy tells me that a lot of people in Cheyenne are from Michigan. He said he feels sorry for a few that he knows because they’ve been away from home for a while, stuck in Cheyenne while their families stay in Michigan.

  After that, it was back to work. They had a huge steel Dumpster set up in the middle of the lot, and my job for the next several hours, as well as the next several days, should I so choose, was to pile all the clippings I had created into a wheelbarrow, roll it over to the Dumpster, dump it, repeat.

  Singing, “Sixteen Tons,” by Merle Travis, I kept on loading, and by the end of the day, I felt like I had loaded sixteen tons into that Dumpster. I had no idea that deforestation work could be so demanding. But before I could go home for the day, there was one last task. I had to destroy the white picket fence surrounding one of the houses.

  Exhausted, my white undershirt no longer white, my skin a shade more olive than when I began, I stood there in front of the white picket fence with my work gloves on, cigarette dangling from my sweaty lips. I thought for a second about what tools I was going to use, and how I was going to tear this thing down.

  I decided to go hand-to-hand on the fucker. It’s a far more intimate way to destroy something than by using fancy machinery or tools. I flicked my smoke to the side and went animalistic on the fence, armed with nothing but brute force and willpower, work gloves and combat boots—I mean work boots. While I was on the ground, tearing it apart, grunting, I looked up to see a kid on a bicycle staring at me with his head cocked to the side, kind of how a dog does when he’s confused. I wanted to tell the kid that this is what happens when you don’t go to college, but he just gave me a perplexed look and pedaled off. I went back to what I was doing, and when I was finished, there was nothing but slivers and bits of the white fence scattered all over the ground around me, like bones scattered after a pack of wolves have angrily devoured something big. Maybe a moose.

  Now that the workday was over, a different guy from the labor agency came by to pick us up. I sat down in the back seat, way too exhausted to pay any attention to the two guys seated in the front, who talked to each other the whole way back. I just smoked, staring out the window blankly, not really thinking about anything. I was too drained to think.

  After handing in our time sheets, I returned my boots and was offered the option of getting paid by check or by cash. The guy I had been working with selected cash, as did I, and a couple minutes later we were handed sheets of paper with a series of numbers to enter into the ATM-like machine in the back. He went first. The machine dispensed his money; he counted it, placed the cash in his jeans, and went to the restroom to take a piss. I went over, typed in my digits, and while I was waiting for the money to shoot out of it, I saw a sign above reminding us to please pay our drivers. After I got my money, all $34.63 of it, I just kind of stood there, wondering if there was more money to come, but nothing else came out. The machine worked perfectly fine. When I turned around to ask about the “Please Pay Your Driver” sign, I was informed that for each ride to or from work, you have to pay that driver $2 in cash. I paid the guy who drove me back, which left me with a hard-earned $32.63 for the day. Only $390 more, and I’d have my radiator all paid off.

  We both walked out at the same time, saying “See you tomorrow” to each other. The sun was about to set, and I watched as he limped east on foot while holding his flannel shirt over his right shoulder. I limped west, my flannel shirt over my right shoulder, too.

  Back at the hotel, a really pale, skinny, shirtless guy stopped me once I got to the top of the stairs. He was holding a miniature electric fan, asking if I was interested in purchasing it off him. I told him no, not today. Limping to my room, exhausted, I opened the door, glad to see that nobody had broken into it to steal any of my shit. I lit a smoke, cracked open another bottle of wine, turned on the television, sat back in the old chair. Beat, I drank the wine straight out of the bottle, catching up on today’s news with CNN. Before passing out, I set the alarm on my cell phone to 5:45 a.m.

  When I woke up, I grabbed my complimentary roll of toilet paper and walked over to the “gentlemen’s” toilet down the hall, half asleep and fully hung over. I took a shit, and returned to my room. I was still dressed, so I grabbed my pack of smokes and my work gloves up from the red carpet, and left. While walking toward the stairs, I found myself fixated on the old dusty American flag hung in the hallway. As I approached, it ki
nd of woke me up, reminding me again what it is like to be an American: no health care, long hours of hard work, shit pay, and nothing to show for it while you make other people in air-conditioned offices richer and richer. As I went down the two flights of stairs, a guy sitting in a chair at the bottom just silently stared.

  Instead of making a left toward the parking garage, I made a right, down East Lincolnway, on my way back to Buck’s to grab my car before work. When I got there at 6:45 a.m., I asked Buck if the car was done; it was. As I handed him my debit card, I asked if the car needed a tune-up, since I was pretty sure the guy who sold it to me hadn’t given it one since the 1960s. I explained that since I started heading east from Salt Lake City, I had noticed that sometimes when I tried to start her up, I had to turn the ignition several times, which never really happened back in California. He told me that what was probably going on was that the altitude was messing up the engine. He suggested that I wait on getting a tune-up until I was at least two hundred miles east of here, closer to sea level. If he did a tune-up here, the car would be kind of screwed once I leveled out in Nebraska. “I started the car and drove it into the garage myself,” he said. “The engine sounded fine to me.”

  When I signed the receipt for the new radiator, I saw that the total was $410. At the rate I was being paid, I’ll have to demolish stuff for nearly a month to pay it off. I shake Buck’s hand, thanking him for his work, and drive the Caliente back around the corner, parking just out of view of the day labor office.

  The lady behind the counter greeted me as I signed in, asking whether I was going to need a cash advance today to pay my driver. Jesus, there are people in this country willing to do hard day labor who don’t have a measly two bucks on them so that they can even get work? My God. I told the lady that wasn’t necessary today, that I had just gotten my car back from the shop, and I’d be able to drive both myself and the guy I was working with to and from the worksite today.

  Just like the day before, about a dozen or so people were patiently waiting for work on white plastic chairs or milling around outside, some seated on the hoods of rusty old cars parked along the curb. I wondered how many of them might have dream boards. One of the guys I had worked with the other day was seated on the bus bench, a crowd gathered around him. I got the impression he was somewhat popular; they were all listening to him intensely, every now and then erupting in laughter as his stories continued.

  Back inside, I filled my Styrofoam cup with some coffee, mixed in a little powdered creamer, and took a seat next to two women. One woman was shaped like a pear and had a short haircut. I later found out she worked full-time at a fast food joint, on her days off coming down here in her pickup to jump on day-labor gigs. She asked the woman next to her, slightly younger, if she had ever read a book called The Purpose Driven Life. The younger woman told her that a friend of hers had actually recommended the book, but for whatever reason she hadn’t gotten around to it. I’d never heard of it, but I liked the title, so added it to my mental book queue.

  I stepped outside for another smoke to go along with my coffee, and walked into a conversation as to which prepaid cell phone service was the best, and which ones sucked ass. The lady standing in the center of the group, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, was leaning up against a car telling everybody about how her mother purchased her one of these prepaid cell phones, so that she could call her and her grandkids whenever she wanted to talk to them, but that she couldn’t afford the prepaid service, so it was useless.

  “I live in a hotel, okay? I got that and three kids to feed; food stamps ain’t cutting it, which is why I’m working here so I can make some extra cash. You know, instead of a phone, I could use that fifty bucks to help feed my kids and, like, buy milk.”

  I returned to my spot next to the two women inside, the younger one now telling the pear-shaped one all about how “he” grabbed her arms really hard, so hard that he left bruises on them, and after that, he proceeded to bite her real hard in the rib cage area—“that’s a pretty sensitive area, even for a guy”—leaving a deep bite mark, and after biting her, “he just kept on punching me over and over again, and I was like, you are way too controlling.”

  I looked up at the clock. It was getting close to game time, so I wandered back outside over to the bus stop where the guy I worked with was still entertaining the crowd, to let him know that it was time for us to go. Surprisingly, he remembered my name. “Hey, Colby, you ready for another fucking day of bullshit or what?”

  Amazed that he remembered my name, I enthusiastically told him that I was. I had forgotten his name. I remembered what the guy I met in Green River, Wyoming, had told me about people here in the middle of the country remembering names.

  Once we’d received our time cards and stepped outside, I told him I was parked around the corner. When we got closer to the Caliente, he said, “Shit man, this is yours?”

  I told him it was, and he got excited, especially when he saw the California plates. He asked if it was a California car, and I told him that I had driven her all the way here. When he got inside he commented that it smelled like it had been stored in a garage for years; I was amazed that the guy could still smell, since he smokes about a carton a day. As I started the car up, I told him that I had purchased it off a guy who claimed to have gotten it from his grandfather, the original owner.

  Since he knew the town better than I did, I asked him for directions to where we needed to be. He told me to make a left at the stop sign. I paused—I didn’t want to make a left.

  All my life I’ve liked to wear muted monotone colors, blacks and grays. Aside from acknowledging that you can’t tell when they’re dirty, I had never thought anything of this color scheme of mine other than how I liked the way those tones looked on me, until my sister brought it up. She said I liked wearing “depressing” colors because I don’t like to draw any attention to myself, that people who wear bright colors are more confident. She mentioned that I needed to wear brighter colors more often, which I ignored. A left turn would mean that I would have to drive right in front of the vehicle-less people standing around the agency. Well, this was the direction we had to go. What were the chances that the people outside would notice us driving by?

  As soon as we rolled by, with the window rolled down, my passenger yelled out, “Hey, guys!” Everybody looked up. I kept my head down, embarrassed, as he yelled, “Check out the wheels, huh?!” He had a huge smile as we drove away. To me, they all just looked confused as we drove off, but he seemed to be having a blast. Since all the windows were rolled down, at the first red light, he asked the car next to us if they wanted to race for pink slips. “You wish you had this car, don’t you?” He threw his head back and laughed as the light turned green and the two of us headed toward work.

  I now knew exactly what I felt like. I felt like that dorky kid in high school that got to hang out with the cool kids because of his car. I was the guy with no personality, who obtained popularity thanks to his wheels. This depressed me.

  “This job’s not too bad, man,” he told me as we drove along. “I’ve been on some shit jobs, and this ain’t one of them. You know what I had to do on the last bullshit job that they sent me out on? I had to move fucking rocks, man, all fucking day long, man. I had to move them from one spot over to another. I’m a fucking union man. I used to make pretty fucking good money until the economy took a shit, a couple hundred dollars a day. Now I can’t get shit, fucking Obama, man, fuck him, he’s the reason I’m doing this shit.”

  A portable stereo was plugged in at the job site today, turned to a classic rock station. I continued my project, decimating trees and bushes, wheeling the carnage away in a wheelbarrow, eventually moving on to boarding up windows on the abandoned homes. It was good listening to the Stones, Zeppelin, and Jimi. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” came on, and it seemed to boost our morale, which was sad, but also kind of sweet. I found out the name of the guy I was
working with, Dave, as he came up to me several times during breaks, always starting the conversation by telling me in some form or another about how he used to be a union worker, making pretty good coin.

  “Winter’s coming up, man, ain’t no fucking way I am going to work out in the fucking cold again this winter, fuck that shit, man. I’m going to get myself a job indoors at a restaurant, man, know what I’m saying? You can make some pretty good money doing that shit, working in a restaurant.”

  Nodding in agreement, I told him, “Yeah, you can make good tips doing that,” just trying to do my part in the conversation. Head slightly cocked, he looked at me all confused, like I was reading from the wrong page. “I’m talking McDonald’s, man, or some pizza joint flipping pizzas.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Yeah! You can make pretty good money doing that shit, they start you off at eight bucks an hour at some of those places, and it’s indoors so I don’t got to worry about freezing my ass off like I did last winter. I think I’m going to get myself a restaurant job. Fuck this shit, man; I used to be a union worker, you know?”

  After a full eight hours of work, the day was over. Time cards completed, Dave and I drove back, got our money, and went back to our hotel rooms.

  The wine I was drinking up in my room did not taste as good as it once did, so I decided to go out on a walk.

  The guy I’d periodically noticed sitting outside the hotel was now sitting on an upside-down plastic bucket. He was a tall guy with a thick accent, sixty-two years old. He said, “Hello.” We shook hands, and he introduced himself as Chuck. “My name is Chuck, and I don’t give a fuck.” With his thumb he points to the hotel and tells me that not a lot of people who live there care for him much. “But I don’t give a fuck,” he said.