Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

by J. R. Helton

  “Man, I’m dizzy,” David said. “That floor kicked my ass.”

  “Where’s Collin?” Ray said.

  “The liquor store,” David said.

  “He’s probably in the van,” I said. I pulled out what was left of the last joint and lit it. We took a few hits and stood there.

  “Let’s go see if he’s okay,” I said.

  We walked over to the yellow VW van.

  “Nice ride,” Ray said.

  We wiped the dirt off the back windows and looked inside. Collin was in there, curled up on his side on a little brown-stained mattress, passed out, surrounded by empty boxes, bottles, paper, and junk.

  “I bet it smells great in there,” David said.

  “I think he’s dead,” Ray said.

  “I think he lives in there,” I said.

  “Nice place,” David said.

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “I like what he’s done with it.”

  We watched him lying there for a second, his stomach moving slowly, in and out, with each breath.

  “Shit, this is depressing,” David said.

  “You’re looking at your future,” I said.

  “No,” David said. “I’ll be in a Chevette.” He lit a cigarette. “I’m going home. You need a ride?”

  “I’ll give him a ride,” Ray said.

  I looked at him.

  “You wanna ride with me?” Ray asked.

  “Sure.”

  “All right,” David said. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Bright an’ early.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Later,” Ray said.

  We walked back from the van to Ray’s truck. I started to get in and then looked up at the warehouse.

  “I wonder if we should shut those doors.”

  “Why?” Ray said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are they gonna steal?”

  “Nothing. I guess it needs to air out. They were open when I got here anyway.”

  We got in the truck. Ray started it up, and we took off. I found another little joint in my wallet and we lit it.

  “So what are you doing tonight?” Ray said.

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “Why don’t you go with me to pick up my daughter? She’s at my mom’s house. We’re all gonna go eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  “I don’t think so, Ray—”

  “Come on, man, come with us. Catherine really likes you. She thinks you’re funny.”

  He was staring at me, waiting for an answer.

  I looked out my window at all the buildings, the cars driving past.

  “Sure. Why not.”

  I remember his daughter, Catherine, was a good kid, smart, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  1989

  I quit my job with Mike’s Interiors and said so long to David and Ray. Mike’s Interiors was deceptively titled as all we painted were the most toxic industrial jobs in the city, with no residential jobs in sight. I finally had enough one day when I got what the old timers called “a paint cold” even though I was wearing a respirator while painting a bunch of shitty pipes covered in asbestos insulation with warning signs all over them in some East Austin warehouse. I was using a poisonous oil-based stain killer with fumes so deadly and strong that they seeped through the shitty respirator Mike had finally issued me and soaked through my skin so that my nose started running uncontrollably with clear mucus, along with constant tears pouring out of my eyes until I became dizzy and started to pass out. I quit that day.

  I got a job then painting dorm rooms for the Physical Plant at UT Austin, the same dorm rooms I had once lived in myself in 1981 in Jester, the largest dormitory on campus. Jester was so big that it had its own zip code, and we painters met in the bowels of the building along with Housekeeping, where we were mostly left alone. It was a humbling experience for me to have to wear my painter’s whites and listen to some smart-ass freshman giving me shit while I and another painter repainted their dorm room. They would eye us with suspicion, as though we were criminals or rapists, and say things to me like, “Hey, make sure you don’t get any paint on any of my shit, okay?” Or “You guys don’t touch any of my stuff, all right? We know everything that’s in this room, and we’ll know if it’s missing. Don’t even move it.” It was all I could do not to clock one of those little chickenshits, but I kept my head down and painted their walls. I needed the money.

  I told my supervisor one day that I used to be a student there myself, in the very building we were painting. He was a nice old guy, and he mentioned that anybody who worked for the university who was a student could get a discount on taking classes. He also pointed out that I was the youngest painter in his shop, something that hadn’t occurred to me, as I already felt like an old man on the UT campus at all of twenty-six. He suggested I go down to the registrar to check it out. So, I did.

  I found out that not only would I get a discount on tuition but that if I would just fill out the financial aid forms—which were, yes, a pain in the ass—I qualified for all kinds of loans and even one grant because of my former good GPA and my several semesters of college. I applied for all of it then, every grant and loan, and got them all. I also enrolled in a heavy load of classes that began each afternoon and ran into the evenings, starting right away.

  * * *

  I was very busy then, between studying, reading, and writing, painting dorm rooms full-time, forty hours a week at UT, and then I would run into the locker room next to our shop and strip down from my dirty painter’s whites and work boots and put on some jeans and desert boots and a shirt to run off to class. Some of the older painters gave me shit when I changed clothes like that, but they were okay; they were mostly laid-back retired old vets from years of American wars who had found a place to hide out the rest of their days in that deep basement paint shop, playing dominoes or drinking coffee and smoking dope just as much as they slowly painted the walls and hallways and stairwells and handrails of the dormitory itself. One of the first things they had told me, in fact, was to slow way the hell down when I started painting there, that I was knocking out too many complete dorm rooms a day just by myself, that they took things a lot easier there and that I needed to get with their program. So I painted and bullshitted with them during the mornings, and by midafternoon, even though I still smelled like paint thinner and oil-based fumes, I was at least dressed like a student and trying to stay awake in class. Now, though, I just wanted to get it all over with and finally knock out my degree as fast as I possibly could, to maybe try again and start over.

  * * *

  For some reason Susan and I still hadn’t pulled the trigger on the paperwork for our divorce. She was working constantly also on any movie-of-the-week TV show that came into Austin, taking what she could get, still trying to move up the movie ladder. She was mostly landing short-term jobs as a production secretary, her goal then to work her way up to production coordinator to then one day become a unit production manager or even a line producer herself. She started coming by my apartment after I’d only been there a few weeks. One night she brought over her latest new boss, a friendly, middle-aged producer, an attractive woman with curly black hair. She and Susan were made up and ready to go out on the town in Austin and said they’d stopped by my apartment to see if I had any pot. I had a quarter-ounce bag in my desk that I hadn’t been touching lately. I took it out and started to roll them both a couple of joints but couldn’t find any papers, so I just said “Here, take it,” and gave the older woman a full Baggie of good, sticky skunk weed. “Y’all have fun tonight,” I said.

  The producer and Susan, especially, thanked me. I could see she was still in her subservient worker-bee mode, the one you had to be in on any movie, doing whatever your boss wanted, including socializing off the set. Susan gave me a special knowing smile to drive it home and rolled her eyes, letting me know I’d helped her out in scoring this pot for her boss. But unfortunately this woman pulled out a couple of twenties and
tried to give me some money. Susan tried to stop her but it was too late. She knew how insulted I would be and, worse, that I might say anything, and she panicked, ready to leave.

  “Uh, hey, you can keep your money, lady,” I said, irritated, and pushed the twenties back at her. “I was just doing you guys a favor.”

  The woman apologized, and Susan said a quick good-bye as I guided them both out the door and went back to work at my desk.

  * * *

  Susan started coming by more often after that night and we would have sex, still some of the best I’d had thus far in my life. I wanted to resist her, but it was impossible. One afternoon I was on the phone, and she came in my open apartment door and asked me to get off the phone, saying that she was in a hurry as she lay on my bed. I was talking to my mother—a rare conversation—trying to concentrate, when Susan slowly began to take off all her clothes and turned over on all fours and put her pale, round ass up into the air, moving it up and down as she looked over her shoulder at me and said, slowly, again, “Get off the phone.” I hung up, we had sex, and then lay in bed for half an hour, holding each other and talking.

  Susan grew quiet at one point and looked up at me. “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. And really, I didn’t. My brain was foggy, confused . . .

  I wasn’t complaining, but I got tired of her just coming over to have sex any time she felt like it and then suddenly leave. I wanted something more. I guess I was still in love with her. It got so obvious that she walked into my apartment one evening, as usual unannounced, no phone call, and she immediately dropped to her knees and started undoing the buttons on my jeans. It took every ounce of willpower I had to stop her. I grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her to her feet, and said, “Hey, wait, come on. Let’s talk,” and she frowned, uninterested. Of course I gave in, and we got in bed and we did the usual, what we had done since we were sixteen years old, having sex slowly while we told each other everything, the complete truth, our innermost secrets, fantasies, and desires. I asked her who she was fucking now, and she told me in detail and asked me who I was fucking, and I told her of some prostitute I’d slept with only the night before, every sordid word, as Susan began to climax and we both came together, rested for maybe five minutes, and it was all over, as though we’d said and done nothing, and she dressed and left my apartment.

  The next time she came over I was just too busy. I was sitting at my desk with five open books around me, typing up a ten-page term paper for my upper-division History of Modern China class, while she sat there at a cheap Formica table in my tiny kitchen on a folding chair, her legs crossed, bouncing a foot impatiently, smoking a Winston Light, watching me work. At one point I looked up and said, “I’m sorry, Susan. I really gotta get this paper done. The semester is almost over.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “You’re my hero.”

  “What?”

  She smiled lightly. “You’re the hero,” she said and put out her cigarette vigorously into a plate on my table. “Going back to college, writing your papers and books.”

  I was too tired to care if she was being sarcastic. I just shrugged and kept typing. I sensed something lonely, though, left out, or lost in her but didn’t have the time to talk about it, if she even wanted me to. She stood up then, gave me a peck on the cheek, and quietly slipped out the door, leaving it open behind her. The cream-colored stray cat, Sandy, was getting more aggressive, and I saw she’d bolted into the apartment just as Susan was leaving. I jumped up, quickly shooed her out, and shut the door behind them both.

  * * *

  I received the divorce papers a few days later. I knew we were split up, but I was still surprised. I shouldn’t have been. I was the one who had moved out of our house in Travis Heights, who had suddenly quit working on movies with her. Even though we had both cheated on each other in our marriage, and even got off on talking about it, there was something different about the affair she had had with that line producer from England, that Ian Watt guy she had gone off to Mexico with for two weeks. It wasn’t that she had fucked him—he was a skinny little uptight square, a corporate yes-man—no, it was the fact that she had lied to me about it so thoroughly. Or maybe just that I had been too stupid to notice it, that perhaps a genuine, however brief, love affair had sprung up between them under my nose, an affair that died, she promised me, the second she’d come back into Austin and found out I knew everything. But it was too late, I was too pissed, and I moved out.

  Now, a year later, it was a midafternoon on a Thursday, and I was sitting at my desk staring at the divorce papers and calling her on the phone. She had given me the number of the production office of yet another terrible TV movie for CBS she was working on, this one directed by some C-list has-been actor for whom she was giving up five solid weeks of her life. I was still trying to read and grasp the details of the papers when I got Susan on the phone and she answered cheerfully with the name of the film.

  “Another Crazy Date Night!”

  “Susan?”

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah—”

  “What’s going on?” she said, adding quickly, “We’re superbusy here. I got like three lines going.”

  “Listen, I just got these divorce papers you sent me.”

  “Right.” She paused. “Wow, that was quick. I just mailed them yesterday. Or my mom’s lawyer did.”

  “You’re using Betty Sue’s lawyer?”

  “He’s cheap. Hang on a sec.” I could hear her answering another phone. “Another Crazy Date Night . . .” I was on hold then for a few seconds, and she came right back. “Sorry. This is the worst time of day, of the week. The Teamsters are bitching about the turnaround from yesterday, saying they didn’t get a full eight hours or a second meal but—”

  “Susan,” I cut her off. “This paperwork . . . It just seems so . . . final.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s depressing. I didn’t even want to send it to you.”

  I sighed, torn but exasperated. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “Well, are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Do you want me to sign these papers?”

  “I don’t know Jake. Listen, hang on again—”

  “Susan, don’t put me on hold.”

  “I have to. Please just hang on one second.”

  I sat there as she got another call. I suppose another thirty seconds passed. Maybe one full minute. I could feel my ears turning red as I sat there and waited. I looked out my window over the city and realized that if I stood up and went out onto the balcony I could just see the building, the tall hotel she was working in, the production office right there, downtown. I felt like a fool, hung up the phone, and signed the last page of the contract.

  I didn’t even read the terms of the divorce, which was stupid. Her lawyer, someone, had put it in there that whatever each party had possession of in their residence at the time of the signing was their property now and forfeited to the other. I felt I didn’t really own anything, but it hadn’t occurred to me yet that—never mind the couch—by signing that document I would never get my albums back, my twenty-foot stack of records. I’d already asked Susan for them three times by then, and the last time she had said, “No, those albums are for your grandchildren,” to which, well, I didn’t know what to say or even what she meant.

  I did see that I had to get my signature notarized to make it all final. I looked up a notary in the yellow pages, got in my truck right then, and drove up Lamar to North Austin to some cheap strip-mall office park. I went inside to a tiny office overflowing with papers and folders where an obese old man in a stretched yellow knit shirt and a lame comb-over took out his little silver round notary tool, crimped it down on the papers, and gave them back to me with a closed-mouth smile.

  “Okay, there you go,” he said. “You’re divorced.”

  I must have looked a little down or confus
ed, because he added, “I know. There’s not much to it, is there?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  * * *

  I finished up the semester, took my finals. I had more than three weeks off from working on the dorm rooms. Our old supervisor at the UT paint shop was a good guy who gave us all a big break along with the students between semesters. He could easily, maybe wisely, have made us work the whole time over the Christmas break with no students in their rooms, but it wouldn’t have fit with the steady, purposefully pleasantly slow pace they maintained in that shop in the mostly unknown and unseen depths of the Jester Dormitory, where we hid out and did as little work as possible, taking cigarette and joint breaks while playing games of washers beside the paint shop throughout the day. It was an easy gig, and between my loans and low pay it would just make the rent and get me through college.

  A friend of mine from West Texas had told me about an old, mostly abandoned hot springs river and limestone pool with a couple of broken-down adobe cabins by it near the Mexican border, some cheap place in the middle of nowhere, south of Marfa toward Big Bend, about a ten-hour drive or so from Austin. He’d said if I ever wanted to truly get away from everyone and everything that was where I should go. He even drew me a map as it wasn’t on any map, only an X off a caliche road in the desert near Presidio and the Mexican border town Ojinaga. I packed up my truck and drove down there, almost fell off a cliff driving through Mustang Canyon, but then found the hot springs, rented a cabin dirt cheap, and stayed for a month. There were only two people there, an old country couple who ran the place, which had a little grocery store and few visitors, only the cats and dogs the couple had, and the many surrounding coyotes, and a mountain lion or two, out in the hills at night. There was no TV, no radio, nothing but myself and the wind and the sky and the dry brown land.