The Camels Back

Sandy was constantly nagging me about helping, so I finally had an opportunity to bring her along on a project. The flooring product was real wood, a product that came prefinished. It was a beautiful looking product called “Dirty Maple.” It was three quarters of an inch thick by two and one-quarter inches wide, and of various lengths. It stretched from the front door to the staircase, throughout the kitchen, dining room, down one hallway into a laundry room, and down another hallway into a bathroom, where it met right up to the bathtub. This particular spot is where Vinyl should be placed. I remember it very well, not because I had to manufacture my own turn around strips due to Bob intentionally setting me up with stuff that was the wrong size in order to take my payout down on the installation but because of Sandy and her damned hiking boots.

Oh yeah, Sandy loved helping. On the day the job was finally completed, we were cleaning up and filling nails holes when I happened to notice a small dent in the wood floor. Bending down closer, I became horrified. Everywhere in an area of at least ten square feet were dents, gouges, and scratches in the finish. The replay of this area went through my mind. It was where Sandy was on her knees, racking together assortments of wood pieces for me to install. Her boots had these metal rings and eyelets riveted to the top of them. They were your typical hiking boots. She sat on her feet while working, gouging the flooring and carving long dents into the surface. There were no visible scratches at the time, hidden by the sawdust and scrap pieces on the floor, nothing to indicate that this was happening. My attention was focused on installing and cutting the end pieces to fit up to within a quarter of an inch of the wall in order to be trimmed out with the baseboard and shoe molding for the finish. Her and her footwear never occurred to be a possible problem to me. I was so pleased with having a project to make money on that it never occurred to me. The worst part of it was that it was a section of flooring right smack in the middle of the room. It was right in the middle of the entire field of work. I silently blew a gasket.

Taking a deep breath, I had to figure out how to handle the situation. Having a certain amount of confidence in being able to handle it or somehow hide it, I loaded up the van and took her back home, telling her that, since I was done and it was still early in the day, I had to go to the shop to help Bob with a few things, and submit my bill to get paid. It was a small lie but the intention was to not attack Sandy, which would have been explosive.

After getting the tools back out I realized that my work was really cut out for me this time. Now was the moment of truth, to see if I was cut out to repair it. Since Bob was a Dutchmen first and a carpenter last, he squeaked when he walked. There was only enough of the flooring material to do the whole job, calculating out where the wood would go next as the pile shrunk, saving him on carpeting or tile expenses. It was basically free flooring, having accumulated it from here and there from past projects. Luckily for me, I am an extremely conservative person when it comes to material handling. And since I was told there was just enough material to get through the job I had to be extra conscientious and methodical. I had managed to use the right pieces of flooring which took me quite a bit more time installing. After rounding all of the scrap up, there was just a little bit more than what I could use for a small fire. The wood I had put in the closets would just have to get pulled up, no big deal. The advantage I had was that my math skills were just two percent better than his, making me the only one who knew the truth.

It would have done no good to tell Sandy about it, and her helping fix it wouldn’t have made things better either. She had enough pain dealt to her in life, so I was just going to absorb this whole ordeal myself. It worried me to death that someone would show up while I was in the middle of it, namely, Bob. The end of hearing about it would never come if he did find out.

Sandy could never understand why she couldn’t just come along and help me on the jobs. I’d tell her, “It’s not about you, it’s about you not being covered by the liability insurance.” I would tell her, “The employer or contractor accepts the responsibility for certain people on the job. It’s not open to the public to come and watch.” I could never use enough tact to get her to understand that, or maybe she just refused to hear it so, I caved and brought her along anyway even though I’d catch a whole world of additional grief because of her. I was risking losing a job that I needed desperately but I couldn’t win either way I played it. This would seem true with every person I dealt with.

 Grabbing a drill and a one and one quarter inch paddle bit, I strategically picked a spot in the floor and started drilling, while praying the whole time for Bob not to show up as I worked at the repair. My hammer and a chisel, along with a lot of hope helped to extract that first piece. I started drilling more holes, got out an extra hammer, placing the head in the hole, driving it out from where the piece was locked in with the other hammer. It was a bent over, drilling, chiseling, hammering task. I worked like a madman for a few hours, start to finish, all backside and elbows. It was one hundred square feet of flooring in total. Now there wasn’t anything left but sawdust and a couple of pieces with the ends cut off that I could throw on the fire pile.

Right next door to this project was one of the last games I played with Bob. While riding back from a project in Ada Township, Bob received a phone call. It was Ricky, his excavator, just a drunken buddy of his that was calling about when and where he was to deliver a load of fill sand. They laughed and giggled back and forth like a couple of juveniles- Beavis and Butthead come to mind. The conversation was very easily heard because the Nextel phone earpiece was audible and clear from where I sat in the van at the time. When Ricky asked who the “lucky guy” was going to be for their little game, Bob was quick to say that he sat right here, turning to look at me as he told Ricky to put the sand in the garage. When Bob hung up he told me he needed me to install the drainage tile around the footing and to place the sand in the basement according to preparation for the concrete to be poured for the floor slab. Naturally, I couldn’t back away from the job since I had to have the money to pay my bills. No one else was willing to work with me due to my injuries to my back, neck and head from the accident in September of 1997. Bob had me right where he wanted me.

Incidentally, Ricky owned the land that Bob was building the houses on. The land was cut up into parcels, which Bob had been buying with large amounts of money in cash. Bob had me ride along with him to make the money drop, which was done in a church parking lot, on the corner of 68 Avenue and Leonard Street, around nine p.m. that night. Bob flaunted the money in my face, having me count it out for him, as if I had never held that much money at one time. It was just another part of his constant head game he played with me. Ricky showed up there shortly after we did, handing over a small time capsule looking container that had a sort of combination lock thing that you had to twist to get it opened. It was a two quart sized unit that he buried in his yard somewhere.

So there I was the next day with little more than a utility knife and a shovel. There was no wheelbarrow and the sand was in the garage just as Bob had asked. To my surprise, this was located as far from where it needed to go as it could really get. The only thing farther would have been the hole it had come from. My task was to install the drain tile and take the sand from the garage, all the way around the back of the house, in through a window of the basement, to fill and level the area for the floor. 

One issue that I had to deal with first was that the tile had to connect with the tile that was around the footing of the garage. I had to dig under the footing to locate it because it wasn’t sticking through the wall where it was supposed to be. This was very frustrating because as I dug, the earth from above (sand) was caving in on me as I tried to work, creating an hourglass affect like being buried in the sands of time. The sand kept coming and coming. It seemed like forever while I struggled with the ordeal. It occurred to me that this was how Bob had envisioned me getting the sand in the basement, by draining it from the garage like this. Surely it would drive me mad, as well as wreck my back, leaving me covered in filth. He had expected that Sandy would be with me, and that we’d both be tortured by the exercise but the joke was on him because I left her out of it entirely.

I got some boards and started fighting to get them into the hole to stop the sand from flowing, managing to buy myself enough relief to actually get the tile installed the way it is supposed to be. By the time I finished with the tile, the cement guys showed up to prepare the site for concrete delivery, remarking on the “idiots who put the fill sand in the garage”. I started to tell them something about it when they broke out the wheelbarrows and started moving it to where they needed it. I didn’t follow through with that comment because I had suffered enough humiliation. I didn’t need to risk their comments to further the degradation. They said they were a day early but were in the area with a little time to work with, so they decided to get an early start. This was all part of their job, not mine. The conversation between Bob and Ricky was still playing in my mind about where to put the sand. They were just two bullies planning a dastardly scheme of impossibility, placing me there under-tooled to break my back. I had driven myself mad trying, all the while knowing what they had conspired, and refusing to let a couple of cheats beat me. Here I was, a highly trained, and highly skilled tradesman, playing in the dirt for no reason but jealousy and hatred. This had been a job for three to four unskilled laborers. My stroke of luck was that the concrete guys arrived a day earlier than Bob had planned on. My guardian angels at work again?

In the meantime, Bob was on the north end of Grand Rapids, at the real job, installing decorative columns that I had built. His fear was that the builder would recognize who the real Finish Carpenter was, between the two of us. The builder was anxious to meet me but Bob wanted to keep me hidden from view, absorbing the credit for what I had been doing in the recent weeks, the main reason for his efforts at destroying me in my mind, destroying my confidence, the confidence that he wished he had. How sad it is to see the sicknesses of today’s men active. It was easy to imagine the conversation he was having, the same conversations I had heard from him so many times in the recent past of others, and the things he had done directly, and caused to be done, to them. He laughed while hiding his insecurities, reveling in duping the only guy that cared about life’s big picture enough to understand him, to forgive him, to fight back with kindness, while feeling sad for the love his wife must long to feel. Sandy and I would eventually catch him in his deception and lies, red-handed that next couple of days. I kept journals that have accumulated over the years. There are many things in them about my relationship with Bob, lying dog-eared in dark cubbies awaiting my reflection.

The tides and tune soon changed and I ended up working for my mom more often, once again needing to pay the lot rent and to make a trailer payment, and in need of a vehicle since my van had taken the toll of time and wear that I could not afford, especially after it was impounded by the Coopersville Police, whom had a hand in rendering it inoperable, which I found out when I tried to collect it from the impound yard. The van wouldn’t start or respond. I don’t know what they did to it but what they did do was make sure I wouldn’t be sleeping in it anywhere around their little village. 
The only thing they needed to do now was stop selling booze.