In Gratitude: A Labor Day Story and a Lesson Learned

                                                                                       

Working Man Blues

     As Labor Day nears, I am reaching into the vault, my own personal time capsule, for an essay I wrote a few years back, about men at work, not in an office or behind a desk, pure muscle, no apologies, no regrets, just men who labored, proud of their work but more proud of supporting their families, so their kids could sit in offices behind desks. 

     I was in my late teens the first time my dad told me this story, trying to teach me a lesson about work, I suppose, or maybe about not quitting. Of course, I’d heard the tale many times over the years, and it’s always stayed with me. In some ways, it’s helped me understand a lot about people, work, and culture, about looking toward the future instead of the past.

     My dad and my uncle, Aurelio, "Ted," for “Tetera,” in Spanish the nipple on a baby’s bottle, but nobody knew exactly why he got stuck with the moniker, were doing a job in the Hollywood Hills, remodeling a home for a well-known movie director, my dad and Ted handling the interior stucco-work, and some other guys finishing up the exterior. 

     It was a modern home, flat, multi-leveled roofs, and large plate glass windows to look out at the L.A. skyline, something along the lines of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, the house and the environment working as one.

     The director, who was living upstairs during the remodel, came downstairs one morning to see the progress. The cement, the undercoat on the walls in the den had already dried. My dad, who carried the hod with stucco, and Ted, who did the plastering, had begun applying the stucco, the smooth surface, to one interior wall. The director, in his robe, his hair mussed, told them the flat stucco had no pizazz. He wanted a surface that would “pop,” something unique, different, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

     My dad and Ted looked at each other. They weren’t designers but plasterers following the blueprints. Most walls they completed had smooth surfaces, ready for the painters’ rollers, where the colors gave the rooms character. The director said he wanted something with texture but not the traditional Mexican texture he’d seen in other homes. He asked if they could show him some samples. Stumped, Ted my dad looked at each other. “What samples? It was either smooth or a slight texture.”

     The director got it. He knew he was asking for something he’d never even seen before. My dad said the job was nearly complete. All they had to do was finish the stucco, get the hell out, and start the next job. A lot of guys would have left. Time was money, but my dad and Ted were interested in what the guy had in mind. They started tossing around ideas. The stucco they’d already applied on the wall was still soft, malleable, so Ted began experimenting, making different designs with the trowel.

     “No, that’s not it,” the director would say after each attempt.

     They were in new territory here.

     My dad and Ted would go outside to the pickup, look around, and return with different trowels, ones used for sidewalks, patios, and exterior walls, trowels with beveled or serrated edges, but whatever they tried, the director would say, “Yeah, better, but that’s still not it.”

     My dad told me, by this time, other plasterers would have gotten frustrated with the guy because most of them were traditional, conservative, and always wanted to do it the old-fashioned way, get in, get out, the way most clients wanted their walls. But the director’s house wasn’t traditional, not colonial, ranch, or English Tudor, more, an experimental structure, on stilts, built into the mountainside.

      For some reason, my uncle had some straw (as in hay), along with a bunch of other junk, in the back of his pickup. He brought in a handful and tossed it up and troweled it into a corner of the wall. “Oh, now that’s interesting. I like that,” said the director, “but no, not quite it.”

     After each attempt, they had to apply fresh stucco to the wall to keep it soft and smooth.

     The thing about my uncle Ted was he approached his work like an artist. He liked the challenge of creating something new instead of the same old thing, especially in a house like this one, that begged for eccentricity, progressive thinking. My dad could, well, let’s say, “take it or leave it.” But one thing he always wanted was to please the client, especially Hollywood types, deep pockets, and good, strong recommendations.

      By this time, Ted and my dad were “into it,” but they were just about out of ideas, when Ted said, “Ray, we got that empty handy-six out there?” My dad nodded, “yes,” in the affirmative. Ted went back to the pickup. My dad said he heard glass breaking. When Ted returned, he was holding a broken beer bottle by the neck, confusing both the director and my dad.

     “Let me try this,” Ted said.

     Gently, and with the care of Diego Rivera, he slowly raked the sharp, irregular edges across the soft stucco, creating circles, ovals, waves, and squares. Softer and grittier than sculptor’s clay, stucco takes skill and patience to manipulate. Too much pressure cuts too deep.

     As the designs emerged from the material, the director’s face brightened. He leaped up and down, “That’s it! That’s it! Marvelous, genius, wonderful!”

     My dad said he went outside and grabbed another empty beer bottle from their handy-six. He broke the bottle on rock and went back inside where he and Ted spent the rest of the afternoon etching designs courtesy of Pabst Blue Ribbon, curiosity, and a little Chicano ingenuity, a Labor Day, and a life's lesson.