The Rhyme of the Ancient Dodo Bird
Cy Hill
I worked for what used to be called “THE Phone Company” until they broke it up into Baby Bells. They said you couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but the Baby Bells ate one another like rats until there were only two left. I would like to say I loved this job. I used to. There was a time.
“Repair” was what I did, what I had done for 47 years. Some of the young technicians called me a dinosaur, said I should retire since I had them all by more than twenty-five years, and I’d say, “Yeah, I’m Tyrannosaurus Rex and I’ll eat you for breakfast.” I was by far the best troubleshooter in the district and no one could out climb me up those wooden poles. There was no argument about those facts. So -- okay. I still loved the work. It was the bullshit around the job.
I always sat close to the door in the garage to make a quick getaway after the morning meeting. When I came into work that particular day, I had no idea it would be my last. Before this one started, Ahorangi did not take her usual seat, but came over and sat next to me. She was a tattooed Maori from the South Seas. She should play linebacker for The Raiders. Her partner, Joe, a short skinny Somali, took the seat the other side of me.
She said, “Fatass,” our Union Steward, “has been out all night with Marvin on that job to repair the bank.”
“And they still have not fixed it,” Joe said.
“So,” I said, “the boss is going to want me to go out again on straight time and make the repair after they’ve been doing nothing all night but collect double time.”
“Don’t do it, Rudy,” she said. “As long as you keep going out and doing their work for them, they’ll keep pulling this shit. They don’t even try to fix it. They’re using up all of our garage’s allotted overtime.” Overtime pay should go to technicians who actually worked.
“You can’t tell him not to go out and help Marvin and Fatass,” Joe said, “but maybe you can say something?” Joe was training to be an electrical engineer when he fled Somalia. He was the only technician in the garage capable of discussing troubleshooting at my level. He was the one who should be getting these difficult jobs, and Ahorangi, an eager student, was next in line.
I didn’t need the overtime money. There was just me to support. Joe and Ahorangi had families. Marvin, suckling off the teat of double-time pay, was the nephew of one of our vice presidents. The story was that after spending time with us blue-collar folk, he would be promoted to upper stratosphere management. I tried to teach him repair, but Marvin did not care to learn. The actual “repair” part was my job. His job was picking up the overtime pay.
And speaking of Marvin – in he strolled, smiling, and fresh – certainly not looking like he had been working all night – he probably slept in his truck. Wearing his signature smirk, he walked back to our First Level Manager’s cubicle. Our First Level popped up like a Jack in the Box. He said something angrily and pointed towards the door. Marvin walked back towards us. I supposed the First Level had told him to get his ass back out there and fix the bank’s service.
“Rough night?” Ahorangi asked him, her words like sand dropped in gears. The lined tattoos on her arms and neck pulsed like a tiger’s stripes. There were times she scared the shit out of me.
“Yeah, so we’re going out for breakfast. I can never remember your name, why don’t you get a regular name like Joe here? Say. Don’t take this wrong, but has anyone ever mistaken you for a man?”
“No, Marvin. Has anyone ever mistaken you for one?”
We had more than thirty technicians, and that rung the room with a good laugh. Marvin’s response was an even more contemptuous version of his signature smirk. Then, he gave me a little wave with his finger. “See you out there in a few, dodo bird. We’ll be at Marie’s for breakfast. Join us. It’s on me.”
His “dodo bird” line came from what I told the kids. That we have dodo bird skills. I said that because I could read the writing on the outhouse wall. We fixed copper wire. The industry was replacing copper with fiber. They would need fewer and fewer of us until they needed none of us. The last time I waxed poetic, Fatass the Union Steward asked, “So what the fuck is a dodo bird, some character on ‘Scooby Doo?’”
I said, “Ask your grandfather. Ask your father.” They were both my Union Stewards, and they were good Union Stewards. “Google it, meathead.” “Rhyme of the Ancient Dodo Bird,” that was my life’s song. That was what got me up every morning, to eat my bowl of cereal with nonfat milk in my empty house.
Our First Level Manager came out of his cube and conducted our morning meeting, feeding us the usual slop of platitudes and bullshit. Telling everyone to beat feet out of the garage, he ended his monologue standing a foot from me. As I stood, he said, “I would like you to assist Marvin and Fatass --,” he caught himself, “– Ernie -- on that high-speed data repair line for the bank.”
Every technician that was leaving froze. I think they knew what I was going to say before I did.
“How long they been out on it?” I asked, like we all didn’t know.
“I don’t care. Go out there and give them some help.”
Ahorangi was right. I was allowing this to happen by going out and doing Marvin and Fatass’ work for them. “I tell you what. You send them home. They must be all worn out. You send them home and I’ll fix it all by myself.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I knew ‘why not’? How would he explain it? How would he explain that he had let his two pets stay out all night on double time and that they had failed to repair the outage? This was a bank, a big customer. How was it going to look when I went out on my own and fixed it before lunch?
“I could loan you to the Dupuy garage. They’re asking for volunteers. Why don’t you volunteer to do what I asked you to do instead?”
Dupuy was a rough area.
It was past time for us to be out of the garage and in our vehicles, heading out to repair something, but not one of my fellow technicians was going anywhere. All of our vehicles had GPS on them and our all leaving the garage late was registering as a big loud DING heard all the way to our corporate Headquarters three states away. They were looking to me. It had to be me. No one else could say what had to be said. No one else could do what had to be done.
“I’m not volunteering. I don’t volunteer for anything. It’s a matter of self-respect. It’s a matter of principle.”
“It’s your choice. Go help them and get my thanks, or go to Dupuy and go fuck yourself.”
I leaned into his weasel face. And smiled. Because he had just crossed the line.
“Kiss my withered, wrinkled ass.” I said a few more things – well, more than a few, many about his mother who may have been a nice woman, but once he crossed that line, cursing me, I had my technician’s honor to uphold, so she had to be syphilitic, how else could you explain her son? He got all red in the face, saying he was going to write me up, and I said he should probably roll that piece of paper up and poke me in the eye with it because that was the only way it is going to do me any damage. His face grew redder, a deep red, like a pomegranate. I warned him about the dangers of apoplexy. He told me to get the fuck on the freeway and head for Dupuy. My work would appear on my computer laptop.
All in all, I felt pretty good. A great start to the day. A Great Day to Be Alive. Look at all that I would miss if I retired. Retirement. I couldn’t get away from it. Something had popped up on my home computer, one of those links that lures you to another site. “The Top Ten Things For Retirees to Do”. Suggestion Number One was to go back to school. I didn’t like it the first time through, why would I go back there voluntarily? Or Suggestion Number Eight, “Help out in your Church”. Maybe, if I went. The last time I was in church was to attend services for an electrocuted technician. The ground wire on the pole he was climbing was broken underneath the sheathing, part way up. The company said he should have noticed that. Yeah, right. Random occurrence. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. Closed casket. Suggestion Number Four: “Connect with people your age”. I don’t like old people, they are always bitching about their aches and pains, or going on and on and on about how much they hate young people.
My first stop was the Starbucks near the freeway entrance. That gave my laptop the chance to populate my Dupuy job, and allowed me to flirt in my old man way with the girls behind the counter. All they had to do was pour me straight black coffee. None of that foo-foo shit-in- a-cup for me. How healthy could that be? I always left a buck tip in the jar, for my luck and theirs. On the way out to my truck I fired up another cigarette. You have to love the new technology. I used to have to break out a map to find where I was being sent. My laptop laid out the quickest route to get me to my first job of the day in Dupuy.
My last job ever.
I performed the preliminary research on the residence while still parked in the Starbuck’s parking lot. This female customer had the basic television/internet/phone service bundle that would all be delivered via a single pair of copper wire. 911 and Showgirls traveled over the same copper pair. Her service had been down for three weeks. That was bad. Three weeks with no service? No ability to call 911? I hoped she could afford a cellphone. I read the history. Six techs had been out to her place and six had walked away, returning the job to our maintenance and repair pool. Three claimed “No Access” which I knew was bullshit, two claimed “end of shift”, and one was at least honest about it: “He was scared for his safety.”
As I drove through the crowded, rutted streets of Dupuy I noted the barbed wire around the churches. Even the barren, de-vegetated vacant lots were fenced and padlocked. At a stop light, one wheel in a pothole, a dead and decaying dog lay just outside my window. I could see through its rib cage, into rotted dried-up guts. No one did basic services in Dupuy, not my company, not the City itself. No one voluntarily lived in Dupuy. When the light changed, I tossed my cigarette butt in front of the poor bastard and moved forward with the slow flow of traffic. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Just another carcass no one cared enough about to scrape off the street. Retirement suggestion Number Two was “Get a dog”.
The residence was a pleasant surprise. It was kept up. There were flowers, bushes, and even a tree on the side. It was a tall two story with a wood plank exterior. All of the homes on the block were two stories, but they were very close to one another. Once upon a time this land must have been worth something.
I strapped on my tools, the dog-killer screwdriver at the ready by my right hand for self-defense. My cell phone rang. It was Ahorangi. She was working with Joe on a high-speed data line for a Seven-Eleven, and their meter indicated the problem was under a freeway. Ridiculous. Those new machines.
“Did you try that test set I gave you?”
“Only you can read that ancient thing.”
“Hook it up, snap a picture of the results, and send it to me.”
“Thank you, Rudy.”
“Say ‘hi’ to Joe.” I liked those kids. They wanted to learn.
As we were talking, a young man came out of the customer’s house, paused in the doorway, and looked around like a wary cat. He moved cautiously across the shaded porch and eased down the stairs. He wore a blue dew rag, custom jeans, and a sleeveless t-shirt. His tennis shoes looked expensive. I was unfamiliar with his tatt designs.
“Are you here to fix my great grandmother’s service?”
“Yes, I’m Rudy Reid.” I handed him my business card. He took it and shook my hand.
“Her service has been out for three weeks. I took a day off to be here. She says that men come, sit in their truck for a few minutes, and leave.”
“I’m sorry about that. Let’s take a look.”
The feeder telephone pole was in the backyard. A flimsy temporary wire was hung from the pole to the house in lieu of heavy gauge drop wire. If I was lucky, the problem would be in that temporary wire, between the pole and the jack inside the home. If I had to chase trouble on the wire before the pole, there really could be an access problem. Standing atop a stack of unopened fertilizer bags, I saw dogs all the way down the line. Unless the owners were home to lock the dogs up, I could not enter those yards.
“You look like you know what you are doing,” he said.
I climbed down off the fertilizer perch and gave him a quick analysis. My cell phone dinged. Ahorangi had snapped a photo of her test-set’s reading to my laptop.
“This will only take a minute.”
“Do you mind if I stay with you?”
“Not at all.”
He was afraid that I was going to get in my truck and take off. I unlocked the passenger door and invited him in. He declined that, but came around to my driver’s side, leaning upon the truck cockeyed, the left half of him aiming one direction, the right half the other.
I had to call her. “Ahorangi, this isn’t going to do it. I need to see a live action shot.”
Joe came on the phone. He was tech savvy. He figured out a way to get a live stream onto my laptop. It was slow, but between me giving directions on the phone, and them adjusting the screen on their test set, I was able to tell them where they needed to perform their repair: about 3200 feet from where they were.
“That was impressive,” the great grandson said.
“I like them, they’re good kids.”
“’Ahorangi’ sounds Maori.”
“She is.”
“Can I give you a water or anything?”
“Wait until I fix it.”
“You will. I have confidence in you.”
He escorted me into the house. It was heavily shaded. The drapes were thick and beaded fixtures hung throughout. An ancient woman dressed in black played solitaire at a table. Unusual instrumental music played softly on a cassette player. She gazed up at me, then looked away.
Her great grandson said something to her in a language I did not recognize – and that’s saying something, I thought I’d heard them all.
I located the wall jack and hooked up my meter. I was in luck. There was a clean break – a severed wire – between the wall jack and the backyard pole. The young man, increasingly interested in my troubleshooting, questioned me as I put a beeping tone in the jack to trace the wire back towards the pole. I love telling young people about what I do.
Outside, I looked up and re-examined the thin temporary wire strung from the pole to the home. “Has this service ever worked well?”
“No. It tiled and reset itself every hour, but she was happy, she could see her shows. They are very important to her.”
“So is being able to call 911.”
The wire wrapped behind a tree, out of my sight, beneath a high window. Maybe a squirrel took a bite out of it. I needed my big ladder to take a look.
“What does she watch?”
“You call them ‘soap operas’, but they are from her home. They take her back there.”
I pulled the ladder down off my truck. He offered to help carry it, but that was a no-no. If anything happened to him, I would lose my job. I did allow him to steady it while I climbed.
When I was about twenty-five feet up, I heard the old woman. She pointed up at me angrily and shook her finger at her great grandson.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“She does not want you to be injured. She says that you are too old, that your company should send a younger man.”
I was so touched. I came down the ladder. “Please tell her that I have done this for many years, and that I will be very, very careful.” I bowed.
She smiled. It made my day. She took hold of my arm and weighed it, as if for manliness. She said something to her great grandson.
“What did she say?”
“You know what she said.”
Now I had to fix her damn service. I couldn’t walk away after that.
I climbed the ladder feeling young but knowing I was old, knowing that the even older woman in black was watching me.
My wife died twenty-four years ago, rear-ended by a drunk. Random occurrence. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. I was so busy raising our three kids it was hard to miss her until they left, the daughter last. They lived in distant states. Now I thought about my wife too much. Part of me wanted to join her, and I had to fight that. Suggestion Number Five for Retirement was to join a choir. I couldn’t even stand to hear me sing. That I had memorized these ten suggestions by number – that had to be my subconscious telling me something. Maybe a part of you knows what’s coming.
“Do you like coffee?” the young man called up to me.
“Sure.”
“I warn you, she only knows how to make it her way. Very bitter. Very thick.”
“I’ve had coffee I could chew. Tell her thanks.”
He said something to her and she left, presumably to make my coffee. I poked my head around the tree and held out my wand, listening for that beeping tone on the wire, sent from the wall jack. I had tone to my right, so no break yet – followed it to my left -- and there it was. A clean severance. And what a severance. The white insulation around the wire was singed. What would burn wire like that?
A bullet. Scattered amongst the tree foliage pressed against the wall were a half-dozen bullet holes that I could see, the projectiles still sunk into the side of the home, running in an ascending straight line, a solid line of lead no doubt from an automatic weapon. They angled up to the bedroom window. If the window had been hit – and I did not fathom how it could not have been -- the window glass had been replaced.
I descended the ladder and told the young man about the bullet holes.
“Oh. You know, I didn’t even think of that. About a month ago some people were shooting at one another in the street and they must have strafed the house.”
He was lying to me, and he knew that I knew.
“That’s not her bedroom?”
“No.” He wanted me to know this. “She sleeps in the interior.”
“You don’t live here with her?”
“No.”
“Who sleeps in that bedroom?”
Suddenly we were both very serious. It was one rung below a staring contest.
“Can you fix it?” he finally asked.
“That’s lousy wire, I’m replacing the whole run from the telephone pole in the backyard to the wall jack inside.”
“How long will it take?”
“At least an hour. There may be other problems beside that break.”
“Okay. I love my great grandmother.”
That counted in my book. “I understand why you care about her.”
His plea was almost pitiful. “She doesn’t want to be here. She is lonely. No one speaks her language, all that she has is that television, to take her home.”
“She will have it. I will not leave here until she has it.”
He put his hand upon my arm; not as his great grandmother had, but as a suppliant. “Only you can do this. I see that now. Only you will do it.”
“I had better get started.”
He nodded. “If you need anything – anything – I will be inside.”
I nodded.
Well, now the real work began. I carried out a spool of drop wire, put on my gaffs and climbing belt, and spiked my way up the backyard pole. The wood splintered as I hit it with my gaffs. I had to be careful. Cutting out and riding the pine down put me in the hospital once when a wedge of wood punctured a lung. On that pole termites had undermined a section just beneath the surface. Random occurrence. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. Wouldn’t my fans love it if I cut out and crash landed now? Then they could force me into retirement.
Once up on the pole and belted in, I inspected the line and confirmed that rather than do the job correctly, some lazy bastard had hung temporary wire directly out of the rat bag next to me. A “rat bag” is a black vinyl enclosure that allows access to the copper wire within, and this rotted thing was zip-tied in three separate places across the bottom. We call them “rat bags” for a reason. I leaned over with my snips and clipped the zip-tie furthest from me. There was immediate motion within and that part of the bag popped open and dropped a five-inch body. It hit the ground hard and limped away. I had me a rat piñata. Using my large screwdriver, I smacked the side of the bag twice and leaned back. One -- two – rodents leapt up onto the wire and ran away from me (thank God they were going that way) – I’d hit the jackpot -- three -- I whacked it a couple of more times and another one left. Quickly and carefully, I snipped the remaining two zip-ties. A mixture of liquid and – I don’t know what -- fell out the bottom and splashed in the yard. The stench was stunning.
I switched out my thick gauntlet gloves for plastic disposable ones. When I used to tell my wife about my work, she always liked hearing what I saw when I was up high with the birds. What I saw now was the great grandson climb out onto that high window ledge by the bullet holes and onto my ladder. I lost sight of him in the tree limbs until he grabbed an eave and pulled himself up onto the raked roof. From there he crabbed his way up to the roof’s angled ridge. He saw me and our eyes linked. He had to leave. Now. He turned his back and his ribcage expanded as he inhaled deeply. He was preparing himself. Then, displaying incredible balance, he attained a rapidly accelerating burst across the narrow ridge, as if it were a runway, and when he reached the end, launched himself. He landed cleanly on the next-door neighbor’s roof ridge and kept right on running. Those expensive shoes of his were not just for show. His head bobbed up on the next roof –
“Freeze! Put your hands up!”
I looked down. A man wearing black with a heavy vest had his handgun pointed at me. I was uncertain as to which of his conflicting orders to follow, but opted for leaning all the way back on my belt and holding up my hands so that he could see I was unarmed.
“I am a telephone repairman. My truck is parked out front.”
A second officer, weapon drawn, ran up beside the first. “I thought you were securing the yard.”
“How could I with him up there? I wasn’t going to turn my back on him.”
“What are you doing up there?” the second officer demanded, and I gave him the same answer. He holstered his weapon.
Another officer opened the backdoor and crossed the yard towards us. A fourth jogged around the side.
My climbing belt was riding up my back. I needed to reposition my gaffs or risk falling. I needed the use of my hands to do that. “Shall I come down?”
The first one whispered, “He may have hidden something up there.”
“You want to see what fell out of this bag?” I nodded towards the puddle.
One was standing close to the mess and moved away. He said, “Come down.”
“I am going to reposition myself and change out my gloves.”
The first one who still had his weapon pointed at me said, “No. You are not.”
“Yes,” I peeled off the plastic gloves, “I am.” I did not look at him. Would he shoot me? I was beyond caring. There were worse ways to leave this world. Like sliding down this pole, taking in a chest full of wood, and breaking my legs when I hit earth. I repositioned myself on the pole, pulled on my gauntlet gloves, and descended. Properly.
They had me take a seat atop the bags of stacked fertilizer and let me smoke a butt while they searched my truck – I volunteered the keys – and verified my identity through their department.
“Was he here?” one of them showed me a photograph of the great grandson.
“When I arrived.” He had risked his freedom to ensure that on the seventh try a repairman would restore his great grandmother’s service. “What has he done?”
Three of them turned and left. Like I wasn’t there. The one remaining asked, “Do you speak their language?”
“What is their language?”
He turned and followed his fellows from the yard. I waited until they drove off before finishing the job.
The old woman had me sit upon the couch with her to drink the coffee. She also provided a sweet, sticky pastry. From her demeanor, I deduced that visits from the Law were routine events in this household. The room was cool and dark, the air stale. Or maybe it was her. A show came up on the screen. She clutched my hand. It was awful. I was glad I could not understand what the actors said. Grand poses, incredibly strained expressions, music as tinnily dramatic as whatever the story was – complete crap – and she was in heaven. This was one of the 247 channels provided by our service that I always wondered who watched. Now I knew.
Within ten minutes, she was softly snoring. I let myself out.
I ran a test on the service, and it came in at the 85th percentile. That was forty points better than any other service in the neighborhood. I closed the job on my laptop, listing “bullet hole” as the reason necessary for the repair. I had just lit up a cigarette and hit “Dispatch” to be assigned my next repair job when my cellphone rang. I answered it spouting the standard required spiel as a greeting.
“Do you think that is funny?” It was my First Level Manager.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“A bullet hole? How do you know it was a bullet hole?”
“Just give me the word and I’ll climb back up there and pry one out with a screwdriver.”
“I am so looking forward to your retirement.” He hung up.
Retirement Suggestion Number Three was “Go out on a date”. I called my First Level and asked in my sexiest voice, “What are you wearing?”
There was prolonged silence. Then: “Remain at the residence. I am coming out. Do you understand me?”
“You want me to stay here.”
“Don’t move. I’m on my way. I will be conducting a Safety Inspection.”
That was the problem with First Levels these days. No sense of humor. He was looking to suspend me for something. For anything. It was time to play defense. I called the Union Hall. Fortunately, I still had sons or grandsons of friends in positions of authority. The Steward of the Day promised to send someone out immediately.
Two hours later, as he and the Union Representative observed (with the Rep recording all on his cell phone), I demonstrated how to properly take my big ladder off the truck, carry it to the side of the house, and return it to the position where I had found the bullet holes and made my repair. I was to dig the bullet out of the paneling that I claimed had caused the loss of service to this customer.
As I strapped on my tools to climb, the Union Rep tore into my First Level.
“You have never heard of a bullet cutting a wire?”
“I thought he meant – like up there, on the pole, not against the side of the house, and for all I know, those marks up there are dirt.”
I climbed. The first bullet I went after was in too deep. I was exploring for a more accessible candidate when I heard a scream below. It was my First Level. Hands flung up in the air, wailing, he ran wildly in small circles. During the subsequent investigation he claimed a limping rodent had hoisted itself up onto his boot and then clawed its way up the inside of his pant leg, going for gold. It was probably the first rat I knocked out of the rat bag, back for revenge.
My boss crashed into my ladder.
Random Occurrence. My head hit the side of the home.
BAM!
Wrong Place. My shoulder hit the tree.
OWW!
Wrong Time. My foot slipped through a ladder rung and I became tangled
FALLING!
Bad Luck. My left knee exploded when I hit the ground –
It was over.
Now it was not just “Ten Things that I Could Do” when I retired. There were “A Million Things That I Could Do” because I was on Disability transitioning into Retirement -- and they all sucked. I was a repairman. It was all that I knew how to do, all I had done since getting out of high school, and all of that was over. My Job was who Rudy Reid was. Was. Who – he – was.
Four months, puttering about with a walker and then a cane. Giving myself injections in the stomach, balancing the pain meds with the exercise, hoping that my ancient body would accept a brand-new shiny titanium knee. That the grafted bone below that would heal. The only thing that kept me going was the phone calls from the kids who secretly allowed me to help them troubleshoot their jobs.
I spent much of my time on my front porch. It was about twenty feet long and had an overhang that kept me dry when it rained, and in shade when it wasn’t. I had five patio chairs lined up, equal distant apart, and moved among them to keep from getting bored with the view of the sidewalk and parked cars.
I was swatting at the flies that kept landing on me one afternoon when Ahorangi’s gunmetal Ford pickup slid to the curb. She and a few of the other kids from work stopped by every once in a while to bore the shit out of me. At least this time she was carrying a six pack.
“Get off my lawn!”
“I saw that picture. Clint Eastwood had a lawn.” She popped the top on a beer can and handed it to me. Then she disrupted my chair organization by dragging one over to sit next to me. “What are you doing?”
“Working on my spirituality.” That was Number Seven of the Ten Things to do upon retirement.
“How’s that coming?”
“I’d rather watch football.” That was Not one of the Ten Things.
“It’s the month of May.”
I shrugged. “That’s not my fault.”
“I think you need to get back to work.”
Was this her idea of funny?
“I have relatives on,” she named a South Sea Island I later learned was part of an archipelago. “They are building up the tourist trade. Last year Sports Illustrated shot its Swimsuit Edition there.” She handed me a job offer and contract. “They need someone to install and maintain the copper lines to the bungalows. Salt water eventually corrodes it, but fiber is too expensive to lay. Repairing and replacing the copper is more cost effective. You will be busy because all of the resorts on all of the island are having the same problem.”
When I spoke, I heard my voice cracking. “Why did you do this?”
“This porch depresses me. You depress me. Do you want the job?”
I pretended to think about it. “Can they teach me how to play the drum?” Number Nine of the Ten Things was to learn how to play a musical instrument. Beating on a drum was appealing.
“Sure. If you get good at it, they take the tourists on a cruise around the lagoons with a band of Maori onboard all beating the drums and singing.”
“Then I would need tattoos. All Maori have tattoos, right?”
“Yeah, but you? You would have to get a dodo bird tattooed on your ass cheeks.”
The funny thing? It sounded like a good idea.
Cy Hill
I worked for what used to be called “THE Phone Company” until they broke it up into Baby Bells. They said you couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but the Baby Bells ate one another like rats until there were only two left. I would like to say I loved this job. I used to. There was a time.
“Repair” was what I did, what I had done for 47 years. Some of the young technicians called me a dinosaur, said I should retire since I had them all by more than twenty-five years, and I’d say, “Yeah, I’m Tyrannosaurus Rex and I’ll eat you for breakfast.” I was by far the best troubleshooter in the district and no one could out climb me up those wooden poles. There was no argument about those facts. So -- okay. I still loved the work. It was the bullshit around the job.
I always sat close to the door in the garage to make a quick getaway after the morning meeting. When I came into work that particular day, I had no idea it would be my last. Before this one started, Ahorangi did not take her usual seat, but came over and sat next to me. She was a tattooed Maori from the South Seas. She should play linebacker for The Raiders. Her partner, Joe, a short skinny Somali, took the seat the other side of me.
She said, “Fatass,” our Union Steward, “has been out all night with Marvin on that job to repair the bank.”
“And they still have not fixed it,” Joe said.
“So,” I said, “the boss is going to want me to go out again on straight time and make the repair after they’ve been doing nothing all night but collect double time.”
“Don’t do it, Rudy,” she said. “As long as you keep going out and doing their work for them, they’ll keep pulling this shit. They don’t even try to fix it. They’re using up all of our garage’s allotted overtime.” Overtime pay should go to technicians who actually worked.
“You can’t tell him not to go out and help Marvin and Fatass,” Joe said, “but maybe you can say something?” Joe was training to be an electrical engineer when he fled Somalia. He was the only technician in the garage capable of discussing troubleshooting at my level. He was the one who should be getting these difficult jobs, and Ahorangi, an eager student, was next in line.
I didn’t need the overtime money. There was just me to support. Joe and Ahorangi had families. Marvin, suckling off the teat of double-time pay, was the nephew of one of our vice presidents. The story was that after spending time with us blue-collar folk, he would be promoted to upper stratosphere management. I tried to teach him repair, but Marvin did not care to learn. The actual “repair” part was my job. His job was picking up the overtime pay.
And speaking of Marvin – in he strolled, smiling, and fresh – certainly not looking like he had been working all night – he probably slept in his truck. Wearing his signature smirk, he walked back to our First Level Manager’s cubicle. Our First Level popped up like a Jack in the Box. He said something angrily and pointed towards the door. Marvin walked back towards us. I supposed the First Level had told him to get his ass back out there and fix the bank’s service.
“Rough night?” Ahorangi asked him, her words like sand dropped in gears. The lined tattoos on her arms and neck pulsed like a tiger’s stripes. There were times she scared the shit out of me.
“Yeah, so we’re going out for breakfast. I can never remember your name, why don’t you get a regular name like Joe here? Say. Don’t take this wrong, but has anyone ever mistaken you for a man?”
“No, Marvin. Has anyone ever mistaken you for one?”
We had more than thirty technicians, and that rung the room with a good laugh. Marvin’s response was an even more contemptuous version of his signature smirk. Then, he gave me a little wave with his finger. “See you out there in a few, dodo bird. We’ll be at Marie’s for breakfast. Join us. It’s on me.”
His “dodo bird” line came from what I told the kids. That we have dodo bird skills. I said that because I could read the writing on the outhouse wall. We fixed copper wire. The industry was replacing copper with fiber. They would need fewer and fewer of us until they needed none of us. The last time I waxed poetic, Fatass the Union Steward asked, “So what the fuck is a dodo bird, some character on ‘Scooby Doo?’”
I said, “Ask your grandfather. Ask your father.” They were both my Union Stewards, and they were good Union Stewards. “Google it, meathead.” “Rhyme of the Ancient Dodo Bird,” that was my life’s song. That was what got me up every morning, to eat my bowl of cereal with nonfat milk in my empty house.
Our First Level Manager came out of his cube and conducted our morning meeting, feeding us the usual slop of platitudes and bullshit. Telling everyone to beat feet out of the garage, he ended his monologue standing a foot from me. As I stood, he said, “I would like you to assist Marvin and Fatass --,” he caught himself, “– Ernie -- on that high-speed data repair line for the bank.”
Every technician that was leaving froze. I think they knew what I was going to say before I did.
“How long they been out on it?” I asked, like we all didn’t know.
“I don’t care. Go out there and give them some help.”
Ahorangi was right. I was allowing this to happen by going out and doing Marvin and Fatass’ work for them. “I tell you what. You send them home. They must be all worn out. You send them home and I’ll fix it all by myself.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I knew ‘why not’? How would he explain it? How would he explain that he had let his two pets stay out all night on double time and that they had failed to repair the outage? This was a bank, a big customer. How was it going to look when I went out on my own and fixed it before lunch?
“I could loan you to the Dupuy garage. They’re asking for volunteers. Why don’t you volunteer to do what I asked you to do instead?”
Dupuy was a rough area.
It was past time for us to be out of the garage and in our vehicles, heading out to repair something, but not one of my fellow technicians was going anywhere. All of our vehicles had GPS on them and our all leaving the garage late was registering as a big loud DING heard all the way to our corporate Headquarters three states away. They were looking to me. It had to be me. No one else could say what had to be said. No one else could do what had to be done.
“I’m not volunteering. I don’t volunteer for anything. It’s a matter of self-respect. It’s a matter of principle.”
“It’s your choice. Go help them and get my thanks, or go to Dupuy and go fuck yourself.”
I leaned into his weasel face. And smiled. Because he had just crossed the line.
“Kiss my withered, wrinkled ass.” I said a few more things – well, more than a few, many about his mother who may have been a nice woman, but once he crossed that line, cursing me, I had my technician’s honor to uphold, so she had to be syphilitic, how else could you explain her son? He got all red in the face, saying he was going to write me up, and I said he should probably roll that piece of paper up and poke me in the eye with it because that was the only way it is going to do me any damage. His face grew redder, a deep red, like a pomegranate. I warned him about the dangers of apoplexy. He told me to get the fuck on the freeway and head for Dupuy. My work would appear on my computer laptop.
All in all, I felt pretty good. A great start to the day. A Great Day to Be Alive. Look at all that I would miss if I retired. Retirement. I couldn’t get away from it. Something had popped up on my home computer, one of those links that lures you to another site. “The Top Ten Things For Retirees to Do”. Suggestion Number One was to go back to school. I didn’t like it the first time through, why would I go back there voluntarily? Or Suggestion Number Eight, “Help out in your Church”. Maybe, if I went. The last time I was in church was to attend services for an electrocuted technician. The ground wire on the pole he was climbing was broken underneath the sheathing, part way up. The company said he should have noticed that. Yeah, right. Random occurrence. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. Closed casket. Suggestion Number Four: “Connect with people your age”. I don’t like old people, they are always bitching about their aches and pains, or going on and on and on about how much they hate young people.
My first stop was the Starbucks near the freeway entrance. That gave my laptop the chance to populate my Dupuy job, and allowed me to flirt in my old man way with the girls behind the counter. All they had to do was pour me straight black coffee. None of that foo-foo shit-in- a-cup for me. How healthy could that be? I always left a buck tip in the jar, for my luck and theirs. On the way out to my truck I fired up another cigarette. You have to love the new technology. I used to have to break out a map to find where I was being sent. My laptop laid out the quickest route to get me to my first job of the day in Dupuy.
My last job ever.
I performed the preliminary research on the residence while still parked in the Starbuck’s parking lot. This female customer had the basic television/internet/phone service bundle that would all be delivered via a single pair of copper wire. 911 and Showgirls traveled over the same copper pair. Her service had been down for three weeks. That was bad. Three weeks with no service? No ability to call 911? I hoped she could afford a cellphone. I read the history. Six techs had been out to her place and six had walked away, returning the job to our maintenance and repair pool. Three claimed “No Access” which I knew was bullshit, two claimed “end of shift”, and one was at least honest about it: “He was scared for his safety.”
As I drove through the crowded, rutted streets of Dupuy I noted the barbed wire around the churches. Even the barren, de-vegetated vacant lots were fenced and padlocked. At a stop light, one wheel in a pothole, a dead and decaying dog lay just outside my window. I could see through its rib cage, into rotted dried-up guts. No one did basic services in Dupuy, not my company, not the City itself. No one voluntarily lived in Dupuy. When the light changed, I tossed my cigarette butt in front of the poor bastard and moved forward with the slow flow of traffic. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Just another carcass no one cared enough about to scrape off the street. Retirement suggestion Number Two was “Get a dog”.
The residence was a pleasant surprise. It was kept up. There were flowers, bushes, and even a tree on the side. It was a tall two story with a wood plank exterior. All of the homes on the block were two stories, but they were very close to one another. Once upon a time this land must have been worth something.
I strapped on my tools, the dog-killer screwdriver at the ready by my right hand for self-defense. My cell phone rang. It was Ahorangi. She was working with Joe on a high-speed data line for a Seven-Eleven, and their meter indicated the problem was under a freeway. Ridiculous. Those new machines.
“Did you try that test set I gave you?”
“Only you can read that ancient thing.”
“Hook it up, snap a picture of the results, and send it to me.”
“Thank you, Rudy.”
“Say ‘hi’ to Joe.” I liked those kids. They wanted to learn.
As we were talking, a young man came out of the customer’s house, paused in the doorway, and looked around like a wary cat. He moved cautiously across the shaded porch and eased down the stairs. He wore a blue dew rag, custom jeans, and a sleeveless t-shirt. His tennis shoes looked expensive. I was unfamiliar with his tatt designs.
“Are you here to fix my great grandmother’s service?”
“Yes, I’m Rudy Reid.” I handed him my business card. He took it and shook my hand.
“Her service has been out for three weeks. I took a day off to be here. She says that men come, sit in their truck for a few minutes, and leave.”
“I’m sorry about that. Let’s take a look.”
The feeder telephone pole was in the backyard. A flimsy temporary wire was hung from the pole to the house in lieu of heavy gauge drop wire. If I was lucky, the problem would be in that temporary wire, between the pole and the jack inside the home. If I had to chase trouble on the wire before the pole, there really could be an access problem. Standing atop a stack of unopened fertilizer bags, I saw dogs all the way down the line. Unless the owners were home to lock the dogs up, I could not enter those yards.
“You look like you know what you are doing,” he said.
I climbed down off the fertilizer perch and gave him a quick analysis. My cell phone dinged. Ahorangi had snapped a photo of her test-set’s reading to my laptop.
“This will only take a minute.”
“Do you mind if I stay with you?”
“Not at all.”
He was afraid that I was going to get in my truck and take off. I unlocked the passenger door and invited him in. He declined that, but came around to my driver’s side, leaning upon the truck cockeyed, the left half of him aiming one direction, the right half the other.
I had to call her. “Ahorangi, this isn’t going to do it. I need to see a live action shot.”
Joe came on the phone. He was tech savvy. He figured out a way to get a live stream onto my laptop. It was slow, but between me giving directions on the phone, and them adjusting the screen on their test set, I was able to tell them where they needed to perform their repair: about 3200 feet from where they were.
“That was impressive,” the great grandson said.
“I like them, they’re good kids.”
“’Ahorangi’ sounds Maori.”
“She is.”
“Can I give you a water or anything?”
“Wait until I fix it.”
“You will. I have confidence in you.”
He escorted me into the house. It was heavily shaded. The drapes were thick and beaded fixtures hung throughout. An ancient woman dressed in black played solitaire at a table. Unusual instrumental music played softly on a cassette player. She gazed up at me, then looked away.
Her great grandson said something to her in a language I did not recognize – and that’s saying something, I thought I’d heard them all.
I located the wall jack and hooked up my meter. I was in luck. There was a clean break – a severed wire – between the wall jack and the backyard pole. The young man, increasingly interested in my troubleshooting, questioned me as I put a beeping tone in the jack to trace the wire back towards the pole. I love telling young people about what I do.
Outside, I looked up and re-examined the thin temporary wire strung from the pole to the home. “Has this service ever worked well?”
“No. It tiled and reset itself every hour, but she was happy, she could see her shows. They are very important to her.”
“So is being able to call 911.”
The wire wrapped behind a tree, out of my sight, beneath a high window. Maybe a squirrel took a bite out of it. I needed my big ladder to take a look.
“What does she watch?”
“You call them ‘soap operas’, but they are from her home. They take her back there.”
I pulled the ladder down off my truck. He offered to help carry it, but that was a no-no. If anything happened to him, I would lose my job. I did allow him to steady it while I climbed.
When I was about twenty-five feet up, I heard the old woman. She pointed up at me angrily and shook her finger at her great grandson.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“She does not want you to be injured. She says that you are too old, that your company should send a younger man.”
I was so touched. I came down the ladder. “Please tell her that I have done this for many years, and that I will be very, very careful.” I bowed.
She smiled. It made my day. She took hold of my arm and weighed it, as if for manliness. She said something to her great grandson.
“What did she say?”
“You know what she said.”
Now I had to fix her damn service. I couldn’t walk away after that.
I climbed the ladder feeling young but knowing I was old, knowing that the even older woman in black was watching me.
My wife died twenty-four years ago, rear-ended by a drunk. Random occurrence. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. I was so busy raising our three kids it was hard to miss her until they left, the daughter last. They lived in distant states. Now I thought about my wife too much. Part of me wanted to join her, and I had to fight that. Suggestion Number Five for Retirement was to join a choir. I couldn’t even stand to hear me sing. That I had memorized these ten suggestions by number – that had to be my subconscious telling me something. Maybe a part of you knows what’s coming.
“Do you like coffee?” the young man called up to me.
“Sure.”
“I warn you, she only knows how to make it her way. Very bitter. Very thick.”
“I’ve had coffee I could chew. Tell her thanks.”
He said something to her and she left, presumably to make my coffee. I poked my head around the tree and held out my wand, listening for that beeping tone on the wire, sent from the wall jack. I had tone to my right, so no break yet – followed it to my left -- and there it was. A clean severance. And what a severance. The white insulation around the wire was singed. What would burn wire like that?
A bullet. Scattered amongst the tree foliage pressed against the wall were a half-dozen bullet holes that I could see, the projectiles still sunk into the side of the home, running in an ascending straight line, a solid line of lead no doubt from an automatic weapon. They angled up to the bedroom window. If the window had been hit – and I did not fathom how it could not have been -- the window glass had been replaced.
I descended the ladder and told the young man about the bullet holes.
“Oh. You know, I didn’t even think of that. About a month ago some people were shooting at one another in the street and they must have strafed the house.”
He was lying to me, and he knew that I knew.
“That’s not her bedroom?”
“No.” He wanted me to know this. “She sleeps in the interior.”
“You don’t live here with her?”
“No.”
“Who sleeps in that bedroom?”
Suddenly we were both very serious. It was one rung below a staring contest.
“Can you fix it?” he finally asked.
“That’s lousy wire, I’m replacing the whole run from the telephone pole in the backyard to the wall jack inside.”
“How long will it take?”
“At least an hour. There may be other problems beside that break.”
“Okay. I love my great grandmother.”
That counted in my book. “I understand why you care about her.”
His plea was almost pitiful. “She doesn’t want to be here. She is lonely. No one speaks her language, all that she has is that television, to take her home.”
“She will have it. I will not leave here until she has it.”
He put his hand upon my arm; not as his great grandmother had, but as a suppliant. “Only you can do this. I see that now. Only you will do it.”
“I had better get started.”
He nodded. “If you need anything – anything – I will be inside.”
I nodded.
Well, now the real work began. I carried out a spool of drop wire, put on my gaffs and climbing belt, and spiked my way up the backyard pole. The wood splintered as I hit it with my gaffs. I had to be careful. Cutting out and riding the pine down put me in the hospital once when a wedge of wood punctured a lung. On that pole termites had undermined a section just beneath the surface. Random occurrence. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck. Wouldn’t my fans love it if I cut out and crash landed now? Then they could force me into retirement.
Once up on the pole and belted in, I inspected the line and confirmed that rather than do the job correctly, some lazy bastard had hung temporary wire directly out of the rat bag next to me. A “rat bag” is a black vinyl enclosure that allows access to the copper wire within, and this rotted thing was zip-tied in three separate places across the bottom. We call them “rat bags” for a reason. I leaned over with my snips and clipped the zip-tie furthest from me. There was immediate motion within and that part of the bag popped open and dropped a five-inch body. It hit the ground hard and limped away. I had me a rat piñata. Using my large screwdriver, I smacked the side of the bag twice and leaned back. One -- two – rodents leapt up onto the wire and ran away from me (thank God they were going that way) – I’d hit the jackpot -- three -- I whacked it a couple of more times and another one left. Quickly and carefully, I snipped the remaining two zip-ties. A mixture of liquid and – I don’t know what -- fell out the bottom and splashed in the yard. The stench was stunning.
I switched out my thick gauntlet gloves for plastic disposable ones. When I used to tell my wife about my work, she always liked hearing what I saw when I was up high with the birds. What I saw now was the great grandson climb out onto that high window ledge by the bullet holes and onto my ladder. I lost sight of him in the tree limbs until he grabbed an eave and pulled himself up onto the raked roof. From there he crabbed his way up to the roof’s angled ridge. He saw me and our eyes linked. He had to leave. Now. He turned his back and his ribcage expanded as he inhaled deeply. He was preparing himself. Then, displaying incredible balance, he attained a rapidly accelerating burst across the narrow ridge, as if it were a runway, and when he reached the end, launched himself. He landed cleanly on the next-door neighbor’s roof ridge and kept right on running. Those expensive shoes of his were not just for show. His head bobbed up on the next roof –
“Freeze! Put your hands up!”
I looked down. A man wearing black with a heavy vest had his handgun pointed at me. I was uncertain as to which of his conflicting orders to follow, but opted for leaning all the way back on my belt and holding up my hands so that he could see I was unarmed.
“I am a telephone repairman. My truck is parked out front.”
A second officer, weapon drawn, ran up beside the first. “I thought you were securing the yard.”
“How could I with him up there? I wasn’t going to turn my back on him.”
“What are you doing up there?” the second officer demanded, and I gave him the same answer. He holstered his weapon.
Another officer opened the backdoor and crossed the yard towards us. A fourth jogged around the side.
My climbing belt was riding up my back. I needed to reposition my gaffs or risk falling. I needed the use of my hands to do that. “Shall I come down?”
The first one whispered, “He may have hidden something up there.”
“You want to see what fell out of this bag?” I nodded towards the puddle.
One was standing close to the mess and moved away. He said, “Come down.”
“I am going to reposition myself and change out my gloves.”
The first one who still had his weapon pointed at me said, “No. You are not.”
“Yes,” I peeled off the plastic gloves, “I am.” I did not look at him. Would he shoot me? I was beyond caring. There were worse ways to leave this world. Like sliding down this pole, taking in a chest full of wood, and breaking my legs when I hit earth. I repositioned myself on the pole, pulled on my gauntlet gloves, and descended. Properly.
They had me take a seat atop the bags of stacked fertilizer and let me smoke a butt while they searched my truck – I volunteered the keys – and verified my identity through their department.
“Was he here?” one of them showed me a photograph of the great grandson.
“When I arrived.” He had risked his freedom to ensure that on the seventh try a repairman would restore his great grandmother’s service. “What has he done?”
Three of them turned and left. Like I wasn’t there. The one remaining asked, “Do you speak their language?”
“What is their language?”
He turned and followed his fellows from the yard. I waited until they drove off before finishing the job.
The old woman had me sit upon the couch with her to drink the coffee. She also provided a sweet, sticky pastry. From her demeanor, I deduced that visits from the Law were routine events in this household. The room was cool and dark, the air stale. Or maybe it was her. A show came up on the screen. She clutched my hand. It was awful. I was glad I could not understand what the actors said. Grand poses, incredibly strained expressions, music as tinnily dramatic as whatever the story was – complete crap – and she was in heaven. This was one of the 247 channels provided by our service that I always wondered who watched. Now I knew.
Within ten minutes, she was softly snoring. I let myself out.
I ran a test on the service, and it came in at the 85th percentile. That was forty points better than any other service in the neighborhood. I closed the job on my laptop, listing “bullet hole” as the reason necessary for the repair. I had just lit up a cigarette and hit “Dispatch” to be assigned my next repair job when my cellphone rang. I answered it spouting the standard required spiel as a greeting.
“Do you think that is funny?” It was my First Level Manager.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“A bullet hole? How do you know it was a bullet hole?”
“Just give me the word and I’ll climb back up there and pry one out with a screwdriver.”
“I am so looking forward to your retirement.” He hung up.
Retirement Suggestion Number Three was “Go out on a date”. I called my First Level and asked in my sexiest voice, “What are you wearing?”
There was prolonged silence. Then: “Remain at the residence. I am coming out. Do you understand me?”
“You want me to stay here.”
“Don’t move. I’m on my way. I will be conducting a Safety Inspection.”
That was the problem with First Levels these days. No sense of humor. He was looking to suspend me for something. For anything. It was time to play defense. I called the Union Hall. Fortunately, I still had sons or grandsons of friends in positions of authority. The Steward of the Day promised to send someone out immediately.
Two hours later, as he and the Union Representative observed (with the Rep recording all on his cell phone), I demonstrated how to properly take my big ladder off the truck, carry it to the side of the house, and return it to the position where I had found the bullet holes and made my repair. I was to dig the bullet out of the paneling that I claimed had caused the loss of service to this customer.
As I strapped on my tools to climb, the Union Rep tore into my First Level.
“You have never heard of a bullet cutting a wire?”
“I thought he meant – like up there, on the pole, not against the side of the house, and for all I know, those marks up there are dirt.”
I climbed. The first bullet I went after was in too deep. I was exploring for a more accessible candidate when I heard a scream below. It was my First Level. Hands flung up in the air, wailing, he ran wildly in small circles. During the subsequent investigation he claimed a limping rodent had hoisted itself up onto his boot and then clawed its way up the inside of his pant leg, going for gold. It was probably the first rat I knocked out of the rat bag, back for revenge.
My boss crashed into my ladder.
Random Occurrence. My head hit the side of the home.
BAM!
Wrong Place. My shoulder hit the tree.
OWW!
Wrong Time. My foot slipped through a ladder rung and I became tangled
FALLING!
Bad Luck. My left knee exploded when I hit the ground –
It was over.
Now it was not just “Ten Things that I Could Do” when I retired. There were “A Million Things That I Could Do” because I was on Disability transitioning into Retirement -- and they all sucked. I was a repairman. It was all that I knew how to do, all I had done since getting out of high school, and all of that was over. My Job was who Rudy Reid was. Was. Who – he – was.
Four months, puttering about with a walker and then a cane. Giving myself injections in the stomach, balancing the pain meds with the exercise, hoping that my ancient body would accept a brand-new shiny titanium knee. That the grafted bone below that would heal. The only thing that kept me going was the phone calls from the kids who secretly allowed me to help them troubleshoot their jobs.
I spent much of my time on my front porch. It was about twenty feet long and had an overhang that kept me dry when it rained, and in shade when it wasn’t. I had five patio chairs lined up, equal distant apart, and moved among them to keep from getting bored with the view of the sidewalk and parked cars.
I was swatting at the flies that kept landing on me one afternoon when Ahorangi’s gunmetal Ford pickup slid to the curb. She and a few of the other kids from work stopped by every once in a while to bore the shit out of me. At least this time she was carrying a six pack.
“Get off my lawn!”
“I saw that picture. Clint Eastwood had a lawn.” She popped the top on a beer can and handed it to me. Then she disrupted my chair organization by dragging one over to sit next to me. “What are you doing?”
“Working on my spirituality.” That was Number Seven of the Ten Things to do upon retirement.
“How’s that coming?”
“I’d rather watch football.” That was Not one of the Ten Things.
“It’s the month of May.”
I shrugged. “That’s not my fault.”
“I think you need to get back to work.”
Was this her idea of funny?
“I have relatives on,” she named a South Sea Island I later learned was part of an archipelago. “They are building up the tourist trade. Last year Sports Illustrated shot its Swimsuit Edition there.” She handed me a job offer and contract. “They need someone to install and maintain the copper lines to the bungalows. Salt water eventually corrodes it, but fiber is too expensive to lay. Repairing and replacing the copper is more cost effective. You will be busy because all of the resorts on all of the island are having the same problem.”
When I spoke, I heard my voice cracking. “Why did you do this?”
“This porch depresses me. You depress me. Do you want the job?”
I pretended to think about it. “Can they teach me how to play the drum?” Number Nine of the Ten Things was to learn how to play a musical instrument. Beating on a drum was appealing.
“Sure. If you get good at it, they take the tourists on a cruise around the lagoons with a band of Maori onboard all beating the drums and singing.”
“Then I would need tattoos. All Maori have tattoos, right?”
“Yeah, but you? You would have to get a dodo bird tattooed on your ass cheeks.”
The funny thing? It sounded like a good idea.
