Juice

As a kid I made money by doing yard work for people.  Irene Jenkins, a crippled woman who lived across the street from my grandmother, got the ball rolling one day when she called the house to ask if I would come over and pick a green pepper from her garden.  She gave me fifteen cents.  Eventually my business expanded to picking cucumbers and tomatoes and then to cutting grass, pulling weeds, and trimming hedges for other people.  But as my junior year of high school neared its end I had decided to supplement my income with some steady summer employment and was hired to work for The City of Niagara Falls, in the Forestry Department.

May 12, 1988

1. Always on My Mind, Pet Shop Boys

2. Where Do Broken Hearts Go, Whitney Houston

3. Together Forever, Rick Astley

4. One More Try, George Michael

5. Prove Your Love, Taylor Dayne

6. Anything For You, Miami Sound Machine

7. One Good Reason, Paul Carrack

8. We Said Hello, Goodbye, Phil Collins

9. Shattered Dreams, Johnny Hates Jazz

10. Electric Blue, Icehouse

“Forestry” was just a fancy way of saying “Trees.” There were no forests in Niagara Falls. Chemical waste and plenty of tourists, but nothing that could be mistaken for a forest. Basically we trimmed and cut down trees along the city streets, and my job, as one of the seasonal workers, was to pick up the mess. I’d gather the branches, drag them into the street and then stuff them into the chipper, where they’d be chewed up and spit out into the back of a dump truck.    

Most of the time you could stand behind the branch and gently push it into the chipper, but occasionally the branches would be ten or twelve feet long, with thick, heavy trunks and a dense network of twigs and leaves. With these, you’d have to stand to the side, at the mouth of the chipper, and guide the branch in, holding it there until the rotating blades could grab hold of the wood. The rest of the branch would then follow. Quickly. The trick was to jump out of the way fast enough to avoid getting slapped and scratched as the branches and leaves swept past you.

Long before the movie Fargo showed us what it looked like for a human leg to be stuffed into a chipper, I’d always imagined getting pulled in by one of the more unruly branches, and there I’d be, scattered all over the back of the truck, shredded into a million little pieces.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Southwood,” someone would say to my mother while handing her a jar of shreds. “We’re not exactly sure if this is your son or a sycamore tree, but here you go.”

I wore jeans and a t-shirt and steel-toed boots that I bought at Thom McCann. To complete the look, I was required to wear a bright red baseball cap, which, because I have a small head, never fit right and was always blowing off. So after spending the first few days chasing it all over the city, I clamped the hat to my belt loop and wore it only when the bosses were around.

I was a skinny kid with allergies working alongside large, burly men with nicknames like T-Bone, Big Daddy, and Rope.

“Why do they call you Rope?” I asked, imagining it had something to do with his amazing skill with square knots or his talent for lassoing a tree stump from some great distance.  But no.  

“It’s because he has a big dick,” T-Bone said. I never asked why they called him T-Bone.

The job started at 7 a.m. on the dot and ended at 3. We got a half-hour coffee break at 9:30 and an hour for lunch at noon.  Sometimes, if we were in the area, Big Daddy would park the truck at the City Market, off Pine Avenue.  It was a huge parking lot with various stores and restaurants around the perimeter and a Farmers' Market at one end, stretching into the lot like a peninsula, just behind the McDonald’s. The area was always crowded in the summertime and you were sure to see someone you knew, whether you liked it or not.

Most days, to save money, I’d bring my own lunch and eat on a curb somewhere or just stay in the truck.  On one particular day I was sitting on the passenger side with my window rolled down, while another guy, Ron, was sitting beside me on the driver side. We had finished eating and were just passing the time when a man approached my window.

He had wild red hair, coarse and thick, and wore a white tank top, which, from the looks of it, doubled as a napkin. His beefy, sunburned arms hung like sausages at his sides and he walked with a bob, as if his knees were made of springs. His name was Jimmy. He worked for the city, too, on the Sidewalk Crew, laying cement. His voice was loud and full of gravel, and you would hear him coming long before you’d ever see him. It was like his voice was the lightning to his thunderous presence. People had pointed him out to me in the past, but we had never met. Until that day, when he showed up at my window.

“Hey, man, who’s your juice?” he said to me.

I stared blankly at him for a moment then said “What?” Not that I hadn’t heard him. Every farmer at the market heard him. I simply had no idea what he meant.

“Who’s your juice?” he asked again. He was getting louder.

Beside me, Ron laughed. He could see I was confused, so he interpreted: “He wants to know how you got the job.”

It was common knowledge that to get a job working for the city you had to know someone. Be connected. Have, apparently, “juice.” Tired of waiting for a response, Jimmy asked a simpler question:

“What’s your name?”

“Ian.”

“Your last name,” he shouted, as if I were an idiot.

“Southwood.”

“Southwood.” He repeated the name several times, trying to place it, then finally did. “Is your father Rick?”

“No,” I said, “he’s my uncle.”

“Aw, man, I know him. He’s head of Sanitation!” Jimmy announced.

I nodded and said “un-huh” but really I had no idea. I knew my uncle worked for the city, but the fact that he was head of something, let alone Sanitation, was news to me.

“So that’s it!” Jimmy said, and I could see that he assumed, incorrectly, that my uncle was my “juice.” In fact, it was my grandmother’s next-door neighbor, Margaret MacDonald, who had gotten me the job.

Mrs. MacDonald was a soft-spoken woman who had been the secretary at St. Teresa’s, my grammar school, before she left in 1980 to become the mayor’s secretary at City Hall. She drove a dusty-blue Impala and, while at St. Teresa’s, would often give me a lift when she saw me walking home from school. My grandmother’s house was no more than four or five blocks away, so it wasn’t a particularly grueling walk, and the point at which Mrs. MacDonald would offer me the ride was always within the final block of my walk. Always. So from the time I climbed into her car to the time she pulled into her driveway, it was ten to fifteen seconds, tops. And it’s not like she floored it; she was pretty much just coasting the rest of the way. So I could never understand why she even bothered. Did I look lost? Exhausted? Was I staggering around aimlessly?

After I’d been hired, my grandmother handed me a box of Russell Stover chocolates one day and said: “Here. Go next door and give this to Margaret MacDonald.”

“What for?” I asked.

“For getting you the job. You need to thank her.”

“But this was three dollars,” I said. “It says so on the box. It’ll look cheap.”

“Cheap? That’s good candy. She’ll love it.”

She did love it. But Mrs. MacDonald was like that. Polite, kind-hearted, generous. And as much as I appreciated the good word she put in for me to get me the job, I couldn’t credit her as my “juice” that day with Jimmy because he was fixated on my uncle and planning my future.

“You should have him get you into Sanitation,” he said. “They pay nine bucks an hour.”

I told him I was still in high school, but Jimmy wasn’t deterred.  “So? When you finish,” he said, and he flicked his hand at the air as if high school were a gnat, a mere nuisance on the path to Sanitation. “They got a list in the garage,” he said. “When you get back there today, put your name on it. You may not get it...but at least they’ll know you’re interested.”

I wasn’t the slightest bit interested, but he seemed so excited by his newfound role as guidance counselor, I didn’t have the heart to just blurt it out. So I gave him a head tilt, the kind that says well, that’s a possibility, then broke the news to him that I had some other options I’d been considering. Like college.

“Aw, man, fuck college,” he said. His spit flew everywhere. “I went to college. I got my college diploma. And look where I am. I’m right back where I started from.” He swept his arms up and out when he said this, presenting the pavement to me as if it were the next item up for bid on The Price Is Right. “You show these guys a college diploma, you know what they’re gonna do with it? They’re gonna wipe their fuckin’ ass with it.”

I really had no intention of showing my college diploma to anyone, much less to anyone at City Hall, but apparently that’s what Jimmy had done with his, and for the rest of the day all I could picture was that shit-stained diploma, framed and hanging on Jimmy’s bedroom wall, a constant reminder of what could have been.

I worked for The City the next two summers, three years in total. From time to time I’d see Jimmy at the market, wandering around in the same dirty shirt, talking to people, shouting hellos. But we never spoke again. I suppose, after graduating from high school and going to New York City, I was a big disappointment to him.