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Terreson wrote:

Aug. 1970, age 17. I had hitch-hiked from Eugene, Oregon to Mt. Hood. I was near broke and I had heard you could make money picking fruit there. Arriving in town in the late afternoon I spent the night down by the tracks in a hobo jungle. Early next morning I was sitting in the so-called farm labor office waiting for a grower to come in to recruit laborers. Within an hour or so a grower came in needing a few men to cull bins of pears, taking out the bad and bruised fruit. I made enough money that day to buy food and cigarettes, spent a second night in the jungle. Next day back in the farm labor office a grower's foreman came in, I got picked again. So did an older man named Lui, himself a hobo who would spend his winters down in Stockton CA, living in the missions, and his summers working his way up the west coast farm labor circuit. I guess he figured I would be a safe partner. He immediately attached himself to me, saying we were partners. Lui and I worked and lived together in the one grower's orchards for the next two months. At first picking pears and then picking apples.

The work was piece work. You got paid for how much fruit you picked. Payment was $5.50 per bin of fruit. A bin measured 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet deep and it held 28 bushels of pears or apples. I could fill 3 bins a day. I always made sure I had a half bin filled by the end of the day. It was a morale booster for the next morning. We climbed orchard ladders, a very tall ladder with a pole that swung out so that it would put you in a tree. We had bushel bags hanging from the neck, resting against the chest. Up and down the ladder 28 times plus to fill the bin. The grower had several different orchards and we worked them all. One orchard had heritage apple trees which I recall were almost 100 years old. As fruit trees grow older, and if not pruned regularly of water suckers, they tend to make more wood than fruit. Or so I've heard. And so while it was almost glamorous to be working trees so old, the yield was not all that good.

Lui and I lived in a labor camp with the other fruit pickers. The building was long and narrow, made of cinder block, and divided into rooms by sheets of gypsum dry wall. Lui and I shared a room. I had a canvas, Navy issue hammock, which I strung up. Lui had the double bed. The window was just an opening and the door was thin. Our source of heat was an old wood burning kitchen stove on which we also cooked our meals. Mostly we ate hamburger meat cooked in with potatoes.

Migrant workers came and went. We were the only two to stay out the season with this particular grower. We did it for the bonus. Back then the complexion of the laborers was different. White men, mostly hobos accustomed to the winter missions. Some families who drove their campers from orchard to orchard and whose children also worked. Some few Hispanics. And then the prostitutes who also worked the west coast circuit. Let me tell the story of my one and only encounter with prostitutes, two prostitutes actually.

It was labor day weekend. Lui had hitched a ride to town and was on a toot. I followed him after he didn't show up one night and found him in a tank at the police station sleeping it off. So I knew he was all right. Returning to the camp I was met with two long lines of men, each line reaching from the adjacent rooms on either side of mine. The day before one of the ladies had propositioned me, she said it would be for free. I had declined. So all night long I listened to the commotion, the humping and the bumping and the bed springs and the "Okay. That's enough. Get off me." I forgot to say the women were accompanied by a protector who was ready to break in if he heard screaming. This went on until maybe 2 or 3 in the morning. Obviously I got no sleep. Then the two ladies joined in one of the rooms and started knocking on the wall, and calling out to me to join them. I think they sensed I was terrified, afraid they would come through my door, and were having fun teasing me. I can't remember how old they were. Probably not much older than me. I turned 18 that month.

I made enough money that season to get a bus back to Seattle, where I had been living earlier in the summer, and to buy a plane ticket to take me back to my then home of North Carolina. Lui and I rode together as far as Portland. He was on his way back to Stockton. When my bus was called we shook hands goodbye. The last thing Lui said was, "I wish you would come with me." But even as young and dumb as I was I knew I had job-adventured enough for one season. I wanted to get back to books, solid walls, and friends.

About Lui I should say, by way of giving him a person, he was Canadian, had served honorably, if a bit recklessly, in WW2, had married an English woman, returned to North America, prospected for gold in Colorado, and, because of his drinking, his wife had left him to return to England with their children. That was when he took to the hobo circuit and to the missions. He had no teeth, which was one reason why we ate ground beef with potatoes. I didn't mind. I miss Lui. He must be dead by now. I hope he ended out peacefully.

One more thing. There have been times over the last forty years, and none too few, when I wish I had followed him to Stockton. I think I've come to understand something of the allure in letting go, giving up, checking out.

Tere

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Terreson wrote:

Sep., '71. Durham, North Carolina.

I thought I wanted to be a carpenter that season. It seemed like a good idea at the time. So with a high school buddy I took a job with a concrete forming crew working on a high rise on a college campus. Concrete forming carpenters make forms for floors, pillars and such into which concrete gets poured and the building goes up into the sky.

I think the idea struck me as romantic. Sort of like the old Tim Hardin song - working my hands in wood. While I kept at it for almost a year I soon discovered a congenital condition: I was constitutionally incapable of cutting or sawing on a straight line. Still am. This used to irritate the hell out of an ex-wife. And how can you be a carpenter if you can't saw a straight line? My buddy, on the other hand, went on to become a general contractor specializing in spec. homes, the custom built kind. He's still at it, but I imagine he is having a hard time making boat payments these days.

The crew I worked with was out of a small county in Virginia. All the men were related either by blood or marriage. And they were black. My buddy and I were the only white boys among them. And we were hired initially to do the grunt work. Keep in mind the year, 1971. And keep in mind that we were in Jesse Helms country. He wasn't a senator yet. But he owned a T.V. station and nightly gave its editorial, which is how he had his start in the public's view. Durham had its share of race riots. Back then it was a mid-size industrial city. Duke University only an enclave. Driving the streeets you knew immediately when you were in a black part of town. The pavement stopped and the road was dirt. During the riots Helms would nightly call out for the harshest suppression of any and all civil disobedience. In '68 I remember the armored personnel vehicles rumbling down city streets. I mention this because, again, the year was 1971. The black men for and with whom I worked were the only skilled black workers on the construction site. There was always tension. It never rose to the surface and played itself out. But it was there. And my buddy and I were shunned by all the other white men working.

The foreman's name was Henry. He had a controlled drinking problem. He would drive to his home in Virginia on a Friday and he would stay drunk for two days. five days a week, however, he kept sober. For some reason he took a liking to me. When I quit he was sad. He said he had wanted to make me his head carpenter. I remember once I was putting together a form for a column. I climbed up the outside to hammer in place the pegs that would fasten the sides together. We were about five stories up. Henry came by and said something like, 'Come down for a moment. I want to show you something.' I climbed down, walked over to him, and he was shaking. He told me never to climb out over thin air again. Oh so young and dumb.

Jack I remember too. Today he would be diagnosed with ADD. He would do really crazy things. Whenever a female student, invariably white, walked by he would go to the side of the building and start cat calling. It is a wonder some of the white men didn't lay in wait for him after work. But I think he did it just to taunt all the white boys there.

Jean and I became friends. He told me all his secrets. As I said the crew members were all related. Jean had once slept with the wife of one of them. Several of them ganged up on him one night and beat him badly. He said they broke his back in two places. But then he finally told me he had gotten them all back, one by one, and except for one whose time would be soon. Jean was a short man but as strong as a pit bull and as tenacious.

I decided that year it is no fun working in the wet winter cold. I still remember how cold I could feel. I remember something else too. I still have the hammer I bought for the job. And the right angle. And the fold out kind of wood ruler which I still use eventhough the numbers and lines are all but gone. And I've given up on cutting straight lines.

I got to where I worked four days a week and not five. I was reading novels that year and I needed more time. Turgenev, Stendhal, Hesse, Mann, Gogol, Dostoevsky. And I was reading Yeats. His Phases of the Moon fascinated me. As did his autobiagraphy and his folk takes involving the supernatural. Anyway, Henry never took me to task for not showing up on a Friday. He never once said anything.

When the job was finished the crew moved back home. Their next job was to work on a new drama building on the campus of U VA. I decided to follow them. I was tired of Durham. So with a woman whith whom I lived we made the move. Within a month of working on the new building I fell some twenty feet from scaffolding to the floor below. The fall amounted to an error in calculation. I was able to break the fall a little. And so I only broke a wrist. I was out on workman's comp while the wrist healed, living in a ratty old trailer parked behind a gas station. And when I wasn't reading I was sitting at the station playing chess with a Korean War vet. It was when the wrist healed that I told Henry I wouldn't return to work.

I would soon leave the county and the girl who, by then, was a grad student at U VA, and I would go home to FL for a few months. I would stupidly return to the county and to the girl and we would marry. That was when I decided to get a liberal arts degree by working in a textbook store and getting paid to read all the books enrolled students had to buy. A story for next time.

Tere

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Terreson wrote:

Aug. 1970, age 17. I had hitch-hiked from Eugene, Oregon to Mt. Hood. I was near broke and I had heard you could make money picking fruit there. Arriving in town in the late afternoon I spent the night down by the tracks in a hobo jungle. Early next morning I was sitting in the so-called farm labor office waiting for a grower to come in to recruit laborers. Within an hour or so a grower came in needing a few men to cull bins of pears, taking out the bad and bruised fruit. I made enough money that day to buy food and cigarettes, spent a second night in the jungle. Next day back in the farm labor office a grower's foreman came in, I got picked again. So did an older man named Lui, himself a hobo who would spend his winters down in Stockton CA, living in the missions, and his summers working his way up the west coast farm labor circuit. I guess he figured I would be a safe partner. He immediately attached himself to me, saying we were partners. Lui and I worked and lived together in the one grower's orchards for the next two months. At first picking pears and then picking apples.

The work was piece work. You got paid for how much fruit you picked. Payment was $5.50 per bin of fruit. A bin measured 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet deep and it held 28 bushels of pears or apples. I could fill 3 bins a day. I always made sure I had a half bin filled by the end of the day. It was a morale booster for the next morning. We climbed orchard ladders, a very tall ladder with a pole that swung out so that it would put you in a tree. We had bushel bags hanging from the neck, resting against the chest. Up and down the ladder 28 times plus to fill the bin. The grower had several different orchards and we worked them all. One orchard had heritage apple trees which I recall were almost 100 years old. As fruit trees grow older, and if not pruned regularly of water suckers, they tend to make more wood than fruit. Or so I've heard. And so while it was almost glamorous to be working trees so old, the yield was not all that good.

Lui and I lived in a labor camp with the other fruit pickers. The building was long and narrow, made of cinder block, and divided into rooms by sheets of gypsum dry wall. Lui and I shared a room. I had a canvas, Navy issue hammock, which I strung up. Lui had the double bed. The window was just an opening and the door was thin. Our source of heat was an old wood burning kitchen stove on which we also cooked our meals. Mostly we ate hamburger meat cooked in with potatoes.

Migrant workers came and went. We were the only two to stay out the season with this particular grower. We did it for the bonus. Back then the complexion of the laborers was different. White men, mostly hobos accustomed to the winter missions. Some families who drove their campers from orchard to orchard and whose children also worked. Some few Hispanics. And then the prostitutes who also worked the west coast circuit. Let me tell the story of my one and only encounter with prostitutes, two prostitutes actually.

It was labor day weekend. Lui had hitched a ride to town and was on a toot. I followed him after he didn't show up one night and found him in a tank at the police station sleeping it off. So I knew he was all right. Returning to the camp I was met with two long lines of men, each line reaching from the adjacent rooms on either side of mine. The day before one of the ladies had propositioned me, she said it would be for free. I had declined. So all night long I listened to the commotion, the humping and the bumping and the bed springs and the "Okay. That's enough. Get off me." I forgot to say the women were accompanied by a protector who was ready to break in if he heard screaming. This went on until maybe 2 or 3 in the morning. Obviously I got no sleep. Then the two ladies joined in one of the rooms and started knocking on the wall, and calling out to me to join them. I think they sensed I was terrified, afraid they would come through my door, and were having fun teasing me. I can't remember how old they were. Probably not much older than me. I turned 18 that month.

I made enough money that season to get a bus back to Seattle, where I had been living earlier in the summer, and to buy a plane ticket to take me back to my then home of North Carolina. Lui and I rode together as far as Portland. He was on his way back to Stockton. When my bus was called we shook hands goodbye. The last thing Lui said was, "I wish you would come with me." But even as young and dumb as I was I knew I had job-adventured enough for one season. I wanted to get back to books, solid walls, and friends.

About Lui I should say, by way of giving him a person, he was Canadian, had served honorably, if a bit recklessly, in WW2, had married an English woman, returned to North America, prospected for gold in Colorado, and, because of his drinking, his wife had left him to return to England with their children. That was when he took to the hobo circuit and to the missions. He had no teeth, which was one reason why we ate ground beef with potatoes. I didn't mind. I miss Lui. He must be dead by now. I hope he ended out peacefully.

One more thing. There have been times over the last forty years, and none too few, when I wish I had followed him to Stockton. I think I've come to understand something of the allure in letting go, giving up, checking out.

Tere

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Terreson wrote:

Okay. I am ready to go after the second hardest job I've had. Working on an off-shore drilling rig. For the sake of comprehension I am pulling down portions of an above post and by way of introduction.
 
~For a reason I get I am reluctant to describe my next jobbing adventure. It involved an initiation that amounted to getting raped.

I was in Charlotteville, VA working in a textbook store and reading, reading, reading. The funny thing about reading great lit is that it makes you restless, makes you want more experience, makes you dissatisfied with uneasy pacts and false contracts and middling relationships. (I've always hated middling relationships in which all parties get cancelled out.) Anyway, that year I needed an adventure. The more extreme the better.

My friend of those years, L.D., his father was in charge of all off-shore drilling for an oil company in the Gulf of Mexico, I asked him if his father could get me a job on an oil rig. He called his father and I got the job. I took a train down to New Orleans, the old Southern Crescent. Mr. C. met me at the station, took me to his home for the night. The next morning I was in his high rise office and from there a Texan gave me a ride down to Morgan City. I checked in with the office of Trans World Drilling. A very kind secretary let me put my duffle bag of clothes and books in a back room. A couple of hours later I was on a two seater helicopter going out to TW 54. And that was the end of any preferrential treatement.

In her day TW 54 was the tallest semi-submersible rig in the world. From deck to top of derrick she measured 200 feet, and she could work in deep waters. Coming in by helicopter you saw her from 10 miles away. She was called back then the Marble Mountain.~

Feb. '76. As mentioned a few days ago, L.D.'s father, Mr. C., got me the job. He made a phone call and it happened. I was certainly not qualified for the work. I neither had the skills of a roustabout nor the body mass. At 6'2" I weighed all of 155 pounds. I had never worked off-shore or been in open waters where you cannot see anything of land. I might have been scared except, true to form, I was both young and dumb.

The Marble Mountain was, for then, a deep water rig. She was what they call an exploratory rig. Some geologist back in his office would make calculations and report that oil might be found here, here, or here. Rigs like TW 54 would be sent to the spot and start drilling. As I recall every new spot in the Gulf we were sent to in fact had an oil field worth the production cost. So I figure those geologists were pretty good at their job.

Coming in by helicopter you could see the rig easily from ten miles away. That is how tall she stood out against the plane of water. Built of steel, she really did look marble in the distance. In shallower waters, where we were sometimes sent, we would play around, drop something plastic over rig rails, like a bucket, and watch it shatter. Those places we knew we were screwed, that in the case of an explosion we had no escape. In deeper waters there was a swirl-depth that I cannot describe. But I can say the vertigo the sight causes enabled me to get, really get and understand, Beethoven's 6th Symphony. The first time I felt that vertigo in the swirl of deep water I immediately understood Beethoven's soul. There was another time when I was on a work boat bringing supplies and equipment to the rig. My job was to attach the crane's bolted hook to the palet's iron cables so it could be lifted to rig deck. There was a lull in the work, it was hot, and so I stripped down and dove over-board. No sooner submerged when I realized two things: barricudas love a rig for the fish that tend to congregate around its legs and the Gulf bottom was too deep for me to touch. I damn near twisted my back looking to shoot up back out of the water.

I've had harder jobs, physically and mentally. And these days I'm wondering when will my body and brain finally fail me. But that was a hard job and I am no macho man. Seven days off-shore, seven days to rest and play on shore. A work day was 13 hours, from 5 A.M. to 6 P.M., or 91 hours. But I never worked less than 110 hours or so. One week I worked 120 plus hours. That week I worked 26 hours straight, got 3 hours sleep, got up for a 13 hour shift. It was a production week, meaning we had found a sizable field of oil beneath ocean floor and were putting down the production pipes to bring the crude up. I remember falling asleep and still standing.

Roustabouts, roughnecks, the crane operator, maintenance man, and the tool pusher. This was the org chart. I was a rousatabout and at the bottom of the food chain. Roughnecks worked on the derrick, putting down and pulling up oil production pipes. There were two crews of roughnecks working twelve hours each. The crane operator was my supervisor. His name was Billy. And his ability to gauge sea swell, her rise and fall, when lifting cargo off a work boat was not just impeccable, it was exquisite. He never once snapped a threaded line of iron when lifting a load off a boat. Billy had a dreamy look in his eyes. I remember that. When he was on shore he raced cars. The maintenance man, I can almost remember his name, was a Texan. He was responsible for keeping the whole of the rig's mechanisms operational. He too was a good man and he loved to chat. The tool pusher was lord of the rig. His word was final. His responibility immense. He could shut down a rig, no questions asked.

The cooks were subcontracted. Their job was to make sure we had food, high protein food, 24 hours a day. The galley was always open. I've never eaten so well, before or since. Nor have I ever finished off a meal in less time. Within two months I could eat lunch or dinner, never have been fond of breakfast, in 10 minutes, and then back on the deck.

Rigs tend to be set on tripods, 3 legs. Regularly someone would have to take an elevator down to the bottom of a leg to make sure the bilge pumps were operational. I remember one Cajun boasting about how he could masturbate all the way down and up. I remember too how his report spoke to both loneliness and fear. I would have to go down to the bilge pumps too. I remember thinking: what a mystery we invade.

I lost a portion of my hearing that season. It involved the engine room where 4 huge diesel engines kept the rig going. My job was to monitor gauges. High and low frequencies I lost.

What I remember good about those four months was coming back to New Orleans and reading Shakespeare. And discovering Troubador poetry in a small bookstore in the French Quarter. What I remember bad was, in effect, getting raped by 5 men who liked me so much they wanted to initiate me by an already illegal rite. Later, Mr C. told me I could have them fired and I said no. My reason was because those coon asses, Texans, and one Indian from Oklahoma had scant means to support their families. Enough.

I've never trusted groups of men since. I've come to where I don't trust groups of women either.

Tere

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