That CrowBoy was a character alright. Though his real name was Werner, after the first morning I saw the crows walking him to work, he was CrowBoy to me. We started on the same humid July day.
We spent the morning ripping down drywall, standing on a rickety scaffold thirty feet in the air and getting to know each other in that bullshit sort of way guys do, our words choked in gypsum dust, their sounds mingled with the sharp reports of our crowbars pounding overhead. We weren't very good at what we were doing. We wasted a lot of energy smashing everything into little bits rather than punching holes in strategic spots and pulling loose whole sections (in time we would master the art of rip and gouge), and all the debris fell on our heads.
The heat gave the whole day a grim and reckless edge. A big hunk of board fell on my head and I just shook it off and grinned like an idiot. I drank eight cokes that day and hung off the faucet, which we kept running all day, between breaks.
Over the next couple of days I was able to draw some cursory biography from CrowBoy in exchange for a little fiction about myself. He was a student of sorts, for a lack of anything better to do I suppose. He came from a small town in Mormon southwest Alberta, and wanted to be either an actor or an airline pilot. A routine I did on the treatment of mongloids in antiquity, largely drawn from Noah's murder of his ape-son in a postmodern treatment of the biblical story, got some unexpected results. It turned out CrowBoy had two brothers who were retarded. After that disclosure I could never quite look at CrowBoy the same way. Every time I looked at him I saw his face slacken into the characteristic mold of the subhuman. I was at a point in my moral and intellectual development where I believed the world was created for my convenience, edification and entertainment, and a coincidence such as this only served to reinforce this fundamentally anti-social worldview.
A couple days later Sam, a surly journalism diploma student with a pregnant girlfriend and $1600 worth of legal bills from an impaired charge he beat (a pound of grass in his trunk the whole time!), joined our happy crew. It was Sam who got CrowBoy to reveal the Oedipal dimension of his character formation. Sam was much better than I was at enacting the conditions for deep confession, and it was Sam who CrowBoy tried to explain his confusion concerning his feelings toward his mother to, how he didn't know how to act when she behaved so affectionately towards his friends when they came over, sitting in their laps and slapping their youthful physiques where they bulged after workouts. "Maybe she's just a warm, outgoing person?" CrowBoy ventured, wanting to be talked out of the discovery he was on the verge of making. In no time at all the three of us began to think of ourselves as a team of crack laborers with a penchant for situational comedy that confused the hell out of the dour electricians, top of the proletarian pecking order,but definitely lacking in humor. We could demolish a cinderblock wall by hand in an afternoon while conducting an elaborate series of improvisational sketches.
Sam's major contribution to our set of labor-rituals was made one morning as we picked up our tools from the lock-up. Over the weekend we had both seen a picture in the Sunday Herald of an 80 year old Brooklyn laborer, a sinewy black man, kissing his twenty-pound sledge hammer. The caption read: "If you're gonna be doing anything for this long, ya gotta love it." Sam picked up his trusty crowbar and gave it a big wet smack. I cried "ya just gotta love it!" and followed suit with my shovel. Thereafter every morning began with the chant and the ritual kissing of the tools: crowbars, prybars, flat-blade shovels, spades, extension cords, power drills, wheelbarrows, sledgehammers, and eventually the ultimate instrument of low-budget machismo, the Kango electric jackhammer. Our rituals served to distract us from our alienation from the means of production and all that, and was tacitly encouraged by our bosses (good for morale, they figured, no doubt) up until the point where they started to think it was negatively affecting our productivity, and then, just like in elementary school, the high-spirited boys were dispersed to work among the half-dozen other laborers now working in different areas of the site.
But is all this detail, chronology and ritual, peripheral to the real issue at hand, the phenomenon of Werner and the crows? It was and is my contention that there was some sort of metaphysical principle at work. Although to the superficial glance of the casual observer the crows might not appear to show a consistent orientation towards young Werner, I was convinced of the existence of an underlying pattern, a deep structure. Sometimes the crows would conduct themselves as a friendly escort, a graceful procession of arcing courtesans, as on that very first morning, and at other times Werner would come running into the yard with crows in hot pursuit, swooping down low over his head and caw-ing menacingly. One afternoon I swear I saw four crows sitting perched on the bicycle rack outside, waiting for Werner all afternoon, just getting uponce in a while to stretch their wings. Also, CrowBoy never brought a lunch. He would sit outside with us on nice days and watch us feed crusts to his pals, but he would never ask for a bite himself. I was not sure how others saw these things, and I kept my speculations mainly to myself, so as not to weird out the new guys.
Of course it is a well-know fact that the crow is for the native peoples of the Great Plains what the coyote is to the native peoples of the Interior Plateau where I grew up, a trickster figure, a shadow-dancing punster and crude wit who usually has the whole tribal world either pissed off at him or laughing uproariously. I had been given the opportunity of this knowledge in a way my high school teachers would most definitely have disapproved of. I had been taking an afternoon off from my formal studies, an all too common practice of mine at the time, when crossing through the Catholic graveyard on my way home I came across a couple of old Indians drinking wine and enjoying the fine spring weather, leaning back against some old stones. I traded a bit of reefer for a share of their jug of Calona Red, and received an impromptu lecture on Interior Salish mythology. Later, as part of my university literary studies, I had endless opportunities to hear old white professors give much the same talk, although in much less interesting surroundings, and with a different set of ironies. But surely our CrowBoy is a perfect Aryan specimen, you say, as tall and blonde as a Nazi statue. There is always, though, the possibility of transformation, a structure of the imagination in perpetual decline since the days of Ovid, now, in fact, a mere convention in third-rate horrormovies.
CrowBoy was thought by our bosses to be fucked-in-the-head, a common condition among laborers, who wear their bad attitudes like badges of Honour. Well, they must have thought of all of us he was the most fucked-in-the-head, because it was only he of the original three who was laid off for the slow two weeks between the end of the demolition phase and the start of the new excavation. This trivia is only important to note in that it gave me clear seniority on site, and after Sam left to work on a rig because he needed more money to support his new family, I was clearly the old guy among the laboring class. Though probably nobody would have noticed if I hadn't pointed it out to them.
Senior laborer, perhaps as redundant a term as ever there was. A laborer is a laborer is a laborer: he must do whatever he is told by whomever decides to tell him what to do, any illusory authority he entertains in the slow moments between the completion of one task and the beginning of another is only delusion, or, in the exalted and profane parlance of the worker, Fucking the Dog. It is a given that there is no dog up there with you, braced on a girder, listening to the radio and using a screwdriver rather than the power-drill attachment because you are grooving on the slow physicality of process; no, there is no dog, but still you slowly, lovingly, fuck it.
Then came a turn for the worse. Enough work for everyone, but of such a monotonous and degrading nature that we all wanted to go back home again. And, in time, many of them would do just that, and others would come to fill their boots until they had enough, and then they would in turn follow their predecessors down the road.
We were digging holes. You don't have to be a genius to come up with the inevitable metaphor for this activity. The existing hardened-concrete floor had to be broken and cleared, and then we had to start digging to find the original sub-soil. It seemed that it was always at least six feet below where it was supposed to be. When a hole was finished, or at least provisionally finished, for it seemed we were always called back to go just a little deeper, you moved on to the next one. We all began to get a little hole crazy after a couple weeks, and production began to drop off. Our boots were all cut up from jumping on the shovel, and it was hard to get excited about a task with such incremental progress toward completion. In moments of near mania it seemed as if the holes were multiplying. It was agreed among the laborers that we were not going to kill ourselves so the bosses could stay on their schedule. If they wanted things done any faster, they'd have to bring in some more help. I threw my slight weight firmly behind the party of sloth; the joints of my fingers were already in a state of decay towards premature arthritis from all the abuse I had imposed on them in those first few weeks of wild abandon.
The day that morale among the laborers hit an all-time low was the day that CowBoy decided to get his ass fired. As the news began to spread around the site, that the monster hole, every laborer's nemesis, had to go down at least another ten feet, soon thereafter came CrowBoy's response: he was going to get himself fired for our entertainment. CrowBoy had been sent off to work a hole at the extreme southwest corner of the warehouse complex by himself, as his talk-to-work ratio had been steadily climbing ever since we'd started digging. Management theory was that the troublemaker separated from his audience would realize the folly of his ways and either out of guilt or sheer boredom throw himself into his work with renewed gusto, tripling or trebling his output with no corresponding increase in remuneration. But CrowBoy did not fit into their equations, he proved he was not of the world of linear probablilities. He was a machine for the annihilation of time.
I was casually setting to the task of taking another foot of fill out of a hole that was to become part of the foundation of a cafeteria in the heart of the complex, singing snatches of an old punk-rock ditty to myself 'cause there was no one within earshot:
"Well it's better than some factory / that's no way to waste your youth / I worked there for a week once / and luckily got the boot."
I'd always had a problem living up to my ideals, even the nihilistic ones. But who doesn't?
Actually, it was two holes joined by a small tunnel underneath a wall, and a pretty cool little spot. You could always tell the holes I'd dug because the way I piled the dirt made them look like foxhole bunkers, and I always shaped a little meditation seat against one wall. The advantage of the formal approach was that I could usually see someone coming before they'd see me. I was bent over scooping a shovelful when something hit me in the back. I stopped, peered out over the edge of my hole, but saw nothing, so resumed digging. Then a dirtbomb glanced off my ear and hit the concrete header over the tunnel. I ducked, waited a few seconds and then popped up, armed and ready to take on all comers. Sure enough, there was CrowBoy, standing in a nearby abandoned hole, bigfucking silly grin on his face. I arced a few over in his direction and ducked to avoid his retaliation. I stood up just in time to take the tail-end of it on the noggin, and was momentarily knocked out of time, into the middle of the giant dirtbomb wars of childhood, which would inevitably end with someone throwing rocks and someone else getting hurt. For a second I was caught up in this diachronic impulse of primordial violence; I was going to get up and beat the fucker over the head with my shovel. But CrowBoy just stood there over my hole, looking down at me with that slack goofy expression of his, muttering, "Go ahead and hit me one, I've got it coming." And I couldn't bring myself to do it. He did the CrowBoy shuffle, hands in pockets mumbling something about James Dean and modelling school. He had received an advance on his next check this very morning, and was spending his time walking around the site, mumbling and shuffling at each of his laboring brethren for a few minutes, ducking in and out of dark spaces to avoid the bosses. Occasionally he would return to his hole, which he was decorating with a series of crude clay figures: a man, a horse, a skull, various abstract and indeterminate shapes.
This time when he rounded the corner into the warehouse he saw the foreman and the soil engineer checking out his hole. Somehow he managed to keep a straight face as he ambled over towards them. The soil-tech was down in the hole doing his assessment,while the foreman squatted beside the hole, turning over CrowBoy's horsey in his hands. CrowBoy asked the soil-tech how the hole was coming, and was told he had a ways to go yet. Then CrowBoy asked the foreman how he liked his horsey, but he ignored this question and walked away with a big scowl on his face. "I can't believe you've still got a job, kid," the soil-tech exclaimed as he hurried out of the hole and set off after the foreman. Neither could CrowBoy. What the fuck did a guy have to do to get fired around here? Could he do any less work? His bluff had been called, and it was now clear that he was going to have to act. He would have to quit. I had been watching this anti-climactic non-confrontation unfold from my hole a good hundred feet away, my expectations for a sort of poetry disappointed. At four o'clock CrowBoy skulked off, never to return, not even to pick up his final check, even though they must have still owed him something after the advance. One of the carpenters claimed to have seen him selling menswear in a suburban mall later that summer, but I didn't want to believe he'd pack it in for a slightly more upscale drudgery and a new set of alienating conditions. There is, after all is said and done, something quite honest and dignified about the laboring life, though perhaps that's easier to say from where I'm sitting now. But if he did go inside, to sidle up closer to the man, would there still be crows waiting for him in the parking lot? Yes, CrowBoy had flown the coop, but I needed the money and was stuck there. In a hole.
Addendum: The Great Hole of Lima
This particular hole got its name with the fortuitous arrival of a shifty little Chilean laborer named Louis. Louis was the same age as me, but he looked decades older, with the weight of his little pot-belly, his wife and three little kids, all supported by this crummy seven dollars an hour, non-union construction job. Louis' appearance was slightly comic, the way he carried himself like a natural straight man, always ready to take the fall. His third-world attitude allowed him to continue busting his ass long past the point where there would be any kind of return on the labor. It didn't particularly impress our bosses, as they in their ignorance were convinced Louis was stupid. Suffice to say that his English was much better than their Spanish.
I advised him to slow down, there were no bonuses for martyrdom on this job. The hole was one of two monsters on site where no original soil had been found at ten feet, which is quite a claustrophobic depth when your hole starts out six by six. Eventually the foreman had to break down and bring in a backhoe to speed up the process, but after the machinery had cleared out and the spillage had been removed, we were still looking at fill, and now it seemed we were below the water table. Our hole was becoming a pond.
The thing about being a laborer is that nobody ever cares to let you know why you're doing what you're doing, beyond the theological reference to ultimate authority: just doing what you're told. It is, to the observer, perfectly absurd activity: pumping water out, descending a ladder in knee-high rubber boots, standing in muck while the water inexorably rises to its intended level, shovelling thickbrown mud into a bucket dropped onto a ledge at chest level, taking a few deep breaths while the other guy hoists said bucket up, seventy pounds of earth straining the muscles of the chest and back in gravity's protest against the forced redistribution of mass, dumping contents of bucket on the great mound of mud accumulating back from the hole's edge, putting the bucket back onto the hook you have rigged and lowering it so the process can begin all over again. Repeat for a half hour or so, then exchange positions.
The descent is slow and excruciatingly dull; it is difficult to convince yourself that you are making any progress at all. Add to this the oblique sense of fear haunting the fellow at the bottom. Once the hook broke when Louis was down there. The bucket took off at its mandated 9.8 metres per second squared, meaning it was really moving when it hit the ledge thirty or so feet down, dumped all over the poor bastard and then fell on his head, along with a good chunk of the ledge.
It's no wonder laborers are such a faithless lot. I know it's not quite the same as rolling a large boulder up a slope, only to have it run you down on its way back. At least we get the evenings off to drink ourselves into oblivion. But it's bad enough for this earth.