Sunset Strip

I guess I just didn’t know what else to do. I needed a job but didn’t really feel like looking for one, especially considering I knew that it wasn’t going to be anything permanent. I just needed to make enough money in the month and a half that would follow to fund a trip we were planning to make from Western Washington(home) to our final destination: Detroit, Michigan. When I say we, I mean the two guys that I was planning to make the trip with, but they’re not important. Well, I will tell you that I shared an apartment with one of them at the time, we were both about 19, and our interests included convincing our parents that we were attending college while we explored the fine art of sitting around and waiting for shit to happen. The other guy was a friend of ours living in Michigan whose parents in Seattle had recently purchased a car for him. So, he was flying out to drive it back, and he asked us if we would go with him. We agreed. Anyway, I’d love to tell you about the life-altering adventure that we had driving across the country(especially through Montana, I mean you can really fucking speed there) but it’s kind of long and really cliché so I’ll skip that and just tell you about how I got some of the money to make it all happen.

My roommate suggested that I take a position at a local saw mill, a place where a friend of his father’s had some authority and could get me a job. This sounded brutally unappealing to me, but after sitting around for a couple days and noticing that I was making no effort to pursue anything else, I decided to give the man a call. He informed me that I would have to get contracted out through a temp agency, and he gave me the details.

The next morning I found myself sitting in a makeshift conference room in the center of the temp office, surrounded by others who were there for the mandatory orientation. After the secretary types were ushered into a separate adjoining room, I was left with a grim bunch of labor-ready men, most of whom were wearing overalls or blank baseball caps. My soft, pale hands stood in stark contrast to theirs, which held more of a burnt glove appearance. We were given a small speech about policy, watched a few videos on the fine art of not killing oneself, and were then informed that a drug test was to be scheduled as soon as possible, in order to get us out and working. So, after fudging a story and managing to postpone the drug test, I sat on my couch for a week and burned up from the all the Niacin I was taking until I would eventually be forced to run to the awkward comfort of numerous cold showers. Following this, I returned, passed the drug test, and was ready to do whatever it was they did at a wood mill.

Bleary eyed, I arrived in front of the building at 6AM the next Monday. The mill was a huge box of a building that reeked of a sweet, cut-wood sawdust smell. After another orientation which involved some more low-budget videos that stressed the point of not acting like a complete shithead while on the job, I joined the team on the floor. It was clear to me very quickly that these people were in imminent danger of being replaced by machines. The job was that rudimentary. Up top, there were a group of workers who sawed the wood and then distributed it to us, the guys who took the small pieces from a conveyer belt and arranged them in like piles on pallets that surrounded the belt. A horn blew after two hours and we would go smoke cigarettes, then in another two hours we broke for lunch and the possibility of two cigarettes, and then four more hours with another smoke break, after which I drove home and wondered how my life had deteriorated so fucking quickly.

In the first few weeks I had a hard time adjusting to the early hours of the job, and I was usually in such a haze that I wouldn’t really speak with anyone. There was a portly older man, a lifer(I found out he had worked there over 30 years), who would occasionally yell over the machinery "Doin’ a good job!" but that was about it. I kept to myself aside from any small talk that would take place in the designated smoking area. Not only was I much younger than most of the people there, a majority of them were Hispanic and didn’t speak English. There were, however, familiar faces that I began to notice as the days went by, and soon people began to talk to me. One day I found myself across the smoking/eating table from a co-worker named Randy, a guy who was in his late twenties and sported a short trimmed beard. His eyes were always blank behind his glasses.

"So, Peter, do you like it here?" Randy said.
"Um, it’s a job, you know? I mean the work sucks, but I just need to save some money. I don’t plan to do this forever." I took a bite of my sandwich. "No offense."
"No, no. Hey, this isn’t what I want to do either." He lit a cigarette. "So, do you do crank?"
"Excuse me?"
"I mean, you look like you don’t do crank. I think you and I might be the only guys here who don’t do crank every morning."
I was beginning to understand why I was having a little trouble keeping up.
Randy took a puff off his Winston. "Yeah, all the Mexicans, they all do crank."
I began to look around the table.

"Don’t listen to Randy." I looked down the table past a few people and saw that it was Rueben, a guy who I had done the small talk thing with a couple times. He was overly polite, but this wasn’t the only reason Rueben stood out amongst the rest of us. While most of us wore boots, flannel shirts, and thick attire that covered most of our bodies, Rueben always wore fairly tight jeans, white hi-tops, and a tank top that showed off a body that he seemed to be proud of. He had dark, neatly cut hair that covered half his ears and he wore ill-fitting caps that rested way too high on his head. I couldn’t pin down his nationality, but he was tan. He had a unique walk too, very peppy and very on his toes. And he was always smiling, which the rest of us could certainly not say.
"Randy, come on, give it a rest," Rueben said, and then he went back to eating with the rest of us.

After work that day, Rueben met up with me on the way to my car in the parking lot and asked if I would give him a ride home. He told me where he lived and it wasn’t far from where I was going so I agreed. The sun was hot on my small car as we drove home and made the normal conversation. I told him about my situation, and I asked him how he ended up working in the mill.

"Well, it’s an honest living," Rueben said. "I do temp work when I can get it and just try and make some extra money."
"Oh, you have another job?" I figured he must work nights somewhere.
"I’m self-employed," Now, this can mean a variety of things. I was quick to not jump to conclusions, but I certainly had already made some. I had to ask.
"Do you mind if I ask what you do?"

Rueben got a bit shifty and smiled. "I’ll tell you, but please don’t say anything to anyone at the mill."
I agreed, trying to assure him that I was hip to whatever trip he was on.
"I run a male stripping business out of my house."
I tried not to pause for too long. "Wow," I said. "So, what’s that like?"
"It’s great. I meet a lot of nice people. I mean, there’s never a dull moment, you know?"

We drove the rest of the way home as he discussed this, saying that the money was good and it wasn’t anything really raunchy, just more fun than anything else. I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in what Rueben was saying. It was the first time I had participated in that particular conversation, and it was more interesting than most. We pulled up to Rueben’s house, a modest place with a car on blocks in the driveway. He got out and peered in through the open passenger side window. "You get high?" he asked. I said that I did and I took the keys out and followed him into the small house.

Everything inside the house seemed brown or tan, and it smelled dusty but not unclean. There was a large, clear, inflatable Miller bottle hanging over the bar that separated his kitchen from the front room, and there were other various bar-type ads on the walls in the form of mirrors and neon. I sat on his old cracked leather sofa while we smoked some of his pot and I picked through some of the magazines that sat on the bottom half of his coffee table. They were old issues of High Times, the ones where they still had centerfolds that were just big piles of coke. I browsed through the magazine and tried to think of something to say. Before I could, the phone rang. Rueben walked over to the telephone and picked it up.

"Sunset Strip," he said. "Hello. Yes, this is the place. Uh-huh. Sure. Well let me tell you what I do. Me? Yes, it’s me. My name is Brandon."

I tried to keep my head buried in the magazine.

"Well, I usually just do house parties, but we can always discuss something different if you had something in mind. I have a standard outfit that I wear but there’s different characters that I play upon request. Sure. No. No, I don’t show little Brandon. That’s just not part of what I do. Pretty dang close though. OK, anything else I can answer for you? Sure. Sure. Bye-bye." He hung up the phone.

"Sorry about that, I had to a little business. Can I get you a beer or anything?"
"No, I think I’m gonna take off," I said. "Thanks though."

Rueben walked me to the door and told me he’d see me tomorrow and I told him the exact same thing. Then I went home and showed my roommate Rueben’s picture in the yellow pages and he wasn’t as impressed as I had hoped he would be.

My best day of work at the mill was the Thursday of my fourth week. The shift boss called Rueben and I and about 6 other guys into a large storage room right after we got to work and came up with the most serious look he could muster. "Guys," he said, "This is the hardest part of the job…."

45 minutes later I was in Rueben’s dank house passing a pipe back and forth and laughing at how absurd a picture of a huge pile of cocaine really was. "It’s probably fucking baking soda!" I said.

"Or maybe powdered sugar," He offered.

Either way, it wasn’t even 8AM and there would be a paycheck ready for me by five and I was ready to go home and crawl into my bed and worry about everything and nothing all at the same time.