Working for the Bird

by David Hollander

The Bird Man swooped into my life precisely on cue.  It was springtime, and my friend Michael and I were inhaling dark beer outside a Brooklyn brewery, discussing my saber-toothed future.  I had just received my master of fine arts degree in fiction writing, and I was down to the final embers of what had once seemed an inexhaustible bonfire of wealth, albeit in the form of unsubsidized government loans.  I’d been the King of Carpe Diem, but my freewheeling stupidity was coming to its inevitable, sad end.  Michael and I listened to the trucks rumble by on 6th Avenue and drank aggressively beneath a fuzzy pink sun. 
        “I think I’m in big trouble,” I told him.
     “It’ll be fine,” he said, nodding vigorously.    He was a drinking schoolteacher.  Or maybe a schoolteaching drinker.  Either way, his gainful employment meant we were in different places.  (He, for instance, was in a place with furniture and a television.)
        “Dude, are you listening to me?  I’m broke.”
      “Hey, what’s that saying?” he asked, beaming with optimism.  “Fortune favors the meek, right?”
        I was puzzling over that, chimp-like, when Anthony Bird intervened.  He wore a brown fedora and a tight leather jacket, and had a copy of the Times tucked under his arm.  He moseyed up to our wooden bench in the beer garden and uncorked a disarming Southern accent. “Are you looking for a job?” he asked.
        “Excuse me?”
        “I’m sorry, I overheard you talking.  Have you ever done any house painting?"
     “Yeah,” I said, surprised. “My friend Joe and I had our own business out on Long Island.”  This was a half-truth.  Joe and I had gotten together one summer during our undergraduate tenure and drummed up some work.  We called ourselves Student Painters, and our motto was, Let your house be our learning experience.  We lasted three weeks before a badly situated ladder kicked out and shattered windows on three descending floors of a regal farmhouse; it plummeted down and down and spared not a pane, in case we needed a metaphor.
       “Plaster work?” Bird asked.
       “No, but I’m a spackling machine,” I boasted.
     “Here’s my card,”  he grinned. “You can start tomorrow.” And with that he disappeared, cowboy-like, through the doors of my local saloon.

Thus began my summer of adventure with Bird’s motley crew of unfortunates.  He was the Indiana Jones of general contracting.  He owned some tools, sure, but you always got the impression he’d rather be swashbuckling.  Maybe it was the roguish wardrobe.  Or the fact that he held black belts in sundry martial arts.  He was the kind of guy who might tip his hat after roundhouse-kicking you to within inches of death.  He was small, kind, and volatile.  He’d employed two other unskilled locals, neither of whom seemed at all fit for labor.  There was Willy, a rotund and aged church organ player with a lisp; and Jocelyn, a leggy mural painter from a nearby arts college.  “I hire based on character,” he told me.  And we were all characters, but of the ilk normally limited to television sitcoms.

next page