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.

Not a single one of us—Bird included—had any clue as to how to accomplish our contracted work. He had a motto of his own: Learn as you go. Once, he agreed to punch a mortar-fire-sized hole through the back wall of a two-million dollar brownstone and manufacture a balcony. Two weeks in he had an epiphany: “This is impossible!” he screamed, hurling a wrought-iron stanchion through the chasm in this once-excellent shelter. He got pretty good distance. It pierced the earth just inches from a passing cat that bolted in terror. 
       Somehow we kept getting hired. The Bird Man sniffed out an eccentric (sometimes freakish) clientele and plied them with liquor. That was the business model. There was, for instance, a hairless albino who doubled our asking price in a whiskey-addled poker game. Anthony told us the good news while we unknowingly rendered the guy’s apartment unlivable, stripping pound after pound of lead paint from the walls. I thought we were avant-garde, more like a comedy troupe than a construction crew. Anthony would arrive one afternoon at a full-blown disaster of a job site. “Go home early today,” he’d drawl, and we’d silently pack up the tools and clear out, adding another cautionary red ‘X’ to our neighborhood map. Seriously. We had a map like that. We were outlaws.
    For a while, though, there was always another opportunity. I blew it the night I invited Anthony to a Manhattan soiree with some of my grad school friends, mobilizing the collision of two worlds, those of Man and Bird.
       “Do I need to dress up?” he asked, suspicious.
       “No more so than usual,” I said.
       “What’s that mean?”
       “It means you’re like Errol Flynn.”
     I always had the impression he might pummel me, but I loved the guy. I loved not knowing what would happen. 
      He was coming to the party by cab, but the driver took a route not to Anthony’s liking. A spirited debate ensued and ultimately led outside the vehicle, where indelicacies could be exchanged more freely. When Anthony assumed his kung fu stance, the driver wisely fled into a bodega to call for backup, freeing the Bird to commandeer the cab and pursue the ideal route unfettered. He managed to flirt with some of my friends, even dance a little, before the cops filed in.
     It was (unsurprisingly) not his first conviction. From Free Bird to Jail Bird, just like that! He went away owing me a bunch of money, but it’s not like I really earned it. We had no idea what we were doing. I miss those days. Nothing in my life since has been so devoid of accountability.