American Outlaw - Jesse James [45]
“Down the road, half a mile on the right,” she grumbled. “Bring your own soap. Their machine’s busted.”
I didn’t have any laundry soap of my own, but I set off anyway, hoping she was wrong. Soon, I realized that the night manager had underestimated the distance greatly. A good mile and a half had passed before a strip mall appeared on my horizon.
It was winter, Seattle, 1988—grunge was being born, but I barely noticed. Sweating and tired, not to mention mildly freaked out to be in a new place, I struggled under the weight of my tramp bag. Vaguely, I fantasized about heaving it into traffic and letting the oncoming cars maul my overripe clothes into oblivion. But then I’d have to buy new ones, and I couldn’t afford luxuries like that at the moment.
Finally, I saw the strip mall. As I walked toward the Laundromat, a guy came out the door and passed me, nodding in a pleasant, friendly manner.
“Hey, man, how ya doing?” he said.
“Fuck off,” I barked instinctively.
A confused, fearful look passed over the guy’s face, and he quickly scurried off.
I muttered “sorry” under my breath, but the dude was long gone. Dammit! I thought. He’d taken me by surprise. Where I came from, you didn’t talk to people you didn’t know on the street. This Seattle shit was going to take some getting used to.
The next day, I rented a car for work. “What’s the cheapest thing you’ve got?” I asked the guy working the counter.
“Try this on for size.” He tossed me the keys to a Chevy, a no-frills piece of crap. It had almost no suspension at all. I felt like I was riding on a set of Tonka wheels. But the price was right. It was going for about ten bucks a day.
Now I would just need food. I lurched to the grocery store, where hungrily I seized a towering stack of lunch meat, three loaves of white bread, and a bottle of ketchup. I moved toward the checkout, but then, reconsidering, I turned to my right and added a stack of pink wafer cookies to the pile: a fourth food group.
——
“So, you definitely know how to TIG weld. Is that right?” my boss asked me on my first day at work at the shipyard. It was seven o’clock in the morning in December off of Puget Sound. The wind coming off the water was absolutely freezing.
“Definitely,” I agreed, shaking from the cold.
“Where’d you learn?” he asked dubiously. “Tungsten inert gas welders are pretty rare in this day and age. And, well, no offense, but you’re just a kid.”
“My dad.” It was the first thing that came to mind. “Welder.”
“Well, all right, then.” He seemed satisfied. “Go over to the office, get your torch and your helmet. Tell ’em to give you a work jacket, too. You don’t want any of those fucking sparks gettin’ on you, am I right? Burn the goddamn skin right off your face!” He cackled alarmingly.
It didn’t take me long to realize the job I’d taken was slow, repetitive, and dangerous. Even more, it was difficult. I’d considered myself a good worker with a torch, but in this shipyard, I found it surprisingly challenging to execute my tasks. In the most basic terms, we attached and repaired the metal appendages of giant crafts: one of my first jobs was to construct the munitions racks for the USS Camden, a guided missile frigate. The scale and importance of the work inspired me, but the job required me to regularly worm my way into tiny spaces. Often, I was caught in between bulkheads so tight that I literally couldn’t wear my welding mask.
“I can’t fit it on my head!” I complained to my boss. “There’s no room!”
“Well, wear this!” he yelled to me. He tossed me a little leather hood with goggles on it. I looked at him.
“This is . . . a gimp hood.”
“Okay, go in there with nothin’ on your fucking head, I don’t care!” He stomped off to troubleshoot the next battery of problems.
Despite the challenges that came with the work, I caught on pretty quickly.