This is not working: Drywall Supply (pt. 1?)

The grunt-work underworld, illuminated and illustrated.

As remembered and illustrated by your narrator.

¹ Better than never. Let’s begin.

Pain is weakness leaving the lobby

It’s 4:45 AM, and I have slept approximately 4-ish hours on a friends “flip n’ fuck” futon which basically makes one feel like they have been beaten with a poverty stick. It’s winter. Outside everything has that “Michigan flavored slurpee” look to it, brown and grey with rocksalt sprinkles on top.

My best friend Buddy (not his real name, more on that later) is already up as is his roommate Dexter (his actual name), and both are going through their morning rituals to prepare for the day.

I have lived with Buddy a few times over the years for brief periods and his morning routine remains unchanged. Shower, tea, boots and lunchbox. Simple.

I struggle to choke down the remains of a room temperature 40 oz bottle of Mickey’s so that the morning cigarette doesn’t hurt as much. As I do this, Dexter becomes the human equivalent of the back of the cereal box at breakfast time.

Dexter

Dexter is a tall 20 something black guy with a vague midwestern / southern accent. I can’t at this point remember what it was that he did for a living. I know it was outside and it sucked. At that time in my life most people I knew either had to suck it outside, or grind it inside, neither was ideal. Dexter’s morning process went like this:

• Beer in the shower, singing jukebox tunes

• Coffee and cigarette (hand rolled Bugler) on the couch

• Thermals, Bibs, Boots

• Old school blue screen weather channel

• Igloo cooler in one hand, milk jug of frozen water in the other

• “Time to make the donuts!”

And out the door like Kramer and I hear his exhaustless Dodge giddyup out in the parking lot of the complex.

I didn’t get a routine until much later in my life. I usually just grabbed whatever shit that was nearby, and got out the door rickey-tick as I was chronically slow getting out of bed.

Wake n’ Shake

Buddy had acquired a 66’ Ford Mustang convertible. I feel like it was Dukes of Hazard orange, but that might just be my foggy memory. It had an inline 6 cylinder in it, so we called it “the Beast” as in “666 mark of the beast”. It was a cool ass car, and also one of the coldest winter rides one can find.

We had to kind of cover our mouths as it warmed up so as to not fog/frost the inside of the windows with our breath. Once it got going it was toasty as you could want with that giant hunk of iron under the hood, but it took the 30 min drive to work to get to room temp which was just in time to hit the cold air again.

Normally our truck would be running already at the shop, and warm. This was considered a “perk” of the job at the time. It sat in the truck barn, a building that if emptied could hold about 20 semi trucks inside of it. It was always about half full of a dark grey haze of diesel and propane fumes from the running trucks and forklifts. This was especially bad in winter because they keep most the big doors closed. You can either get asphyxiated, or feel your fingers, you can’t have both. Life is full of choices, and those ratchet straps won’t work themselves, so brain damage it is.

All due respect.

There are trucks, and then there are work trucks

The inside of a work truck in just about any industry is fairly predictable. I say work truck because that (to me) is different than a POV² truck you may see on the road or own yourself. Not to get all Jeff Foxworthy here, but if your truck had power anything aside from steering, you did not have a work truck. Can you locate seat belts or your registration / insurance? If the answer is yes, you probably aren’t driving a work truck. There is (or was) no AC in a work truck, but your results may vary.

There was always at least one garment of unknown origin such as one glove, a fluid stained t-shirt, or doo-rag. Plastic Mountain Dew bottles filled with dip spit were the tumble weeds of the work truck biome. Everything smelled like carcinogens, and every knob on the dashboard is either missing, bent, or non-functional due to interactions with various 200lb gorillas. It wasn’t exactly hostile to humans, but it motivated you to get the hell out of it and to do your job.

Fun Fact: Buddy got teased about how clean he kept our truck, and he was fiercely territorial over it. The reason Buddy got assigned this truck was because it was a brand new, custom built ordeal that had cost a fortune. I can’t actually recall what the rumored price tag was, but it really was a one of a kind thing. I know that Eaton transmission, which was up the road from the shop had scratch built a 4x4 transmission for this lifted 2.5 ton truck. I don’t even know how one requests such a thing, but the owner of the company had this truck purpose built. Buddy was smart, or at a minimum could talk smart, and occasionally wore glasses. So the owner decided only Buddy would be behind the wheel of this shiny Frankenstein’s monster of a truck. Boy oh boy how the Dale Earnhart type guys on the crew resented Buddy for that honor. I think at the time Julia Roberts was married to Lyle Lovitt, it was that kind of vibe.

Trucks are as much a part of the job as the board they haul. They are the setting for your greatest victories and the source of your most crippling losses. The truck you get put in at Drywall Supply says as much about you as it does about the task it is meant to complete. It is “your truck” insofar as you live and die by what happens to, and because of it. It’s your home, if home was truck stop shitter in July. It might be a POS³ but it is YOUR POS and constant companion. In the parlance most substack readers might better understand, it is your “work hubby / wife”.

Getting “run off” a job

To give you an idea of how this job worked I will say it is all rather deceptive at first viewing. You have trucks of various sizes delivering primarily drywall and drywall related products to various homes and businesses. There were “Boom Trucks” which were essentially straight bed semi-sized trucks with a boom arm that had an articulated fork at the end. These were for large shipments of board, or pallets of items that needed to be lifted to an area. We had a few “Deuce and a half” 2.5 ton flat bed trucks (of which Buddy’s truck was the flagship) for smaller jobs, usually residential deliveries. Occasionally we would “two truck” with a boom truck to assist with an offload.

Most trucks had driver and a grunt. The exception to this was when there were new guys, who weren’t schooled as of yet in the black magic of board humping, so they would travel along in a boom truck as “training” as it is easier to learn how to carry board when it came off of a boom than off of a flatbed.

These new guys would ride “bitch”⁴ which means they would sit on a bucket in between the seats behind the shifter. You haven’t done construction until you have had the pool ball material shifter knob hit you square in the knee on a cold December morning when a driver takes his marriage out on the transmission and traffic. It clears the mind and fortifies the resolve to look for better, more civilized work. It usually takes two weeks for one to decided or be told that this job is not for them. Sometimes you get “run off”⁵ sometimes you just do the running off yourself.

Drywall is not just sheets of cardboard

Anyone who has ever had to deal with drywall, either hanging it or just hanging a picture on it knows this. But to the unschooled it just looks like a big sheet of craft cardboard. It is not.

It weighs somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 lbs per square foot depending on the size, type and thickness. It is delivered in what are called “books” which are two sheets held together by a strip on either end. The lightest book is a standard 8’x4’ quarter inch board (roughly 90-ish lbs), technically the heaviest was 14’ 5/8 54” board, but to most the 16’ books were the gold standard of heavy humping, but more on that later.

However, it's not the weight so much as the shape. Carrying a man sized playing card that is made of heavy and fairly brittle material can be a challenge in many ways. The average construction guy can carry a standard book on his or her⁶ own with a little bit of effort and some technique. In most cases, OSHA regs insist that there be two men on each book if it is not possible to put the board on a cart and roll it to its destination. I think I used a cart on a total of 4 job sites in my entire time working at Drywall Supply.

Buddy and I mostly did small runs to residential jobs where the board was used to finish a basement, attic, or garage. Sometimes the delivery was to supplement a bigger load later.

Carrying board up or down stairs can be spicy, even for vets of the sport. The only reason I got put right into a flatbed to start is because Buddy told the boss I was “mustard”⁷ and that he would see to it I got with the program.

Tears were shed but I survived by the lifeblood of construction; shame and insults. My buddy was well aware of the various tender spots to poke me in, and could motivate me to perform. By week two our friendship was deepened by the hardships, and I was never so thankful we were the same height and weight, which makes a hell of a difference when it comes to carrying board.

Graph illustrating the trajectory of success and my participation in it.

…and on the third day, he questioned

To me the real challenge was day three. Most able bodied guys can bear the heavy lifting and marching all day long. It is construction after all, and there is some self selecting going on. But where the rubber meets the road is the hands.

On day one by the time you deliver your first run of board as a new guy, you can barely make a fist. By the second run, a 5 year old could beat you in arm wrestling, and pissing standing up becomes hit or miss.

At the end of the day, which is at minimum 8 hours even in slow seasons, you are just dead weight to the truck. Thus riding bitch bucket is essential for new guys. They will help some, but they burn out fast and you need a place to put that spent grunt where they are out of the way.

Day two you start out half the man you were (or thought you were), and no one is even trying to pretend that you have utility. You are in shock. Later, when you think about it you will have no idea there was a pause for sleep and slop in between day one and two. But for now the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact a train, or a minimum the struggle bus coming to take you home.

On day three your body has had enough time to properly process the horrific abuse you have subjected it to. It is doing it’s level best to convince you that being homeless isn’t all that bad. If by some miracle you haven’t actually injured something, your whole body feels like a bruise. Your hands generally get the worst, not accounting for whatever value as a man you once thought you possessed.

I have dainty lady hands by construction standards. Long, bony fingers are not useful for hauling board, not enough meat for padding. Most guys that do well at this job have the sausage fingered / catcher’s mitt type hands. I ended up with mountainous calluses that were in weird places and torn up. The reason for this is that I thought gloves were a good idea. They aren’t.

Your bare hand will do far better at getting a grip on the board, and that is a huge part of carrying. Put a sock on your hand and try turning a door knob. When you put on gloves you have to grip twice as hard, and your hands sweat. This sweat makes your calluses (if you have any) go soft, and your grip gets weak from all the extra gripping, so slippage happens. If you had calusses before, you probably don’t anymore.

One of the things that led me to leave the job was my hands. Touching my girlfriend at the time didn’t feel like anything to me, and god knows what it felt like to her⁸. I guess that was a problem. More on that later, probably.

What I am trying to say is that no one is expected to make it, but also anyone can. There were all kinds of shapes, sizes, and dispositions on the crew. If there was a unifying theme it was probably lack of options for gainful employment due to incompetence, intelligence, or criminal records. The sorting hat did not in fact take your wishes into consideration. You are all equally worthless pieces of human garbage to the general job market, but at Drywall Supply you are either reborn as a shit-hot board humping ape, or you become a reference point to someone else of how bad the first two weeks can go. With that in mind, let’s examine some of the results of that self-cleaning oven that is construction. We meet the cast of (offs?) that work at Drywall Supply.

Nicknames

In construction there are often nicknames. If your shop has an assignment board, it is almost mandatory that a nickname is assigned to you. There are many ways one gets a nickname. In almost all cases one does not choose their own nickname, and the nickname you are given is seldom flattering. Arguably the worst outcome is not having a nickname at all, but again, your results may vary.

I have had many nicknames at many jobs over the years. Most were unremarkable, and based on my appearance, name, or position of work but here were a few that I can remember:

• Bozo⁹

• Little Curt (I am a Junior, er was a junior?)

• Fuckstick (Fitzpatrick had too many fricatives for the Army)

• FNG / FNGIC (walk-on temp jobs I had during my construction days)

• Monkey (including variants Design, Shingle, and Rock Monkey)

At Drywall Supply almost everyone had a nickname, and they usually had a story.

I was unremarkable enough to not have my own nickname, but instead was given a nickname based on the friend who got me the job. I am what I call a default guy. If you have ever played Nintendo Ice Hockey* I am the guy in the middle on the selection screen.

It took me about an hour to find a screen capture of the game, and recreate the pixel art to my satisfaction, only to realize that if it took that much effort to find and recreate this weird shit, no one is going to know what the fuck I am talking about. So like, you are welcome.

I am not a big guy, or a small guy and aside from apparently having “monkey arms” too long for my body (some former nicknames see above) I am an extra in any cast. So with nothing to go on as inspiration the dispatcher wrote me down in my friend's truck for the day as “Buddy’s Buddy”. As noted above my friend’s nickname was “Buddy” and since I got straight into the truck my first morning, I was just scribbled in. I kept that name the whole time I worked there, and sometimes it would get confusing to people since my friend and I looked alike and often worked together.

Friend of mine since I was a kid. We liked Bob Dylan, Baseball, and would shotgun a pint of El Toro before going into a bar (pre-gaming for budget). We had a pyramid of little sombrero caps in our apartment as well, that is until we discovered the liquid cirrhosis that is Everclear. For those not in the know, Everclear is what they call a “rectified spirit”. It is 190 proof, that is ninety-fuckin-five percent pure memory erasing, end up in jail juice. No amount of rectifying from any spirit is gonna save you.

Fun Fact; Most professional drunks can do a shot of Everclear with a little effort. It’s doable, albeit unpleasant. However, one must train for the AA Olympics to be able to do a double shot. The body recognizes poison even if you don’t. If you toss a double shot of Everlear into your mouth, it takes about one shot of fluid before your body gets wind of the dumb shit you are attempting. Its reaction is to clamp your throat shut like those scenes in submarine movies where the sub is flooding and they merc the engineering section to save the ship. Only the engineers and grease monkeys in this case were armed and not about to take one for the team. They make their own way out, and that way is your mouth and sinuses. Nothing is more illustrative of failures in judgement like flooding your nostrils with angry corn juice. Buddy and I learned to tame this self-preservation reaction so that we could win money off the large college bros we would encounter while crashing frat parties. Fun for Profit!

Buddy was raised in a fairly affluent home by a single mother who was some kind of professional or other. Their house was, to me, like something off the tv. Think “Family Ties” but lonelier.

He didn’t have the kind of “manual labor market bound” upbringing I did, but to his credit, he was never a slouch about getting shit done and chasing that money.

We sort of shared a brain, though often neither of us knew who was in possession. Working with him in any job was going to be fine.

Lunk was the owner’s son. He is not your normal owner / boss’s boy, that is the “my dad says” or “someday I will run this place” type. He seemed like he was engineered to haul around board, or close castle gates or some shit. At 19 years old he was about 6’ whatever”, 250lbs give or take, and balding. He was dutiful, and strong as a bull. Buddy and I got him drunk all the time, and would turn him loose in public for shits and giggles.

Lunk had a girl we never met, but we all assumed she was either a Brunhilda girl, or wheelchair bound. Whatever the case one assumes he tended her rabbits in one way or another.

If you took an Airedale Terrier, doped it to the gills with PCP and bred it with a Hobbit, you would have Pork. I have no idea how he got his nickname. I kind of think he was just living on the land when they built the company and just brought him along for the ride.

He was maybe 5 foot tall and about a buck 30 soaking wet. He never got tired, ate beef jerky, and dipped that gross tobacco shit you have to fill your mouth with and chew. I think he called it “CHAW”. I never saw him drink water. Not once.

Pork was a diver and boom operator. He looked like a gremlin up on that crane and hopped up and down in the seat of the truck when we were in a hurry home from a run. He was dirty sure, but if you ain’t dirty you ain’t workin’ and Pork did the working to be sure. Maybe “Pork” came from “bringing home the bacon” now that I think about it. That makes sense, tho its too clever for what we are into here. He was prolly a Muslim, that feels closer what with the whole no swine thing. Yeah, a red-headed, drug gobbling midget, faithful to Allah sounds just like the kind of shit you come across in construction.

Stan apparently was a state arm wrestling champion. I didn’t even know we had a state level for that sport, but I guess you have to give these type of people something to do other than rape and pilliage.

He was a kind of Super Grunt in that without a license he couldn’t be a driver despite the fact he was vet of the board biz. A LOT of guys didn’t have licenses due to the ol “DUInot?” culture around after work recreation.

He could do that sledgehammer trick where you grab the end of the handle and touch your nose with the head. I never tried that shit, but it looked pretty hard and no one else could (or would) do it.

Stan left the company one day when state troopers showed up to arrest him at the shop. We hid him under a tarp on a truck and he rolled out of the yard, and our lives on that day. No one saw this as an odd thing to do btw (another theme in construction).

As for not getting to choose your nickname as noted above, Gidget was the example.

He was a weeble-wobble shaped guy, and talked alot. I can not recall what his first assigned nickname was, but he did the unthinkable thing and erased it from the assignment board and wrote in something else.

I think he wrote in something like “hammer” or “wolf” or some other such man shit. Upon seeing this later that afternoon, the dispatcher, rightfully horrified at seeing handwriting other than hers on the board decided this shit would not stand. I don’t know how long it took her to come up with it, but she got on the radio and told all trucks that the person traveling in truck 6 with Pork was now to be known as Gidget. The dispatcher is law, and so it was from there on out.

He wasn’t terrible at the job, but kind of operated like a permanent newguy / talk radio made flesh in most trucks. He did have a pretty good knowledge of OSHA¹⁰ regs, which occasionally either came in handy or were good for a chuckle or two.

Dennis was a bodybuilder. He used to go to McDonalds for lunch and order 10 quarter pounder patties with no bread, and drank that nutrient slurry whey stuff all day long.

He was generally an attractive fellow aside from the back acne and hands that were more fucked up than mine from the double whammy of board hauling AND weight lifting.

They called him Denise because one day his personal truck took a shit and he had to drive his girlfriend’s car to work. It was a barbie pink Dodge Neon with a hood decal that said “Princess” in old english font. He tried to hide it in the back lot, but as they say, truth will out. He didn’t even protest when the boss made him stand in front of it so we could take a picture. That photo was framed and hung in the shop even after he left the job.

Bossman don’t get a nickname. As a foreman / site boss Rick seldom interacted with any of us unless something went wrong. I don’t know what his normal personality was like since the only occasions I came into contact with him usually involved something breaking, or failing and the company losing money. His previously mentioned daughter occasionally helped out around the shop, and she was by all means a stout and sensible young lady. So that indicates he might have been a normal good guy in private life.

Rick’s pick up was the rare exception to the “work truck” rules as it was a bosses truck and never got a hot supper, and had power everything and AC.

Not a bad boss, but a boss none the less so I kept my distance and found something to do when he was around.

Al was the strongest human I have ever encountered. He was a bit shorter than me, so maybe 5’ 10”. I have no idea what he weighed as he appeared to be made out of some kind of high density construction polymer.

Everything was funny to Al, and being a bit on the funny side for a construction guy Al liked working with me for that reason. He was a joy to work with.

For starters Al could carry a book of 16’ 5/8 drywall (not sure if they even make that shit anymore) by himself, and did so often. That is roughly 260 lbs in one hand, bumpin off down the road. I tried it once and made it 3 steps before it ripped all the calluses off of my hand. So if you were working with Al, shit got done in a hurry. Al was also such an ultra-uber-megaman that he basically neutralized all testosterone in his general operating area. No one was playing grabass, teasing, or doing general grunt shit around Al. It was almost like a normal job, everyone on their best behavior.

Being made up primarily of peckerwood hicks, a construction job like Drywall Supply is not ideal for some folks with darker skin. Al didn’t like most of the guys, but he tolerated their shit long enough to get paid.

I kinda think this wasn’t his job, more like a hobby. But we never got into the details about anything. Just work and giggles, the best way to make a day go by.

Cracker Al (also Peckerwood Al) was essentially the negative of Blackman Al in almost every regard. He drove a fork truck in the yard, was pissy, and built like asthma. No one talked to him much, and being a yard guy¹¹, no one had much cause to.

I assume Al had a personality, and some kind of rudimentary self-awareness but the only words I recall hearing him say were “NERTZ!” which is a term budging piles of board into an organized stack (on a truck, or leaning against a wall), and “YALLGIT!” which was his way of saying the truck was loaded and we could leave.

Al prolly shaved one year off his life every winter being inside of that fume and diesel dust filled barn for 8 hours a day, every day. He always looked like death, which is about par for the course I suppose.

Most people don’t last long hauling board. We had a particularly bad crop of new guys for a while in the summer and no one really bothered to get to know them after a while.

But Nunu (short for the NEW new guy) miraculously came back after it seemed like he had reached the end of his rope. He was unremarkable in almost every way, other than the fact he returned for more of what he clearly did not like. He was still there when I left.

There were many, many others, but these were the guys that I could recall in some way, accurately or not. This should give you an idea of the kind of setting as I saw it at Drywall Supply.

More?

Since I have been busy I wanted to force myself to put something out there as a starting point. The rest of this post is almost equally long but I have no idea if anyone would even read this much, let alone a whole other thing like it. Who could possibly find this stuff interesting other than me? However if I see that folks are actually reading it, I will continue the effort, do some more doodles, and lay out a few misadventures I had at this job in between bouts of plowing and salting Michigan’s parking lots and driveways. I have oodles of more jobs of this ilk to cover from back in the day, but if it is not sparking for folks. I will perhaps find another handle to jiggle. Let me know what you all think.

1. Thanks to the madness that is Michigan weather in the winter, and the whole sale failure of the Weather Channel Cabal to even kind of forecast said weather, this post has been a long time coming. Driving a snow plow 60 hours in a week really tamps down that creative energy. I shall do my best to be a bit more consistent, not that anyone is asking. ~Cluis

2. Personally Owned Vehicle

3. Piece Of Shit

4. There is going to be… language in this post. This should shock no one who has read anything from me before, but on the slim chance someone stumbles upon this ramble by accident, fair warning is being given. It might be more so than usual in this post due to the job. So yeah, heads up.

5. Getting “run off” a job is something I found common in all kinds of construction / grunt work. It happens when your co-workers decide your type isn’t welcome, whatever that type may be. Again for my substack readers, the term you may be familiar with is “culture fit”. It isn’t always malicious, sometimes they do it to save everyone the trouble. Its little things like not making eye contact, calling you something unpleasant, or in extreme cases handing you a bit more work than you are fit to do. It’s how grunts fire other grunts basically.

6. Odd as it may seem, even back in the day there were some ladies who either attempted, or could hump board. At Drywall Supply the foreman’s daughter who was about a buck nothing in bodyweight could run board all day. If you got the technique, you don’t need to be a gorilla. As hostile as one might think a job like this is to the fairer sex, her being the foreman’s kid, and not exactly fetching in the typical sense meant that all the guys basically treated her like one of the boys. She would consistently embarrass new guys by running them into the ground by her pace. She was a good kid.

7. It’s a condiment.

8. I was like 20 and in construction. I lacked the fundamental mental and emotional hardware to process my own shit, let alone the shit that shit caused others. I have since apologized to those affected, to what end? Who knows?

9. My father’s failed attempt to attach me to a biblical figure “Boaz”, reimagined by my trailer trash contemporaries and family as “Bozo” or “Boze” either by failure of diction or the clown whose show I once participated in.

10. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the greatest threat to job sites since asbestos or free range women.

11. Yard guys tend to have the closest thing to a regular job at Drywall Supply. Mostly because they never left the shop so they just clocked in and clocked out when their work was done. They were also considered “skilled” because they could reliably read inventory lists and operate a piece of equipment or two. For regular grunts, ending up in the yard was punitive, usually resulting from getting hurt on the job and the boss not wanting there to be a workman’s comp claim for the company. You push a broom around until you can pick up a 50lb box of mud, then back in the truck you go.