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belltown stories
My 48-hour Day as a Day-Laborer by Alex R. Mayer 
He handed down a container of nitrous oxide to Jesus and joked about “getting loopy.” I agreed to help my friend Cecil move some aging bikers out of the industrial building he bought recently for his expanding legitimate business. I did it for the adventure or possibly for the money. 
For some reason the bikers wanted to keep every single thing they'd accumulated during their decades of occupancy: all the moldy plywood, soggy mops, grease-stained issues of "Canadian Biker" from 1980, cases of damaged Harley parts, weight-lifting equipment. It's impossible to give away old weight-lifting equipment. Friends and family? They hate weight-lifting. No thrift store in America will take that stuff. I figured biker Bert could've rented a dumpster or hauled it to the scrap yard, but that didn't happen.
Turns out a friend of Bert's has a son with drug problems who'd been living in the building for months. Bert wanted to try one of those "soft eviction" deals – knowing that the landlord was selling the building to my pal – so he shut off the water. Good thinking. And that explained the bottles of fermented pee, the petrified Burger King cups full of the solid stuff. There were some baggies around, a couple home-made pipes, but no evidence of a meth lab. That's where I draw the line as far as working conditions go.
One groggy kid, our designated helper for the day, showed up, peeked inside the building, turned around and left. Jesse, Cecil's brother who recently sold his business for millions, pulled up in his new Audi; ever the savvy businessman, Jesse tells me he bought it at auction for $10,000. He glances inside Bert's building and assesses the ten-foot piles of rubble and motorcyle junk with an expert eye, and then we head to Belltown to hire up Jesus and Pedro, who eventually save the day despite not speaking a word of English. Tells you how important English is.
We don't arrive back at the site until noon, which prompts many Teamsters jokes among the crew. And by the way: why the hell were we doing this again? Seems Bert was too lazy to move out on time, so Cecil agreed to help him move so as to get him the hell out. Eventually Bert's pal, the one with the druggie son, shows up. When he overheard me monkeyshining with my Mexican friends about the soda bottles filled with greenish urine ("Cerveza?") he got uptight: "That's my son you're talking about, man!" His adult son pees in Mountain Dew bottles in the middle of the night in a greasy motorcycle shop ... but wait, who am I to judge? I hope I am as protective of my own boy when I am that age, but not until then.
Bert, his wife and their friend were all chain-smoking and eating Red Vines. Bert has a bum leg from an accident and truly looks exactly like what he is, a 70-something biker. His wife is petite and tan with muscle tone, her face
revealing some rough miles. Their friend wore a wig. When Bert started ordering around our Mexican pals (Bert, wife and friend did not do any actual work), I began joking with them about "loco diablo gringo" and so forth. I don't even speak tourist Spanish, but Cecil learned the language during some spare time he had in prison and he assured Jesus and Pedro that they weren't in any danger.
Then I drive a van full of stuff (Jesse is behind us in the U-Haul) to somewhere outside of Everett, with Bert riding shotgun. Bert is a good guy who has had many adventures, so he's unfazed by this. It's raining, the windshield wipers don't work and Bert chain-smokes the whole way. His property is right off the highway, with seven cars, a dump truck, tractors, trailers and other junk strewn about. He's built a new bike shop out of shipping containers. His house is nice with a garden and lawn sculptures and blooming trees.
All good fun, and after that ten-hour day I start the next morning by picking up Jesus and Pedro (in front of new construction for a Belltown condo called "Alex," across the street from where I lived for 10 years) and we get the gang together and go to Bert's farm. Bert was for some reason unable to unload the truck we had packed the day before, so we had to go down and wake him up so he could watch us unload it. I pick up an important junk keepsake made of rusted metal and slice my finger open as fate would have it. "Should have worn gloves," mumbles Bert, standing there smoking a cigarette as the Mexicans continue to bust ass unloading his crap. He handed down a container of nitrous oxide to Jesus and joked about "getting loopy." I learned later that bikers use NO2 for souped-up dragchoppers. His wife won't let me in the house, with all that blood coming out of me and all, but she emerges eventually with some peroxide and toilet paper and band aids and dresses my wound, which leaves a giant pile of crimson foam and band aid
junk beneath us – which I'm guessing Bert did not hold on to as a keepsake.
After a few minutes of recuperation I half-heartedly help unload some stuff with my good arm, just so I don't look like a sissy to our Mexican brothers, who by that time are almost finished unloading anyway. What happens if one of those guys slices open a finger? Where do they go? They were pretty horrifed at first, when I was dying of blood loss, but on the way home I turned on a Spanish-language station and everyone cheered up. And I was totally in their corner food-wise. "You gotta buy these guys dinner," I told Jesse the first day. He goes, "There's a Wendy's up the street." "No way!" I shrieked. "That's an insult to their culture!" So then Jesse goes and gets the worst "Mexican" take-out imaginable. Rubbery chicken, floppy onions, runny rice, rancid red sauce. Muy malo! The next morning Cecil bought us all breakfast steak burritos from Jack in the Box. Gristly corporate beef and hash browns (!) wrapped in a flour tortilla. Also malo.
So I spend a nice couple hours getting stitched up at urgent care at Group Health, separated by a curtain from a guy with HIV-related issues. He seemed to have been stuck in there all day, and when an orderly came in and wanted me to put on some kind of lead vest so they could do a procedure on him, I left the room until they were done. I never got the chance to talk to the guy (I was in and out of there quick – amazing) but I did make eye contact with him a couple times, as if to say "Dude, I cut my finger: we're warriors in this adventure called life." Always turning a negative into a positive, I am. The sexy Chinese doctor gave me Vicodin, and then Cecil called and told me to send him the bill. Anyway, next time I move I'm hunting up Jesus and Pedro. They did all the work and managed not to injure themselves.
Edited by Messenger legal dept.
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