A way you could think me to be

A friend of mine who thinks too much thinks he’s a writer, but the only thing he’s ever written, as far as I know, are a few entries in a blog. He says the blog was supposed to be a joke, mostly, but I don’t see much humor in it. It’s mostly him blowing himself up like he’s some kind of big deal. He hasn’t written in months, though. He says he doesn't have time- he goes to school and he works full-time. He’s ambitious, my friend. He always says "if I'm still doing this when I'm thirty..." while he shoots himself in the head with his finger, rolling his eyes. I think he’s kidding. I hope he’s kidding. He’s got a couple of years. I think he’ll figure something out before then.

I like having someone I can talk to about work, though. When he quits, I’ll miss the conversations we have.

I’ve done all sorts of work. The best job I ever had was summers in high school when I worked for a landscaper. I’d get up at five in the morning and spend the day walking behind a four-foot Honda mower, mowing rich people’s lawns all over the suburbs where my parents used to drive on Sunday afternoons, hoping someday to own a house like those ones. I wish I would have thought to have worn a pedometer one day, to keep track of how many miles I walked, up and down and back and forth in razor sharp rows. Many, many miles I walked behind that mower. I was the only white boy on the crew, but I didn’t let anybody think I slacked off because of it. By the end of every summer I was burned dark red and brown. My friends called me a Mexican, but I didn’t care. I had more money in my pocket than them. I saved a lot, too, enough to put me through a year of college at NYU. I was lucky to get in. I wrote a good application, I can talk smart when I need to. I wanted to be a lawyer back then, not that I knew anything about it- the first lawyer I ever talked to was at this job, although I’d mowed plenty of lawyer’s lawns. I just thought it would be a cool life, to be a big shot with plenty of money, nice suits, nice car, and a hot secretary, like on TV.

I remember the summer before I started classes at that school, there was an orientation for freshmen. There was this girl I liked, she was beautiful, I was talking to her, small talk, but flirting, too, even though I didn’t know too much about that. I was surprised when she acted like she really liked me, she got real close to me and squeezed my arm, feeling the muscles I built up lifting green barrels full of grass clippings. She asked how I got so tan. When I told her, she backed off me like I was a really cute puppy she just found a flea on.

It’s like that with this job, too, my friend agrees. When you’re wearing this uniform, women look right through you, it doesn’t matter how good you look, you’re not getting anywhere. I’ve tried telling the women I meet outside work that I work in real estate, which is what my friend does, but that doesn’t explain why I can’t meet up any nights but Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The black and Spanish guys at work, they don’t have any trouble getting women, but when I try to talk to black and Spanish girls, I just come off like another soft white boy, and with American girls, the first question is always “What do you do?” I tell them and shazaam! I’m invisible.

I couldn’t afford to stay at NYU, and my parent’s wouldn’t co-sign student loans. Or they said they wouldn’t. They were real religious and they said they wouldn’t pay for the kind of godless education I would get at a school like that. I think they couldn’t, but they were too proud to tell me. I wish I was black or Spanish sometimes. I knew kids whiter than me at NYU that had lower grades than me and lower SAT scores that got full free rides because they had Spanish last names. Meanwhile I’m the white kid with a GED and broke-ass parents and nobody cared if I had to drop out or not. They made such a big deal out of diversity at NYU, but they didn’t need any white boys who had to get GED’s because their parents were crazy fundamentalist Christians who sent their kids to school in the church basement. I’m the diversest person I know.

I’m the only white guy on staff where I work, besides this one other older guy. The only white American, I mean, if that means anything. There’s a couple guys from European countries I’ve never heard of that I can’t pronounce the names of either, but mostly Jamaicans and Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. There’s another older white guy, but he’s not really someone I can talk to either. He’s the kind of guy that says he’s not racist but whenever anyone messes up, he’s like “whaddayou expect from these animals?”. Sometimes I think that’s how he keeps it together, “at least I’m not an animal” he can tell himself.

It’s real funny to me that most of the guys I work with- the ones that come over here from somewhere else, or the ones that grew up here in the city- the only white people they’ve ever really spoken to are the ones that live in the building where we work, and me and the other white guy. I like that I get to be the coolest white boy these guys ever met.

I feel bad saying I pity some of these guys, because you almost have to feel like you’re better than someone to pity them, but I do. For most of them, this is their dream job. I envy them, because I wish I could say I had my dream job. They just think different. One night last summer, beautiful night, clear, warm, not too muggy, I was working with Oscar and this guy that lives on the 7th floor comes in. Mr. 7th floor, he’s a real cool guy, doesn’t talk down to you or try to pretend to be your buddy, just acts natural. Anyway, he’s kind of teasing me and Oscar, like “what are you guys doing here? It’s a beautiful night, you should be out enjoying it.” I got the joke, I don’t mind being teased a bit, especially when the alternative is pretending like there’s no where else in the world I’d rather be, or feeling like someone feels bad for me, because that just makes me feel worse. Anyway, Oscar, who’s Dominican, says “But Mr. _______, we are slaves.” And he was serious.

One day I’m going to try to write some kind of book about all the stuff I see at work. I took this class once with all these black writers, and they wrote about a lot of the kind of stuff I think about, except they thought that everything that happened to them was because they were black. I think the same way as a lot of those guys do, except I can’t say it’s because I’m black, because I’m not.

But I’m not a very good writer. In fact, that friend of mine I told you about before, he’s the one that wrote this, but he said I could have it because the words were mine.