The Eight Day Itch

Last month, on a break during the 6th day of my 8 day insulation nightmare, Brit made the mistake of asking me how things were going.

5 minutes into my rant, he cut me short. "What if I gave you the choice right now: either you have to install insulation, full-time, for the rest of your working life, or, you never have to touch insulation again, but your penis is one-inch long, bright blue, and as thin as a pencil. What would you choose?"

That put things in perspective for me. "I'd take the tiny blue penis." It was a no-brainer. I explained that I already had kids and a wife who would love me, no matter what the size, shape, and color of my manhood. We could always buy a replacement, the size, shape, and color of our choice. I could live with that. But working with insulation? Every day? Forever? Just the thought started my chest heaving. I'd never be truly happy again.

At the time, I was wolfing down a couple of Big Bite Hot Dogs in my truck, coughing and shivering in a cold sweat. I had been taking most of my meals at the 7/11 for over a week, even branching out to "taquitos" and other scary items that spin their days away on the roller grill. I was simply too sweaty and dirty to dine anywhere else, and I had abandoned any concern for things like nutrition, manners, and hygiene.

A peek in the rear view mirror revealed that my eyes looked as bad as they felt. They were 3' bong hit red, with pinkish globs of fiberglass coalescing in the corners. I coughed, then sneezed, then coughed violently a few more times, lacking the strength to fully expel the pink pathogens from my lungs. I had given up on protective eyewear, it fogged in the humid weather. Towards the end of the day I had pulled of the dust mask, too; the wet, shallow Darth Vader breathing just go to be unbearable. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve flannel shirt to keep the pink menace off my skin, but it was August and I was working in an hot attic, so I was soaking wet. Dirt adheres better to moisture, thus the filthiness.

How did I end up in such a shitstorm? My cousin, Neal, whom I liked and trusted (before the insulation debacle) had offered my $1000 to stuff one of his construction projects. He said it would take 4, maybe 5 days. I was underwhelmed by the figure, but we both knew I needed the work. Neal is the co-owner of the solar company I usually work for, and we hadn't had any panels to install for weeks. It was nearing the end of the summer, and I could use that grand to pay some bills before I went back to my real real job teaching ESL at a community college.

So I agreed. How bad could it be? Insulating a house is not, I tried to remind myself through the sweating, tearing, coughing, bleeding, and itching, so bad as, say, pulling month old corpses out of attics in New Orleans, or searching for body parts in the toxic dust and rubble down at Ground Zero.

The thing is, though, those workers are heros, and I was a complete zero, the low man on a very crappy totem pole. That was established on Day 1. Neal had me cleaning up the construction site as I waited for my Herculean shipment of insulation to arrive. The guy who delivered the parts for the plumbers walked by and asked, "How's work?"

I was slow to answer; my consciousness, as a coping mechanism, had already retreated deep into my happy place.

He went ahead and finished the joke for me: "Picking up?"

Aaaaah. I got it. I wasn't in a laughing mood, though I did, regretfully, fake a smile for the dude. There I was, with two master's degrees, living in a house with a million-dollar view, married to an MD, and here was this plumber's assistant wearing a bandana with a flag and an eagle on it, breaking my balls. It was going to be a long week, though I had yet to find out exactly how long.

I had cleaned up many a site when solar was slow and the bank account low, and I had learned how to check my ego at the trailer. Neal would joke that he was helping build my resume with on-the-job-training and mini-lectures such as "The Do's and Don'ts of Dumpster filling."

Whenever I felt my pride rise into anger I would remind myself to be humble. What made me too good for this work? Someone had to do it. What Would Jesus Do? The WWJD test was leaky, though. Jesus was, after all, a carpenter, and damned if you wouldn't see a skilled tradesman sweeping plywood floors and filling Dumpsters, especially if he was union. He'd probably have a helper: a kid, or an illegal alien, to do that kind of stuff.

Whenever I'm cleaning up a construction site, I get to wondering if the carpenters, plumbers, and electricians are wondering about me. The reality is they probably don't think of me at all, but they have to be curious: "Why is this white guy picking up hunks of concrete and tossing them into a Dumpster? How did he end up responsible for disposing of my scrap metal and my Gatorade bottles? Where did he go wrong in life?" It would be a fair question. I am big, and bearded, and, on these particular days, wearing a nasty scowl, so I like to think they mark me either for 1. an ex-con, or 2. a mental midget, Neal's dim-witted nephew or something.

Later on Day 1, Neal hit me with take 2 of the "How's work? Picking up?" joke, and that may have been the exact moment when I stopped liking my second cousin, whom I had once looked up to. The not liking became out and out disliking when I heard him bantering with some concrete guys about the evils of insulation:

"If I even touch the stuff, I break out in hives."
"Forget about it, I can't even be in the room when they open up a bag of it."

But apparently he had no problem having his dim-witted cousin drape himself in insulation for for 50 hours or so.

The insulation, a horrifying amount of it, arrived around lunchtime, and by mid-afternoon I was pining for the days of filling Dumpsters. I decided to attack the least appealing part of the job first, which was the basement ceiling. It was unappealing because I had to work in a crawlspace maybe 30 inches high, and I am 6'1" and 240 lbs (being tall has been linked to success in the business world, but it is not a plus in the insulation business). Neal, whom I did not completely despise yet, had brought a little roller scooter so I could lie on my back while I stuffed strip after strip of insulation in under the floor above. Neal hadn't provided any goggles. I did have some safety glasses, but they were tinted, so in the already dimly lit crawlspace I had the visual acuity of a newborn mole. The little airborne fibers had a way of getting around the dust mask, behind the glasses, and under my clothes anyway. My fortnight of suffering was underway.

To locomote, I had to push with my legs and grope with my arms like an upended water strider. On more than one occasion, I bent my leg too far back and my hamstring knotted up in a debilating cramp (this happens to me, especially when I'm dehydrated, often when I'm just rolling around in bed. I can't explain why it happens or how much it hurts.)

After 3 hours of this, I was spent. And I had only done a third of the basement. There were two more sizable crawlspace sections to go, plus a higher ceiling, plus the upstairs walls, the upstairs ceiling, the attic ceiling. It hurt to think of it. At that point, however, I somehow believed I could still do it in a week and resume my life unscathed.

I was the last to leave at almost 7 pm. I had an hour drive back home that would take two hours if I had tried to leave during rush hour, so I didn't mind staying late. For the same reason, I was the first to arrive in the morning. Just get 'er done. Longer days would mean less gas, which would help my bottom line.

I got home just in time to kiss my baby boys goodnight. I took a cold shower because that was supposed to work better, but I still didn't feel clean, and I tossed and turned, itching through the night.

At 7 the next morning I ventured in the attic hoping to get as much done as I could before it turned into a sauna. With my neck already cricked and my body bruised, I had to worm my way in between support beams and over ductwork, all the while hopping from ceiling beam to ceiling beam with only space below. My mission was to cover the underside of the roof of this 3000 square foot structure with 2' x 4' pieces of pink styrofoam, some 500 in all. I secured them to the plywood with a staple hammer. I had to wear gloves to avoid shredding my hands on the thousands of nails sticking down through the roof. I used 6 to 9 staples per styrofoam piece (eventually, I figured, I threw about 15,000 staples into that house). The lower third of the roof belly was too short for me too squeeze into and the upper third was too tall to reach. In other words, this was going to take a long time and it was going to be a whole different variety of hell than the crawlspace.

That was my solace and my strategy, I could migrate from one torturous task to another before any one misery drove me completely insane.

By lunchtime it had to be 100 degrees in the attic, so I spent the afternoon back in basement hell, stuffing the ceiling in the walkable section, now holding my arms all the way overhead, getting a microfiber facial. This too, stuffing behind pipes and cross braces with my arms fully outstretched above me, was exhausting.

Late afternoon I started the upstairs walls. Hold up a strip of insulation, roughly measure to the space, cut with a box cutter, stuff, and staple to the studs. Simple. Just repeat about 600 times.

Neal, at this point, admitted that this whole project was going to take a little more than 4 days. I admitted to myself that I had made a horrible, horrible mistake. When I agreed to $1000 I had no idea what I was getting into. I had seen the school house, but I just thought I'd be doing the walls and the ceiling, no basement ceilings and double layers on the underside of the roof. My once-beautiful summer was going to end in pain, sweat, dermatitis, and misery. Every extra hour I worked would bring my hourly salary down $25 --> $20 --> 15$ --> 12.50, a depressing function of (x) with (x) being hours and y approaching minumum wage. I couldn't insist on more money. Neal had given me the job in an attempt to help me out. According to him, if he had contracted out to actual insulation installers ("install" being an extremely technical term for what was happening here), it would have cost him the same amount, maybe less, and they would probably finish in three days.

"Three days?" I asked incredulously. "How many guys?"
"Usually two," he replied.
"Well, that's six man-days," I pointed out, "with guys who know what they're doing." I realized his little miscalcuation, intentional or not, meant an incalculable amount of anguish for me, free of charge. "Who does this shit, anyway?" I asked him.
"The Vietnamese, mostly. You should see these guys swinging from the rafters."

At that point I would have paid good money to watch a Vietnamese hang insulation. I wanted to learn the tricks of the trade so I could get speed up and get the hell out of there. I even found myself in the unimaginable scenario of wishing I were Vietnamese: 5'1", nimble, and just happy to be here.

But instead I was still white, 6'1", 240 pounds, hyper-literate, the son of an Ivy Leaguer, doing work that only the most desperate of immigrants would agree to, and very unhappy to be there. I plowed on, stoic and smileless, moving from one level of hell (attic, ground floor, basement) to the next, staple by staple, stud by stud.

Neal needed the work done quickly so the sheetrockers could come in, so on days 6 & 7 he borrowed a couple of his landscaper Mexicans to help me. (Neal, along with most of the contractors in these parts, calls all Hispanic laborers Mexicans, be they from Mexico, Honduras, Uruguay, or Pakistan. I used to think this was a bit callous, but, after meeting enough of them and determining that 90% were, in fact, Mexican, I started calling them all Mexicans too. My apologies to illegal laborers everywhere.) It was nice to have help, someone to talk to (even if it was just commands in Spanish), and to move up one rung on the ladder. Plus, the end was in sight. On Thursday I had to go to meetings for school. The Mexicans would finish up for me before the inspector came Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, praying for a reprieve, I called Neal.
"How'd it go?"
"What a disaster yesterday. Tino didn't show. The inspector never showed. And that Julio, he's got a real attitude on him."
"He worked fine for me. That's what this stuff does to you, it makes you mean. Tino probably walked back to Mexico rather than spend another day with the insulation."
"Yeah, well, anyway, I'm gonna need you one more day. Can you work tomorrow?"

One more day. A Saturday. I had no choice but to fulfill my obligation, no matter how bogus the whole deal had become. Hopefully my rash would still have time to heal before my first classes on Wednesday. When I got there, about a dozen Mexicans, none of them over 5'2", were sheetrocking like crazy to the rhythm of some loud ass Bachata or Meringue or something.
My work was in the attic, the very peak, which required me to hammer braces across the support beams and balance on those while stapling. The ceiling was fully insulated, and there was no electricity yet, so it was pitch dark. I brought up a worklight. It was a cool, rainy day, and, with a couple of days off behind me, I was moving along quite nicely. Just as I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, my world went completely dark. Damn Mexicans! One of them had unplugged my light, and I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.

Furious, I hollered out, "My light! MY LIGHT! LA LUZ!" but they were bopping and drilling away to their accordion music and had probably forgotten I was in the house, if they had ever noticed in the first place.

I was perched up in space, with nothing but ceiling beams 3 feet below me, 24" apart, with insulation in between and sheetrock beneath. To make it to the platform where my light was, I was going to have to do some ninja creeping through dozens of invisible obstacles. I would make it, but it was going to set me back 20 minutes. I was annoyed, to say the least.

I reached one leg out, feeling for a steady beam to put weight on, when "CRACK", the half-assed brace I had nailed in gave way. I could put what happened next in chronological order now, but at the time it all happened at once, or in reverse order; my entire body, belly button down, was suddenly sticking down through a giant hole in the sheetrock, my elbows were screaming in pain, each one propped on a 2" x 8". From that reality, I pieced together my fall in the dark, the nails pulling out of the brace, the left side of my body, from my shin up to my shoulder bouncing down the beam, the light coming through the hole in the sheetrock, surprise that I didn't fall all the way to the floor, pain in my shoulder, anger at the Mexicans, Neal, the whole situation, and laughter at the ridiculousness of same situation.

A Mexican called up, "What'chu doing man?". The pure venom in my response "You turned off my fucking light and I fell" was enough to end the conversation, even if he didn't understand a word I said. They cut my light, I fell, I broke their sheetrock. Even Esteban.

Neal came up later, and he couldn't help but quip, "If you want to get down below, we do have stairs over here." He told a story about a time long ago when he fell through a lady's living room ceiling. She was on the phone, and she one-lined to her friend, "I gotta go. Someone just dropped in." I laughed. I didn't really hate my cousin. I was about 60 staples away from being done with insulation forever, I wasn't a tiny Vietnamese or Honduran illegal, my penis was a normal size and color. Life was good again, better than ever.