I once had a construction boss named Jep. He wasn’t a foreman, but rather the man in charge of a ragtag group of minimum-wage summer laborers, a position I believe he may have started in decades earlier. His real name was Jefferson or Jeffords. He was feared and hated by his crew. I can still hear us: “Here comes Jep.” “Look out for Jep.” “Don’t cross Jep.” “You can’t do right by Jep, so just let him fume and fuss and then nod your head like you half give a shit and it meant something.” And on and on. He was among the most miserable men I had ever met.
I was sixteen, maybe seventeen when I knew Jep. I had been hired for the summer to labor on a new munitions storage site on a naval weapons station, not far from Williamsburg, Virginia. I mostly carried supplies and drove an old pickup around the large site, which was acres and acres of churned-up dirt, mud holes, and tenacious weeds. I also sometimes transported people, workers and, less often, supervisors. At the end of each day, I collected trash and debris for about an hour to keep the grounds safe, or at least safer. Then, every afternoon after four, I parked the company truck by the office trailers, from which men in clean jeans and company polos and dirt-free white helmets came and went. After that I headed home, exhausted and a little frayed from Jep’s day-long verbal abuse, only a small amount of which was ever directed at me because I listened, worked hard, drove the truck directly and quickly and safely to wherever higher-ups told me to, and kept my mouth shut. In other words, I was deathly afraid of the guy.
Jep was in his fifties, small, about 5’6”, and thin as a man near his death bed except for the classic alcoholic’s paunch above his belt buckle. He had thick hair, black with gray in it, some days greased back. His massive black eyebrows assaulted your first gaze upon his face and dared you to hold still your expression. His teeth were a lost cause behind his lips. His lower face and spindly neck and arms were deeply tanned and leathery—that original reason for the term “redneck” to describe white Southern laborers—from years in the sun on construction sites all around southeastern Virginia. His once-white helmet was filth-covered and scratched from all the times he had slammed it to the ground in anger. He also drove an old Ford pickup. I think his truck belonged to the construction company, too, but I’m not sure. I do remember Jep used his truck as a personal vehicle. It was filled with gas station coffee cups and dead cigarette packs. You could have misplaced a small pet in there.
I have forgotten many more things from the job than I remember. The names of the other workers are gone. How specifically I spent my days is mostly gone, though I remember they felt long. I say “mostly” because I do vividly remember the sensation of wrapping pallets of large stacked bricks in storage plastic for so many consecutive hours that my back went numb and I felt an electric needling in my feet. I remember the heat and sweat—heavy jeans saturated to the point that I could ring them out into a little river of black filth when I got home. I remember the foul, damp insides of my mud-caked boots. I remember small clouds of humidity hovering over the low parts of fields in the morning, beautiful in their way. I remember the smell of cracked-open earth—loamy and pungent and rich, like the morning breath of God, one of the carpenters used to joke. I remember the just off-stage humming and whirring and clicking and buzzing of unseen insects before the machines got going. I close my eyes, concentrate, and see and smell and hear the setting. It’s stored away in me. Yet most of the events, the actions, the characters moving in time, are gone. Except Jep, my interactions with Jep, and what happened with his truck one day.
When Jep was angry at a laborer—we received no specific training or general instructions that I remember—he’d turn red and shout with no sense of a boundary where his hatred and coursing emotion might be checked. His eyes would widen. Then he would begin with “Goddamnit, boy!” and it was off to the races on vile and hateful insults about your stupidity, your worthlessness, your hopelessness as a worker. Every third or fourth word was a curse. “Son of a whore,” for instance, was one of his favorite epithets. He said it with spittle flying from his mouth. But this still doesn’t capture it—this wasn’t just anger; the rage was a kind of energy, bigger, it seemed, than Jep, who became a skinny, unhealthy, and somehow towering presence in these moments.
There was the anger and verbal assault, which was bad enough. Beyond Jep’s frequent shouting, however, he also had a remarkable and devious cruel streak. He liked to put young people he had power over into dangerous situations—as had perhaps been done to him—that could have easily been avoided, like having us stand down in trenches when concrete would be poured, or straddle iron rebar, which created the structure for concrete walls, twenty feet off the ground with no harness, in southeastern Virginia’s brain-cooking summer sun, or maybe sort through shattered lumber that guaranteed abrasions, cuts, and splinters (there was an epidemic of red, pus-filled finger tips and palms on the site). His favorite thing to do to whoever was that moment’s target was to assign the infringer to surveying duty with an old man whose name, I think, was Dave, or maybe Dan.
Dave (let’s go with that) was a quiet and generally kind and decent person, as most people on the site were. He carried around his caution-orange surveying tools—a tripod with a high-powered lens atop it and complicated dials to measure angles—as part of his job to make sure the ground was level for building. He used to say something like, “Measure ten times; dig once.” You might think that surveying was a good job, as opposed, say, to digging ditches or wrapping stacks of bricks in plastic or carrying splintered and nailed boards to disposal areas. It should have been. Except that Dave always needed his helpers to walk out into the weeded-ground woods, toward where the construction would expand, and hold the plumb line—a wire with a pointed weight at the bottom—to get accurate measurements for the complicated charts and plans Dave would later make with some of the supervisors on the building crews. Problem was that whoever had to hold the plumb line would end up with both legs covered in ticks—sometimes twenty or thirty on your jeans, your boots, your socks from only a few minutes of standing in the woods. If there were any problems or delays, the helper could be in the woods for up to an hour and would later have to go behind a large dumpster the size of a one-car garage and disrobe to pull ticks from his skin. Lyme disease was a concern of all the contracting companies. Jep was sending people into potential disease on purpose because that person had proven himself to be a knucklehead. A dumbass. A worthless, rotten, lazy scoundrel who should not be able to drive a truck or touch a tool because he was so outlandishly, unbelievably, shockingly stupid. A “son of a whore.” Once you’d been called that, you knew you might spend part of your day standing in ticks.
One of the laborers, a nineteen or twenty-year-old with long blonde hair and a wispy beard, a gregarious guy I liked working with who told me about his baby and his ex-girlfriend and his court dates, whose name I cannot now remember, was the son of a whore one day. I don’t remember what he did or didn’t do or failed to do correctly. I just recall he had to go out into the woods, hold the surveying thingy, that high-tech fishing weight, absolutely still, and then stand there and stand there and stand there as the ticks invaded his socks and began embedding in the moist creases of his body. Don’t get me wrong; everyone not getting punished in this way found these moments hilarious, especially the blooper reel of when the worker had to pluck ticks from sensitive areas with an air of rush and panic.
After the laborer came out of the woods on this day, swatting his jean cuffs, Jep told him to take his truck over to one of the other quadrants of the site, where someone needed him and the truck to get a piece of equipment.
As the blond laborer bumped across the uneven ground in the truck, on his way, the sun beaming, his red-brown arm hanging out of the open window, he began braking, then shouting something incomprehensible (the site was a cacophony from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.). Jep and I watched. Then the laborer braked more abruptly, the front of the old truck dropping and the bed rising, slamming the vehicle into park. Truck barely stopped, he leapt out, swatting and plucking off ticks crawling on him that he hadn’t seen, since he had only a minute or so between finishing helping with the surveying and Jep telling him to drive somewhere for some urgent work order. I looked back at Jep, who was smiling, his eyebrows holding sweat like sponges in this heat, those teeth like pieces from the site’s gravel fill. I’m sure I smiled, too, since the whole tableau had a slapstick, comedy-sketch look to it.
The laborer was focused on his jeans and boots and the bottom of his shirt, where little ticks clung, searching out some flesh to pierce. Within maybe ten seconds he realized he hadn’t shifted the old truck securely into park. Jep and I watched for an instant, not understanding the physics at play in our field of vision, then we were really mesmerized and unbelieving for another instant, then we started shouting for the laborer to get the truck get the truck get the truck because it was rolling at idle, about three to five miles per hour, I’d guess, but seemingly picking up speed, bumping across the uneven ground of the site, flinging up copper dust clouds, the shocks under more stress and banging harder as the truck went along. Eventually, after maybe twenty-five yards, the driverless truck hit a low, transportable concrete barrier, the kind they place along highways during construction, and stopped with a loud bang, almost like a shot, and then the hiss of the radiator spewing steam. Workers within a fifty or so yard radius—even in this industrial noise—stopped to look at the mayhem. It was the kind of thing that every so often got a worker badly injured. And since this was a government job, there was a small squadron of safety workers who just showed up around incidents like picnic flies, who I think were referred to as “industrial hygienists.”
Jep ran to the truck at a speed that was hard to believe, considering his physical health, or at least what you would assume his physical health to be based on his physique and looks. I followed. The laborer was already there since he had been chasing the truck. He had reached in through the open driver’s-side window and pulled the steering column shifter out of drive, thumped it into park—it was still revving against the cement barrier at that point—and then removed the keys from the ignition. Now, as we arrived, he, the laborer, was leaning over, hands on his knees, stuck between panic about the crash and a concern for undetected ticks in his boots.
The laborer braced for the ripping he was going to get from Jep, who lost it over small things and this was, by any measure, a big screw up, a no-brainer fire-able offense. Instead, Jep, again moving faster than I would have thought possible, opened the driver’s-side door, leaned into the truck, and dug through the cartons and wrappers to pull a pint of cheap whisky from underneath the seat. He clutched it to his chest, turned his back to most of the site, and then walked the short distance over to me. He told me to put the pint in the front of my pants, cover it with my filthy T-shirt, and quickly walk over to the company truck I usually drove and put it under the seat, where no one would find it, which I did.
When I got back to the scene of the accident, the other laborer and I were still processing what was happening, what was going to happen, what our role was and would be. How bad was this for the laborer?
By the end of that day, Jep had told all the workers who had come over to check on him and the industrial hygienist writing the report that his shifter was loose and would sometimes move easily between gears, which is what must have happened. An accident. The laborer was not blamed. Jep sending workers into ticks and then laughing about it was, of course, not mentioned. The accident report was filed. The laborer and I never brought up the pint of whisky in the truck—never spoke a single word about it—which I was told to give to Jep at the end of the day, outside of the high, barbed-wire fencing surrounding the construction site.
What else can I say about Jep, a man whose life intersected with my own one summer more than thirty years ago? He was a life-long Virginian, a baby-boomer. He was married and his wife cleaned houses for a living. He supposedly went to a Pentecostal church with her, at her prodding, every Sunday. He had one child, a son, a decade or so older than me, who drove long-haul trucks for a living. Given this paucity of documentary facts, I should probably avoid psychological or sociological pronouncements regarding his character and deeper (if inchoate) motivations, other than to say that meanness almost always starts from a place of old hurt and festers in the crater of loneliness it creates, that solitary night drinking eventually starts walking around with you during the day, pleading for your attention, and that human misery cannot be drowned by spirits or contained in a single body, but rather it flops around like a cut livewire on a road, just waiting for someone new to touch it. Jep was still employed at the end of that summer, when I left.
In the weeks and months after this accident, Jep stopped scolding me and my fellow laborer quite so harshly. We were never assigned survey/tick duty again. We did have to unsafely (and against procedures) direct concrete flow in the bottom of deep trenches, stand atop and secure shaky rebar in 100-degree heat, and dispose of jagged, flesh-tearing materials without gloves. I was young, a naive observer of the world, too intimidated to even consider using the information I knew about Jep’s drinking on the job against him. Lucky for me, he didn’t know that.
