MINIMUM WAGE

Kathy, Ronnie's girlfriend, always accused me of cheating him, of taking advantage. She said I didn't pay him enough money. In the early hours of the morning, the blackness of night, actually, I'd pick Ronnie up. And every morning Kathy re-enacted a mini-drama for my benefit. She was a young girl in her early twenties, almost three hundred pounds, hopelessly addicted to cigarettes, Pepsi, and People magazine. She'd kill for any of the above. So every morning I'd knock, stand at the door and wait. She knew I was there, but she never answered. I'd have to stand there and listen as she ranted and raved at Ronnie. But she was really talking to me.

"Ronnie, motherfucker, you motherfucker, you! Wino, bum, motherfucker!" She spoke fast, sharp, with accentuated, mocking syllables. "You tell Frankie you want more money! You hear me, motherfucker? You hear me? He's paying you by the hour to steal! I don't believe it! You're a stupid motherfucker, Ronnie, a dumb-ass minimum-wage thief! You better wake up, motherfucker. Don't come home without no cigarettes. I got nothing up here, Ronnie, nothing, no pop, no cigarettes, no nothing. I'm starving up here, you motherfucker! You make that motherfucker give you more money!" In all fairness to kathy, for her the word "motherfucker" was not a curse word but rather a form of punctuation. She once commented on a woman's baby, saying, " What a cute little motherfucker."

Except for hiding tools and the perpetual wine bottle, Ronnie really didn't work for me. He kept me company, was a sort of cultural attaché. Yet, until this day, I've always felt a stunning guilt about him. Like maybe I didn't pay him enough.

It was the mid-Seventies, and the south end of Chicago's Loop was in decay--the whole near South Side, for that matter. Many of the buildings in the area were being set for gentrification. The one positive note in all this was that the scrap-metal market was soaring--street prices were sky-high. Copper, my area of interest, was up to a dollar a pound (today, it's around fifty cents). For me, copper was poor man's gold, and I'd break into abandoned buildings to get it. I was a scrap-iron man, a junk man. I was young--in my mid-twenties--and it was my way of playing pirate. Imagine, sneaking around in the wee hours of the morning in abandoned buildings, dressed like a Captain Commando of sorts, tools hanging from your belt. I got to swing sledgehammers, pry with crowbars, and swing from ropes, always on the watch for circling squad cars. I wasn't really stealing. It was adventure and romance. Plus a good haul of copper could net a few thousand. And the scrap dealers always paid in cash--nice, small bills. I took in a $4,000 load once--one night's work. I gave Ronnie $200. Not a bad sum when you consider that he sat on his ass all night and drank wine. We watched two other guys work, while we discussed the possibility of the existence of vampires.

I knew Ronnie from high school. Even then he was on the wine. By the time he was twenty-one, he had already achieved the title "wino Ronnie," and looked well beyond his years. He was a blond-haired kid of Croatian descent. He had green eyes and a pink face. He was always half-smiling. Too nice a person for the wine. But that's why I kept him with me. He was a pleasant guy to be around. He wasn't mean. And no matter how low he sank in life, no matter how harsh and difficult it became, he never lost his sense of humor. We had our own scenario, a standing comedy routine. We'd enact it any number of times during the night, It made the working grunts think we were crazy. It kept them on their toes. There we were, in the middle of some basement in an abandoned building. I'd stand back and look at Ronnie aghast. "Ronnie! What in the hell happened to you?" I'd say. "Where in the hell did you go wrong?" He'd ponder, swig on his wine, and sink deeper into earnest thought. He always gave me the same answer.

"When I was sixteen, my father threw me out in the street like a dog."

"Like a dog, Ronnie?"

"Yep, just like a dog."

This answer always made us laugh like idiots. It was a private joke that made no sense. Yet, in a strange way, it did. That was why I liked Ronnie. He could see beyond things, to the other side of them. But one thing you learn around working-class people, especially tradesmen: when a guy drinks, you never pay him a lot of money, because, (and an old uncle of mine even affirmed this) "They'll only drink it up."

In truth, the main reason I kept Ronnie with me was that he was my barrier against squalor. I had these two guys working for me, the Santelli brothers. They were vile bastards. Believe me, if they could have been replaced, I would have replaced them. Let me explain.

You just don't pick copper cable up off the ground. It has to be pulled. It's encased in conduit pipe. Sometimes, up to six one-inch cables are intertwined in one pipe, and the pipe might travel for hundreds of twisting and turning feet throughout the building. In fact, initially, you can't pull cable. First, it has to be jerked, one cable at a time. Success depends on a good, powerful initial jerk--something to shock the cable free, get it moving, loosen it up. Until you do this, all the pulling in the world, no matter by how many, will avail nothing. When one cable is loosed, freed, the rest is not that difficult. Then you can pull it, and use your body weight for leverage. In short, it takes a strong, powerful man, especially in the wrists, to jerk cable. (Believe me, jerking cable is an art, and it can only be done by one man. If you try to use more, timing difficulties develop. Cable-jerking requires the same concentration and strength as Olympic weightlifting.) Well, I wasn't even good at pulling cable, let alone jerking it. And good jerkers were hard to find. That is, until I met the Santelli brothers.

Louie and Sam Santelli were twins and unemployable. They were thirty years old and had never held a real job in their lives. They basically lived off their mother. There was something apelike about them. But this description insults the elegant race of apes. No, there was something gremlinlike about them--they were short, burly, with brown kinky hair. They perpetually punched each other in the arm. They were neo-neanderthals--crude, vulgar, ignorant, one complete belch. All they ever talked about was murdering black people, with crowbars yet. Yet they had the gall to spend their pay over on Maxwell Street, on black prostitutes. That was the biggest thrill of their lives. When their mother gave them money for Christmas or some other special occasion, they took it over to Maxwell Street, punching each other in the arm all the way there. Actually, I doubt if they were conscious of their own existence. There was no reasoning with them, no imagining. But, man, could they jerk cable. Life cheated them by not making it a profession. They came cheap, too

--five dollars an hour for the night shift.

They were something to watch, though. On the job, they acted as if they were professional tag-team wrestlers. Sam was usually the main jerker. He'd stand in front of the cable and eyeball it, as if he were trying to psych it out, taking deep breaths and fluttering his wrists. Louie bolstered him, backed him up, paced back and forth like a manager. "Come on, asshole!" Louie yelled. "You can do it! You can do it, motherfucker! Come on, babe! Pull that mother!" A scream was forthcoming and the cable was jerked, usually with success. Ronnie and I would clap. And Louie punched Sam to congratulate him.

The Santellis depressed me. I hated being alone with them. Actually, I was scared of being alone with them. So Ronnie was like a barrier. Not that he could fight, because he couldn't. Wine robs your muscle. All the same, it was nice to have him there. He represented civilization. Besides, you don't just jerk cable. It takes some thought, some figuring. That was my job.

Consider: once you've found the line, you've really only found one end of it. Next, you've got to find where it runs to. You locate that position, and that's not easy, and then free the other end of it. Now you're ready to jerk. But conduit pipes, the stuff the copper's in, are usually clumped together like spaghetti. And they branch off in all different directions throughout the building, and many times disappear into walls. In short, you've got to do some hunting. That means wandering around, in darkness, in a falling-apart building. Sometimes, you've got to go far, up and down numerous flights of stairs. Believe me, it's nice to have company when you're doing this. Again, it was nice to have Ronnie along. The real treat was the conversations that we had when we were searching.

Once, we were on the twentieth floor of the Transportation Building (it's now called Printer's Row). The elevator doors up there were all wide open. The shafts were empty. There were no cars in them. The shafts were black, empty holes, twenty floors of express--a straight drop. It made you scared to walk alongside them through the marble hall. Moonlight was shining into the building, and it gave the shafts an eerie glow, sort of like a warm attraction. You were tempted to look, stare down, see bottom. Ronnie wanted to. He swigged wine first--courage--and he took the flashlight and looked, actually leaned over and looked. The fucker laughed and said, "That's a long drop down, whew! Falling falling gone."

He made me laugh, made me think of Milton, of Milton's Paradise Lost. We sat down on the steps, drinking, looking at the elevators, and I told Ronnie about Milton. "Listen," I said, "somebody fell that far once, farther even."

"Who?" he asked.

"The devils," I answered. I quoted from the poem. "Ronnie, imagine, `they fell for nine days and nine nights. Him the almighty power hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.'" Ronnie laughed. "You laugh," I said, "but `they fell with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition,' Ronnie, down into hell."

"What did they do wrong?"

"They were like the Santellis, always looking down, never up."

Ronnie pondered, understood, and through the course of the night, he reflected on the topic of Milton, the devils, and heaven and hell. He created a stable conversation piece. He wanted to know who the devils were, why they fell, and if they deserved it.

"If you wanna know the truth," Ronnie said, "I kinda feel sorry for the Santellis."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't know. They kinda can't help it. They just don't know." Ultimately, he felt sorry for the devils, because they reminded him of us. "Don't you think? Everybody makes mistakes. Look at us."

"So we're no better than the Santellis?"

"We're here with them."

"So then they should be forgiven?"

He swigged, smiled, scratched, thought, looked over at the Santellis as they grunted away. "Well, I guess God's gotta do what God's gotta do."

We busted out laughing. "You mean fuck 'em, right?"

"Yeah, I guess."

We sat and talked the rest of the night, swigged the wine. Ronnie handed the Santellis the tools they needed. The conversation moved to vampires, the possibility of them. Ronnie felt if they existed, it would have to be where we were at. Our surroundings were pretty dark and dungeon like. We were in another world, and the Santellis were in hell.

I sometimes felt that I was nothing better than a cheat, cloaking my minimum wage savings in the guise of good will, a literary fraud of sorts, quoting Milton and all other sorts of poetic crap. But I could never forget what my old uncle said, "Pay those bums too much and they'll only drink it up." I couldn't have agreed more, experience proved this. So fuck it was the only honest approach. And then one day news reached me that Ronnie was dead. An enraged, drunken landlord caught him sleeping in one of his newly remodeled apartments, spic and span and ready to rent. He needed a place to stay and kicked in the door, the apartment above Kathy's, knocked over a paint can too, bright red all over the floor. Kathy said that she kicked the motherfucker out that night. Said that he drank up what I paid him, and didn't bring her no fucking cigarettes, no fucking nothing. I wonder if the landlord knew this, knew it when he rolled Ronnie up in a carpet and tossed him from the third floor back porch down to the garbage cans below. Tossed him out just like a dog, just like his father had done. This was on the day I wouldn't give him an extra ten that he said he needed real bad; because I knew that if I gave it to him, he'd only drink it up. And the Santelli brothers could never stop laughing.

Fin