Finding Mike

Upon further review, I think it makes more sense to continue going backwards, to look a little longer at the path I traveled to getting fired from my job last Halloween. The career counseling I've undertaken this summer is still in progress (somewhere in an "investigative stage"), and I'll have more to say on the topic as more is revealed to me. Until then, I think it's important to revisit the years since I first started in construction, all the way back to October 1996.

I grew up in a suburb of Boston and graduated in 1995 from Middlebury College (in Vermont) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Literature. I had written poetry, short stories, and a novella during my years as a student there, and seemed to be on track for a career in writing or editing or teaching. The summer after my graduation I started working at Harvard as a publications assistant for the international development institute. So all was good in the world. No problem. My first job in a successful career run that would no doubt land me the editor-in-chief job at the Atlantic Monthly by the time I turned thirty. Yes! Sweet and easy success!

Well that didn't happen. Somewhere along the way I ran into serious issues with my first love (more on that later) and chemical substance abuse (more on that later). I quit my job at Harvard in early December 1995 and started making plans to leave for the West Coast by the end of the year with my friend. I wouldn't return to Massachusetts from California until September 1996, and that gap in time would morph into something more like a Black Hole Monster, terrifying and devouring everything it ran across. Those nine months in the Land of Golden Sunshine would play an extraordinary role in my life; those nine months would be the gestation period leading to the birth of a nine year struggle to adulthood.

But before I get into that whole thing...it's important that I get back to the original point of this entry: how I got into my career in construction.

When I returned from California in the fall of 1996, I had absolutely lost myself and needed to find work that would ground me. Something practical. Something that would teach me the value of a dollar and would provide me with some real-world reward. Days of rummaging through the Boston Globe want ads led me to a $7 per hour job as a laborer and builder's apprentice for a small general contracting firm based in my hometown of Winchester. I had moved back into my childhood home (humbling but necessary), so I could get by on the modest wages. And I also took a job delivering the Boston Globe for some additional income. It was a start. And believe me, I was building a life from the very beginning.

To this day I do not feel very comfortable at the top of a very tall ladder. My legs stiffen and shake, my palms produce sweat like bees produce buzz. So my first attempt at homebuilding was a bit of a false start...I left the company within a couple of weeks because I couldn't summon the courage to paint the tall side of an apartment complex. God bless my boss, Mike. He put up with two of the least productive weeks of painting in the long history of paint. He was supportive. He knew I didn't know the difference between a screwdriver and an extension cord. And he was patient, even at seven bucks an hour. But I was just too scared to stand on the rungs and focus on the clapboards. I just couldn't stop looking down.

So bye bye, Mike. I took a job installing cable TV instead. I figured most living rooms are at ground level.

I quickly learned that installing cable TV sucks, too. O the harassment! Such unrealistic expectations of the cable guy! The bitching, the whining. "Don't track dirt into my house!" "Why don't you offer these channels?!" "Why are you running so late? You ruined my day!"

I had a lot of pent up anger in my life at this point. It had something to do with the way I processed failure as a young man, but I'm certainly not going to get into that right now. At 23 I was driving around town in my fenderless Toyota pickup, chainsmoking cigarettes, walking around with a permanent scowl and exporting some sort of immature rebellion to the local television audience looking to expand their cable lineup. I didn't handle the nitpicking criticisms well and was soon peeling out of driveways, flipping the bird to unsuspecting Cinemax subscribers the town over. Sweet.

So that didn't last long. And soon I was back at Mike's door, begging for my "old" job back, promising to conquer my fear of the third floor. Again, a gracious and good-natured Mike was good enough to take me on again, reassigning me this time to scraping paint off the interior windows and nailing down plywood subfloors. I can only remember breaking the panes of glass and wondering whether I'd ever feel my forearms again. I went home at night needing to be fed my spaghetti.

But my life with Mike lasted for two years, and I learned a boat load about homebuilding. Someday I'll talk more about my relationship with him, which blossomed into an extremely rewarding one, but will stave off the desire for now. What is important to this story is that a few months into my second (and final) stint with Mike, he asked me if I would help him with the accounting. I agreed to pick up QuickBooks and was soon coming over to his home office a couple of times a week to create invoices and process the accounts receivable. It would be a far more meaningful decision than I would have ever guessed at the time, and would be the first step on a road that would eventually bring me to running multimillion dollar residential construction projects. At that time I was just looking to pick up a couple extra bucks. And I was enjoying my life as a builder. I was building houses. That seemed like just about the coolest and most useful thing I could possibly do. And even though I still think it's cool and useful, it was ultimately not what I would want to commit my life to. But I wouldn't really figure that out for another twelve years.

I think I'll take a break for the night. I'll get back to this tomorrow.