And Now My Favorite Collar Is Blue

So look at Paul. He goes for a cup of coffee. Out of his windowless, darkened, combination-locked office, down the elevator, two ways across a crowded intersection to the espresso bar to wait in line. His head hunches forward, he stares at a point in front of his hands, which fiddle absently with one another. He doesn’t look at anyone directly. His skin is so pale as to be almost reflective. He drives a Porsche; he is curt rather than cowering, a brash and driving man, the man in charge. He has as good a claim as anyone to being the sharpest programmer in a large office chockablock with crackerjacks. He is formidable, perfectly sure of himself, he just has nothing to say to the people lined up for coffee. They too are computer professionals, many of them. Or, like him, they work for lawyers.

I worked for Paul. I loved the job for one reason: I liked and respected the people.

The more I think about those people now, the more I am tempted to get a facial tattoo.

I begin to think I may have renounced the middle class for good. Two or three years into working in the trades, I find my picture of the world is beginning to flip like a Necker cube. I have not known very much about human society, I think. What have I known about the working classes but that they are alien, frightening, immured in a dull world, undertaking to look after the world’s moving parts for lack of choice? Like many, I have assumed that they knew nothing of my “educated” world.

It’s not without some truth. There are workers and workers, and I know some indeed who surprise me with how little they may know outside their purview. Some who talk only of fighting and drinking and women dismissed with epithets, who spout racism unconcernedly, everything I might have feared. To be fair I know of some lawyers too who say these things.

But only some. Plenty follow the news, are well-read, know history. I have learned many bookish things on the tops of scaffold frames, lately. And the trades themselves, the subtle and deeply interconnected arts of laying hands upon the physical world and remaking it, are a fearsome legerdemain in their own right, and they confound the helpless shirtsleeve world, opaque as a brick wall. Indeed a brick wall is nothing final to these cocksure daredevils with whom I have thrown my lot; they have X-ray vision, they see the past and the future, and everything they see and touch, they can imagine altering. Theirs is a sunny world of possibility. They fear nothing.

There is this, too, invisible to me through years of working in neckties toward unseen objectives. Paul cares nothing for the doings of his neighbors whose skills he shares, but workingmen are always interested. Every diesel pickup slows for a look as it passes me on the rooftop; plumbers, painters, even mechanics can guess at what I’m doing, their art intersects with mine, and moreover they have learned to see possibility, to keep a weather eye on the flickering changes in the built world around them. And each of them, the concrete truck drivers and the road crews and the builders at other sites who meet one another’s eyes across the ridgelines, each one waves. A tiny gesture, maybe a nod, but contact is made. It makes all the difference to walk into an auto shop with my battered work clothes still on; even my tanned face is beginning to suffice. At the convenience store, at lunch or morning break, we recognize one another at first glance. Some speak up—hey, where you guys working?—others just make note and nod, but the commonality always has value, and a simple, benevolent, human alliance is implied. (Can it be that once we were all this way?)

I know you, the weathered faces say. You understand things. You do what is real, what is necessary, you do it yourself, your motives are uncomplicated and just. You set your hands and your tools to the hurt places of the world and make them right.

I, too.