See, now you guys got me crying because there’s a comradery there that I’ll never experience again (self-employed, much older, never to wage labor again). I even caught myself staring at amigos setting those trusses for a second. I heard the hispanic station blaring through the dented boombox… some love song, it sounds like… bro’s pleading his heart out, i think. The sharp pttthtkk pttthtkk of the nail gun. A slowly warming half bottle of gatorade that you set on the window sill in the sunlight and forgot about. Spanish numbers are shouted back and forth over the music. Ocho. I dunno if i even spelled it right. I’ve heard the word Ocho more times than the entire population of Veracruz. A dirty microwave on a tree stump beside the power pole. Enchiladas in Tupperware courtesy of Juanita. Javier uses a hatchet instead of a claw hammer. Purely a fashion statement. Few framers do that, but you can if it has a nail puller on it. Marco always carries at least fifteen racks of nails in his pouch (nobody can fathom why), so everybody always bums a rack off him when their gun goes empty so they don’t have to carry any (heavy af) or make a run for the box when their up on the roof. And every time, he says ‘carry your own nails pendejo’ and then gives you a rack. He doesn’t realize that if he’s done this at least a few times, none of us are ever going to carry nails. We know that he’s bluffing.
Fuck i gotta stop. I’m gonna cry, man, siriusly.