Fast Times at Bradish Alley

A couple months ago, a craigslist ad seeking “roadside techs” caught my eye. The title was appealing because it sounded manly and maybe a little futuristic –perhaps I would wear a biomechanical suit?—but most importantly, it was a job. After you have been fully unemployed for a few weeks, the whole scope of what the American Dream means is to have a place to be during the day that is not the couch or a coffee shop. A gruff and harried voice answered my phone call after the second ring with “May I help you?” I told the voice that I was interested in being a roadside tech, and he gave me a terse job description. It would entail changing flat tires, providing jumps, and delivering gas to people who can’t remember to fill up their gas tank. He said, “Call me back in an hour, at 10:00. I’ll be back at my office by then,” and returned to whatever activity was making him so harried.

I did as he said and called back at 10. The phone rang twice. He picked it up and said, “May I help you?”

“Yes, I called earlier about the job. The roadside tech,” I said.

“I’ll be back at my office in an hour, at 11:00. Meet me there.” The first tendrils of suspicion began to creep into my head: wasn’t he supposed to already be back at the office?

“I can do that,” I said. “Good,” the voice told me. He sounded less rushed, and therefore capable of now launching into an unexpected and unprompted exposition. “If you work hard at this job, you can make good money. You’ve gotta work hard and take care of yourself these days, that’s something Americans are gonna have to figure out. They expect everything handed to them. It used to be you could do that, just coast on a salary somewhere in a factory or an office, but that’s a thing of the past. You’ve gotta do it yourself. The days of a safe 9 to 5 job are over. You have to have initiative.” I agreed with him as blandly as possible and agreed to meet him in an hour.

His office was on Bradish Alley, a street that I have never heard of before and that I am fairly sure I will never hear of again. It is located near Tulane and Broad, just a couple of blocks from the Orleans Parish Prison. It’s in one of those dislocated slivers of city that most definitely would be categorized as a Bad Neighborhood but that also seems so peripheral and overlooked that it’s hard to feel that it contains much menace (especially on a sunny January morning). Bradish Alley is exactly one block long and contains neither businesses nor homes except for one tiny, inert apartment building surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire. There is no address on this building, and it is guarded by a gate plastered with large vinyl posters advertising off-brand cell phone plans in bright, bilingual pinks and oranges.

The place seemed abandoned except for a minivan out front, in which patiently sat two squat Latino men. I called the phone number again. Two rings. “May I help you?”

“I think I’m here,” I said. “Where should I go?”

“You’re in Bradish Alley?” he said. I told him I was. There was a distinctly annoyed pause. “Ok, well – there’s only one place in Bradish Alley, and it’s mine,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Oh,” I said, staring at the apartment building. “I guess I see it.”

I got out of the car and walked a slow little meander around the gravel driveway, trying to look like I was nonchalantly waiting for someone and knew what I was doing. The squatter of the two Latino men got out of the van and approached me with a cautious geniality. He looked like he was in his late 30s, with bad teeth and a sad face.

“You waitin for him?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “you too?” He nodded. “Electrician,” he replied. “Oh, ok,” I said with enthusiasm. “I’m looking for a job.” He nodded. Our conversational material exhausted, we lapsed into an awkward silence of staring off down Bradish Alley and avoiding eye contact. After about five minutes, a pickup swung around the corner driven by a man in a reflective vest. “There he is,” murmured the electrician, still staring down the street. “Ok,” I said, also still staring down the street.

**

My potential employer brusquely introduced himself as Eddie. He did not smile. He was thirtyish, black, and of medium build with quick, critical eyes and a stride and body language that indicated a constant energetic impatience with his surroundings. Once inside the gate, he set the electrician and his companion to work in an unfinished downstairs room with dangling wires and took me up a metal set of stairs to the upper story of the shabby building. We went inside and he offered me a seat. He threw himself into an office chair and opened his mouth to speak, but just then his phone rang. A spasm of annoyance crossed his face, but he answered the call after two rings with, a friendly “May I help you?”

While Eddie helped them, I surveyed my surroundings. This was clearly a man who placed few boundaries between work and personal life, as evidenced by the fact that the large room served as both living room and office. It was dim, comfortable, and quiet; a TV was going somewhere in another part of the house, accompanied by the light rustles of Eddie’s wife doing something in the adjacent kitchen. I believe she may have been making Rice-a-Roni. The brown walls were covered with phone plan advertisements like those plastering his compound’s exterior, along with copious papers held up with tacks or Scotch tape: numbers of clients and contacts, lists of various kinds, business cards, a handful of low-res family pictures spat out by an inkjet printer. Beige furniture was clustered around a large flatscreen, and the entirety of the wall behind the television was covered by a colossal painting of the interior of the cockpit of a plane. The place was not disorderly, but it was packed with what social psychologists call “behavioral residue” – the stuff we leave behind in our living space as a result of our daily actions. The rates on the phone plans actually looked pretty appealing so I pocketed a spare pamphlet from a stack atop a file cabinet.

All the while, I kept an ear open to Eddie’s phone conversation in hopes of gleaning insights into his character. He seemed to be giving directions to someone who was also attempting to find Bradish Alley for purposes of a job interview, and he was struggling to keep his irritation from coming through in his voice. Instead, it manifested itself in lots of grimacing and eye rolls. Whoever this other interviewee was, they seemed to be struggling with the basics of navigation. Eddie ended the call with a terse, “ok, see you then”, hung up the phone, and swiveled in his chair to face me. He stared directly into my eyes and was silent for several seconds, a look of anger and disgust on his face.

“These people want to work for me,” he finally said softly. “And they can’t even follow simple directions.” He paused and continued in the same tone of voice.

“I’m a decorated veteran.” Pause “And in those deserts over there, you learn to read a map. You know how to follow directions, and you know how to find coordinates.” Pause. “Because you know what happens if someone doesn’t know how to follow directions? You know what happens if they get off by one click when they’re reading their map?” Pause. “I’ll tell you what happens. Some son of a bitch drops a fuckin’ bomb on your head, that’s what.” He continued to stare into my eyes.

I nodded.

“These people.” He stabbed finger at the phone. “These people are going to drop a bomb on my fucking head.”

I nodded again and looked very serious, indicating that I understood the gravity of the situation.

Eddie shook his head in disbelief and attempted to move on . “So, you want to be a roadside tech. Tell me about your experience. You know how to change a flat?” I told him I did and made vague references to helping my stepdad with cars, hoping he wouldn’t inquire into the details and discover that by “help” I meant “bring my stepdad various wrenches when he asked for them, after which I would stand around listening to him bitch about metric sizes and secretly resenting the fact that I was twenty-five and still so comparatively mechanically inept that I was reduced to being his tool gopher whenever a serious automotive task was required.”

Eddie outlined the job: I would be an independent contractor paid $12 per service call, plus mileage for anything outside the Orleans Parish line. I’d be on call from 6 am to noon each day. His clients were large companies who provided roadside assistance to their management staff as a job benefit – thus, the cars whose flats I’d be changing and gas tanks I’d be replenishing would typically be Benzes, BMWs, and the like. “The job is easy, like taking candy from a baby,” he said, but the one caveat was that should I somehow cause any damage to a car, I would be personally liable for the cost. “That means if you don’t know what you’re doing and you put a bottle jack under a $60,000 car and miss the frame and it rips right through the body and the floorboard, guess what? You’re paying for it.” His voice was dark. Again, I read the situation as one appropriate for a very serious nod.

And then, without any transition, he said, “Americans are the laziest people in the world. Americans want everything handed to them – don’t want to get an education, don’t want to work, just want to sit around and complain. Complain, complain, complain. Like complaining about Obama. Jesus, the man has been president for two years and people are criticizing every move he makes because he hasn’t fixed all the problems with this country? It’s ridiculous.”

I generally agreed with Eddie’s sentiment on this issue, but I admit I was thrown off by the rapidity of these conversational turns. And he kept on going. “Thirty years. That’s how long it takes for the decisions to turn out. The stuff we see happening right now is happening because of decisions they made thirty years ago. And we won’t know what’s the deal with Obama for another thirty years from now.”

What the hell, I thought, roll with it. I experimentally engaged in a little softball shit talking. “Yeah, well, what gets me is when people blame Obama for the economic situation when the crash happened after eight years of Bush. It’s like they have no memory whatsoever,” I said. Eddie paused, nodded, and stared me down with even greater intensity. “Fifty years ago my people were getting hosed down in the streets of Selma,” he suddenly announced, “beaten and attacked by dogs because they wanted the right to vote. That’s how the government has always treated the poor.”

You want to open up to craigslist strangers, Eddie? Fine, I’ll see you and raise you. I said, “you know, a few days ago my roommate was listening to a speech by Dr. King that he made towards the end of his life. I’d never heard of this before, but Dr. King supported this idea of a guaranteed minimum income, where everyone in the country would get a minimum amount of money to live, no matter what. He believed in radically changing how America works. This idea of a guaranteed minimum wage says basically you still have to work hard if you want to be rich, but whatever you’re doing, whoever you are, everyone has the right to a certain minimum standard of living.”

I wasn’t sure how he’d take this. Eddie’s face was unreadable. “And do you agree with that proposal?” he asked in a low voice. I hesitated. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure, it’s so radically different from how things are structured today—” The phone rang again. His eyes narrowed when he looked at the number.

“May I help you?” His eyes widened in outrage. “You’re WHERE? You’re on Broad and WASHINGTON? Oh, my God, how did you get to WASHINGTON? No, I did NOT tell you to turn that direction.” He slouched back in his chair in bitter despair for all humanity, and I tried not to stare at him as he again spat out directions to Bradish Alley.

In my occasional forays into the twilight regions of the informal wage economy, I’ve learned that the division between jobs that are legit and those that are not is considerably more of a spectrum than it is a solid line. I was slowly coming to classify Eddie as a particular character type, a breed of person I’ve encountered before due to craigslist job postings and certain friends of friends from Arkansas: the Fringe Entrepreneur. The Fringe Entrepreneur is a self-employed person who works nonstop but hasn’t really made it yet financially. Despite constant setbacks and a gauntlet of enemies both real and imagined, the Fringe Entrepreneur still manages to cobble together a living by managing a neverending cascade of diverse business activities running the gamut from pyramid schemes to starting an LLC. Driven, excitable, paranoid, idiosyncratically opinionated, and ultimately ruthless, the Fringe Entrepreneur approaches all people and all situations with a brooding, calculating intensity.

“No. Take. A. LEFT. Onto. TULANE,” Eddie was growling into the phone. Strangely enough, I suspected by this point that he would hire me. I think I make a good impression on Fringe Entrepreneurs, probably because I will listen to them talk about their bullshit for as long as they want and nod along convincingly. Sure enough, when he ended the call he offered me the job. “You seem like a level headed guy” he said, and began rapidly jotting down a list of all the items I would need to perform my duties: reflective vest, four-way tire iron, rainproof clipboard, gas can, and jumper cables. I made the mistake of smiling when he asked if I knew how to hook cables to a car battery and he said, “funny, right? Real funny. But you know what’s not funny? When the red cap on a customer’s battery is on the wrong terminal and so you hook positive to negative because you’re not paying close attention and the thing blows up. And now you’re paying four, five, six thousand out of pocket to get the engine in a fucking Lexus repaired. Because something was funny.” I tried to keep from gulping, but I couldn’t help it.

This job is a bad idea, I told myself. This would be a bad working situation. Anyone could see that. But I was still intrigued. I could learn more about cars; Eddie also said that he could show me some basic locksmithing techniques after I’d worked for him awhile. And I could probably hang out with Eddie, which would be interesting. After twenty minutes in his presence I both admired and resented him. God only knows what crazy experiences would result from being his minion. A cascade of potential images flashed through my head: struggling to jack up a car in the pouring rain on the Causeway, chatting with Eddie over beers every night, being invited to family functions and camping trips, being seduced by his Rice-a-Roni cooking wife one morning when Eddie was out on a job, him attacking both of us in bed with a tire iron… Don’t commit to anything, I told myself. Get out of here and think it over.

I’d let him know in a few days, I told him. Eddie said he understood but also that he was looking to hire someone RIGHT NOW and that if he found someone else in the intervening time who was also level headed and available he’d pick them over me. Gotcha, I said. He showed me out and we shook hands.

Back in my car, I recalled the terms of the job. Twelve an hour. Liability for mistakes. Independent contract work. Yes, this was a flat out terrible deal. And upon further reflection, I most definitely did not want to work for Eddie, to be his sidekick and protégée and perpetually entertain his ramblings. I never called him back, and he never called me. I drove the thirty feet or so out of Bradish Alley and steered right back to craigslist, looking for my big break.