The Business

The work experience started easy enough. I was relieved to have a job that paid a livable wage, and things started off well. I had responsibilities that I could learn. The pay was consistent, and I didn't take the stress home with me. At first, it felt like the right move. I was helping a family business find a way forward in the long-term collapse of a town's economic paradigm that had spanned its entire existence of 30 years of buildout. I was there to manage and service our main client. He quickly became the focus of our entire operation. He wasn't a homebuilder; instead, he was an independent property investor, which meant we were working for the ego of the owner rather than a builder who was selling a product.

Dad came along to accept the project before I was hired. My dad was worn out from the stress of dealing with the client, who prided himself on getting what he wanted at all costs. He paid, sure, but the damage was a volley of phone calls at all hours of the night, weekends, and holidays -- freakouts -- anxiety that he would put in the person on the other end of the line. I helped Dad at first running that stuff down; we paid bills and cut checks for people providing work. It was modest. Then the work we were to perform got more expensive and ostentatious.

At the time, Mom was going through hell. My first weeks were met with a volley of questions from my brother and dad: "How is she driving that brand new Jeep? Fuck, what happened to the old Cherokee? She beat that up to shit!" They asked questions for weeks before I told them that mom had stage four cancer. I also didn't tell them her boyfriend had died.

Eventually, Mom and Dad moved back in together. It was reminiscent of the hollywood movie trope, "this is my side." The couple spars combatively with each other and end their conversations at each individual's door to their room, each closing themselves off into their personal space.

Mom began medicating herself with a variety of different medications. Sometimes she was sharp and could hold a conversation. Other times, she would hole up in the side bedroom with Keeping Up with the Kardashians on the television, sitting in her red velvet side chair. Sometimes we would find her soaked in urine. Other times we would get phone calls where she had gotten into an argument at the pharmacy over not getting a prescription filled, then collapsed into a store display. The Kia was cheap and easy to fix, but it was not a safe car to drive. I came to find out that the 2007 Kia Spectra had the dubious designation of "Deadliest Vehicle in America" with 191 deaths per million registered vehicle miles. It required an elevated degree of attention paid while driving, especially in wet weather as the brakes loved to lock up. It was a defensive drivers type car. You did not drive fast in it, you let everybody drive past you and kept people in front of you. I drove a reverse commute most days out of Houston, one of the most deadly metro commutes in the nation, with 640 deaths and 2900 injuries annually. Commutes were spent navigating 45 miles of horrific wrecks and vehicle fires. Unsafely packed pickups would leave chairs and mattresses in the middle lanes of the freeway for cars to swerve around. A commute to work felt more like the iconic chariot race out of Ben Hur than a modern or humane experience. I traveled hundreds of miles a day between our clients' construction sites, all the while getting texts and phone calls from them with status updates and what and who they didn't like.

I had to perform to avoid getting fired. Many of our employees were family friends that couldn't find any work since the financial crisis. My dad had a good sense of empathy, understanding very well the precarious nature of the construction business. He always spoke about his experiences in a distinctly southern anecdotal way. He could always point out unnecessary ruthlessness: "If you don't pay someone enough money, they don't have enough money to fill their gas tank to get to work in the morning." Ruthless men don't give a fuck. Usually, a go-between who is empathetic to both parties is necessary. Most of those guys' work life didn't go that way. We employed two people that I had known since I was a child who worked for house painters. Cancer in the industry was a massive concern in the sprawl of largely unregulated construction projects. Sprayed paints were applied to building interiors sealed off with plastic, while the painters who worked inside were left to have the solvents leech in through their skin and the atomized pigments inhaled deep into their lungs. When a client bitches of costs, but does not see what it takes for somebody to complete a task, it is your job to know how to say no and explain why. You are an advocate for your workforce. Dad was great at this, though our client was tired of his age slowing him down. He wanted more and more, but Dad always found a way to slow down.

The phone calls were the worst. At 3:00 AM during a thunderstorm, we got texts saying the house was going to flood. Midnight on a Saturday, that the paint was peeling from the walls. Everything seemingly failed, and nothing was ever good enough. There was zero personal space, not on Christmas, New Year, nor weekends. Not at night, not at dinner. Never.

When Dad was sick, I started noticing the variety of questionable accounting items as well as items we invoiced that I was not comfortable with managing. I brought it up to the client, to which he plainly told me, "I'm not hiring white guys for this work. In my other business I have to hire white guys and provide them benefits and health insurance. You see, you guys aren't special. You don't like it, I can easily find a replacement." I quietly dropped it, asked what he needed while he was away on business that week. I left his office, drove down the road a mile, stopped by the side of the road and threw up. I sat in the car for an hour before returning to the office. A week later, Dad had a heart attack. He recovered slowly. He had to keep a pacemaker wired to him for six months. We had to go to the client's estate for a Christmas party. He knew about Dad's knee, but he probably would have fired us if he knew about the heart attack. In retrospect, letting the client know about the heart attack would have been the ideal end game. We weren't so lucky. Instead, Dad wore a jacket to conceal the pacemaker. We took him to the Christmas party, a scene straight out of Weekend at Bernie's, propping my dad up as a wave of sycophants fawned over our client's house, his possessions, and success. Guests implored our client, trying to get him on board with various investments,

"If you invest 100k, I could get you a piece of a tilapia farm in Costa Rica."

Dad and I sat, we played the game for a while, looking for our first opportunity to get out of there so Dad could heal, and I could run on the treadmill for him some more. I had to be his hatchet man, if the client didn't like the way a guy was performing, I had to terminate him on the spot. Sometimes I could put it off and sweep it under the rug, to wait for a mood change, but others I had to do what I had to do. One time a guy got sick in the middle of the summertime heat, he went to the hospital and found out he had 20 percent kidney function left from a medication he took for gout. I was made to fire him. A $2,000 check was made in severance from the client's company, and I had to go and give him the news. He was living in a trailer on the property and needed to be out by the end of the month. He went back to Mexico and died a few months later.

I became angry and anxious. I was driving everywhere, and the places I had to go manage were in the middle of speed traps surrounded by miles of freeway, sometimes 20-30 miles away from the main freeways. I lived in my car, sometimes driving 35,000 miles a year. I got pulled over a few times for going five miles over the speed limit. I rolled a couple of stop signs and got pulled over. I even got a ticket for texting while driving while I was actually taking a vibrating phone in my pocket from a client complaining about the way a landscaper was looking at him. I took the phone from my pocket to place it in the center console. I didn't matter that I wasn't texting, I was looking like I was. That translated to points on my license. Despite the fact the surcharges were paid, the state suspended my license in 2013 without me knowing it. That client ended up firing us because he ran out of money. It was the beginning of the end, I just didn't know it yet.

October 5, 2014: The Day My Wife Entered a Hospital to Give Birth

My phone was off for the duration of the event. On the hospital television, the Houston Texans were playing the Dallas Cowboys. My Dad told me one time that he had been watching a 49ers vs. Cowboys game in the waiting room when I was born. My wife had an unmedicated natural birth, and the room had a long run of lower cabinets with a vast, open countertop space. The hospital staff placed all the medications that would numb and speed up the birthing process on the counter. It was mine and a friends' job to be present as communicators between a team who wanted drugs in the patient to speed the process along, and a mother who wanted a boy delivered without meds.

My wife was in a trance, managing a level of pain that I couldn't fathom. I was left in the room managing an entirely different type of pain, a slipped disk in my c-5 vertebrae that I had been struggling with for a few years, and the hospital staff that was dead set on taking advantage of her in her state. At least half of my time was spent going between asking JL what she wanted, if she still felt that way, and as nicely I could, to tell the hospital staff to fuck off.

Have you ever seen a movie that had a torture scene, with an assortment of tools on a table that they were going to use on a victim, but they would show one device that could end all the pain and suffering? That table was used as a sales tool that could end all the pain and suffering. This went into the night and into the next morning before Marco finally came. The next hour was the sounds of suction of a seven pound human being moving through a birth canal, and the deep red of blood pouring from stretched and torn skin, accompanied by the use of my body as a leg stirrup, stabbing mundane pain into my broken neck.

When Marco was born, I cried uncontrollably and held my boy skin to skin, getting him acclimated to his brand new biome. JL was getting stitched up from the level-3 rupture, and I got some quality time with my boy. We stayed in the room for another 45 minutes as they told us we needed to stay in an observation room with Marco under a UV lamp because his bilirubin levels were a little low. I asked myself: "Isn't that what sunlight outside is for?" Then I remembered the hospital couldn't bill for the hydrogen fusion plant that was burning overhead, instead the hospital could bill us for putting our son under a heat lamp so they could recoup their losses on the meds my wife didn't consume.

When we arrived to our observation room and got situated, I turned my phone back on to check what I had missed. I had multiple messages from work, all asking where I was, from clients all placing their anxiety squarely on me. It was Monday after all and we needed to be working for the people who were always slow to pay us. I called the purchasing manager of a client to let them know my circumstances. "I had a son," I said to her. "Oh, wow!" she replied, and notably without transition she proceeded to ask, "Where are we for Friday? Are you going back to the office today?" I said, "No, I am not". The conversation went around the weekly routine of business, ignoring the fact that a new human life had been born.

That call irks me even now. Not the hassle of that client. And not their habitual slow payments. Just the mentality of "It's not happening to me, so the problem doesn't exist." I called my partners to ask the status, and they also asked me when I was coming back. Same thing, same lack of empathy, just the same desperation of work. I think that was the moment I began to realize something was wrong.

I was dependent on this business. I was dependent on my business partners. This business had been part of my development, of my bad habits and I was seen as less family and more as an employee using all of my energy, physical and emotional, to keep it barely afloat. I had been doing the sacrificing of myself, and that was the first moment I had reservations about it, as I was on the phone, feeling the apathy on the other end as I watched my little boy squirm about under a UV lamp. Did I want this for him, my anger, my runaway anxiety? For what? The first instance of people only caring about Friday. This was the first time I knew that this business was bankrupt. What was the point of the struggle?

November 21, 2014: The day I Changed My Mind, On Everything.

The Kia had about 100,000 miles on it, without the slightest mechanical problem. The only issues I had with the car was battery related, but the parts were so cheap it was an easy swap out. It was on its last payment and on that morning I was on the regular work routine I had during that time.

Monday and Tuesday were spent trying to figure out what projects could be invoiced, while Wednesday and Thursday were spent making sure customers would have checks written by Friday. The final day of the work week I was driving to offices to pick up the checks so that I could finally go to the bank, deposit what I could, run back to the office, distribute payroll. On good weeks money would be left over for the following week. The worst weeks maybe we couldn't make the contractor payroll.

During this time, the weeks were more bad than good. Pressure mounted from my family business partners. They NEEDED money all the time. And when I came back on those days, they looked at me as though they were hungry dogs and I was bringing back a fresh steak. On a Friday about a month later I was back into my routine, Jenny Lynn needed to go out to an appointment, and I was out driving with Marco to do my Friday check collection routine. It was a cold rainy day. Halfway through the day I decided to drive to my mom's house to see if she could take care of him while I ran my errands. I remember feeling nervous about driving with him in the car for the 150 miles I would normally do on a Friday collection run. I dropped him off in the carrier with pumped breast milk and instructions of when to feed him. It was a Britax carrier that locked into the seat with a bottom plate that stayed in the car. A latch removed the entire carrier with the baby inside where you could carry it like a large basket. It was a convenient design feature.

I had to drive back south to a client's office to pick up a check. After chit chat, I was free to go to my next pick up -- a home builders office in Spring Branch across town. He was notorious for floating me until the last minute. Residential construction paid easier, but in the event of nonpayment, liens are nearly impossible to collect. We did business with the homebuilder mainly because we were trying to slowly collect our debt that crippled our company. By the time we collected it eight years later, we were done. I drove into the neighborhood, which was an independent township outside Houston, along a winding road that led to a red light. I stopped in the rain, tired, with a sore neck. I remember closing my eyes, tilting my neck downwards trying to touch my chin to my collarbone, attempting to stretch to relieve some pressure. A huge pickup truck with a massive steel bumper smashed into the back of the car. My head smashed into the steering wheel. I still remember the impact, but everything went silent and slow.

I was normalizing from a transient alteration of consciousness-- I looked at the Kia emblem on the steering wheel, the airbag didn't deploy. I opened the driver's side door and slowly got out. My neck felt very funny, not yet hurting, but not well. I couldn't define how I felt because of the adrenaline holding my body together. A kid, not more than 16 years old, maybe younger, got out of the car, phone in hand from texting who knows who, maybe his boss. I asked again, realizing he didn't know English, "Estas Bien?" he nodded quietly without saying anything. I remember thinking that little fucker should have been in school, not on a goddamn construction site.

I went back to the Kia and saw that the back had been crumpled like an aluminum can, the trunk smashed up into the backseat... "FUCK!" I went back into the driver's seat and sat down in the car that had been pushed into the middle of the intersection. Soon the cops and wreckers came and reviewed the situation. "Are you okay?" they asked, to which I said: "I don't know yet!" We moved to a parking lot down the street to finish up and where they loaded up my wrecked vehicle on the back of the flatbed truck. Head still shook up and body starting to stiffen badly, they took me back to the wrecking yard to finish processing the accident and filing the insurance claim. I sat in the office, finished the processing, and got set up with a rental car that I had to be shuttled to ten miles away. I asked if I could get my belongings out of the car before we left, and they said yes. I went to where they towed the car, in the graveyard of scrap metal. I opened the door and picked through what I wanted to keep out of the glove box and center console and placed them in a paper grocery bag.

I looked in the rearview and saw the bottom plate of the child safety seat pushed up in the backseat much closer to me. The back seat bench had been crunched and warped. I sat and looked in the rearview for a moment, summoning the focus to manage the pain I was going to feel twisting into the back seat to unlatch the mounting plate. I didn't care how bad I hurt, at least I had trusted myself to drop Marco off with his grandma. I walked out of the yard with a grocery sack in one hand and the child seat mounting plate in the other. I got in a van, and they took me to an enterprise along the freeway to rent a car.

I got into a Chevy Equinox, locked the mounting plate into the back seat and drove back to the homebuilder's office to pick up the check. He normally taped the checks to the back of an air conditioner vent next to his office. In the cold rain, I went to the back alley and found my check, it had fallen off the unit, as the rain had soaked it, the scotch tape detaching from the sheet metal. I put the check next to the heater as I drove 40 miles back to the local bank to make the deposit and then back to the office. I got back with people waiting for their checks, not one giving a fuck about what I had just gone through. I cut their checks, with my partners asking for what they needed for the week, which was far greater than what I had managed to collect. I paid them. They didn't ask about how I was and they didn't ask about my son. I didn't get paid that week. I went to get Marco from my mom and drove home. I had a compressed spine from the accident, which required traction treatment twice a week for five months. That car was on its last payment.

All told I was left with three thousand dollars after the treatment, which served as a down payment for a new car that I still had to make 60 more payments on. Picking up Marco and getting through the day, what was apparent was a disregard of the risk and sacrifice I was making. It was demanded that I keep this going and not a word was said about it. I couldn't keep this routine going.