We arrived at the school around 9am. Darren sparked a cigarette and passed one to me. We did the walk around. Darren led. He showed me all the areas we would need to cut and those we were not responsible for. He showed me what I would be responsible for and what he would take care of. He put on his gloves.
I always thought those gloves were bad for the hands, When he wasn't wearing them his hands seemed more fragile paler and weaker. My internal philosophy up until then by the way was full of inconsistencies, I believed one needed to expose oneself to the elements and roughness of the world.
If I was forced to live my life over, I wouldn't live by this philosophy. Maybe I would wear gloves too. Maybe I would consider self preservation more.
So darren got on the ride on mower and started driving it up and down the front field of the school. I got on the loud and heavy weedeater, cutting the grass on the edges and small slopes. I already had some experience with this kind of machine, but i was to become a master at it. Not just because of the daily practice but because I genuinely enjoyed getting better with it.
The Depot where we started was near Miramar where my mother was from. The job we were doing that day was somewhere out near Tawa twenty minutes from Wellington. Before I was finished with cutting the edges of the paths and little tidbits the mower couldn't get, Darren had already grabbed the blower, he was blowing down the paths and driveways. By the time we were done the place looked like a million bucks. One of those few times I was genuinely proud of myself in my life. But this by far was one of those moments.
The rest of the jobs we did that day gave me a chance to use the ride own mower, an experience I had never had until that time. It was a hypnotic experience which involved focusing on the line of grass you just cut, aimong the wheel along to an inch of overlap, at a speed you could handle. Coming back in the same direction. Later in my car, on the road it felt like I was still on the mower focusing on making myself drive absolutely straight. Darrens schedule for the jobs landed us back close to our company depot, where we would clean up, store our stuff, check on our boss Keith for the next day of work and leave.
After a month on the job I was already getting good. I was in the middle of moving into the capital Wellington. So I had to take the long one hour ride home back to Waikanae along the original highway. I would feel like I was twenty years old and I felt like I had it under control. Things were about to get good. And they really did.
It must have been late August and we were working on a job in a housing estate not 20 minutes from the depot. Darren had unloaded the mower. I had already started weed eating, the sun was still shining but all of a sudden ther was a deluge. A rain shower that soaked the grass and the ground so much, just standing on it would cause a mud patch. As for the mower, it would tear up turf with it's small tractor like wheels. So we had to stop. We went back to the depot cleaned everything up and went home.
By this time i was living in Wellington, I had moved out of my parent's house for the second time.
I arrived at my little flat which I shared with a land lady who wasn't often there. The cold forced shivers. I ran a hot bath and got in, celebrated my day off because of the rain.
Sometimes on the weekend friends of mine would come up to see me from the region I grew up in. Callum a quiet, short and sometimes wrathful man, who had quips and mimics for every occasion. Michael who was polite and quiet as well. And also Lewis who was self assured, selfish and celebrated his right to be a follower. At the time he was teaching himself how to grow marijuana, the good stuff.
The four of us would start the night session just before seven, then we'd hit the bars in wellington often getting separated before the end of the night came.
These visits went on a few times and actually bolstered my own confidence, afterall i was the only man among us who had the courage to live a lone and take care of myself.
The following week I was at a job near Porirua, Darren driving. The same line up of jobs.
The conversation was focused on the weather, for the year 2000 in wellington was one of the sunniest on record, and to me it felt like the hottest, but probably only because I spent all day outside.
Darren got on his mower, I got on mine and we divided the work. The sun was getting hotter and hotter. Sometimes we needed to get off our mowers as there was trash on the grass sticky and ready to get turned to confetti. But we always picked it up. Infact rubbish collection was pretty much part of our responsibility, and the area was council flats, which meant the lower tier of society and in their priority of interests cleaning up after themselves didn't even get on the list.
But the work was the work. Certainly didn't sell me on the virtues of immigration into our country. At this stage of my life I think of immigration as an absolute necessity for the N.Z economy as they can't replace the young people lost from the brain drain. Myself among them.
Every job we'd get an elderly person running out of their house to congratulate us. Sometimes they were incomprehesible with some form of aphasia. It was in times like these I would see Darren's eyes narrow and he would be able to get the gist and sometimes even explain what the guy was saying to me. They would come out in a dressing gown or pijamas mostly men, sometimes women. I'd think to myself, is that how people prepare for death. I imagined their long boring retirement lives, their hammering lonliness. where the highlight of their day(hopefully not their week/fortnight) was talking to us the low income earning grass cutting, shit kickers. That's what Darren called us shit kickers.
A few weeks later a very short half japanese, half Maori lad called Phil joined us. Full of bluster and trying to tell us how the world worked. He was a mormon and had to use ample self restraint to stop himself from trying to convert us.
He made several mistakes on the job, and everytime I corrected him he would say that he knew. But he really didn't know. On the drive back to the depot Phil told us about the fact he was a clean man and never had urges or even dreamed of having sex anymore. Darren looked at me as if to say,- is this guy for real. He timed the awkward silence, then Darren and I fell into fits of bellowing laughter.
Darren was the inquisitor as far as new guys were concenred. People like Phil and the others were treated differently. Mostly because they took the job as a last resort and not because they had any background in landscaping gardening or home maintenance. Therefore Darren didn´t believe they were serious, often Darren was right.
Continuing the drive back to the depot, Darren´s first line of questioning was, -what do you do to ease the sexual tension if you don't masterbate.
Phil raised his head as if he was asked to speak after his team had won the championship. He said -I lift weights and think about girls. Then there was another awkward silence, Darren took his last drag on the cigarette, put it out and said- so you lift weights thinking about masterbation. And then it was impossible to hold back we laughed so loud that even Phil who was taking himself so seriously to that moment, started grinning seeing how we had seen him perhaps.
And that was Phil the mormon. Always right and always holy, always on the lookout for spiritual corocodiles. I never claimed to know the truth, And so one day I ended up going to Phil's mormon church. I was the only person of euorpean heritage with the exception of the administration itself.
Darren reprimanded me for going, but I'm on the earth to learn. And it changed nothing I continued an energetic agnostic.
Phil's nickname became "Lil Bill" not as some ironic Mafia play on words, but because Phil was really short.
The next new hire was a troubled young man whose name was Damian. Damian had a constant grin, not the kind that made you think he thought himself better, but more like a dark grin of someone hiding pain. Also a man of short stature, he'd show magic tricks with his cigarette or talk about his lovely life in upper hutt the city across the bay from Wellington.
But he didn't like his life. He was awkward and tested me constantly blurting out ambiguous things. Darren made a joke about him once and he pretended to laugh in a slow artificial way, he also had a lil bill complex, he didn't seem to deal with error. If he made a mistake he had five hundred excuses, and if it went far enough he'd say we were short sighted and hadn't lived what he had lived. Which would make me cringe, because if Darren was near the awkward silence would occur then Darren would make some sort of snide comment that would steal the air from my lungs in laughter.
Darren was the bullshit detector. Noone was exempt, and I wondered everyday why I wasn't subjected to it more. Although he often got me with it, I was able to laugh at myself, especially if it was just us. But even when the others were there, I could take it. I knew I had inconsistencies, lies I believed that manifested through my speech or behaviour.
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