Holding It Level

A realtor named Todd called me in mid-November with a cash job over on South Algoma. He said the property just needed a "light sweep."

Todd wears loafers in the snow. His definition of a light sweep is useless to a man who actually knows how to hold a broom.

The heat had been cut off since October. When I popped the deadbolt, the smell hit me like a physical blow. The squatters were gone, but they had left behind a monument to biological failure.

Garbage bags were stacked waist-high in the hallway, acting as a terrible, squishy insulation against the drafts. But the real problem was waiting behind the bedroom doors.

Five-gallon drywall mud buckets.

Sitting there in the frozen dark.

I have mixed a lot of mortar in those pails over forty years. They are structurally sound products. But when the lid is bulging and the label is worn off, you do not want to test the tensile strength of the plastic against the laws of physics.

My knees are basically gravel and bone dust at sixty-eight years old, and I had to haul seventy pounds of other people's bad decisions down an icy flight of stairs. I held that first bucket out in front of me like it was highly unstable nitroglycerin.

You can’t trust the bucket when the contents are liquid, brown, and totally still. One wobble, and it is all over for you. You just hold it level and pray.

I never spilled a drop on my boots. I got the envelope of cash and handed half to Massimo so he could buy new strings for the Fender. There is dignity in labor, but there is no spotlight for a job like this. Country music is about heartache, but I promise you, real heartache is a heavy bucket you can't entirely trust.