Off the seat of a bicycle

The house was gradually finished over the next five years including a combination barn/shop built out back. It really felt like a home once the carpet went in.

Our acre of land lay next to an abandoned railroad easement near a stream so we had a steady flow of wildlife coming through. Over the years two bobcats and a puma showed up hunting in the back yard. Since then the concrete-pourers have cut down most of the trees and eliminated all sustainable life except car-world so seldom anymore do creatures show up but it was fun cataloging the critters while it lasted.

In strange paradox, the people that moved in next door were local country folk and he shot everything including one of our housecats. You would expect native Texans to appreciate the wild animals, and want to preserve that way of life, but they were local gossipers and popular purveyors of the local code and spread shit on me more than once … so it was nice to see them go bankrupt and move away.

My business flourished but it was a long drive into Houston every day to do remodeling, so I changed-up and put out flyers across Sugar Land, TX in 1989 and became a painting contractor … of course I wasn’t the biggest or flashiest guy around, but with my three helpers we never missed a day’s work, and had a stack of houses lined up and we knocked them down two or three a week.

We became an assembly-line painting machine, and I guess in doing so, we became environmental polluters of the highest order … throwing all that spray paint in the air. But who knows, maybe the function of the earth is to process atomic particles in strange and exotic manners, and if this were the case, then we were following the prime intent, and indeed making sure things would continue changing on the planet.

Each morning I picked up materials then spent the five-day week replacing rotted wood and painting alongside my workers and spent evenings and weekends hustling more jobs. It was the usual work-a-holic pattern that has followed my life but I relished creating my own opportunity.

When you’re self-employed, nobody gives you a check for doing nothing … you have to go out and make it happen. And success came because I worked hard and saw each job as an opportunity to solve the complete problem for the customer. It was a challenge to become better and more efficient with each successive job.

We never watered-down the paint or used the second-line materials, and we replaced all the rotted wood, not just the easy-to-reach stuff. It was personally important to provide genuine service to my customer’s homes.

Over the next twelve years, my body felt good fixing and spray-painting houses in the hot Texas sun … and occasionally I told my customers it ‘burned the evil right out of you,’ because the heat and exercise helped my arthritis quite a lot.

Still my life-long problem relating to people re-emerged at the local lumber yard. Frankly I wanted to do business with a vending machine … I despised the social organization and resented having to ‘key-in’ human-connection codes before the store could pony up a yard ticket or load up a board.

Old-timey lumber yards are a natural outgrowth of the local code … and the people working there guard over the lumber because they assume first that you need help deciding between a 2x4 and a 2x6, and second that you’ll steal their shit if they let you touch a board before it’s paid for.

Lumber yards attach special importance to the rituals of ticket writing and the appropriate conversational exchange that takes place before the paperwork can be issued. The salesmen are empowered like border guards … and exercise their duty carefully, making sure to point out any deficiency the customer might have in his manners … for instance the customer cannot say, ‘hurry the fuck up.’

Of course I was a ‘hurry-the-fuck-up’ sort of customer because standing around the lumber yard exchanging pleasantries was dead money overhead and I saw those guys eating up my day over their social nonsense. Just clear the fucking decks and shoot the product out to the customer?

The irony was that I enjoyed exchanging conversation, but about work-goals and new methods for doing things and astrophysics … but counter salesmen and lumber-loaders don’t give a moose’s butt about those things …

… they spend their day churning personal gossip into ‘social currency.’ They require the social-club exchange as a way of reaffirming their existance, and community leaders capitalize on this by rewarding those people for sharing gossip. This is the operative backbone of the local code … and creates the thriving beehive that funnels information to the police and legal system, and it is why the prosecutor can pull little threads of gossip out of the hairdresser to convict some lady for poisoning her husband.

‘She-said’ is base-line local code. 

Myself on the other hand, I didn’t want to know anything about other people. I listened to my customer’s stories but never repeated anything … that chit cluttered up the day’s work.

I just wanted to load the lumber and get to the job … but the lumberyard workers punished this lack of people skills as a social offense and they started causing problems for me. You know how border guards act when the searchee don’t act right.

Obviously my personality would get me voted off survivor-island on the first ballot, but it’s also true I would learn how to survive in the wilds because of fearlessness and work ethic. Self-employed people are highly motivated to find new ways, but counter-workers and border-guards are highly motivated to stop people they don’t like.

… increasingly it was hard to get service at the lumber yard. They accused me of not knowing ‘how to act’ because I was pushy and flashed anger and finally I had to call on management intervention.

I didn’t go there to visit the workers, I went there to get boards, and if they can’t do that job without requiring me to visit ‘appropriately,’ then what the hell is going on?

It didn’t take long before I got pissed off royal at the lumber yard. They were wasting my work day, and once I called up and ordered a water heater and asked if they would roll it out front to save time, but when I got there, nobody had written a ticket. No sir, the border-guard manual sez you must place your order in person and pay for it before we can issue a ticket.

What a filthy local attitude … forcing the contractor to spend valuable work hours waiting for their important asses to search your luggage. Those guys got paid by the hour, but a contractor gets paid only when he’s producing.

One of the clerks asked me if I worked for poor people … as if my greed would never stoop to help others, and his would. The selfish bastard never knew I was homeless once but held himself out as the poor-man’s champion. He was trying to embarrass me because I made more money, and he wanted a social recognition to equalize the deficiency. But he was just mandating my participation in their social peck.

I realize nobody wants to feed a cat that scratches you, and that’s how the lumber yard personnel saw me, but I didn’t want them to feed me. I knew their product-numbers and could write my own ticket and load my own lumber, so I started side-stepping the store nightmare and began driving straight into the yard and loading my own boards and then driving back out to the parking lot before going inside to pay.

Not paying in advance for a yard-ticket before loading was an outrageous move, but their rules were stupid … they shipped truckloads of material to people who had ‘charge accounts’ and hadn’t paid first, so get off my back.

I was a very profitable customer for them because I paid cash, and they didn’t have to carry a 30-day note, nor wonder if my money was good … but Attila broke through the wall and was pulling his bags across the border without customs inspection.

It was social suicide to sidestep the store bottleneck but look what both sides gained: I got to select which boards were best for my customer, and I could impulsively choose more products than were on my original ‘buy’ list. And I didn’t require employee time to sell or load the products, plus I got to see every new product they brought in. I was printing money for them, and cutting their overhead.

I created a win-win partnership with that lumber yard, but the salesmen hated me because I couldn’t relate to their local code. I just didn’t give a shit about personal lives.

The store manager kept implying in front of everyone that I was stealing lumber; the short little jerk. But I had a sit-down with the top manager and laid out that his business and my business were cooperative partners … which is a contemporary economic model; one that replaces adversarial business practices with trust between parties. And the concept of ‘just-in-time-inventory’ is an outgrowth of this thinking, but it only works when inefficient bottlenecks are cleared out (like salesmen who value social exchange over productivity).

Then one afternoon I ran my truck into wet concrete at the lumber yard.

It was the end of a hot July day around 5:30, and the sun was glaring in my dirty windshield as I drove through the gate toward the warehouse. Frankly I wasn’t paying attention to the fucking lumber yard. I was thinking about what materials were needed for the next day.

The section of concrete they just poured was sloping away from my vision angle, so I didn’t see it, but more incredulously, the yard personnel hadn’t put up a wood barrier or marked-off yellow tape to designate a driving hazard … and then I clunked my front wheels off into a hole of wet cement.

As soon as it happened I saw the wet concrete and immediately stopped but none of the fellows helped me back out even though I had a fully loaded trailer behind my van.
 
I got out of the hole and picked up the materials then went into the store to pay … and that’s when the store manager showed up. He had left for the day but raced back over when the yard foreman called him, and he said aloud in front of everybody that I was speeding and ignored the men who were waving at me … and he added that I intentionally tried to drive through their work.

That ripe mf. Obviously my aggressiveness in all matters implies I would intentionally damage my vehicle and their cement work, for what purpose I don’t know.

The manager said from now he was requiring me to get a yard ticket before going into their yard … which revealed his real motive: he wanted to force their slow-down world of gossip on top of me. So fuck him.

His attitude infuriated me. He held himself out to be a Christian but was accusing an honest man based on false witness … and his daily derision of me at the yard was what prompted his people to bear that false witness. The store manager was no Christian, he acted like a cheap local mullah.

The first thing I did after washing off my front tires was to measure the wheel-base of my van, and then calculate how fast the actual driving speed was based on the fact the back wheels didn’t enter the cement. Factoring in response time and the short distance traveled before coming to a stop, my speed was barely four miles an hour … and that shot the eyewitness in the ass.

I was not speeding and it proves the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, especially about unpopular people, but moreover it shows how the local code fabricates false testimony based on popularity … which goes to the heart of prosecutorial misconduct in this nation, and is why popular and wealthy people don’t pay the same price as others … but it also essential for understanding why bicycles are not given equal protection under the law … quite simply because bicycles are unpopular and are seen as a nuisance on the road.

Chapter 67

It was ridiculous to be involved in the concrete incident at the lumber yard but I faxed the top manager a note about the store manager’s accusations along with my mathematical proof of speed … and then reminded him that there were no ‘construction barriers’ in a lumber yard filled with boards. I also reminded him that his yard men had delivered an extra twenty dollar sheet of siding to my job the month before, and I covered their ass and returned it to stock.

And I reminded him that nobody at his yard inquired if my van or person was damaged by the lumber-yard’s negligence for not putting up a barrier, and the store manager got demoted, but his attitude was a sorry state that helped usher in the arrival of Home Depot, and I pumped a fist in the air when they broke ground for that business.

And the strange thing, as it turns out, most contractors think like me because the local lumber yard went ka-put when Home Depot and Lowes moved in … and those lumbering counter-salesmen lost their jobs including the store manager … and interestingly, a few of them hired on at the Depot, but their former job ill-prepared them for anticipating customer needs. Sales is more than writing a ticket.

If the true measure of a man was whether he could charm his way with counter salesmen, then John Gacy would still be living in society and burying his spoils under the house, because he was well-liked among the Century Supply salesmen.

Sales is about personalities and social formalities at some level, but I felt strongly that I had proven my worth at the lumber yard and simply wanted to be left alone by the employees. I wasn’t interested in their life stories or gossip, and quite frankly Home Depot didn’t require the contractor to get involved.

The old-timey lumber-yard model still exists some places today, and it’s a shame too, because that’s the business model for the antiquated, inefficient prescription drug delivery-system in America, where the customer cannot simply pick up their product off the shelf.

People want their right to privacy, and have the right to expedited business and they don’t like gossipy businesses like the pharmacy, because the world is too fast-paced for mullahs that refuse to do business with someone because he doesn’t pray facing east four times a day or give a shit about your personal life.

Index of chapters