August 1979, August 1981
The first time I met Floyd was also one of my first jobs as a solo electrician. "Fuckin' pleased to meet ya," Floyd said. We were rebuilding a cottage in Mountain View. Floyd was framing like a madman while I was drilling holes, running Romex.
Floyd was a skinny guy with an extreme mustache like the bad guy in a cowboy movie. He wore cutoff shorts, steel-toed boots, and a tool belt. Nothing else. On a jobsite, I never saw him wearing a shirt. There was a wildness in his eyes like the untamed gaze of a coyote.
We were freaks, hippies, dropouts who liked working with our hands. In the late 1970s we were a loose collective of hairy craftspeople working the boomtowns of the Silicon Valley.
We all started as carpenters. Gradually we diversified and specialized. I became the hippie electrician, reliably unstoned and logical. Floyd was, first and always, the hard-core carpenter.
For this job, I spent a 12-hour day inch-worming over fiberglass insulation while old rusty roofing nails scraped my back. At least 2 of those hours were spent on my belly reaching under a 6 inch overhang to splice wires in a junction box at the far end of the attic. It was easily 110 degrees up there. At last I flipped the main breaker back on — and nothing worked. It took me another hour and a half to track down the problem, which was in the original knob-and-tube, not my fault. Floyd had cut a neutral wire in his frenzy of framing.
"Oops, fuckin' sorry," Floyd said.
The next day, while waiting for the Mountain View building inspector, Floyd told me tales of women he'd known. As a 19-year-old he'd been a grunt in Vietnam with R&R in Pee Eye — the Philippine Islands. "I'm a hunter," he said, "and I learned a thing or two about females." Now in the USA he was still hunting but having a little trouble meeting women as a noncommercial transaction. Disaster after disaster. Drugs, disease, demands. "I'm not what they think. All I want is a little fuckin' companionship. Is that so fuckin' hard? I'm a sensitive person."
"Maybe," I said, "you should tell them what you want."
"Ya think?"
"Where do you meet these women?"
"Drinkin'."
The inspector arrived. He hated us. None of us were licensed, but the homeowner had a valid permit and could hire whoever he wanted. We thought we were outlaws, sticking it to The Man. Later we figured out that mostly we were sticking it to ourselves, unable to earn premium wages as long as we stayed outside the system.
The inspector combed the structure — never before or since have I seen such meticulous scrutiny — until at last his flashlight beam detected the junction box at the far end of the attic.
"I'm citing that," the inspector said. "All junction boxes must be accessible."
Floyd exploded. "No fuckin' way!" he shouted. "He fuckin' crawled back there and installed it, so by fuckin' definition it's fuckin' accessible."
Floyd proceeded to call him a fuckin' ignorant fuckhole, but somehow the inspector was not persuaded.
We bonded right there, Floyd and I. He thought I'd suffered an injustice. I knew the inspector was right. I'd made a rookie mistake. It would have saved me hours of itchy labor if I'd located the junction box elsewhere. But I appreciated how Floyd had leaped to my defense, regardless of the facts.
I spent a couple more hours in the hot dusty coffin, rerunning Romex. Later, unpacking the truck at home, I realized I'd lost my favorite chisel. It must have fallen from my tool belt somewhere in that attic. No way would I go back for it.
I didn't see Floyd for a couple months. One day, though, I found an odd bundle attached to the front door of my cottage with a rubber band: my chisel, a $5 bill, and a note:
Found it in the attic.I appreciated the tip. Mostly, I was impressed that he'd written 3 entire sentences with correct spelling and the use of quotation marks, and without swearing. Buried somewhere in his background, the mustachioed desperado had a fuckin' education.
Sorry I kept it so long.
Here's a "tip" for the inconvenience.
* * *
A couple years later my friend Sonny got married. Sonny, the ultimate hippie carpenter, wanted a conventional wedding with all the trimmings. My wife baked an enormous wedding cake using, as I recall, 24 pounds of butter. I hired a stripper named Brandy (a story in itself), and the night before the wedding we had a bachelor party at somebody's house in Mountain View.
Brandy was a pro. Great body, friendly personality. Sonny removed her last item of clothing with his teeth. She then removed clothing from several of the men, dancing all the while. One of those men was Floyd.
At the halfway point, Brandy said she needed a break, so she followed me to the kitchen where I handed her some bottled water. Since I'd hired her, she treated me as the boss even though it wasn't my house. We then proceeded to have a business-like conversation in the kitchen, me and a naked woman sipping bottled water in front of the refrigerator while the other guys watched from the living room.
There was never any physical contact with Brandy, other than Sonny's teeth on her panties, and her fingers removing clothing from several of the guys. At the end, with the only flesh-to-flesh touch, she shook my hand, thanking me for the job. Then she was gone, and we all stood around in stunned disbelief. What had just happened? We'd never done a bachelor party before. We were used to casual nudity among friends at beaches, in hot tubs, or at the saunas in San Francisco. Our straight friends called us the let's-get-naked crowd, but this was a whole different vibe. We'd never experienced the unspoken, rigid rules of conduct with a stripper. And if we hadn't sensed the rules, Brandy was accompanied by a male escort who sat silently watching us, unsmiling, packing heat.
The only one of us familiar with the stripper scene was Floyd. And now everybody was ready to call it a night — except Floyd. He was urging us to go to a sleazy bar: “I want to get stomped on, pissed on, beat up and thrown out. I want to be degraded, man.” We just shook our heads.
Sonny told his naturally curious bride-to-be what happened at the party. She of course told her friends. The next day at the wedding I overheard Floyd, champagne in hand, telling the sister of the bride: "It's fuckin' painful to be such a sensitive person like me."
"Yes," she said. "It must be difficult."
"Let's dance," he said.
"No," she said, walking away.
Floyd, smiling, moved on to the next bridesmaid.
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