I hate this. It sucks whales. I hate this. It sucks big dog turds.

Mondays

Mondays are often the thinnest crew of the week and today was no different. Just 3 of us. AIDS Walk L.A. was Sunday, and since everything in West Hollywood is a BFD, this a.m. the parking lot was full of production crew and equipment un-doing the BFD.
So we loaded up in the van and Julio took us to east WeHo to clean up La Brea and head west. I get the new guy, some young 'n' dumb white kid who seems kind of tough but you can tell comes from something better than 'street'. He's handsome but with an edge, and I don't want to pay too much attention to him b/c of his hot shot kind of attitude and he seems to know so much anyway. I just tell him about Julio's obsession with the butts.
He looks over at me repeatedly. Sometimes I catch him and hold his stare, sometimes I ignore him completely. WTF. These are the times I feel oldest. I'm tempted to let him know that I'm old enough to be his mommy. But I save it for another day.

Sorry I've been lazy. Its just so monotonous. And I'm not picking up trash in the rain. I've done it before; it makes me cry.

Pacing

So this guy I worked with for a few days, the one that was hungover that day, who moves the slowest I've ever seen. The two of us together moved like a snail. Now I'm getting it. You can move so slow that you're staying in one place as long as you act busy.
Last year one of the first guys I got partnered with on a regular basis was this Isreali dude, about my age, had done his time in the Isreali military and seemed to be pretty darn fit.
He was very nice, put me at ease. He had a system: one person does the inside of the sidewalk, the other does the outside which includes the street gutter, we take turns pulling the can. Very simple. If there wasn't much trash, we'd take turns - one person picks up while the other walks along pulling the can. When we did this he was a comedian and he'd kick the butts in front of my face, like Julio.
"What, you don' like the brown ones? Heh-heh." Maybe this is one reason I'm the weird one who notices every single butt out there. I'm the butt police.
He bought me coffee on many occasions. Because he wanted coffee and he thought in our vests it would be easier for me to get service. I don't know why we were so insecure about it. The first time he gave me a $5o to buy two small, er, tall coffees at Starbuck's. In case you ain't in the know, Starbuck's doesn't take $50's.
The guy let me have it on the house. After that, I made sure to bring small bills to 'work' so I wouldn't push it at the 'Bux.
Several times, Mr. Isreal wanted to sit down with his coffee, have a smoke. But we're always looking over our shoulder and I didn't really want to sit with him. Nothing personal.
He always walked fast. There really weren't 'slow' days w/Isreal. In fact, the days were grueling and my legs always hurt. I actually lost weight. It got to be ridiculous sometimes - he'd be an entire block or two ahead of me, pulling the can with him.
It just occured to me that maybe there's a reason I got stuck with that jabberwalky a couple weeks ago, maybe its karma, that fickle bitch. Back then, with Isreal, I was the chatty one. Some days I just babbled on to pass the time. Maybe that's why he ran ahead, to get away from me. Hmm.
On his last day though, when we got to Hayworth and the 7-Eleven, he bought me an ice cream and we sat on the curb and ate them. When Julio came by, Isreal spoke to him and that was that.
And then, you never see these people again.
Well, except Lance. I see him all over the place.

The Cowboy

I don't like being judgemental of others. I believe in equality and often root for the underdog. I try hard not to compare myself to others because someone always ends up ahead.
Some days though, I'm a real bitch in my head. Like the first day I laid eyes on the guy who ended up as my partner today, I was startled, and half expected him to break out in a hillbilly version of The Village People's "YMCA." Having never seen him before, I felt totally justified in ignoring him. Until I had to work with him, I could pretend he didn't even exist.
Since then, he had said 'good morning' a couple of times and seemed friendly in a Green Acres sort of way, so when we were partnered today, I was laid back and kept an open mind. Its been an easy week, relatively speaking, and I was eager to keep it that way.
He is light-eyed and fair-skinned with a skinny bald head on top of a wirey, middle-aged man's body. Every day he wears extremely faded jeans that look like they had the help of a bottle of bleach, a buttoned shirt with the sleeves cut off, really, really, old cowboy boots and a dirty white straw cowboy hat. We refer to him as... 'the cowboy'.
He speaks with a southern accent and behaves like one might expect a middle-aged Texas man to behave - very congenial, but he is from Conneticutt(sp!). Been in Cali for a while. I'm quite sure he's gay. He is here because of a DUI that he didn't deserve...
And now he doesn't know if he wants to stay in Cali because of how tough and expensive that DUI is - insurance, SR22,the attorney he wasted money on, how is he going to get around, how can he get his Cali license back without giving up his Conn. one... I started to worry that he might start to cry as he was sounding more and more emotional, like he's still caught up in the stress of it all. I do try to stay uninvolved, but I just had to reel him back in a bit.
I told him I road my f***ing bike all over this freakishly spread out city for an entire year and yes insurance sucks but not to get too caught up in the now because it is temporary and his life will get back to something resembling normal he just has to ride it out...
Because that's what I keep telling myself.