When I worked as a foreign day laborer in Canada

The first thing I noticed about Frank was his fingers, all gnarled and callused wrapped around the steering wheel

When I was 23 years old, I had a girlfriend going to school at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. I stayed in her tiny apartment in the basement of a big old Victorian house located a stone’s throw to a rocky beach and a short walk to the city’s downtown.

Victoria is a beautiful city built largely in the 19th century, small and almost overly majestic for its size. The inner harbor had wooden boats and seaplanes surrounded by a parliament building and a grand hotel with ivy growing along its stone walls.

At night there were buskers and pubs where we danced and drank Guinness and Jameson, and if you wanted a smoke you could buy weed in dime bags at the park right next to the police station.

We walked back from the bars with arms wrapped around each other taking long strides, feet together crouching down like we were Groucho Marx. It was a magical setting and a really great time for both of us. There was only one problem: I was running out of money.

Intent on extending my stay, I borrowed a page from one of her father’s old stories. I ran a classified ad in the local newspaper that said something like this:

HAVE TRUCK, WILL WORK HARD: Available for any junk removal or physical labor, just call Dave…

That began my short career as a foreign day laborer in Canada.

One of my first calls came from a woman who said she wanted to remove the insulation in her garage. When I got there, the inside of the garage appeared half finished with insulation in the walls but no drywall installed yet. She wanted the insulation removed because she said mice had gotten into it.

When I pulled down the first strip of pink insulation from the ceiling, dozens of mice came raining down. Mice of all sizes — some large, some small — went scurrying in every direction and out the door.

The woman screamed. I covered my head. Once the mice had cleared, I finished the job.

Hauling a heaping load of insulation to the landfill in a Ford Ranger became another adventure when pieces of pink foam flew onto the highway. Motorists wagged their fingers at me as I pulled over with my California plates to adjust the load.

“Sorry, I’m just working illegally in your country and now I’m littering all over the highway. My fault, I’m from California,” I thought.

The few jobs I got after that I can remember were more ordinary. There was a couch, or a chesterfield as they call it in Canada, a pile of aluminum bed frames from a hotel and used office furniture.

Then one day I got a call from a guy named Frank.

“Can you do what it says in your ad?”

“Can I do what?” I asked, confused.

“Can you work hard? Or are you shitting me?”

“I can work hard, sir. What do you got?”

“I’m a handyman. I’m 74 years old and I need an assistant. Are you up for it? I got a lot of work.”

“Yea sure,” I said, eager for more hours.

“Okay then. Be at my house at 7 am tomorrow morning. Here I’ll give you the address.”

Frank was a short and stocky old man who was easily agitated. He wore jeans and dirty sweatshirts most days to work. In his line of business, you showered at the days end, not before.

I left my Ranger at his place and hopped in his Ford F150.

As we headed to the lumber yard, the first thing I noticed about Frank was his fingers, all gnarled and callused wrapped around the steering wheel. These were working man’s hands, not the delicate typing hands I was developing.

“So you’re a journalist from California?” he said to me, after telling him a little of my story and what brought me to Victoria. “Are you a liberal Marxist like all the rest?”

I laughed and acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about.

On the way to our first job, he turned on Rush Limbaugh.

“What do you think of him?”

“No comment,” I said, not wanting to cause an argument on my first day.

“This man tells the truth,” he said. “What does he have wrong? You tell me.”

I shrugged.

“What is that? Why did you shrug? Come on with it.”

He was always trying to draw me into a political debate. We often ate lunch at Dairy Queen where he prodded me. Sometimes I took the bait, which he enjoyed. Somehow I managed to find one of the only conservatives in all of British Columbia.

Working with Frank taught me a lot of things.

There was the work itself, wielding sledgehammers and jack hammers and shovels and carpet cleaners. Anything physical was my job. Retrieving tools from the back of the truck, minding the extension cord and cleaning up at the end of the day. Those were my jobs.

Frank could do just about anything. His body just didn’t bend the way it used to. There wasn’t a job too small or too large that he couldn’t handle. We built windows and walls, removed slabs of concrete, completely rebuilt the corner of a garage where the wood rotted, along with a lot of small jobs like weather sealing doors and building a screened in porch.

At the end of the day I was dirty and tired and felt great. At night, the girl and I took long walks along the shoreline and watched marathons of Sex and The City.

Frank introduced me to the attendant at the landfill who let us bypass the scale if we gave him a good tip. That meant I could make more money on my junk hauling jobs when I wasn’t working with Frank.

Even though we had our political differences, Frank and I got along well. He always paid me on time with cash each week, and I enjoyed his feisty attitude.

One time I arrived at his house early. When he came out, he saw me already waiting there sipping coffee.

“What did you do, shit the bed?” he said.

I was making enough money to rent a bedroom in a small farm house out of town where the girlfriend and I built big fires on weekday nights.

After a month working together Frank was prepared to give me a bonus until we were at the lumber yard and I pushed a board through the truck’s back window shattering it all over the front seat.

“There goes your bonus, son.”

Another thing I loved about Frank was his cynicism. When things didn’t go well, Frank recalled Murphy’s Law: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. But Frank did it in a unique way.

If he cut a board too short.

“Fucking Murphy!”

If he forgot to buy something at the hardware store.

“That fucking Murphy again.”

Or if he smashed his finger.

“God damn motherfucking Murphy!”

Frank didn’t have a college degree but he was brilliant when it came to building and repair jobs. He once built an entire house and the whole interior of a bar and restaurant. He worked hard and did well for himself and his family.

I realized by working with Frank that brains and success didn’t come from universities and that anyone was capable of genius within their fields. You didn’t have to be a doctor or a lawyer or a writer to be smart.

I also learned that with an able body you can always find work. I was lucky I didn’t have to rely on physical day labor for long. My experience with Frank was enough to realize it was a tough road.

By December it was time for me to go back to California. The work was fun, but I needed to get back on track with a job in journalism.

I said goodbye to Frank, kissed the girlfriend so long and drove off down the road.

Thanks for reading.