Labor Day is upon us, a time when we honor the hard-working people that make America great, so it seems as good a time as any to write about the laziest man I ever knew.
His name was Bill Ray, and I was 16 when I met him. I was never sure of his age, but he looked somewhere between 45 and death.
It was my first summer working construction. We built houses. The crew was made up of two guys named Bill and a lead carpenter named Edsel, who, in a stunning turn of events, was not named after the car.
Grown-up Bill was perpetually grizzled and shambling and had a strange sweet aroma about him. I came to learn it was the smell of tobacco and alcohol.
Edsel paid Bill $2.50 an hour. I got $2. My first day on the job, I dug out the footings for a new house while Bill propped himself on his shovel and told stories. He talked and I sweated, it being North Carolina in mid-June.
The second day found us at another house we had underway. Bill and I stood on a makeshift scaffold installing siding. Bill had taken a deep dive into a bottle of Wild Turkey the night before and was suffering, but he had manned up and climbed the ladder.
I held the first piece of siding in place while Bill aimed his hammer. Pow, the steel landed smack on his thumb. Then a second time and a third. Bill climbed down the ladder and went home.
Edsel and I finished the job.
It went on like this all summer.
“Well, he’s good company,” Edsel told me, answering a question I’d wondered about but never asked.
Then one Monday, Bill showed up to work in a new convertible. The car was a 10-year-old Ford Galaxie that looked like the “before” part of a Rust-Oleum commercial. It was the convertible part that was new.
And so we learned Bill harbored some ambition after all.
A month before, he was sitting on his porch surveying his estate, which featured several vehicles, a couple of which actually ran.
Bill got to thinking how nice it would be to own a convertible. He had no cash but it proved no problem. “Let me guess,” Edsel said. “You cut off the car roof.”
Thus, I learned to never underestimate the power of a drunk with an oxyacetylene torch.
“How’s it run?” Edsel asked.
“Runs like a charm, ‘cept when it rains,” Bill said.
Two years later, my family built the house my folks still live in today. My father hired Edsel and Bill for the carpentry work.
Three weeks into the job, Bill failed to show up one Monday. Edsel was mightily put off when he learned why. “You paid him two weeks in advance?” he asked my dad, voice rising. “You don’t advance money to a man like Bill. He’ll be drunk for a month.”
That was the last I saw of Bill for five years, until one Saturday morning, when I saw a familiar figure shambling down Maney Branch Road, a .22-caliber rifle in his hand. He was walking into the sun and away from what had seemed like a good idea the night before.
I pulled over and offered Bill a ride, provided he stow the gun in the back seat. Bill struggled in.
He had aged in dog years.
“How you doing?” I asked.
“Not bad,” he said. “But I’ve got to tell you something.”
“Yeah?”
“It ain’t easy being a working man.”
Happy Labor Day.
William Porter writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at wporter@denverpost.com or 303-954- 1977.
