the Gusmeister
September 17th, 2007 by smidge
Gus is the mechanic at the MRF. 6 foot 1, 250 pounds, white, perma-stubble, earings, a few crude navy-style tattoos. And a uniform that says ‘Gus’, though once he referred to himself as “the Gusmeister” and it stuck.
After we weigh in at the MRF, we have to pull around the building to get to the unloading area, and sometimes Gus will be there in the yard working on a loader or some other piece of equipment that’s been broken. When I’m not in a hurry, I roll down the window to talk to Gus for a minute. Sometimes he flags me down. Or sometimes when he sees I’m coming he just raises his arms to his sides as if to ask “What do you have for me today?”
See, once I asked Gus if he was looking for anything and he said a snowblower. I got a junky one the very next week and set it aside for him while I was dumping my load. Gus took it home and fixed it with his mechanical savvy, and ever since then, he always asks or holds up his hands like that. It’s the joke we can always rely on when I’m driving by in a hurry.
Once when I pulled up, Gus was standing there talking to another MRF worker, this tall skinny black man who I’ve never met, and he turned around to the man and said something like “Didn’t I hear that a monkey escaped from the zoo? They’re looking for you….” and so on. The black man laughed and muttered something back. I didn’t quite know how to react besides to shake my head in combination disbelief and disapproval. Somehow there’s something less insidious about this playful, direct form of racism, coming from a person who works with Black and Hispanic people all day, than the kind of racism that hides in academic discourse or middle-class pleasantries.
Anyway, that’s Gus for you. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts introducing the people I come into contact with regularly while hauling. If there are any readers left here after my shameful absence, I hope you enjoy. Names have been changed, of course, so if you were ever a partner of mine, please try not to use anyone’s real name in the comments. Thanks.
ah, I see that Gus gets a glimpse of the “everyday is Christmas” phenomenon:
What do you have for me today? Every day is Christmas when you’re friends with a hauler.
Let the racist get his own shit from now on. I’d give the next snowblower to the skinny black guy.
The skinny black guy, and most others, tend to keep to themselves. With the Mexicans, I can make a friendly sort of overture to them by resuscitating my High School Spanish. But it’s hard entering into entrenched workplace segregation.