July 5th, 2002, I did a roof job on a building I owned in Newark, NJ. The roof leaked and quite frankly needed a total rip down and re-do. But being a cheap landlord of an inner city property, I tried the cheap way out. There was a local guy, Jalil, that did odd jobs in the neighborhood, and I asked him if he wanted to work on this project with me, and could he bring another guy. He said yes and that he could get his girlfriend’s son to come. I told him to meet me at my house at 9:00AM. He admonished the kid to be on time, and then failed to show himself. The Kid showed on time, and we waited for Jalil for an hour before leaving.
I had an Econoline van at the time, which I loaded the day before with about two dozen green five gallon cans of Karnak fibrous asphalt roof coating, and one red can of Karnak roofing cement. It was 102 degrees in the shade, and must have been 150 on the roof. The good news, if there was any, was that there were internal stairs to the roof, so we didn’t have to haul all those cans up a ladder. I brought two gallons of water, one for each of us, and we drank it all. But we sweat so much, we never had to stop to pee.
The Kid wanted to quit in the middle and finish another day, but I urged him to continue on. After we finished the job, I drove him from North Newark, to his grandmother’s house, where he lived, in South Newark. I paid him and he went in. Standing at the rear of my van, I noticed tar on my leg, so I started to wipe it off with a rag soaked in paint thinner. Being literally the only white guy for miles around, people walked or drove by, staring at me like I was out of my mind. As I drove away in my blue van, hot, sweating and stinking, satisfied that I had saved thousands of dollars and had at least staved off the inevitable roof job, I couldn’t help thinking as I so often have, “I went to college for this?” I didn’t…
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