Glory Days

As a scientist, Mark could be a brutal critic. He was outraged by laziness and shortcuts, and didn’t think anybody who half-assed their way through a lab should be in the business of science. He saved his harshest criticism, though, for anyone who he believed was not evolving in their research to keep up with a rapidly changing scientific world. He was highly competitive and pushed himself every day. He knew what everybody in his field was doing and was constantly trying to keep one step ahead of them. For those who he thought were skating by on their past accomplishments, or not getting out of the way for someone hungrier, he’d complain to me about them and then finish it off by singing Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen.

Glory days, well, they pass you by….

Mark had his own Glory Days in the years that he was a roofer, and it wasn’t due to it being some major feat, but because he survived and lived to tell the tale. During those physically hard blue-collar years, Mark worked for two different companies. I didn’t know him when he worked for the first one, but according to Mark the guy who owned it was a cheat. Cheated customers and cheated his employees, and when Mark had enough he went to a competitor and got hired on the spot. The owner of that company was named, Jimmy, a full-blooded Italian at 5′ tall, and what he didn’t have in height he made up for in rage. He could explode at the drop of a hat, the kind of rage that would have made someone like me cry and then quit, but Mark could perfectly imitate him with his frantic pacing, swearing, and arms flailing, so every meltdown gave him more material.

The roofers would report to the office by 7:00 a.m. Mark was a foreman so he’d lead a crew to the job, whether it be shingle roofing or hot tar, and over time Jimmy relied on Mark because of his experience and how he could help younger guys learn the ropes. It was with Jimmy’s company that Mark would learn how to spit nails. Long before automatic nail guns, he’d throw a handful of nails in his mouth, turn them around, spit one out and pound, spit one out and pound. One of his front teeth had a groove permanently worn into it from spitting nails. On our first date he showed it to me and said that he once swallowed a nail. On other dates, we’d drive around Chicago and he’d show me jobs he’d done. He’d pull over and talk about the pitch and how they had to nail narrow sticks to the side of it to stand on as they roofed, the bullet holes they’d sometimes find in tear-offs, how many bundles of shingles he’d pounded that day.

Much as Jimmy liked Mark, he cut him no slack. He constantly was on him about getting jobs finished on time, getting repairs and leaks figured out in one visit, making customers happy. One time we were invited to a family party at Jimmy’s house, and when Mark introduced me to him he asked, “What are you doing with this dumb sonofabitch? You can do way better than him.” Mark laughed and Jimmy slapped him on the shoulder, looked at me, and said, “I’m kidding you. I love this guy,” and it was mutual.

But the forklift story that Mark told would surpass the regular and frequent verbal abuse. Mark and the other roofers reported to the office to get their jobs for the day and Jimmy was in rare form. He was raging mad first thing in the morning and when he got that mad he’d tear off the job sheet, hand it to each crew, and then start pointing at trucks and yelling at everybody to get out of his face. In Mark’s case, he needed him to use the forklift to move shingles before he left and Mark knew to move fast and efficient before Jimmy exploded again. After moving a few loads of bundles, the chain on the forklift broke. I think that probably happened often to most of the equipment in the yard but it was the first time it happened to Mark and all five feet of Jimmy came running over. “What did you do, Fisher? Did you just break my forklift? Did you just do that to me?” Mark didn’t know what he did so he started trying to fix it and Jimmy said, “I swear to God, Fisher, if you don’t get out of here in two minutes I’m going to crush your nuts in that forklift. Do you want that? Do you want me to crush your nuts??!!!”

That night when Mark told me what happened my mouth hung open. “He said that? That he was going to crush your nuts? That’s bad, Mark, if he does that we’ll never have kids.” Mark laughed and said he didn’t mean that literally, but based on the stories I heard every day about Jimmy I didn’t believe that for a minute. Mark said he ran to the truck, jumped in, told the guy driving to hit it, and they peeled out of the yard with Jimmy screaming at him in the rearview mirror. By the end of the day when they got back all was fine. The forklift was fixed and Mark was back in Jimmy’s good graces.

Years after we moved away from Chicago and were home for the holidays, Mark said he was going to go to the yard and pay Jimmy a visit. He walked into the office and Jimmy jumped out of his chair and said, “Well, will you look who the cat dragged in.” Mark updated him on his life, told him he was a professor now, and that we had three kids. There was nothing more important to Jimmy than family and so the news that there were little Fishers made him happy for us. A crew came in during their conversation and Jimmy said to them, “Look at this guy, will you? He used to do the same thing as you and now he’s a professor. If you dumb sonofabitches applied yourself once in awhile maybe you could do that.”

Before Mark left, Jimmy said, “I’m glad you came by. I’m really proud of you.” It would take years of Mark keeping his own lab afloat, when money started to dry up and he’d panic, to see that he and Jimmy always had something in common. They stayed hungry less it all collapse while they were in charge, but even on his worst days at the med center, on days when it felt like everything was in freefall, Mark would come home, tell me about it, and then say, “But nobody threatened to crush my nuts today so I got that going for me.”