Back when I was living in the Hemlock there was an older woman I worked with in my department at Macy’s, she took pity on me when she found out where I lived. She was horrified such a young man should be forced to live under such debased conditions, even after I told her I liked the debased conditions.
“But that’s a welfare hotel!”
Poor girl, she simply wouldn’t believe I actually liked it there, much less even thrived there.
“But how do you eat without a stove?”
“I heat some water in a crock-pot and stick a can of 99c chili in it. Boom, hot chili in ten minutes!”
“Oh my god!” She was absolutely aghast.
Anyway, her husband owned some big high-end construction company and she was obviously pestering this man constantly to give me, this young stranger he didn’t know from a hill of beans, a good decent paying job.
She’d come into work breathless, throwing her purse down and whipping off her scarf. “Oh, Jules, thank god you’re here! My husband has a job over in Walnut Creek for you next week! You could lay tile, couldn’t you? My husband needs someone to lay tile! $15 an hour! You absolutely must take it!”
But I’d always beg off. After all, I already had a job, I was making my rent and expenses and best of all my writing was going well. I figured why jinx it with a lot of damnable hard work?
Even after I’d moved over to Oakland to be with Max this nice lady would phone me now and again to offer me work. By then I was broke and needed every penny. Now I was definitely open to suggestions. So one day the word came in: a children’s playground over in San Francisco on Harrison Street. Hauling debris. $9 an hour. Unskilled labor. Forget the Mexicans, they were doing me a favor as a white man. I took it and gladly.
I explained to Max and Roy, “I need me some decent work boots. I don’t wanna be wearing my good boots, they’d only get trashed and then where would I be?”
“I’ve got a pair of boots,” Roy said. “What size are you?”
“10 ½.”
“Bingo!”
Roy found them underneath the rubble in his room and hauled them out for me to inspect. They looked exceedingly cheap but I didn’t care.
“Where’d you get them?” I asked.
“Found em on the street, where else?”
That figured. But what the hell, they fit and the price was right, so I wore them in to work. The job wasn’t half-bad either, not too back breaking. But I had to trudge through a lot of standing water and do a lot of washing of the wheel barrows I was using and rinsing sludge off of work surfaces. The playground was actually up on the roof of an industrial building south of Market Street. This was back in the days when parents started seeking out private playgrounds for their little kiddies, places where parents had to buy memberships, places where the kids could romp around freely without having to fear some drooling pervert lurking in the shadows ready to kidnap and defile their precious offspring.
As the days went on in the job I found my feet getting sorer and sorer. I just thought it was the result of hard labor and didn’t think much of it. But finally one day my feet were killing me so much that when I got home I immediately slipped off the boots and socks to examine my feet more closely. They looked odd. They were whiter than I’d ever seen them. In fact they looked dead, like the feet of a corpse. I touched them and I couldn’t feel anything beyond a certain numbness. That scared me. I rubbed them and what happened next made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
The flesh of my feet just slipped right off the bone, easily, in layers, like the layers of a rotten onion. It was all dead flesh. It didn’t smell and it didn’t hurt but it was an absolutely horrifying spectacle. I dug at the skin and it just came off in gobs, gobs and gobs of dead flesh, oozing through my fingers like warm candle wax, enough to fill a mason jar.
I instantly knew what it was: trench foot. That old infantry affliction of World War I. The soldiers would be stuck in these watery hellhole trenches with cheap military-issue boots for months on end and their feet would begin to rot inside the boots. Now that’s what I had, rotting feet.
“For fuck’s sake!” I screamed and threw Roy’s cheap boots across the room.
I had to call in sick the next day. I couldn’t even stand for five minutes at a time, the pain was so bad. The husband at this construction company, he took my absence in stride until I told him the reason.
“You have what?”
The man had never heard of trench foot before. I explained it to him, or tried to, but apparently it was just too exotic for him to wrap his head around, it was too last century. I might as well have told him I had leprosy or black lung or polio. He hung up on me. After that I never heard from him or his wife again.
