The window was open a little last night, and some cigarette smoke began to drift in from my downstairs neighbors. I was practicing my guitar, but as soon as I sensed the flavor of the smoke I was transported. I tripped into the past.

I was a construction worker, measuring and cutting drywall, working at the Bour house. I worked alongside Andy and Ben, but another troupe of laborers hung drywall elsewhere in the skeleton of the house. We were young and they were older. They were David, Loretto, Chris, and Wes.

Andy, Ben, and I would work through our morning and afternoon breaks so we could take an hour break for lunch. The rest of the workers would take smoking breaks in the morning and afternoon, but they would smoke the rest of the day anyway. Anyone could walk around that construction site blindfolded and tell where the chain-smokers were. Their skin and clothes reeked of tobacco—well, except for Chris. Chris’ skin and clothes reeked of tobacco and alcohol. He was drunk every day I ever saw him.

Chris would show up whenever he wanted to, wobbling on his bike with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip and mumbling some hard rock lyric. He talked dirty, listened and wailed along to metal and country-pop on the radio, and seemed to be impervious to pain. His fingers were always bloody somehow, and I don’t know how he did it. Once I accidentally drilled a Phillips bit through my left thumbnail, and I was out of commission for a half hour or so.

Chris, on the other hand, would repeatedly hammer his fingers, drill them, and slice them open with razor knives that we used to cut the drywall. He would just cuss and keep on working. Sometimes he would bring in some cup from a fast food restaurant, but I knew it was full of alcohol because of the way it smelled and the way he drank it.

Our contractor, Merv, would usually comment on the other workers to me. He would say things like, “Yep, he’s always drunk but he gets the job done.”

Chris and I had a few meaningful talks, mostly about things I never wanted to talk about. One of them ended up with Chris saying, “Well, I guess you’re a bigger man than I am if you don’t need to sleep with a woman to love her.” This was sort of a nightmare for me, because he was almost always bellowing everything he said.  

Chris wore almost the same thing every day. It was a gray, stretched-out t-shirt, blue jeans (dirty, of course), and beige work boots. Everything he touched smelled like alcohol, much to my dismay when he asked to borrow my cell phone. He had to call some sort of agency to arrange a meeting with his son. He was incredibly polite on the phone, but when he got off he would curse the mother of his son. He handed me back my phone and it was oily and potent. I might have gotten drunk just by putting it up to my face. I waiting until he was out of sight to wipe it on the underside of my t-shirt, with vigor.

Loretto was a quiet illegal Mexican immigrant who ate habañeros every day with his lunch, washing it all down with salted lemonade. He would give me Spanish lessons and would congratulate me when I could communicate with him in his native language. He called Andy, Ben, and David by different names. Andy was Dandy, Ben was Benz, and David was Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis, sung in a little ditty.

Loretto was a smoker too, but not as much as the other three. He was always cheerful, because, I supposed, he was earning money for his family. He was a Catholic, but believed that the Bible was all myth. He and I talked about the Bible on several occasions. He also shared his habañeros with me once.

We were in the garage, having lunch on stacks of drywall sheets. Andy, Ben, Loretto, and I talked about whatever came up in our lunchtime banter, until the conversation came around to Loretto’s peppers. I asked if I could try one, and Loretto said yes. I bit the pepper off at its stalk and told Ben that it was good and he should try one.

I held back my tears as the acids of the pepper saturated my taste buds, chewing the whole time. Ben put one in his mouth and bit, and that’s as long as I held my true reaction back. I fumbled for whatever liquid I could drink as Ben started turning red, jumping up, and doing whatever he could to alleviate the heat.

I had a good laugh amidst my habañero tears and red face, and so did Andy and Loretto. Ben wasn’t enjoying himself, but he got over it and our friendship suffered no harm. I still don’t know how Loretto ate two or three of the peppers every day.

Merv usually chuckled at things he saw Loretto do.

There were only a few times when I saw Wes’ mouth without a cigarette, it seemed. I think he was an Okie; at least he talked with the drawl. His speech was short, though, blurred and rapid: “Gimm’ thet thar ham’r.” He wore a dirty baseball cap over his dirty blond hair, always had sunglasses on, and wore his mustache long. His arms were too thin, with the veins and arteries protruding like mole tunnels. He looked like he was as old as Merv (in his 70s), but I’ll bet he was younger than 40.

The first time he came, Wes just showed up on a bike, I think, and with a big smile, assuming that Merv would put him to work. It was a little while after Andy and I had started working. Merv put him to work, but Wes didn’t last as long as everyone else. He was fired the first time because he was taking two hour lunches and then clocking in eight hour days. He apologized and later talked Merv into letting him work again. He lasted a little while until I exposed him for doing jobs he wasn’t supposed to be doing, jobs that were easy ways to pass the day.

Merv just shook his head and admitted, “I don’t know about him. He’s no good.”

David was Merv’s main worker, and David went through bouts of alternating bitterness and thankfulness toward Merv. Some days it would be, “Merv’s a good man. He’s pulled me out of so many bad situations and gave me work and let me earn good money.” Other days would be full of cussing.

He rolled his own cigarettes. There would be a pouch of cheap tobacco in his pocket and a wad of papers as often as he had money. Every few weeks he would claim he was quitting, but he never did. He also claimed he never drank, but I remember him complaining about hangovers.

His teeth were as rotten as his stories about his divorce experiences. Sometimes he would laugh when talking about his past and sometimes he would be furious. He and I had a subtle feud over the radio—he wanted it on the hardest rock station and I wanted it on something easier to listen to. That lasted until I bought a small CD player and branched off with Andy and Ben to work as a different group.

David would laugh his hoarse laugh and smoke through his breaks, and we could hear him laughing anywhere on the site. He was always advocating Metallica and Pantera, and condemning whatever music anyone else was listening to, with few exceptions.

I worked with David and Marv on another job after the Bour house, tearing off a roof of an East Bakersfield house. On that hot roof David and I talked plenty about life and sundry issues, until he blew up at Merv over some little thing. Merv fired him or he quit on the spot—it wasn’t clear what happened. There was a lot of yelling. David fumed around, smoking like a steamboat, cussing all the words, and threw his shovel off of the roof. We used shovels to pry up the old shingles.

Then David decided to prove his value to Merv and began to work feverishly. He yelled at me, telling me that I needed to work like a man, but I kept on working like I had been—not wearing myself out, prying off the shingles steadily. There was an unspoken threat in this. He held his shovel up for a while as he screamed at me, and I didn’t even spare him a frightened face. I kept on prying up shingles.

After that, I gathered my wages and told Merv that I wouldn’t be able to come back to work for him as long as David was there. He understood.

The smoke still lingers after years. As it wafted through the window last night, I looked backwards in time and felt like I did back then: in the world, in the heat of the semiarid outskirts of town, and in the paths of different lives.