Waiting for the Electricity (21 page)

“I also run a roofing business called Precision Roofing,” Merrick said.

“You have your own business?”

“It’s major stress. I always worry that one of my customers is going to say to me, ‘You said that you do a precise job, but this job is not precise!’ There’s a lot in a name, how we label something. I had this dream recently where I changed the name of my business to Merrick’s Good Enough Roofing. People should be happy with good enough. Of course I didn’t change the name because in reality who’s going to hire someone only good enough? But this dream was a blessing from the universe, the omniverse I mean, because it relieved some of that anxiety. I did decide to give up driving my truck everywhere and now I ride my bike to a job site and haul my roofing equipment in a cart behind. I have some anxiety, though, that the chemicals used in the roofing materials aren’t very eco. I wear this gas mask but no matter how tightly I adjust it, I can still smell the fumes from all that tar, and I’m thinking, man, this is going into the atmosphere. Some people are a little put off when I ride up on my bike. They expect some big guy with a truck. Isn’t that weird that people only trust you as a roofer if you have a big truck? So I start a job by driving up in my truck, get to know the guy, and then gradually start using my bike once I’ve delivered all the roofing to the site. I would have picked you up in my truck but yeah, my sister’s boyfriend is borrowing it.”

We got off the train on Market Street, a wide boulevard with brick tessellated sidewalks, newspapers fighting their way through the valleys of the tallest buildings I had ever seen.

“This is the financial district,” Merrick said. “But it’s kind of funky at night.”

We got on a bus, Merrick talking the whole time. “I’m thinking of getting out of roofing altogether because lately I’ve been feeling like I’m working for the man. I’d rather work for mankind. I have a friend who sells imported clothes from Thailand off his bicycle, he calls it a Thai-cycle. Get it?”

As I listened to Merrick I stared outside the window. All the streets were illuminated like the day before our presidential elections. When we got off the bus I tried to pay close attention to what Merrick was saying as he pointed out the street sign. “From this little hill you can see the towers of the Golden Gate, when it’s not so foggy. If you walk in that direction you’ll hit Geary. If you start to get homesick, you can speak Russian there. Buy Russian products.”

“We only get homesick in our own country,” I said.

We walked toward his house. “It’s the gray one there. But I have to warn you about one thing. I have a homeless guy living with me for a little while. I met him on the bus a couple of months ago. I got to talking with him, and he told me his whole life story, about how he grew up somewhere in the south. Georgia I think. Ha ha. Like you.” Merrick unlocked the metal gate. Behind were some brick stairs leading up to his door. I picked up my bag that Merrick had set down. “And his house burned down, something like that, he’s looking for his wife, or his kid, I forget, but he’s trying to find a job, but he can’t get himself cleaned up enough to find one. So I thought, man, I’ve felt like that before. So I invited him home and told him he could stay with me for a while. I had an extra bedroom because my girlfriend just moved out. There’s only one minor problem: he watches TV all day. I’m pretty busy during the day so I don’t know what programs he watches. Do you watch much TV?”

“The news.”

As he fumbled with the keys to his door at the top of the stairs,
he spoke a little more quietly. “I ordered one of those assemble-at-home dollhouse furniture kits to give him something to do, try to get him up on his feet. Oh shit, wrong key. You order these pieces from a catalog and then they pay you to put them together, to make little dollhouse rocking chairs or wardrobes, there’s even a DVD player, but I worked it out, oh I think this is the right key—they all look the same—and even if you’re working as fast as you can, you’re making like forty cents an hour.” He opened the door and whispered, “I spent a few nights assembling the pieces with him but I ended up doing all the work because his fingers are so stiff. Have you heard of fat finger syndrome? You can hang your jacket in this closet. I can’t kick him out because every day he’s like, ‘Jesus took pity on me through you, praise the Lord.’ That’s why there are dollhouse furniture pieces all over the floor. Watch out for them.” He put his finger to his lip, “I think Charlie’s sleeping. I told him he had to sleep in the living room on the couch.”

We tiptoed through the dark, down a hall.

“You’re probably exhausted right now. There’s the bathroom. You can sleep here.” He pushed open a door.

When he turned on the light, I saw a guitar on a blue plastic stand in the corner. A green blanket covered the bed next to the window. “I burnt some sage to sort of cleanse the room. Sleep in however late you need to, all day if you want. You don’t have to start the seminars until Monday. Oh, here are some matches if you want to burn some more sage. Or if you want to light some candles.”

“Please no candles. I do not like candles.”

“Suit yourself.” He shut the door behind him.

I lay down on the bed, still in my clothes, and contemplated the low ceiling that resembled Russian farmer cheese. Then I got up; hung up my clothes, my trousers, suit jacket, and tie in the closet; put the roll of tape and every other thing I owned on the half empty bookshelf, glancing at the books.
The Renaissance Guitar. The Surfer’s Encyclopedia. Building Bridges for Those Who Burn Them. Rise Up Singing. Raising Sheep the Modern Way. The Modern American Language Bible
. I opened the Bible and read, “And then
Jesus invited us over for a snack.” Interesting. I had never read the Bible before in English.

Merrick hadn’t updated the month of the calendar on the wall. January had a photograph of a sunset over the sea. I opened the window, leaned my head out, and looked down into a yard overgrown with greenery. The fog was too thick to see beyond that. Moisture curled off the leaves, the names of which I did not know. I put my head back inside and closed the window. I lay on the bed and considered the ceiling again.

Even though I had dreamed of traveling to the West ever since I had procured my coveted Western civilization law textbook, I had thought that in America I would still be in the same movie of my life, but with better lighting.

When I left that Georgian medieval matinee, I didn’t know that I would enter a new movie altogether, one in which I didn’t know any of the characters.

I took out a piece of paper. “Dear Tamriko,” I wrote. But I didn’t know how to continue so I quoted some lines of poetry from Shota Rustaveli:

Forgive me that I went from thee and thy command did not obey
.

No power had I to do thy will: enthralled, from thee I stole away
.

I fell asleep with the light on.

14.

I
WOKE UP LISTENING TO THE SLOP OF THE SEA.
T
HE ELECTRICITY WAS
on. I should use, I thought, this opportunity to fill up a water bucket. I opened my eyes and then remembered where I was. For the first time in my life, I felt homesick for the sea.

Merrick cooked pancakes for breakfast. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said.

I nodded.

“Wait until you taste these. I buy the mix down at Whole Foods. Actually, we call it ‘Whole Paycheck,’ but it’s the only place where I can find blue corn flour pancake mix. I like to add bananas and walnuts. Blueberries too for the antioxidants. Oh,” Merrick said, opening the freezer, “I guess I’m out of blueberries. Charlie,” Merrick called from the kitchen, “I’d like to introduce you to Slims. He’s from Georgia, not the state, the country. It’s part of Russia, right?”

“No. Not part of Russia,” I said.

Charlie came into the kitchen patting down his hair. I shook his hand.

“Charlie, if you eat stuff, that’s fine with me,” Merrick said, rummaging through the refrigerator. “You just need to tell me so that I can replace it. You’ll have a pancake with us, won’t you?”

“I’d rather have some bacon,” he said.

I looked inside the refrigerator. There were about a dozen bottles of beer labeled LOST COAST ALE. Maybe the Soviet propagandists were right about Americans and their beer. That was the dominating item. But the refrigerator was also filled with all kinds of vegetables: red peppers, cucumbers, and bunches of coriander—the types of vegetables we only eat in the spring and summer.

I thought about the time one winter when Tamriko had run out of vegetables and I had brought her some jars of tomatoes and eggplant, but she refused them. She had said that according to the Herbalife company eating vegetables in the wintertime is equivalent to stealing from the earth. Instead, she fed herself on strawberry jam and pickle juice. She slurped her vitamins from condiments. I tried to explain this to Merrick.

“She drank pickle juice? Like as a salad? Like in a bowl?”

“Well, from a spoon,” I said.

Merrick cracked some eggs into a bowl. “I hope you like my food. I’m not really into condiments but I have some mustard I think. I’m introducing Charlie to a new way of eating, actually to a whole new sustainable lifestyle,” he said. “Charlie doesn’t get out of the city much. I took him to a sustainable building conference up in Hopland where we designed a hut out of straw bales.” Merrick looked up from his pancake batter to make sure Charlie wasn’t still in the room and whispered, “When we were there Charlie said, ‘What? You all make a house out of straw? What kind of house is that?’”

“Yes, that is a little strange,” I said. “We usually use wood, or concrete, or stones.”

“No, I’m not saying it’s
normal
building material. It’s sustainable technology. It’s so well insulated you can heat it with a candle.”

“Yes, people in our villages do such things,” I said.

“But don’t you create alternative power in Georgia? Isn’t it a movement?”

“It’s illegal,” I said. “The government controls the electricity, turns it off most of the time, so that we must buy their oil to heat our houses. The villages almost always have homemade electricity though.
So I guess they’re alternative.” The frying pan splattered oil on my neck. “Is it usual for men to cook?”

“Sure,” he said. “When my girlfriend lived here, or I guess she’s my ex-girlfriend now, I did all the cooking.”

“Why did she leave?”

“It just didn’t work out. Have you heard the saying, ‘I’d rather be single than married to a psycho?’”

“No.”

He told me about how she would always become emotional, and how when he tried to cheer her up, she would say, “Don’t try to fix this. I just need to feel like this.” Perhaps Americans don’t like to fix things because everything works properly all the time? Anyway, in America, it seemed, women were just as emotional, but they wanted to have long conversations about it a lot. It’s the opposite in Georgia. The men are always wanting to talk about relationships and the women say, “I’m tired of talking about relationships.”

“Here, try them now while they’re hot,” he said, scooting a pancake onto my plate. “Charlie!” he called. “Come and eat.” When Charlie came into the kitchen, he sat down in a metal chair across from me and started eating, so I did too.

“Charlie, do you cook?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“So, this is the American weekend,” I said, biting into the pancake. “I have heard about the American weekend.”

Merrick turned on the radio. “Do you like jazz?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to imitate his language.

The American man passes his time on a Sunday with a big breakfast, listening to jazz and then playing folk songs on his guitar. It appears to be a prodigious activity. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and particularly songs about peace.

After Charlie and I had “stoked” ourselves with pancakes, Merrick said, “Slims, in your room there’s a book called
Rise Up Singing
. Could you get it for me? And Charlie, could you fold up your bed? I want to vacuum.” I got the book. Charlie folded up his bed back into a sofa and Merrick vacuumed up the dollhouse furniture pieces around it.

“Have a seat, Slims. Be at home here,” said Merrick. “I’ll bet you never heard these before,” he said flipping through his much marked-up spiral-bound book.

We sang “Yellow Submarine,” “I Am Changing My Name to Chrysler,” and “Waltzing Matilda,” and then Merrick cried out, “Here’s one for you, Slims, turn the page, it’s called, ‘When I First Came to This Land.’” He began to sing, “When I first came to this land, I was not a wealthy man, so I got myself a farm and I did what I could. And I called my farm ‘Muscle in My Arm.’ But the land was sweet and good and I did what I could.”

I debated whether to sing for Merrick a similar Georgian song by Raphael Eristavi, which goes:

Dust am I to dust I cling

I was born a rustic
.

My life is one eternal strife

and endless toil and endless woe

till life is gone I plow, I sow, I labor … on
.

With muscles strained
,

in all kinds of weather
,

I can hardly live on what I earn
.

And I remain tired and hungry
.

The owners of the land keep tormenting me
.

Even the little ant is my foe
.

For the people in the town
,

for the priests
,

for the villages, like I pig
,

I sweat and plow and sow
.

But then I decided I wouldn’t.

“Here’s one for you, Charlie,” Merrick cried out, “you’ll remember this one, come on now, ‘I ain’t got no home, I’m just rambling round, Just a wand’rin worker, I go from town to town. The po-lice make it hard wherever I may go, and I ain’t got no home in this world anymo’.” Merrick stopped playing. “But you got a home here, right bro?”