The life and Times of the Cowboy Coppersmith. PART I.
I am the Cowboy Coppersmith, and this is my story.
Me after a normal 12 hour day in -15C. Oakville Toronto. I smoked King-sized Filterless Cloves like a wild working class gothic beast. The were banned in Canada one week after I started coughing blood.
Sometimes the stars align.
AUTHORS NOTE: These following stories, I wrote the guts of them at the time of their unfolding… but I have edited them up a bit.
If it slips into present tense it’s because that's how it was as I wrote it…
Its gunna probably jump back and forward between tenses… parts of the following stories were sent as as emails to my friends back home…friends who never replied because most people are fucking useless cunts.
I had met the love of my life in the USA and had gotten engaged, as detailed at the end of Operation Finnish Princess.
My brother moved to the USA from NZ in 91 and married a coked up nurse in West Palm FL.
My Sister moved over and Married a guy who wore a gold chain - in Ft Lauderdale in 95 . It was easy for her. Just pick a guy 10 years older and shake ass.
Me… after the events in Operation Finnish Princess, I got over in 2004 and stayed with my sister and husband where they lived in Sacramento, capital of California.
Lame by LA and San Francisco Standards… but I was just visiting my sister on the way to Finland, to marry a hot Fin… as detailed prior…
But having been raised on American Shows and blond Californian 90210 fantasies… I felt I would be super remiss if I diddnt at least have a romance or two…. before locking it down in marriage…
So I rode her bike out to the mall, trying to find someone who wanted me to become their latest bad decision.
The following occurred all in one day.
Big Goth Gal who worked at starbucks…, way to eagar. Called her mum and had her come round to the store to meet me… what the fuck. NOPE.
Waitress at a TGI Fridays. I came from NZ, we don’t have tipping.
I TOTALLY misconstrued her tip grinding super friendliness and chattiness as hot blooded romantic interest.
I proceeded to leave NO TIP as I didnt even know what that was, and then ask her out. She looked at the check and then at me, like I was a fuckin alien…turned and walked off scowling….
I left TGI Fridays with a belly full of fatty Merica meats, but a brain full of confusion. NOPE.
That night my sister took me to a Halloween Party and I met a Single mum, 5 years older than me whos Ex was in jail. YES!
I stayed at her place, fixing things around the house, being a super cool pseudofather to her son and going to the Mall, Blockbuster, and the newly opened and amazing place called Whole Foods, in a loop.
I filled the big American Fridge with food and took a photo of it to send to friends back in NZ.
EMAIL SUBJECT LINE: TAKE THAT! I’VE FUCKING MADE IT!
I could hear them now.
“Did you hear that Wez is shacked up with some blond bird over in California?”
“NO!”
“Yeah… and he has a whole fridge full of food!”
“I always knew he would make it”
I was reminded of the New Zealand pop song by ten band VOOM. that went
Everyone’s going off to Sunny Califoni.
Everyone flying off, to dance in the Sun.
Everyone’s going off to Sunny Califoni.
But were not.
Were staying behind because we cant afford it….
and we love our dark little rainy island.
Vooms big NZ hit - RELAX.
Fun fact. I met the guy above, I got the painting job I was doing in the story How I beat Starbucks” from him.
After 5 nights with her I proposed.
Me: “You know… the only way I will be able to stay in the US is if we get married….”
Her: Three second pause… “OK”
Me: “Sweet.”
My big plan was to head to Canada, as I was born there as you know from such stories as “ My First Best Friend Tard Boy.”
I would work hard and make a ton of money and bring it back to the USA for a great wedding and to start my amazing new Merica life.
I google searched “Copperwork Companies Canada” and found one!
I sent them an email and told them I was a professional coppersmith, and I sent them photos of the dome. Yes the dome detailed in the story THE DOME.
I was not a pro. I was a talker. I was a Cowboy in the full sense of the Australian slang term.
Cowboy: noun
The word cowboy is used to describe somebody who is not good at their job, usually unreliable types, ads for carpenters will often have "no cowboys".
This term is used in a derogatory sense in the world of work to describe someone who cuts corners, ignores proper procedures, and takes unacceptable risks to get a job done.
—
How did I know that I was a talker and not a pro at anything? My Dad told me :)
Once when I was a hard-partying 23-year-old concrete mixer guy, I had gone back to NZ from Australia with my big gangsta roll of brightly colored plastic Auzzie money to play “breakfast buying big daddy” to my old friends…. and I was visiting my childhood home and my Father.
I had left the house, but had forgotten something… I went back in and from the kitchen, I overheard one of my Dad’s rough as fuck biker friends say kind of carefully…
“So that was your son? … What does he do…? ”
My Father: “ Yeah….” Sounding like a blend of 70% uncertainty and 30% disappointment….
“Hes….. a …. he’s … a … he’s a talker…”
Then my Dad perked up a bit and his voice went to 97% Pride 3% confusion…
“You should see the women he brings here… wheeeee doggie… he has them standing over there at the counter in a mini skirt making him breakfast…”
A product of the 70s my old man was, and the fact that I had a woman in a mini skirt in the kitchen making me breakfast at 23 was a prideful moment for him as a father.
I was a bit short on providing my Dad with prideful moments… as you can guess from my lifestyle detailed in my other stories…
These mini-skirted women were not making me breakfast out of any sort of subservient gender role rubbish. It was 1999 and they were probably just hungry and were in the kitchen making breakfast without me as I was still asleep because I’m as lazy as fuck.
But that’s not how my dad saw It and that was fine by me.
Sadly I think this may have been one of the only proud things he ever said about me and it wasn’t to me directly. I never forgot it. I hung onto that moment… and thought, “I’m gonna make you proud Dad! That’s what I am! I’m a TALKER!
So…. back to the talking…
I flew to Toronto, rolled up to the company, and started work with them.
Like a true legend Cowboy I had, boots, a leather jacket…very little money, and nowhere to live so I asked the boss if I could live in the workshed.
As you hopefully know from my previous story Gutter Boss, I am trained to sleep on any flat surface, so this carpet-covered bench used to fold the copper was perfect.
Here is a picture of my bed.
It was very very cold. Winter as fuck. Canada. You can die. But I slept under the heater vent and in all my snowboarding clothes so I was warm.
I also stank pretty bad but only under the clothes.
On my first day of work, I had not expected it to be so cold in the winter of Canada…
It got to – 15 C up on the roof and my hands and face were numb in minutes, a great incentive to work hard … you find yourself arguing with people over who will race up the ladder to get the forgotten hammer.
They put me on a 12-foot-long plywood dormer and said, “You know what to do eh?”…
“OH yeah..Sure.” I said.
So I had to copper-clad the whole thing including soldering.
There I was… a cowboy posing as a professional (far better at convincing others of my ability than convincing myself), yet real cowboys surrounded me. They didn’t give a shit about their job. I was rolled out as a highly trained bigshot.
I immediately went into a confusion.
I survived by taking measurements and getting started with what I knew and then calling my old actually professional friends in Australia at night and asking what the fuck to do. Taking detailed notes. I learned fast.
Cowboy 1: Bruce, Chain smoker, brown teeth, balding, has a big handlebar mustache, wears a trucker hat. I have never seen him eat food. Only drinks coffee.
He is grim as fuck. He has a cd with 100 farting, spewing, and pooing noises on it and he likes to play it as we eat lunch. That is when he laughs. Always ready with a snide remark or a put-down.
He is evil and must be watched.
Cow Boy 2: Jim. Former stripper and playgirl model. Got a model girlfriend pregnant and quit his life of partying for one of being a good hard hard-working dad. He got a job at the company and had never done anything like it before. He makes his way by whacking things with his hammer, asking Bruce how to do things, and keeping busy by cleaning up the site and going and getting coffee.
He has heaps of nice tools that I always borrow as I have the hand-me-downs of the hand-me-downs.
A ripped pouch sewn up with dental floss, an old cracked wooden handled hammer fixed with glue and tape, the rustiest and most grease-coated pair of snips ever, a cutter with half an inch of blade left, and a tape measure with a broken spring (and of course, it’s in inches, which I had never encountered).
Jim’s car is always broken so Bruce picks him up in the work truck.
I’m working with them but they are not too friendly. Jim is nice enough but he goes sour quickly due to Bruce’s EVIL and corrupting influence.
Anyway, I managed to copper-clad the dormer by using a synthesis of what I knew, the phone calls I made, and the duplication of the completed one over the other side of the building.
I had to sneak over and have a look on the pretense of seeing if Jeff needed a hand chipping inch-thick ice off the roof.
So yeah I was mostly hanging off the side of a 70-degree roof, which was coated in thick ice, with howling freezing wind ripping around me as I struggled to put this stuff called ice/water (it was like a tar paper stuff) and copper panels on the bloody dormer. I was roped on for my own personal safety. It was not suggested by anyone.
The company has a policy “Safety ropes are optional but if you slip then you were fired as you were going off the roof, at the precise moment you passed the gutter edge.
It was a terrifying mind and nerve-wracking day that taxed me to the end and prompted me to write this story as a tribute to how a Cowboy who arrives via an email can flourish in such harsh conditions. Carving out a little igloo of a home for himself among the rough and ready wild men of Ontario.
I sleep on a bench in a work shed all alone in Canada.
I work outside in the super-freezing weather all day long.
I eat lunch from a weird food truck and chili for dinner at a place called Tim Hortons.
I am the Cowboy Coppersmith and this is my story.
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