Throwing lunches off the roof.
The archetypal struggle between the young and careless and the older and cautious.
I used to live like a younger man. Nothing held back, Admirable. But mistaken.
As a younger stronger man I worked up on the roofs of Sydney in the scorching sun, as a roofer.
Hard as a coffin nail.
Like all proper construction jobs, we gave each other no end of harassment.
Things sometimes got deadly as detailed in my seven part series “The Life and Times of the Cowboy coppersmith”.
Well I hadn’t graduated to copper at this point. I was 23 and just a shitbird slate “lugger”. It was my job to haul stacks of slate on my shoulder up long ladders and carefully walk it along the roof to be laid by the real “slaters”.
I would lug about 5 tons of slate up a roof and then go back to the apartment and do weights, pound this cheap protein powder called mega mass 5000 and take huge dumps.
I was strong and powerful. Rocksolid… virile as fuck and had hair.
A big proud black mane like a beastly gothic lion.
Glory days, well they'll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days…
I digress…
So up there on the roof working away in the sun we would hustle till lunch time… which was around mid day… no set time… just when the shakes of starvation hit.
I really looked forward to these lunches, there was a whole world of shops and bakeries in Sydney that catered to the working man.
Many just went with the classic Aussie meat pie and a coke, or a burger fries and a maybe a powerade...
If you were a tight penny pinching fuckwit you would make your lunch and bring it and not leave the worksite… sadly stuffing it down quickly before getting back to work…
Not me!
I churned through about 30% of my pay on extravagant lunches because I was living my best life before that was a thing.
Huge greek salads, Large flat white coffees, big bits of battered snapper, crab sticks, sweet potatoes fries, slices of cheese cake, lobster bisque with french bread, steak sandwiches… maybe a delicious thai duck curry with a side of sushi!
Or… the crowning glory… a fisherman’s basket served with a salad not fries, consisting of mussels, fish, crab sticks, scallops, prawns and calamari.
The lunch equivalent of kicking you wallet right in the nuts.
One guy always harassed me about spending my money on these bountiful lunches.
I’ll call him Shitbrick.
He was a real person, had a truck, had money, didn’t live on a floor in a room with two other guys, and didn’t skateboard to work…
He also had misery, a hostile attitude, no woman, few friends and his lunch’s were tea in a thermos. Brown rice. Carrot sticks. Tuna. An apple.
I was too happy, had a positive attitude, many great relationships with healthy Aussie Gals as detailed in the story series “Operation Finnish Princess”, many good friends and as you have read my lunches were the food of the Gods.
-
The conversations went like this:
Shitbrick: How much money are you wasting on these big lunches a week?
Me:Dunno… I love these lunches, they make my day.
Shitbrick: Probably like 100 dollars.
Me: More like 200.
Shitbrick: You should be saving that money.
Me: I could die falling off the roof tomorrow… I want to die with my belly full of scallops, not carrot sticks.
Shitbrick: You could be saving 1000 dollars a month, your being stupid wasting all your money.
Me: Oh My GOD! This fish is SO GOOD. Each bite is better than the previous bite!
Shitbrick: Your a fucking idiot.
Me: OH WOW. This is likely the best latte I have ever tasted… each sip is actually making me stronger.
Shitbrick: Your wasting your money, you will never get ahead.
Me: I’m already ahead, just from eating this amazing food. Im super happy and tonight my hot girlfriend is gunna wash this slate dust off me in the shower at her rich parents place and then get pounded for fucking hours while I drink her dads expensive scotch.
You will be at home, chopping up carrot sticks and boiling rice all alone, thinking about me fucking ruling it and then you’ll have a miserable crywank before getting a sensible early night.
And so on … I would keep escalating it to see if Shitbrick wanted to have a fight on a two story roof.
He always broke off the conversation before that point, with a sigh and an shaking head eye roll.
-
Then one day something amazing happened.
I wore him down with my enthusiasm and description of how amazing each bite was.
He opened his lunch box and the gross fishy reek of tuna wafted up to him… the carrot sticks looked particularly dry today… and the rice was grey and unappealing…
He looked over at my lunch, a full fisherman’s basket and a tall quad shot Mocha to die for.
I saw intense mental turmoil roiling inside him.
Shitbrick: Fuck this! I’m going to get a good lunch!
And in a rage brought on by years of groveling self denial he threw his entire lunch off the roof!
Dry orange sticks spun end over end and rice flew everywhere like lame tan confetti.
Without looking back he hustled off the roof and down the road.
He came back grinning ear to ear.
He still cheaped out and only got fish and chips and small salad. No drink.
We sat there eating without him trying to smash me down and without me retaliating to the point of a roof fight.
He seemed kind of happy with it… it was hard to tell…
When he was done I asked:
Me: How was it?
Shitbrick: It was 12 dollars.
He spent the rest of the day stressing over his lost 12 dollars.
Spaz.
I went on in life. Partying and blowing my money, loving every moment of it.
Later in life I was to become a financial advisor with a wife and kids and started going nuts when they left the lights on, saying “I’m not made of electricity”.
But I still sit here in my office and wistfully remember my crowning achievement.
The time I worked my ass off for six months- as detailed in the Cowboy coppersmith Series.
I saved up over 30 grand Canadian in 2003.
$30,000 in 2003 is worth $46,364.96 today.
And I fucking Waxed the LOT in six months partying about Toronto and Vancouver island, like some kind of latter day dandy.
I regret nothing.
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When I was working as a hammerhand my boss used to scarf down these kind of lunches every day and often second lunch at smoko too. He was getting paid ten dollars an hour more than me so he would always want to knock off around 3 p.m. To be fair he was a machine who could do two men's work in three quarters of a day. I just basically tried to make myself useful and even though there was no way I could keep up, I tried not to embarrass myself too much. I got the one big arm one small arm like a fiddler crab thing so I would always make a muscle with my right bicep if I wanted to show off. In his spare time my boss would cycle 300 km for fun. Then later he became a vegan. I couldn't understand the ins and outs of that energy equation. He had used to eat two meat pies at a time and now it was only tamari almonds etc.? (I did know a plumber who only ate raw vegan food for a decade until one day he got too hungry and cracked and ate a mussel fritter.)
Anyway recently I saw my old boss for the first time in a decade or so and he looked exactly the same as before. My friend the Farmer says when he was working on a road gang in England in his mid-thirties he used to get through half a loaf of bread, a bunch of bananas, and a quart of skim milk per day, and still weighed 74kg. He was also spending his entire weekends dancing non-stop to hard house though. Don't know what the moral of the story is except that physical work requires a massive amount of fuel and you might as well live it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j58V2vC9EPc
1979 till 1989, my glory years working in London, making money hand over fist and splurging the lot on alcohol, drugs and a good time…. I had, what we called then… champagne tastes and beer money, I was never going to be rich but by fuck I was going to be happy.