First Job

$40. Is what my father offered.   $40 dollars for my first paying job. $40 to tar the roof of his store downtown. $40.  It was early summer, I was turning 13 years old and had saved nearly $20 in all the years of getting a small allowance.  Now I was about to triple my funds by merely doing a roof painting job for my dad.  What a deal.  I was imagining being flush with cash as I strolled to the pier to play baseball pinball for hours during our upcoming summer vacation to Surfside beach, just south of Myrtle Beach SC.  I could buy three T-shirts and have plenty of dough left for endless arcade games.  This would be great.

On that first day, Dad climbed the ladder with a 5 gallon tin bucket of tar.  He carried it to the far corner of one of five sections I was to coat with this tar.  He pried the lid off the tar can with a Phillips head screwdriver, screwed a new brush head into what looked like a broom handle, dropped the brush into the liquid tar, turned it a couple times to throughly coat the brush, then quickly plopped it to the roof surface and began moving the tar about. The tar left a shiny black coat next to the dull gray of some 4000 square feet of roof surface I was to do.   “That’s all you do” he offered.  “Take your time”.

Better words have never been spoken.

It took me the better half of the summer to complete that job.

And as fate would have it, the restaurants I owned would have roofs that, you guessed it, had flat roofs which from time to time would need tarring.  I had become rather skilled with the material.  In fact, years later when I began painting, my wife and mentor came downstairs to look at an abstract piece I was struggling with.  “I love some of the color schemes and combinations but it just seemed too much of one thing.”  I pined.   

“You can make the parts of the painting you don’t like go away” she offered.

“Go away?”  I asked

Sharon nodded to the bucket of tar I had amongst my other discarded house paints.  “Cover up what you don’t like, try it” .

So I grabbed a flat scraper and the gallon of thick tar, and then disappeared. Not physically, but there are moments, and here I am reminded of being on the kitchen line, a slew of tickets suddenly appear and I would be faced with two choices, freeze and stumble, or slip into a state where the subconscious speaks only to the body, a zone, a state of flow where self doubt melts as the soul works uninhibited.  It’s a high.  An elevated state and when I came to with tar covered hands and cloths, I had finished this painting.  As an artist, this was my first job.