Many years ago, during a long winter and spring right outside Chicago, I worked for a guy named Bernie. Bernie was loud, profane, harsh, and magnetic, and I think he’d agree with every part of that characterization. I was the grunt on Bernie’s small, proudly nonunion construction crew, and during that stretch, Bernie was much more than my boss. The way he made us work, and the things he said while we worked, overwhelmed me. I can’t remember the houses we built or what I got paid or the carpentry I learned; it’s Bernie I remember, and especially the things Bernie said. Most of those things are not fit for this magazine, but I remember them clearly, in part because at the end of each day, even though I was worn out and my body ached and it was already dark, I would write them down.
Here’s how I remember us doing the work: Bernie and Kevin did the skilled stuff, Paul helped them, and while those three built houses from the ground up, I moved a lot of lumber, cleaned scrap, laid out and gathered tools, climbed ladders, lugged around the generator and the cords. Generally I tried to keep my toes and fingers from freezing off, to do what I was told, and to escape Bernie’s ire.
I didn’t do so well with any of these. Bernie would constantly leave what he was doing to hover over me and belittle me. He would tell me that if I cared at all about him or my pride, I should quit the job immediately. Anytime I put something down, Bernie was there, telling me in so many expletive-laden words how wrong and incompetent my work was, or I was. And it wasn’t just me. Anyone he saw as failing to keep up with him—so, everyone—would get the same treatment. One of his favorite—and gentlest—things to say when he felt we were dragging was “You guys makin’ love or workin’?”
But mostly Bernie would say things about other people—people who weren’t out there with us, people with a different skin color, different bodies, or different ways of living. None of these things are worth quoting here, but all of them hung in the frigid Chicago air, were scribbled down later, and still occupy an uncomfortable space in my head.
In addition to the things Bernie said, he had an unbelievable facility for every task in front of him. I remember watching him drive nails home in two strokes while swinging the hammer upward in cramped spaces from the top of a ladder. He was tireless, skilled, and industrious. He had the stamina of a sled dog and was a demon of a carpenter.
Most days I didn’t feel ready to go to work. But I went, and all through December, January, and February, my fingertips and toes froze and thawed, froze and thawed.
Paul left when I was three months into the job. His wife had been laid off, and he needed benefits, which Bernie didn’t offer. Kevin told me that in his five years with Bernie, he’d worked with about fifty guys. Only two had lasted more than six months.
Not long after Paul’s exit, Bernie started giving me more space and more skilled tasks. In the middle of March, he offered me an additional buck an hour and surprised me by saying something complimentary. But he would still go after Kevin and me, and even though I had figured out how to respond with a sarcasm that he seemed to like and that I found a certain enjoyment in, Bernie’s ripping on us wore me down. What wore me down more, and what I never figured out how to effectively confront or navigate, was his relentless talk about anyone but his kind of White man.
My last day was at the end of April. Bernie was Bernie right up through the end. His final words to me on the site were “Well, it’s been a slice.”
Bernie and I were similar in a few obvious ways (both men, White, from Chicago), but in so many other ways we were different. Yet for five cold months I chose to build houses with Bernie, eat most of my meals near him, spend most of my waking hours with him—and even though I happily left BP Carpentry for other jobs and other places many years ago, I’ve somehow still been carrying him around with me.
It seems clear to me now that my experience working with Bernie filtered into different parts of my subsequent work, attempting to create conditions for people to hear one another and to feel seen. And I still hear him very clearly in my head when I put something down where it doesn’t belong. But what isn’t as clear, and what I still wonder about, is how much of what I try not to do and not to say stems from that slice that I shared with Bernie.
Adam Davis is executive director of Oregon Humanities.
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