It was the summer of ‘99. To earn some money before college I lined up a job working for my town as a member of the paint crew. The job was simple: paint over the graffiti on the school. We lived in an upper-middle class suburb so the graffiti was mostly harmless. Stuff like which equestrian team is better or whose dad was on cocaine. Nothing offensive, but for whatever reason the school wanted it gone. I guess I did too when I saw my dad’s name on the wall. My dad had never done a drug in his life; he just laundered money for the cartel. I mean, I’m no Banksy but I feel like graffiti should at least be accurate.
We painted over the graffiti in record time. Seven minutes and 36 seconds! The principal, Mr. Carter, asked how that was possible and pointed out there was more graffiti than when we started—”paint crew rulez!”—but we swore up and down that none of that “new” graffiti was there seven minutes and 35 seconds ago. He seemed skeptical and angry with us—“lousy bureaucrat,” we mumbled and then spray painted over the town seal—but after he washed that off and threatened to fire us he agreed to give us another chance. “Go repaint the chipped paint on walls outside,” Mr. Carter said. “Just the walls, nothing more, nothing less. This is your last chance, and I mean it.” I’d known Mr. Carter for almost eight minutes so I knew what he really meant: go paint with reckless abandon. And paint with reckless abandon we did.
We started repainting the walls like he said and then moved on to the parking lot. One teacher who saw us working didn’t like the numerical system we assigned to the new parking spaces—”Fractions have no place in parking structures!”—so we started painting teachers who dared to question our methods. The art teacher got it worst of all. Not only did he yell at us for painting his parking spot into oblivion, he also criticized our technique. Sure, he was right. Our use of pointillism was dated and clumsy, but he wasn’t the boss of us. It was our way or the highway, hippie, we told him. We didn’t have to answer to anyone.
I guess the art teacher had connections in city hall because by mid-morning the town hired someone we did have to answer to: Mr. Hess. Good old Mr. Hess.
He was everything you’d want in a boss: often asleep and utterly devoid of emotion. The only time we ever saw him show emotion was when a bird flew in front of his van as he left for lunch and he yelled, “Up yours, bird!” We felt bad for the bird. Mr. Hess really shouldn’t have parked in that tree. But then again, Mr. Hess did have the right of way.
The teachers complained to Mr. Hess, but he didn’t care. Mr. Hess didn’t care about anyone or anything. When the teachers came to talk to him, he pretended he only spoke Spanish. When they got the Spanish teacher to come talk to him, he pretended to only speak English. When they got the English teacher to talk to him, Mr. Hess corrected his grammar and then pretended he was invisible. “Invisible people don’t deal with complaints,” a figureless voice boomed. “Complaints are for the tangible.”
By the end of the day there was almost nothing left to paint. The school walls, the school parking lot, the school field, all of it repainted. We tried repainting the horizon, but it kept disappearing into the distance, so we called it a day. When we reported back to the principal, he fired us on the spot. Looking back I can’t say I blame him. We used up a year’s supply of paint in one day and the vice-principal hadn’t been seen since he visited the M.C. Escher Memorial Stairwell we painted. I learned my lesson though. On account of the paint fumes I forget what that lesson was, but it had something to do with not letting birds get in the way of your dreams or lunch. Thanks, Mr. Hess.