Bee Inside a Bullet

Congrats, you snagged the one job in the East Bay that didn’t require a resume during the application process. Before you left Milwaukee, the ex-hippie framebuilder who let you hang around his shop told you never to trust anyone who required a resume, which is why you spent the better part of your first month in California couch surfing at the apartments of friends of sort of friends and bumming around Telegraph during the day. You tried angel dust for the first time and went to heaven, but were glad when you got the call. The job’s exactly what you wanted: knocking out the finishing work on bicycle frames. You have a three-frame-a-day quota, which is good because you don’t trust things like W-2s and Social Security and taxes. You like to stay off the government’s record.

You work in a small yurt behind Clay’s Berkeley bungalow in the hills west of the Gourmet Ghetto. He shows you the stack of China-built frames that you have to braze rack mounts and cable stops onto. He tells you to clean up the sloppy brazing on the dropouts and lugs to make the frames look like they were built in Japan. He plans to tell customers the frames were built by a famous Japanese builder who has been previously reluctant to sell his frames in the States. Clay shows you the jig you have to work with—a homemade job that he cobbled together with two-by-fours and whatever hardware he could find at the True Value. There’s an alignment table too, but you’re sure it’s out of alignment itself.

When Clay retreats back to his bungalow, you stand there a moment and look at the pile of estate-sale brushes and files and other supplies. You note the short distance between the small workbench and the jig. You take the tape measure off the bench and draw the tape out to measure the diameter of the yurt you will be working in. The diameter measures eleven feet, so effectively you’re working in an eight-by-eight shop because the yurt is round and nothing can be put against the walls. You’re reminded of the tiny efficiency you rent with your new girlfriend and how she’s excited you both may be able to move to a more suitable living situation now that you’re employed and all.

She works in a psychology lab at UC Berkeley, the only job she could find after she graduated with a B.A. in French. She lied on her resume and said she was a Psych minor and they hired her as a low-level lab assistant. There’s some professor up there doing experiments on bees and she’s responsible for knocking them unconscious with ice and cramming them into bullet casings. She has been at the job for nearly a year and is starting to show signs of rather unconventional behaviors, behaviors unconventional to you at least, by bringing home small groups of committed polyamorists who close-talk you in the corners of your already cramped apartment.

“See, Rob, it’s a lifestyle,” they say. Last night there was one woman who tried to redirect the conversation to things less polyamorous and instead seemed very much interested in your new vocation.

“Fascinating. I’d like to hear more about it sometime,” she said. She smiled and waited for you to respond, but instead you nodded and slipped away to the bathroom to drink one of the many expensive Danish beers they’d brought and listen for how many times your girlfriend laughed a little too hard.

When you heard them all leaving, you listened to her apologize for you. “He puts a lot of pressure on himself, but you can see why the emotional support just isn’t there.”

Later, you didn’t bring up your general discomfort with polyamorists in close quarters.  Now you’re beginning to regret moving in with her after only knowing her a month, but that’s the Bay Area way, apparently, because rent’s a grand a month for a one-room dump with a hot plate for a kitchen. When she comes home alone at night, the good nights, she cooks you both a meal of something noodle-based on the hotplate and hums and rolls a bullet casing around her mouth while you watch the woman across the street do yoga in her front yard. And when dinner’s over, you and your girlfriend climb into bed early and fuck and you fall asleep with the faint flavor of brass in your mouth.

You work your way through the tools and jigs to the small window on the yurt’s door, the only source of natural light in the place. Across the yard, beyond the clusterfuck of sunflowers and mums and miscellaneous wildflowers, Clay sits in a weathered wicker chair, reading the paper. He sips an espresso from one of those little white cups that you see so many of the bo-bos around Berkeley drinking out of. You wonder if it tastes any better than the black coffee you buy every morning at the BP on Ashby. Your framebuilder friend in Milwaukee told you never to trust anyone who drinks anything but black coffee from a gas station. Clay pulls his hair back into a ponytail and pours himself another espresso out of an aluminum stove-top pot and you know he’s a jackass and doesn’t care if this framebuilding deal makes any money or not. He’s one of the many Berkeley-style idlers you’re starting to notice around town. They all have money, but no jobs and anyone from anywhere but here would wonder how these people have any kind of money. Old money, Goldrush or timber money, maybe.

You move back to the jig where Clay’s set up the first frame you have to work on for the day. He’s rigged a kind of fixture to hold the cable stops in place with vice grips and a few blocks of wood. He’s already applied the flux and all so you’re almost ready to go. You put the brazing goggles on and turn the gas on and spark the torch. He’s laid out a bunch of old brazing rods of different sizes, none of them correct, so you pick up the one with the smallest gauge and turn to the jig. This is why you came to the Bay Area. You wonder what you’d look like to someone standing outside, say, staring through the yurt’s little window. You think of the old school image of Tom Ritchey that started this whole bike thing, your life always moving toward framebuilding. You think of how Tom Ritchey looked healthy and rustic and happy fillet brazing a road frame in his cottage-style workshop. How the years of framebuilding supplies hanging from the redwood rafters in the background made you, even at age ten, want to have a workshop crowded with such history. You wonder if you look like him standing in the yurt in your second-hand brazing goggles and frayed black t-shirt and torn jeans, waving the brazing torch around.

The yurt heats up in a hurry and you question how safe it is to be working in such a space. Dried redwood floors and frame, waxed canvas cover—the place wouldn’t cut it with OSHA inspectors, that’s for sure. You’ll need to avoid your usual carelessness with the lit brazing torch, how you have a tendency to wave it around while working and in conversation. But no one will be visiting you, so the torch shouldn’t be a problem. What if the place did go up? Clay wouldn’t save you. He’d stand in his garden and take a few sips from his espresso cup and watch the place burn with you inside. You wouldn’t know how to get out because the door is the only way out and it would be a flap of flaming fabric. Maybe you could cut your way out. You’ll need to buy a good knife for such purposes and sharpen it regularly. Yes, Clay definitely wouldn’t save you. He’d stay calm as he watched you, his business, burn. Maybe that’s his plan—to wait until you burn the place down and find a way to collect the insurance money off the whole deal. Maybe he’s done this before and that’s why he doesn’t really have to work.

You turn the torch off. You won’t tell your girlfriend about your unsafe working conditions when you get home tonight. This sort of thing excites her, as do your stories about sleeping in Dumpsters and beater cars when you lived in Milwaukee, and she’ll invite another group of polyamorists over, more eccentric ones who dress in pirate costumes in their leisure time, and ask you to tell them about your new job as they crowd around you. Instead, when she asks how your first day went you’ll shrug and say work is work. You won’t touch her lower back as usual when you pass her on your way to the sink, just to let her know it may be ending soon. You don’t think she’s capable of picking up on such clues anyway. You tend to do these subtle things when you’re thinking about ending a relationship. You do them for yourself. She won’t notice and instead will ask you if you are interested in a peanut butter and honey sandwich, which is your usual break from the noodles. She has this bee obsession now and has started using honey whenever it is even slightly appropriate. The sandwiches are her preferred means of honey intake. You know this because she pours the honey on. She sits at the little cafe table against the kitchen window and chews on the sandwich while telling you a bunch of random facts about bees. Like how they carry an electrostatic charge.

You know some unique facts now too, thanks to your new job. Clay gave you a comprehensive history of the yurt as part of the orientation process, complete with information about how yurts relate to his own cultural heritage. He told you that the word for yurt in Turkmen can mean “black house” or “white house,” depending on the quality of the yurt. You asked him which his would be and he doesn’t answer your question directly. “My yurt is top-shelf, custom built by my Turkish friends.” Clay is half Turkish, his mother’s side. He tells you that yurts were used by nomads in Central Asia, packed up and moved around, but his yurt is staying put.

You go back over to the window. Clay’s smoking a joint and you make a mental note to search the garden for any roaches on your way out. Clay is the type of Berkeley lush who doesn’t smoke his joints down, so you’re hoping for an added bonus every day. Maybe he’s doing you a favor because he knows you’re in a tough spot and live in an apartment tinier than the yurt and have a bee-obsessed girlfriend with polyamorous interests and that she plans to take you with her into this opaque philosophy of love. Maybe he knows that you have a hard enough time showing affection for one person, let alone loving three. Maybe Clay’s not that bad of a guy and that’s why he didn’t need a resume—he already knew you have lived in five states in two years and haven’t held a job for more than three months. He already knew you prefer the neo-nomad lifestyle and always move in with girls who have at least one quality unattractive to you so you end up going through a tough breakup and have an excuse to relocate.

You could move. You could tough it out for a few weeks while you get everything organized. Your girlfriend wouldn’t notice because she’s too busy recruiting polyamorist groups to bring over to your apartment and convert you. You could bail, hitch a ride out to someplace less populated, like Wyoming, and find a job taking care of land owned by a guy like Clay. Maybe Clay has a friend with some land and a half dozen sheep and an A-frame cabin you can take care of for a few months. You could offer to make repairs to the roof of the A-frame. Ideally the place wouldn’t have running water and you’d have to hike out to the well every morning to hand pump enough water for the day. You could start drinking tea, maybe even grow your own tea leaves. You could drink tea at night and look out at the sheep in the valley and decide they need to be moved because that’s what shepherds do. But maybe one night you would notice the well water tastes faintly metallic and miss your Berkeley life after all. Just thinking about it now makes you miss it already and you haven’t even left yet. You’re learning to like honey, as it turns out, though your mother forbid you from such sweet substances throughout your childhood and you’ve always been terrified by the prospect of being stung by a bee again.

You walk back over to the torch and notice you’ve burned the better part of an hour just thinking about all this. Tonight your girlfriend will bring home another group of polyamorists for you to hide from. After work you’ll steal Clay’s roaches out of the garden and slip them into your pocket for later. You’ll come home and introduce yourself to all the polyamorists and politely excuse yourself because you’d been working so hard at your new job that you neglected to use the restroom before you clocked out. You’ll take one of the expensive beers and make a peanut butter and honey sandwich on your way. The bathroom window will be open and you’ll be able to angle your head and watch the woman across the street stretch for a while. Then you’ll sit in the empty bathtub and drink the beer and think about how things always taste better when you don’t buy them and that’s why you’ll stay with your new girlfriend for just a while longer. You’ll sit in the tub and listen to the muffled laughs and begin to understand how people may love more than one thing at once—bees, bikes, bullets.