I asked my parents to send me a pair of gloves and my high school bio notebook. When I went to the mailroom, I saw my dad’s big-blocky-architect-handwriting in thick sharpie on my package and felt an immediate and inexplicable wave of comfort wash over me.
The first time I watched my dad climb up on the roof, I was 11 or 12. "You stay down there and take my phone, so if I fall and break my neck, you can call the paramedics." I think of that every time I climb up. Who's waiting at the bottom for me?
As I waited for my pan to heat up, my dad hurried me by commenting that this wasn't a union job. I told him that if he threatened my lunch time, I would unionize all lawful child laborers. "We'll demand enough lunch time to cook ourselves all the almond flour pancakes we want." "Good luck with that." I realized that I was now 17: maybe still a minor, but well above the legal age to work a job. I allowed myself to fantasize about my youth uprising nonetheless. I imagined rallies and meetings and conference tables and many children far too confident in their public speaking abilities.
Getting up on the roof was always a delicate affair that had to happen well out of sight of my safety-minded mother. The one hatch for roof access was in the ceiling of a tall stairwell, and to get the ladder to reach it we had to put a sawhorse on the stairwell’s landing, then span wooden planks from the stair directly below the hatch to the sawhorse, then put the ladder on the planks. As you climbed up the ladder, the thin plank it rested on flexed a little. “The tree that does not bend will break,” my dad repeated. This did little to reassure me. When you get to the top of the ladder, you have to reach and pull yourself up by the lip of the hatch, and squat on the load-bearing rafters in the crawl space as you use both hands to lift the heavy roof cover off. My dad used to do the whole process on his own, but he wasn’t limber enough to squat in the rafters anymore and had to send me up on my own to lift the cover. After I scurried up, he groaned and heaved his way up the ladder behind me, doing his best to make it look easy.
I brought my phone up with me this time. Part of the reason I brought it up was because I imagined a scenario in which my mother was in our basement, my sister had her airpods turned all the way up, and there was no one to hear my father and I in case our ladder fell and we found ourselves stuck on the roof. The other reason I brought my phone with me was that listening to music made squeegee-ing fibered aluminum across the roof as the scorching June sun beat down on me that much more tolerable. As I turned the volume up on my phone and dropped it into the pockets of my ancient and torn cargo shorts, my father cocked his head.
"Is that an alarm?"
"Is what an alarm?"
"The sound."
"It's Cast Your Fate To The Wind by the Vince Guaraldi Trio."
"Is that your ringtone?"
"No, it's Cast Your Fate to the Wind by the Vince Guaraldi Trio."
"But why is it playing?"
My father did not understand the importance of ambiance. I found a way to make everything romantic. I imagined myself as some hardened laborer, sweating away on my hot Chicago rooftop, trying to ignore that I was, in fact, a wiry queer child about to go to a fancy college, probably majoring in comparative literature, but doing my best to convince myself I was going to be a bio major. As my squeegee ran dry, I leaned it against a yet unpainted section of the parapet and looked up around the block. A cool breeze blew by as if to congratulate me for this bout of hard work, and invited me to enjoy the verdant view of my neighborhood: dappled with trees springing up from parkways and between alleys, green tile roofs glinting in the beaming June sun. I tried to ignore the fact that I would be halfway across the country in a few weeks as I soaked in the sprawl of two flats that seemed to extend endlessly into the horizon.
I love working on the roof; there’s something about the view that seems like I shouldn't be allowed to take in the neighborhood from that angle. I get to see everyone's crappy roofing jobs, where the tiles on the house down the street are cracking behind their chimney, how the top of the pine in the alley is turning a brownish-red as it slowly dies, hiding its decay with green branches below.
"Aliuk," My fantasy was interrupted. "Help your old man mix this aluminum, will ya?"
"Look at the pretty colors in there, the golds and silvers mixing together." My father tried to appeal to my need to find whatever I was doing beautiful. It was not the Chicago alleyway vista that I had been admiring, but I did my best to stare into the bucket and find it equally romantic. Something about the gasoline-and-paint smell it gave off reminded me of childhood. Filling up with gas on long road trips, coming with my dad to construction sites. I was doing my best to find the beauty he was referencing. I guess I was getting somewhere.
As buckets of fibrated aluminum sit out, a yellowish oil rises to the top, and all the fibers sink to the bottom. Before you can use it, you have to stick a two-by-four in there and get the layers to mix — a process akin to what I imagine restaurants have to do with large quantities of salad dressing. Only this salad dressing has a dull gray shine to it; has thick, hairy goop on the bottom; and is going to put off having to get a new roof for another ten years so my family doesn't have to face any more big expenses until after my little sister has graduated college. I guess there's something beautiful to it after all.
Once I was sure that I had reached a stable emulsion, I did my best to pour out another line of aluminum on the roof. I gripped the handle with both hands, put my legs wide like I was about to throw my back out at a kettle-bell class, and started shuffling over to an unpainted section of roof. I heaved the bucket up with one hand and tilted the bottom with the other. As soon as the thick shining sludge peeked past the lip of the bucket, I scurried along the length of the roof, listening to the aluminum fall on the cracking roof tar with a symphony of wet plaps.
I picked up my squeegee from it's resting spot on the chimney that got filled with concrete whenever it was that coal burning fireplaces went out of style. The handle of the squeegee was covered in a thin layer of the reflective aluminum paint that was no doubt carcinogenic, but I couldn't be bothered to grab gloves. Well, in reality, it's that I wanted to not be bothered enough to grab gloves. Prior to getting to work, I looked up fibrated aluminum’s safety data sheet and was terrified by phrases like “may cause cancer” or “may cause genetic defects.” I tried to figure out exactly what the extent of my exposure was, but at the same time I couldn't stop thinking about how much of a whiny bitch I would sound like if I told my dad that, according to Johns Mansville Safety Data Sheet 200000000650, we should both be wearing gloves and eye protection. I wanted so desperately to be a teenager who thought themselves invincible, with no conception of their own mortality, so I kept my mouth shut and kept painting.
As I was moving caustic, shining aluminum around the roof, my dad came over to comment on my technique. "If you use the rubber end and push as much paint as you can up the side of the parapet, when it drips down, it'll fall in the cracks." I know he's right, but I have to let him know that when I use the brush end instead of the rubber end, the bristles push the paint into the cracks on the first pass instead of waiting to fill the cracks on their descent. He'll go on a tired polemic about how I never listen to him, I'll respond by telling him that he never lets me learn things on my own, and when he's not looking anymore, I'll flip to using the rubber side of the squeegee.
We finally clambered down looking like low budget tin men, and my dad said “Let me clean you up.” He took me down to his “workshop,” which isn’t used for woodworking so much as it is for smoking weed and storing things too caustic even for the cupboard under the sink. He wet a rag with paint thinner and wiped my arms and legs down with it. My skin burned and glowed red for a few hours. My dad said it was better than how raw my skin would be if I tried rubbing the paint off without it. I believed him, even if I wasn’t happy about it.
During the month before I left for college, my dad would occasionally realize that I'm not going to be around forever, and he would find me wherever I was in the house. He'd wrap his arms around me, breathing deeply as he unknowingly made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and confused as to what I should be doing with my arms. He would say "I love you, you know that? I don't let you know that enough." As a little kid, my parents would always ask me "Žinai ką? You know what?" I would roll my eyes as I begrudgingly responded "Ką. What." "Aš tave myliu. I love you." It was a chore to go through that little play. I never really appreciated its sincerity until I stopped hearing it. Instead, as my dad drove me to school every morning, we would sit in terse silence as we tried to figure out how to talk to each other.
“I was thinking of grabbing food with Sam today after school, I might be home a little late.”
“This Sam’s a girl?”
Sam’s been one of my closest friends for something like a year now, and my father has met her on numerous occasions, so I just kept it to a simple “Yeah.”
“She cute?”
“She’s gay.”
“Isn’t that a shame.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard that.
Conversations about my friends, or really most of my school life, were never particularly fruitful, so we stuck to conversations about local radio stations and how much we loathed companies like viacom, because one of the things we shared great concern for was the disappearance of independent broadcast media. Once a conversation about whether Paul Simon supported South African artists with his album “Graceland,” or whether he just profited off of them spanned three separate car rides. Somehow, little bits of sincerity managed to slip into those conversations.
Once I brought my care-package-from-home back to my dorm from the mailroom, I tore it open and found two empty cassette tapes tucked inside the gloves. I had mentioned to my dad on the phone that I had picked up a cassette deck here at a yard sale. This time when I cried, I didn't draw my blinds.