Fiction
The Tileman
Life on the renovation crew
Raimundo is a tileman. His thick black rubber knee pads and his white rubber mallet are tools of the trade. Raimundo has been laying tiles for more years than not. His trademark goatee is now all gray. It started out as a mustache a la Goose Gossage, the Yankee closer, his favorite player when baseball was his religion and the nearby stadium his church. The facial hair spread to his chin in his late twenties when he thought he needed a new look.
Most people, including many of his clients, assume there’s not much skill in putting down some tiles. His geometry of polygons, diamonds, squares, and rectangles requires careful measurement and thorough calculations. He knows that even his wife’s family belittles his work behind his back.
Raimundo sees himself as a craftsman among the renovation team. A notch below the electrician and the plumber, but a cut above the painters, floormen, and the laborers and handymen that make up most crews. There’s always a pecking order, perhaps even more stratified than the social ladder.
He mostly gets kitchens and bathrooms, and an occasional foyer. He rarely gets a large space, like a lobby of some commercial building. When he does get a lobby, it is usually in a doorman building, not his favorite type of building. He has a running, one-sided, silent feud with doormen. The doormen, whose job is to receive packages and keep undesirables out, always mark him an undesirable the first day on a job. It’s their power play with all the men — and women — on the crews.
“No, you can’t go up yet,” the voice comes over the crackling speaker by the service entrance. “It’s not nine o’clock,” scolds the doorman into the telephone handset at the desk by the front entrance. He’s right, the jerk. It’s 8:57.
The supers are more accommodating. They already lord over the doormen. No need to make the workers feel unappreciated. Plus, an unappreciated crew foreman doesn’t tip well.
Raimundo gets to most jobs after the heavy demolition work has been completed. He typically arrives too late to offer advice to the client who has picked out cheap tiles from one of the big box stores to go with their high-end Sub-Zero and Miele appliances. Other common mistakes are tiles too light for the mess of a kitchen or the wrong shape for the dimensions of the room. His typical client is a woman who has a friend who is good at interior decorating from her magazine subscriptions. Whatever tiles she gets, though, Raimundo is resigned to make them work. Start with a level floor and things will sort themselves out, he always says.
Some jobs come with architect plans showing the exact pattern to be laid down, but most don’t. Raimundo works out the layout, minimizing the number of tiles to cut for the edges. He verifies his starting point multiple times. An edge of tile slivers is a tileman’s cardinal sin.
Some clients have accused him of stalling when he squats in the room thinking and planning, with no visible work underway. If the complaint is directed at him, he reminds her he is paid by the job, not by the hour like the other laborers. “So, please let me work this out for you right.”
His jobs usually take only a few days, with much of the time waiting for things to dry. Waiting for the thinset to dry, for the grout to cure. During his downtime, he goes to the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette, a habit he can’t kick, although he smokes only a few a day, a pack lasting him most of the week. He avoids the other workers, especially the younger ones. They either know it all or know only how to grow huge upper bodies. Raimundo is lean, emaciated, his wife says, especially in his roomy cargo pants. The large side pockets float over his scrawny legs.
During one of those sidewalk breaks, a few of the guys decided they should come up with a slogan for tilemen. They had seen an elevator man with a t-shirt that said, “Elevator men do it up and down.”
“Hey, tileman, what’s your slogan?” they yelled over. Raimundo shook his head letting them know he didn’t know or didn’t care.
The boys continued their banter. One yelled out, “Tilemen do it with knee pads,” which sent everyone into an exaggerated celebration of their wittiness, eliciting a “yeah, like fuckin’ Monica.” Raimundo said nothing. He’s never been good with a quick quip, always coming up with a good retort well after the moment has passed, one reason why he avoids the banter. He was grateful that just a few minutes later, the super gave them the sign that he was ready to take them back upstairs in the service elevator.
Raimundo has been trying to come up with a better slogan for tilemen. The best he has come up with is, “Tilemen do it with spacers.” He has tried to work the tilemen’s adage, “hire a tileman with the longest backlog” into something clever, something subtle, but nothing has worked despite mulling it over for hours while on his knees. He dreams of showing up to work with the perfect slogan on a custom t-shirt, but he knows he’ll never do it.
When Raimundo finishes a job, it is likely the last time he’ll step on the tiles. Sometimes he takes a picture of a special project, but usually he forgets the room after a few weeks. The only time he ever comes back is if a tile cracks. Replacing a tile is not difficult, especially if the owner kept leftover tiles around, but it is usually unpaid work and usually not his fault. Most replacement calls come after a new refrigerator is installed.
Raimundo’s knees have begun to trouble him. He knows this is bad. His flow — tile, spacer, tile — is disrupted by a barking left knee. He should see a specialist, but he is always saying, only old people see specialists. He looks at his calendar, noting he has jobs lined up for the next six weeks. At least. A good backlog. No time to see a specialist.
Raimundo thinks of his work as relaxing. His clients would call it meditative. Laying down tiles gives him a feeling not dissimilar to the enjoyment of working on a jigsaw puzzle. The major difference is that the border of a jigsaw puzzle is always a perfect rectangle. His rooms are never perfect rectangles. A wall can be angled as much as six inches. If he doesn’t account for this, the tiles will look off kilter. A grout line looking like Broadway on the Manhattan grid is bad. And unlike a jigsaw puzzle, you can never start a tile job by finishing the edge first.
It is the grouting he loves best. The tiles, already set in thinset, with blue spacers, which for some reason remind him of his childhood braces, are ready for their smear. He fills in the cracks, wiping the extra grout with a large moist sponge he rinses in a yellow bucket, leaving clean perfect lines between the tiles. The floor slowly takes on a polished look. When he fills in the final grout line and wipes it clean, a rush of contentment saturates the tileman. He stands over the finished floor with the elation of a closer striking out the side in the ninth inning.
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