My First Job in the Gateway to Death Valley
Cleaning swimming pools in Baker, California almost got me killed.
Southern California is known for its abundance of swimming pools. Fly over the Los Angeles basin, and you’ll see blue dots every third house or so, chlorinated oases, a way to beat the summer heat. Someone has to clean all those pools.
My first job was cleaning swimming pools in Baker, California. Except Baker, is not southern California.
Situated one hour to Barstow to the west and one and a half hours to Las Vegas to the east, Baker is known as the gateway to Death Valley. Along I-15, the major thoroughfare between Vegas and SoCal, Baker is marked by a giant thermometer, which regularly tops 100, 110, up to 120 degrees in the summer months.
Baker is nowhere and going nowhere fast. I was 14 and also going nowhere fast. I had started smoking and lying about it to my hypocritical chimney parents. I got caught twice. I guess I wasn’t such a good liar. So at 14, my parents decided I needed to have a job to keep me out of trouble. They sent me to live with my mother’s cousins in Baker.
Patty was a school teacher who taught several grades, drove the ambulance at night, and drove the school bus 300 miles a day, while raising a family of 4. Her husband, David, was an ex-combat marine who had served in Vietnam. He was big and quiet, a gentle giant. We called our 4 cousins “desert rats.” Life is hard in the desert and trouble finds you quick.
They had two houses, Patty, David, and Traci lived in one with their standard poodles and guard dog German Shepherds. Tracy would cook up steak and ostrich eggs for the dog every night. The other kids had moved out, though Troy, the only son, lived in a trailer in town and worked with David. They kept their stuff in the second house — tools, mining equipment, motorcycles, RVs, dune buggies. They had so much stuff. Long hours and good pay and nowhere to spend it kept the coffers full. They were living large, raking in the money fixing the air conditioning units non-stop to combat the 100-plus degree daily heat.
If a refrigerator unit should happen to go out in that heat, food would spoil quickly, so they had to work fast, running frequently to Barstow or Vegas for parts and hurrying back to get the job done.
They lived in a housing complex, 100 or so houses surrounded by chain link, houses that were built by the phone or electric company for its employees when they strung wires across the desert. Now that the wiring was complete, they hired my cousins to serve as caretakers of the property. They were provided an allowance of the houses in exchange for making sure the place wasn’t trashed.
That’s where the guard dogs come in. At lights out in the evening, David released the shepherds outside, and you were not to step out until the morning when he called them back in.
It was 1978. Disco was in high gear as were designer jeans, which I wore. My cousin Traci, two years older than me, worked at the Bun Boy restaurant during the summer as a waitress. Bun Boy was a quick-stop burger diner on the road to Vegas, frequented by truckers.
Often, Traci stole my jeans and squeezed her 16 year old body into my skinny Jordache or Sassoon jeans and wore tight-fitting shirts that accentuate her big boobs. She had a nervous giggle, but she knew what she was doing. In her room around her waterbed were jars and jars of quarters, tips from her regular trucker customers. Later, she bought a Trans Am with her tip money. That’s a lot of quarters.
Traci and I hung out at Pike’s restaurant down the road where she met up with her 21-year old boyfriend. They laughed at me as I tried to smoke and made out in the booth as we ordered ham and cheese melts and fries. They would lose themselves in each other, and I would grow bored, unable to drive, unable to get back to the house. They teased me and said they should take me to see Rosie in a trailer down the road. She would relieve me of my virginity. My teenage body was interested but I took a pass. It seemed sketchy to me in a way I couldn’t define.
The movie of the summer was Grease, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. We saw it in Vegas, a way to beat the heat. Even though Tracy was obviously experienced, she laughed and cried out “oh my god,” when Travolta sang about Greased Lightning, about how “all the chicks will cream” because it’s a “real pussy wagon.” She was doing her best to corrupt her younger cousin.
During that same trip, we got tickets to see Leo Sayer in concert at one of the casinos. He had a major hit at the time, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” and it was a major concert. Tracy’s boyfriend placed fifty dollars on the roulette table and with one roll of the ball, walked away with $150.00, betting black or red. Play money. Since the concert was at night, we had arranged with Traci’s mom to stay over night at a hotel rather than drive the dangerously dark roads at night, with all the drunks who lost leaving Las Vegas.
Traci’s mom told many stories about driving the ambulance in the middle of the night. If it was a call about a motorcycle accident, they rarely hurried. People drove too fast and the accidents were severe. It was an hour to civilization to the west and an hour and a half to the east. By the time they got to the accident, it was often too late anyway. A middle of the night call usually meant they were scraping up body parts from the road.
There was only one bed in the hotel, so I had to sleep on the floor. I woke many times from the commotion on the bed. The next morning, as we had cheap breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast for 99 cents at the casino restaurant, Traci’s boyfriend’s neck was covered with hickies and she had a couple large bites herself.
After seeing Grease, I bought the cassette tape, a two-album 90-minute cassette was large for my two tape deck am/fm radio mini portable boom box with foldup handle and antenna, all the rage at the time, about the size of a lunch box but half the width.
I played that tape twice each morning as I worked my job cleaning the swimming pools and learned all the songs by heart. By the end of the summer, because of the heat and blowing dirt, the tape stretched and finally broke while it was playing, fouling up and destroying my boom box.
My job was simple. Brush and vacuum two motel swimming pools every morning and scoop leaves out of the pool with a skimmer. These were not fancy motels. In the middle of the desert, they had wild west themes with wagon wheels half sunk into the paved driveway and brown and beige stucco buildings. From what I learned, a single absentee proprietor — what rich guy would live in Baker, after all? — owned much of the town as well as the motels, and he had asked David to look after the places while he was gone. So David hired me that summer to take care of the pools. I probably made $4.00/hour. It was too hot to sunbathe. It was too hot just sitting in the shade at 8:00 in the morning.
Traci’s brother Troy still lived in Baker, though he had a double-wide trailer of his own now. His giant 6'6" frame had grown too tall too fast as a teenager and he was plagued with aching muscles and a bad back. But he was strong, lanky and rough. He liked the ladies, and they liked him. He wore a cowboy hat, boots, and giant silver and turquoise belt buckles and, from what I could tell, had a world of women at his beck and call. It was Troy’s job to make sure I had enough chlorine to do my job, which usually meant several trips a week to Barstow.
Troy had his own agenda, though, and he’d go to Barstow when he had to or not at all. He didn’t really care about my job or the swimming pools. He was busy keeping the air conditioning going at the Bun Boy restaurants and getting laid around town.
One day, Troy didn’t pick up the chlorine. The next morning, I couldn’t find my jeans. Traci wore them to work, and I had to wear shorts. I usually wore tennis shoes but I didn’t like the look with my shorts, so I wore flip flops. It was hotter than usual anyway, not that you could really tell. After 110, all hot is just freakin’ hot.
When I got to the pools, they were black. I tossed a small rock in and couldn’t see it reach the bottom. Troy saw the pools, spat and cursed, and told me they’d need to be drained and acid washed and filled back up. This happened twice during that summer because Troy didn’t make the drive to Barstow to get chlorine.
He told me he’d be back and left. I had nothing to do but sit in the shade and listen to my Grease tape, which by this time I had memorized. A motel guest came out and looked at the black mass of water.
“Is the pool closed?”
“No, but it needs to be drained and cleaned.”
“Can I swim in it?”
“Umm, I don’t think you should, but it’s up to you.”
It was god-awful hot, past 110 degrees. I was sweating sitting in the shade. The guest walked down the steps and into the shallow end, dunked himself under, and came right back out. Anything to stop the heat. Without a towel, he was dry before he got back to the door to his room.
Troy returned with two giant compressors attached to two fire hoses that he had borrowed from the volunteer fire department. He showed me where to plug it in and how to start it. One hose in the water, and one laid across the driveway so the water drained down the street. This would take some time. He said he’d go to Barstow to get chlorine and more hydrochloric acid for the acid wash.
I had to stop the compressor when the water was almost gone from the pool. The compressor had a giant lever on it to start and stop it. Putting the hose in the water had sloshed water all around. The compressor sat on the deck near the pool and vibrated on the concrete. I wasn’t strong enough to pull the lever and I didn’t want to slip, so I removed my flip flops. I kicked gently and tried to push the level with the bottom of my foot to get it to release.
That’s when I felt the jolt. It was a shock that vibrated my leg all the way up to my hip. I couldn’t stop it, but I felt like I was stuck to the machine. Finally, in a bit of a panic, I pulled myself away and fell onto the pool deck. I crab crawled further away from the compressor. It’s then that I realized that it had shocked me. I didn’t understand about the need for an electrical ground then, but I knew well enough that electricity and water don’t mix and that I’d just been shocked and was lucky I wasn’t electrocuted.
I pulled the plug from the wall to stop the compressor. When the compressor wasn’t running, it was easier to pull the lever.
The entire bottom surface of the pool was covered in black algae. It had only been without chlorine for 24 hours. From the shallow end to the deep end, I could see two sets of foot prints. One set belonged to the guy I had talked to. The other set must have been made by a guest in the middle of the night.
When it’s this hot, you’ll do anything to cut the heat, even swim in an algae-filled pool. I’m sure in the middle of the night you couldn’t tell that the pool was black.
Now the real work started — acid washing the pool in 110 plus heat. God, it was hot. I had to grab a towel from the motel and wrap it around my mouth and nose like a bandana. I had to pour acid from the gallon containers and brush the sides of the pool with a long handled brush to remove the algae. As I poured the acid, it sizzled and steamed. Mixed with the heat, the caustic fumes were a dangerous cloud that I had to work hard not to breathe in.
Normally, I worked 4 hours a day, from 8 to 12. Most days, I would go back to the house and relax in the air-conditioning and sleep and wait for Traci to pick me up so we could hang out at Pike’s. But this day I had to drain and acid wash two pools so it was a full day’s work.
In most cases no job lives up to your first, the first time you earn your own money. For me, I earned it by the literal sweat from my brow. I didn’t mind taking care of the pools, but acid washing them was the worst. The fumes, the heat, just the worst. If Troy had only gone to Barstow like he said he would . . . Not everyone will have the same work ethic as you at a job.
I don’t know if it was the acid wash or the desert culture, but the glamour of Baker quickly wore off quickly.
I don’t know what I thought at the time. My parents may have been punishing me by sending me to Baker or they may have seen an opportunity to get me started on a working life or they may have just needed a kid-free summer to themselves.
Other than starting a solid work ethic of a job well done, living in Baker was an education I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. I was 14 and everything was tinged with sex and sexual innuendo, from the movies we watched to the way my cousin dressed to earn tips, to the way she hung out at Pike’s with her boyfriend, to the hickies they gave each other, to their threats of dropping me off at Rosie’s trailer to lose my virginity.
When Traci finally got her Trans-Am, she took me for a ride. She found a small road headed north, nothing but sand and cactus between Baker and Death Valley. “Hold on,” she said. She floored it, slipping on the pale sand and finally gripping the road, 100, 110, 120, 130, 140. At the point, my mouth started making noise and Traci slowed, laughing nervously. My knuckles were white and my feet were pushed deeply into the floor on the passenger side.
She giggled. “That’s the fastest I ever went.”
I remembered Patty’s casual talk of scraping bodies off the road due to accidents of people driving too fast in the desert.
I was ready to go home, back to the San Fernando Valley, back to my piano and train set, to my stereo and my L.A. television stations, my rock and coin and stamp collections, and beloved Dodgers. Back to my books.
I kept smoking, but after that summer, there was an unspoken agreement between us. My parents never asked again, and I never offered. If the punishment for lying was summers in Baker, I’d learn not to lie. Lifelong smokers, my parents both died of COPD. I stayed a closet smoker from my parents until after my father died. After three years of trying to quit, in my early 40s, I sat on the back steps of work in the summer Kansas heat, smoking, unable to breathe. I crumpled the pack that day and never even had a craving to smoke again.
What I most enjoyed that summer in Baker before more adult jobs filled my time was our swimming pool. It’s warm in southern California in the summer, not like Baker heat. Never like Baker heat. Our pool never turned black.
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Lee G. Hornbrook taught college English for 25 years in every time zone in the continental United States. He has finished his memoir. Follow his efforts to find traditional publication at his FREE substack newsletter: My Own Private Waste Land: T.S. Eliot, Mental Illness, and the Making of a Memoir. Find him on Twitter @leehornbrook and at his Medium publication The Writing Prof.
