Call Me Land Dan

You might watch the show "Landman," but I lived it. Sorta.

Raise your hand if you watch Landman. Or go ahead and raise both hands while screaming “Woo!”, the primary form of communication of female characters on the show.

If you are unaware of the phenomenon known as Landman, it is a wet dream vision of “real” America, where men do hard work drilling for oil in Texas and women FaceTime their husbands while wearing bikinis to beg for shopping money. They also don’t go to the doctor. When Billy Bob Thornton’s character needs a physical therapist for his aging dad, he goes to a strip club and hires an exotic dancer to float Sam Elliot and his mustache around in a pool. God only knows who he’d employ for a preventative colonoscopy.

The Landman world is rough, tough, dirty and dangerous. And it is one I can relate to.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was part of a summer work crew that scarred the landscape more than any oil drilling operation ever could: we installed above-ground pools on Long Island.

On Landman, the low man of the workcrew totem pole is known as The Worm. The worm runs and fetches tools while the other guys do the more glamorous work of wrapping their arms around oil-slicked poles and exploding in fiery deaths.

On our work crew, I was known as The Dil. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that is short for. While the other guys — my brother and next door neighbor — leveled the ground, I, The Dil, was tasked with scraping my knuckles to shit while screwing in a million screws to metal pool uprights, railings and decks. While no one ever died on the job, I can’t be sure all of our customers made it — I may have skipped a screw or two to speed up the process to get home in time for Three’s Company reruns.

We put up pools all over The Island. Sometimes the people were nice and invited us inside to eat lunch in the AC. Other times, they told us to stay the fuck out of their house. A wise decision, especially towards the end of the week. Wearing fresh, clean clothes every day was not a big priority on our crew, and there’s only so much Drakkar Noir can do.

On most jobs, we started from scratch, unpacking new pools from boxes like IKEA bathtubs. Other times, we were tasked with replacing a liner on an existing pool. Some of these pools were in bad shape. Rusty walls, bloated squirrels at the bottom that didn’t survive their game of Marco Polo…More than once, my boss — a high school math teacher — took one look at the job, ran some numbers in his head, and informed the customer that we needed to go back to the shop to get the “electric bolt cutter.” There was no shop and no such thing as an electric bolt cutter. We’d eat a French fry out of a McDonald’s bag that was in the back seat of the truck for three days, but even we had our gross-out limits.

Or so I thought.

One job was out east, in Montauk, in the backyard of a house still under construction. A few hundred feet away from the pool was the Atlantic Ocean. It didn’t make sense why someone would want a pool here, but in the grand scheme of Long Island, probably pretty low on the bad decision scale.

Anyway, we finished the job and my boss loaded a cardboard box into the back of the truck. We usually left all the trash behind, so my brother asked my boss what it was. He answered, “Oh, just some shit.”

We drove off and after about ten minutes on the road, my boss pulled over near a Dumpster, got out and tossed the box in it. “What was in there?” my brother asked. “I told you,” said my boss, “Some shit.” The house was unfinished, and so was its bathroom. You do the math.

I couldn’t help but think of this moment as I watched the final episode of season 2 of Landman last night. A turd in a box that stays with you much longer than you’d like.

Woo!