I swear I don't spit in their coffee.

"Hey, Jose," came his gruff voice from the darkness of the job trailer. My eyes hadn't adjusted yet, everything was a blur. Slowly, that blur became a blue blob of three-hundred sixty pounds. Pat's small bald head sat atop his oversized denim work shirt like a cherry on one of the thousands of ice cream sundaes he'd devoured over the course of his thirty-five years.

"I got your fuckin' Jose swingin', pal," I said with a smile befitting a humble apprentice. It was too early in the day to throw wrenches or resort to fisticuffs.

"Todd told me you're Puerto Rican," he said in a softer tone. It was as if he'd revealed the fact that he knew I was a convicted sex offender. My jaw tightened, I felt my cheeks jut out at the sides. I wasn't scared, I'd heard stories of this lump of shit getting his ass beat by people half his size. I was just tired of the damn routine.

"Yeah. So?" Eye contact was impossible, the fake smile was just hard.

"Look, you could've told me. I know I make racist jokes, but I'm trying to turn over a new leaf." The sweat trickled down over three rolls of fat on the side of his head. I wanted to puke over this grotesque man's attempt at unsolicited pity. He'd been thrown off jobs before over dropping the N-bomb, calling Mexicans 'Wetbacks', and being ignorant in general. I knew who he was before he tried to convince me otherwise. A reputation goes a long way in the trades, especially a bad one.

"That's good, Pat. Good for you." It was all I could say. I wanted to present him with a mirror to show him that he'd probably die prematurely like his brother if he didn't lose weight, or remind him that he was a notoriously worthless worker without a condom's worth of common sense, or ask him what series of poor decisions caused him to lose his house and force his wife to pile his four kids into their one family vehicle to drive him to and from work every day. But I didn't. Again, the humble apprentice. The typical Pisces. The underdog tired of trying to settle an ancient and pointless score. My lower lip's got scars in the shape of my upper teeth.

"You're a good worker," he spat out like some sort of consolation prize for being Puerto Rican. "That's all that matters to me." His dull eyes tried to smile, but all I saw was that stupid grin that I wanted to slap away from his sloppy goatee.

"Thanks, Pat. Means a lot." I left him there in the darkness of the job trailer and went about my business. Some people still earn their pay.

And later on when he asked why I didn't take off work for Cinco de Mayo I fired back with something about wanting to drape the Mexican flag across the hood of my truck. Make your punchline better than theirs. Steal their thunder. It's all you can do sometimes.

It's not the constant jokes at work that get me. I'm not thin-skinned, and I know that people take themselves way too seriously. Hell, I even call myself out sometimes-- "Not bad, for a Spic," and such being a common response to a compliment from a coworker on my job performance. I can take it just as well as I can dish it, if not better. No, it's not the jokes themselves that get under my dark skin, it's that unwritten expectation for me to just silently take it because I'm a Hispanic on a construction site. It's that requirement to grin, bear it, and eat more shit force-fed by the White Male Republicans (who secretely vote for Democrats since that party is pro-Union). High school doesn't ever end, and neither does hypocrisy.

All of the men I've worked with have vouched for me in one way or another, whether I knew it or not. I'm going to continue to make a name for myself in this business, whether I like it or not. And someday, when I'm general foreman, I'll be sure to remind those creative poets who use their Sharpies to label the inside of the shithouse as "the Mexican Spaceship" that at least those silly Wetbacks didn't pretend to land on the fucking moon forty years ago.