I don’t think you could have called us a team, but three of us worked as painters for Mister Roller. That wasn’t his real name. We called him that because he said there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be painted with a roller instead of a paintbrush. He didn’t want us to know his name, anyway.

We could tell a few things about him from things he said, but mostly from what we found in the back of his panel truck on the way to this job or another. No problem, for most of our work was at strange jobs along the Portland waterfront, and done for folks who probably didn’t care much about us, as long as things got painted.

We didn’t care about them, either. We cared about doing our work.

It was clear from the stuff way back on the floor of his truck that he got breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts drive-in, ate it behind the wheel, and then discarded the paper doughnut wrappings and coffee cups in the back of the truck with a great over-the-shoulder pitching arm so as to avoid municipal or state-wide littering fines.

He seemed to divide his lunches between Subway and Burger King, and where he had an evening meal remains a mystery to this day. He would not say.

We surmised that he spent the summer months around Portland, while the place was alive with tourists and summer folk from Massachusetts and even as far away as New York, on occasion, and divided his time during the winter months between Miami and Tampa, where the less hardy holed up for the winter and the warmth. And anyway, you can’t paint a barn or a gas storage tank in the snow. It’s hard enough scraping the rust bubbles off the old surface when the weather is warm and sunny, without having to warm the paint up so it would flow.

You can always find something that needs to be painted, wherever you are, and the supply of folks willing to slap some paint on somebody else’s back porch for pocket money for the day was endless in Florida, too. His comings and goings seemed to make a strange sort of sense at the time.

Lest you think that I am finding fault with him, I would like to say from the start, that he treated us with some respect, although he liked to shout commands at us, and then stand back and grin, while waiting to see whether or not we were going to do what we were told to do. Usually, we did.

He paid us without fail in hard cash, green and black U.S. bills, punctually at the end of each working week, and he never short-changed us, nor came through with a raise. Punctual, reliable and easy to work with, and generally non-judgmental. He did not pry into our personal lives, and for all purposes maintained that he had no private life himself.

I did learn five important lessons from working with Mister Roller, but I’ll let them go for another time.

Orrin Frink is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at ofrink@gmail.com.

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