If you want to find the place where I work, you have to go deep into the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District—past the groggy, shoeless girls who shiver in painfully short skirts, past the one-legged pigeons that peck at chicken bones and used condoms, past the grocery cart shanty towns and upended dumpsters. Every morning my coworkers and I meet there to gather the day’s supplies before we head out to the mansions of the Presidio and Pacific Heights to do what has become our duty.

While men in torn shirts sift through garbage out on the street, I’m inside gathering the tools needed to paint pine to look like redwood or redwood to look like pine, or to cover cabinets with a veneer that resembles the shells of hundreds of dead tortoises. I’m a deceiver, a peddler of the fake. I’m a faux finisher. 

7:40 a.m. This morning my coworker Cleo* and I pass a charred pile of clothes and blankets next to a warped shopping cart. Yesterday there was a note pinned to the makeshift shelter in this spot that read, “Don’t mess with my stuff or your ass is grass.” 

​About a block further a young woman, no older than 19, shirt unbuttoned, blood trickling out of sores on her face, her arms stretched up to the sky, is screaming, “All I want is a cigarette! 

Goddamn you. Is that so much to ask? Just one goddamn cigarette!” She swings her stare toward us. 

“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t smoke.” 

9 a.m. “Every little scratch has to be fixed! Every little scratch has to be fixed!” Mrs. Jefferson, the homeowner, screams at us. She parades through her four-story Pacific Heights house, showing us every tiny flaw with indignant disgust. It’s as though the small cracks caused by minor earthquakes and the natural settling of the foundation were created just to spite her. 

The house is filled with incredible hustle and bustle. The florists decorate the banisters of the spiral staircase and the Corinthian columns that frame the entrance to the dining room with long, twisted vines. The maid gingerly holds the vacuum’s cord as she cleans, careful not to scuff the polished granite floors. The dog walker arrives, and the Jeffersons’ dogs yip nervously. Out back, the gardeners water English-style gardens flanking the child’s playhouse, a tiny replica of the original house, while the landscapers dig up the front yard. The doorbell rings, and the maid answers it, revealing the carpet cleaner and the man who delivers the seafood. He has a pound of shrimp. 

“Now, look at this!” Mrs. Jefferson gasps, pointing at a thin yellow cray¬ on line on her child’s “antiqued” desk. “These children are ruining my house!” she bellows. Through the open door we can see her six-year-old daughter in the next room, vomiting into an actual champagne bucket, while the nanny absentmindedly holds back the child’s hair. 

10:20 a.m. I often worry that we’ve all gone insane. Each of the faux finishers has devised his or her own way of folding sandpaper, scoffing at the others’ folding jobs as “the stupidest way of folding sandpaper I’ve ever seen in my life.” My supervisor once noticed that I had folded mine in thirds and made me unfold it and re-fold it into quarters. “There’s nothing to discuss,” he said, shaking his head. “Folding in thirds is totally against company policy. I can’t believe you did that." 

“This sandpaper is fucked,” Lisa complains today, picking up a used piece. “Why is everything on this job so fucked up? Can’t we get any de¬ cent sandpaper around here?” She 

doesn’t notice the entire package of unused sheets next to her before she storms out of the room. 

11 a.m. Contrary to popular belief, faux finishers don’t do much sponge painting. The bulk of what we do is apply oil glaze to a wall, then wipe it off with our weapon of choice: cheesecloth. This creates the effect of age without the untidiness of dirt or the cruelty of time. Since on this particular day we forgot dust masks and have to sand the ceiling before we glaze it, we tie cheesecloth bandannas around our faces like faux-finishing bandits. 

“Hey! We’re Sandinistas!” I shout from my ladder, breaking out in a fit of laughter so violent I worry that it might throw me to the ground or turn into uncontrollable sobbing. 

“Ce-ilings,” Cleo sings to the tune of “Feelings.” “My life is nothing more than ce-e-ilings.” We all chime in. 

12:45 p.m. After we’ve glazed about half the ceiling, the designer comes in. My usual tactic in this sort of situation is to speak to no one. If someone asks me when a job will be done or why it looks the way it does, I nod stupidly, as though I can’t understand one word. But this woman is relentless. 

She stands underneath us yelling, “Oh my god, I’m losing my mind. I am absolutely losing it! This doesn’t look like the sample at all! It looks horrible! I can’t handle it— lock me up in the nearest asylum and throw away the key. I am losing my mind!" 

When I try to explain to her that the ceiling will look better when we are through, she exclaims, “Well, I, for the life of me, have no idea how you’re going to fix this one because you people are making this house look like a leather bar!” Before I can ask, “Oh really? Which one?” she runs off to call my boss. 

​About an hour later I hear her in the room next door yelling at the electrician: “I can not handle having this outlet so close to the door! It’s absolute madness! How can you expect someone to live with this? You people are driving me to drink!” I start to feel weird as she comes closer. 

“Well, I talked to your boss, and he ...” Suddenly, she gasps, throwing her hands to her mouth. “It is perfect! Perfect!” She screams and turns to me, crying, “Drop that brush! Don’t touch a thing!" I drop the brush. We leave as quickly as possible. 

2:30 p.m. We stop by another house to do some touch-ups in the library, a room we had grained to look like pine, old and graying, over the painted wood walls. Pine is a cheap wood, cheaper than our finish, but I guess faux is in right now. It gives the homeowner something to talk about at parties. 

It’s the job of the faux finisher to temporarily satisfy the whims of the extremely wealthy. Whatever mirage they want us to create, we’ll conjure it up with smiles as false as our finish. We’ve covered laundry room walls with fake marble meant to recall old Tuscany. We’ve gold-leafed bathroom ceilings, a job that inevitably sends us home sneezing up 24-karat-gold snot. 

We have painted portraits of our client’s dogs, Snuggles and Pumpkin, in the “gift-wrapping room” engaged in, as the designer put it, “various gift-wrapping activities.” Frankly, our every sensibility fought to paint them engaged in more doglike activities, but we do as we’re told. We’ve painted countless murals that at first sight look to be the Garden of Eden but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be the homeowners’ backyard as they imagine it was decades ago, before there were houses or sidewalks or occasional transients. 

Today is the first time I get to see this particular library with the furniture in it, and I can’t hold back a groan on entering. An actual zebra’s skin, flayed at the gut, with the eyelashes and mane still intact, lies next to a painting of a zebra running wild. Two statues of shirtless Africans with feathered skirts and ebony skin hold trays above their heads, On one tray is the TV remote control, on the other an embroidered pillow that reads, “Life’s too SHORT to smoke CHEAP cigars.” 

4:40 p.m. On our way home Cleo and I pass a man leaning against the wall grinning a wide and toothy grin. Next to him is a shelter made out of a shopping cart and a chair with some kind of plastic draped between them. On the plastic, “Fire Retardant” was printed every foot or so in an official-looking typeface. 

“New house?” I ask. The man nods happily. 

The same woman we’d seen in the morning is sitting on the curb, surrounded by dozens of cigarette butts. She stretches her hand out like a zombie. 

“Please?” she whimpers. Cleo and I walk on without saying a word. 

​We trudge quietly past weeping prostitutes, discarded clothes, and clubfooted pigeons. The mid-after noon light glares over the Mission, making it difficult to see. We watch our feet as we walk, trying to avoid the piles of excrement on the sidewalk. 

​Suddenly, Cleo bursts into laughter. “Did I ever tell you what it’s going to say on my gravestone?” she giggles. 

“No,” I roll my eyes. “What?”

She stops in her tracks, waves her hand as if addressing a large crowd, and proclaims: “Finished.”