John Cooper was photographed by Antonio Perez in January 2000 as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. He’s shown in a section of Deep Tunnel near 134th and Torrence. I interviewed him last summer at my office downtown. Afterward I walked him out to his car, a deep green Cadillac DeVille.

Right now I make $25.70 an hour. And there’s plenty of overtime. It’s a hard job, but it’s a good job. It’s year-round. If you’re working on top, you’re laid off for about four months out of the year. Underground, you’re working year-round, because you have a temperature that’s bearable and things don’t freeze when you’re that deep.

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I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Before coming to Chicago I was a cook. Just a small restaurant, we cooked what you call soul food. I guess I got into it through my father. He loved to cook. He passed away in 1990. He and my mother separated when I was very young. He was in the service most of his life–32 years. He was in the army for 9 years, and he came out of the army and went into the air force. He was traveling all his life. That’s one of the main reasons he and my mother separated, because he was never there.

I’ve lived in Austin for 20 years. I’m in a kind of a neighborhood where we have a block club, and everybody watches after each other, so it’s pretty nice. It’s a pretty quiet neighborhood. Two blocks away there’s a lot of gang activity, drugs and stuff like that, but in our couple of blocks, if anybody has problems, we have meetings and stuff every month. The area really is not that bad. And hopefully things are getting better; we have an alderman who stays about a block from me, and then we have a state trooper who stays north of me about a half a block. It’s still kind of a mixed area. You got whites and you got Latinos moving in there.

I was what you call persistent. It took me about a month to get the job. Once you get the job then you pay a fee to get into the union. Then you just keep your dues and stuff up and it’s automatic.