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Truck Shop Boys…

One of my clients is a trucking company. I stop in the shop and bullshit with the wrenches every time I’m there. They break my balls about working on the easy shit, computers and stuff, and ask questions about why Pornhub is blocked in the shop managers PC, but they know I’m one of them, and not one of the ones from the office who give them shit and assignments all day without a clue what life is like in the shop, under or in the cab of a truck.

I just got out, but I never left…This is my turf and my troops. Me, and some of the old guys were talking about ‘real cold’ winters. Zero is pretty cold. A handful of us did some winters up north on the TransCanada Highway. Twenty-Thirty-Forty below zero. Steel is a fluid, truckers and welders know all about this. It’s as fluid as water, it just freezes at 2500 fahrenheit.

“Zero is cold,” this one old guy stated, like it was news, “but it ain’t that cold.”

He was right. Metal seems to be pretty happy from zero to the low hundreds. Under zero, stuff gets weird. You can bang on a piece of iron with a sledge hammer all day at forty above and nothing will happen but some surface dents, hit that same metal with a sledge at forty under zero it will shatter like glass.

We spent a half-hour talking about frozen engine blocks and bad fuel at twenty-below and that waitress I knew up in Saskatoon and how we met; when I asked her for ‘a hard roll with anything hot’ and she slapped me across the face and made my nose bleed. I learned later in Saskatoon they are called ‘Kaisers.’

Yesterday afternoon I’d just come off an aggravating conference call with a room full of suits and ties and people ‘reaching out’ to each other and a woman named Debbie, and I am still baffled why she was even on the call, a position in sales I’m quite sure. Technical sales people are a special breed. They literally sell things with no idea whatsoever they are selling, but I guess she was there to ‘keep things civil,’ when the tie wearing boys started blaming everyone and everything but themselves for the project delays.

Yeah, after an hour with these assholes I need to be around some guys who smell like ninty-weight and know how to shift a duplex Mack and ‘real cold…’

Poverty

Kiss me with your dry and cracked lips; your mouth full of crooked and broken teeth; your breath the sweetness of sour milk and once again, call me your good boy. No one else ever called me that. No one else ever would call me that again. But you found your goodness what was missing in all things, even me.

Sit me down one more time at your old and rickety kitchen table. It seems this piece of furniture discarded from someone else’s life is the centerpiece of my life with you. That and your asparagus patch over on the neighbor’s property.

Offer me coffee and apologize for your poverty once again, as if your poverty was a choice, you regret making a long time ago. Apologize you only have canned milk and not much of that.

It’s cold in your kitchen unless it’s summer and then it’s sweltering. I comment I should go steal something and get you some money to fill up your propane tank. Without turning or even raising your head you reply, “I’m cold, I’m always cold in the winter, but I ain’t no thief…” and she walked over to the counter next to the sink and rinsed out a dirty coffee cup for me.

Her’s was a profound poverty, more than generational, or a relic of the Great Depression; it was personal, it demanded ownership. It was as if she poked a stake in the ground and on it, she raised the flag of her poverty for all to see.

She held an honor in her poverty, a strange pride I could never connect to. Like her ability to see the value in anything. I’d not bend down to pick up a dime. A penny she found on the ground was to her a fortune of good luck and cause for a celebration of gratitude.

Everything she owned was old and worn and threadbare. Her dresses were clean, but stained, and she wore an apron, and that too was stained, but clean and she was happy in the work that left the stain.

Pride and reverence and an abiding gratitude for the next to nothing she could call hers—a respect born of fear of everything being taken away—again—that everything must be used and reused and repurposed, and never-ever wasted. Her’s was a world of sin and salvation, and it could be, had to be, the greatest sin was gluttony and waste.

Aluminum foil, folded and creased in a drawer. The madness of watching her unwrap a Christmas gift, working loose each piece of tape. Slowly removing each bow, and gently removing the paper, again, folding it neatly, perhaps to be stashed by the foil.

Her son would buy her cans of food and gently dent them, a crafty move. Presented and challenged with the dented cans—she could not accept them as charity—but she could not let them go to waste. A moral conundrum. She took the cans, and often looked for ‘poor people’ to share them with.

She came from another time. Her daddy was the son of a Civil War soldier. In my sad and broken world of excess, I see now, long too late, the lessons of her time and her earnest depravation

First Chapter—The Three Lives Of Richie O’Malley

Chapter One

Before – New York City 1950s

A spark was ignited fourteen million-millennia ago when the first stars formed from carbon dust.

Over time that fire was injected into every one of us who has ever successfully exited the womb, creating something deserving of a big, complicated, raging and powerful name.

But we call it simply, “Life.”

That ancient, mystical, boundless flash can be snuffed out in less time than we spend in the cycle of one breath.

The process, the decision of a sentient being to end a life may take only seconds. The methods have been experimented with, honed and polished, within the confines of those years, to perfection. In this case, the process ground down to a shot fired from a single gun.

This handgun, a revolver, was born shiny and clean and smelling of machine oil at the Smith and Wesson, Springfield Massachusetts factory in 1949; assembled by a couple of guys recently home from the big war.

A gun is an object. It can’t be good or bad. The gun is a vehicle. Violence is a construct and a tool of man.

I’m a violent man.

Men like me are drawn to many things: the shiny objects of money and power, to the rush, to the safety and anonymity of the lie. To safe, and grounded women. We beg these good ladies to join us in our quest and to leave their innocence, and pretty dresses crumpled on the floor.

The dresses do find their way to the floor, but in a short time, we turn and run. First from warmth and comfort, then the terror of family dinners and kids and dogs and well-trimmed lawns. Men like me find our solace in the chaos, the carnage, in the gun.

The gun in this story, my story, was stolen from its original owner by a kid called Lucky Johnny. Johnny was from the streets of Brooklyn, 1950, a black and white world, a world of large analog and mechanical things.

He held odd jobs, lived with his mother in a third-floor walk-up apartment. The stoop out front was concrete and dirty. There were some flowers outside one first-floor window, but they seemed gray too.

One of his jobs was a night janitor at the local police precinct. He hated the job. A couple of the local street cops were good to him, and he considered them friends. The sergeant, though, was a master prick and treated the kid like crap, picking on him, calling him a loser, telling him how much he’d like to fuck his mom. Johnny hated him, and so did most of the beat cops.

That December, about a week before Christmas, the cops had a party in the back of the station. Johnny was cleaning out the men’s locker when he found Sarge passed out drunk in a stall. Sarge had been loudly proud of his newly issued .38 Smith and Wesson Police Special revolver. It sat unstrapped in the drunk cop’s holster. Johnny, looking over his shoulder, reached in where the fat man sat stooped over on the toilet and stole the gun, sliding into his pants. He finished his work quickly, went back to the party, said goodnight to the other cops, and left.

Walking home he passed a liquor store and thought of his mom, and the Christmas present he hadn’t yet bought. He needed money. Stepping inside, he announced, “This is a stickup!” He pointed the revolver at the man behind the counter. Holding it with both hands, he fired off six shots. Glass and lead and whiskey filled the air. A bullet ricocheted and took out the front window glass and the neon sign that said, “Fine Liquors.” He missed the cashier entirely.

The boy ran home.

Johnny hid the revolver under his bed in an old shoe box. He lay there awake all night thinking about the gun-terrified the cops would find out he was the one who shot up the liquor store. The cops would realize who stole the sergeant’s gun. He poked his head under the bed and opened the box. It was real.

Lucky Johnny needed to be rid of the gun. He took a train to the Bronx. His friend’s brother, a jewelry store owner, wanted to buy a weapon for protection. Johnny sold it to the guy for forty bucks, a fortune in 1950.

With his money, he bought a Christmas tree and took it home to decorate it. He bought his mom some towels for the kitchen, a loud testament to his lack of imagination. He paid a girl who lived in his building on the floor above him fifteen dollars for sex. It was the best Christmas of Lucky Johnny’s life.

The cold winter of 1951 moved on and gave way to the summer heat of August. The jeweler was happy with his purchase. It seemed to keep a distance between him and the bad guys of the street.

One evening he was on his way to deposit the day’s cash in the bank before heading to his home on the Grand Concourse, near Yankee Stadium. The jeweler was a good guy, a decent guy with a family. He had kids. He liked beer and baseball. But he’d begun to fear the neighborhood where he kept his business, so he carried the Police Special revolver. It made him feel more secure, less afraid.

A thug named Angel, working an empty street that had turned dark and damp and was drowned in an early evening, and a late summer’s fog, jumped the jeweler and took the gun. The jeweler fought back, taking a long, arching swing, but he missed and fell face first to the wet concrete.

In a flash of time, less than a second, Angel decided to transfer the power of life and death from his brain to his finger, to the shiny metal trigger, to the bullet.

The process is simple: the trigger pulls back against the force of a spring. A pawl pushes up, and a ratchet is turned. A barrel spins one-sixth of one turn and is locked in place by another pawl. The spring, under pressure from the trigger, pulls the hammer back. The finger applies more pressure. At the apex of the cycle, a pause only microseconds long, but seems a lifetime-is all the time that remains for the target. Somewhere between that second and the next second, a life will cease.

After the pause, the split second, the trigger as far back as it can go, now slams forward, like a hammer, like an uncontrolled and angry cock. It releases its kinetic power driving into the primer of the bullet cartridge. The primer pushing forward causes an explosion in the little shell, enough to force the lead from its casing and down the barrel. A death seed is let loose.

To decide a fate, to take a life, in a moment, just a moment-breathe in and out-now count the seconds. Fate decided.

The bullet entered the jeweler’s body, bursting through skin and muscle and bone and passing through the heart at six-hundred feet per second.

Angel exhaled. The jeweler didn’t.

The damp, sticky air echoed the sound of the explosion that follows the lead from the barrel. It bounced off and was absorbed by the walls of the buildings on the foggy street, up and down the alleys and hollow city caverns.

Angel heard sirens in the distance. He pocketed the man’s wedding ring and cash, the day’s proceeds from the jewelry store and the gun. Angel is now the owner of the snub-nose .38, Smith and Wesson Police Special.

The thug is also a refugee from the war. A man weary of war and death, yet he continues in a lifestyle that embraces and requires violence and killing.

Still a young man, but already so very tired. He finds his life on these dirty streets. He finds a way in, acceptance, into the mobs, the family businesses.

Angel hunkered down, he did his job, he hated his work, and he lived modestly, unnoticed.

He met a pretty girl and dreamed of a farm and a life away from all of this.

He hoped the farm would somehow silence the screams of those he killed with the .38 snub-nose revolver.

He married the girl and found the farm.

The gun went with him.

He was a terrible farmer. He got a job in a factory and raised his family and tended to his land and cows and chickens. Angel lived like a guy with a mortgage and bills and a crummy job. He never showed the world anything he took from those streets.

Angel became “Unk” to everyone. His friends, his family, even his wife called him “Unk” at times. Angel had a favorite nephew, me, his wife’s brother’s boy Richie O’Malley, the nephew who became the next owner of the snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson made in 1949 in a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts by men just home from the war.

It Wasn’t Always Like This

It wasn’t always like this, the rush and commotion and panic and dread of something so meaningless. No, it was simpler, because it was a simpler time. A scary a-bomb time, but simpler. The season was shorter, and it was less important, because it is less important.

A man could make a hundred dollars a week and put his hands in his pockets and jingle his car keys and coins and feel himself quite a success. A one-hundred dollar a week man would still have a boss, but he could maintain some semblance of dignity. A well-paid man.

At a hundred dollars a week, a man could own a car and a house, and have a family and a black-and-white TV set that worked more often than not. On the nights the TV worked, which was most nights, the man could listen to Walter Cronkite and see pictures of John Glenn blasting off into space, hear stuff that made him worry about the Russians. The man took a shaky comfort, and a cumbersome pride in being an American. Something I never quite understood, though I was sure I was supposed to understand it.

About a week before Christmas, each year, I’d accompany the man, and we’d walk deep into the woods. Everything that was the previous summer was dried and dead, and our feet would crunch the hoarfrost on the leaves and twigs and we’d break footsteps in the white rime of the frozen dirt. A week before the festive day, not a month or two months; just a week.

He’s take out his oiled and sharp knife and carefully cut us a big armful of scotch-pine boughs, while reminding me of the importance of caring for my tools. Tools were precious, much more than an implement to break free a bolt and nut or cut a branch.

Few greater sins confronted me as a boy than a socket or ratchet or a knife left out in the rain to rust. Tools were generational and inherited, not simply purchased. A lineage was completed when a hand grasped the grimy carbon steel. I touched the same steel as my father’s father, and in a way, I felt the callouses of that hand in my hand. When he did buy a wrench, or a knife, it came with an expectation it would last at least three lifetimes.

He owned two sets of outdoor lights, with maybe ten bulbs in each. A similar set was in the charge of his wife, and she dutifully attended to the tree inside. We’d weave his lights into the carefully nailed-up pine that framed the front door. Sometimes his wife would decorate the pine with bows and shiny balls. The front door a kind of no-man’s-land where the responsibilities of indoor and outdoor decoration commingled.

The lights were the big and ancient, even by 1963 standards. Fire-code breaking lights of red and blue and green, with bulbs that got hot enough to burn skin and peel paint. He would point out the Underwriters Laboratory tag, with a strange pride, implying and assuring me they were safe. But he’d turn them on at 5 p.m. and off an hour or two later, fearing to burn them any longer would set the fresh pine on fire.

I spent most of my Christmases as a young boy waiting for the house to burn down from those sketchy lights inside and out. I came to realize it must be an important holiday to put so much at risk for his lights.

When he died fifty some odd years ago, I knew him as a young man, but today he’d be nearly one hundred. I feel myself a time traveler of sorts stranded between two worlds, his and mine. The path between them is so muddied and blurred I wonder at times if either ever existed or exists.

I suppose it is good in a way he died when he did, before we came to challenge and hate each other. Such is the tribal ritual and passage of boys to men, and the reality the young men force the old men to admit and accept; the best days for the old men have passed on by. I feel the anger of that confrontation now, in every sore muscle and once broken bone. It’s good, I suppose, he died before we could have ever spoken to each other in rage and torrents of testosterone. When all I took from him was the importance of caring for the generational tools, without question or cursed words or angst or hate.

I face west and watch a cold, early afternoon sunset and ponder and crave the simplicity of his Christmas. There seemed to be a little more baby Jesus and mangers and wise men and a lot less retail involved back then. None of it, then or now, made a damn bit of sense to me, aside from the agency created between me being good for a few weeks, and some fat man in a red suit.

And the whole thing start to finish lasted maybe two weeks, and that was a lot. Then we’d take down the deadly two strands of lights and burn the pine boughs in a barrel and move on into the next years.

I come to the realization that the rituals I perform today are meaningless, but I do them anyway, a tribute to a man so long dead. I still wrap my front door in pine, and hang lights because he did, but my pine is purchased from the store, no more the walks in the long and dark woods and my lights less a fire-hazard.

I miss him on this night, but I realize now as then, I didn’t understand much of anything of his Christmas or this Christmas at all…

It’s been the same dream since my first dream.

It’s been the same dream since my first dream. A prairie somewhere, level as glass for miles in any direction. In an ocean of switchgrass sits a junkyard and a teepee and a ‘51 Shoebox flathead Ford.

It’s not a shiny black Ford, with chrome glistening in some summer’s sun. The body is rust-pitted and the windows are broken and the guts of the interior have been ripped out. The flatty V8 robbed of easily assessable parts. A testament to the violence of age and the passage of years.

My father was certifiable about certian things, many things. He bought a lawn mower from Sears one time. His first gasoline powered mower. One of those pre-historic rotary mowers. The thing would start but not run. The better part of the summer of 1964 he was at war with Sears. They wanted to send him a new mower, my dad wanted his mower fixed.

One day, I guess I was seven, I decided to fix it myself. I wasn’t far into it when he came home. I doubt I had more than a few screws removed from the engine cover. My mom expected he’d be mad I was messing with his tools. His reaction was, looking at her and pointing at me and the mower, “He’s right, it’s time we fix this damn thing.”

We found it was a bad head gasket, well he did. I just watched and lost parts for him. That day I learned the beauty of the art of figuring stuff out and fixing things.

I think about that day and some imagined obligation I now feel to find and fix a lost and forsaken ‘51 flatty and make it whole and take it with me to some imaginary prairie somewhere and let some wind cool us and the teepee keep us dry and warm.

I’ve never been much on heaven and hell, but I hope where my damaged soul ends up it involves old junkers and greaser’s ghosts and hammers and wrenches, and the sound of swearing over bloody knuckles lilting over some grassland savanna.