A hot day alright, and them flies were in my face before the sun rose over that ocean of black and green. The morning’s ever present smell of eggs frying and bacon grease burning, and diesel exhaust and onions rotting in the crate.

The cook girl was pretty, not real pretty but pretty enough for me, and I wasn’t too pretty either, and the eggs were hot and the bacon wasn’t too burned. She snuck me breakfast first, before the rest of the field boys. I think she liked me. She gave me extra bread, and it was fresh baked with a lot of butter. She said, in jumbled words of Spanglish she wanted to fatten me up, but I was sure it was going to take more than butter to do it. She liked me, I’m sure, but more like a big sister, not looking to get laid.

I worried a lot because I always fucked it up with the farm girls. Their English wasn’t so good and I fell in love too fast. Them fields were so hot in the summer, there wasn’t a lot else to think about. I’d think about them field girls and falling in love. That was more fun than thinking about goddamn hot dirt and miles and miles of onions to be weeded.

By the time August rolled around, I was pretty sure there were bigger problems here on this earth than some fucking weeds, anyway.

The cook girl always made sure I got to eat first, and I didn’t want to wreck that. So I decided to not tell her straight up I loved her.

She smelled like sweat and her brown skin was powdered with the black dirt, but that wasn’t so bad. I smelled like sweat too, so we kind of smelled the same.

I think I was smart, but I wasn’t too sure. Everybody was always calling me smart, but I figured I couldn’t be too goddamn smart to be working in those endless fields. I looked up from the dirt one day when the temperature was topping ninety-five, only halfway through weeding a row. I stood there, and I swore to God if I didn’t get the fuck out of there, I was going to drown in that black and green sea. I never did drown, though. It’s probably real hard to drown in dirt. But more than one time, I wished I did.

Every summer was always about those goddamn onions, then into the fall, when we’d harvest. I hated onions. I hated weeding onions, and I hated grading onions. I hated dumping onions and stacking crates; I hated picking rots. I hated those fields, and everyone in them, except the girl who cooked for us. I swore one day I was going to learn how to speak Spanish good, like I speak English good, so I could tell her I loved her.

On a hot day I swear them fields felt like what Hell must have felt like, and since I was sure I was going there anyway for the thoughts I had about the cook girl, I’d be as ready as anyone for living in a pool of fire for eternity. At least that’s what the old lady told me every goddamn night.

I’d come home with that black dirt caked thick on my skin. Patches of mud cracked open from dried-up rivers of sweat. The skin on my back was burned by the sun until it bubbled up in blisters and it felt like that sizzle-burned bacon I had for breakfast. And I wasn’t in no mood for hearing about no Jesus nor Hell. I just wanted to wash off the black muck and go to bed. But first I had to learn me some Jesus and sing that song about an old rugged cross and listen to some Tennessee Ernie Ford, not no fun music ever, no songs about being in love with the cook girl, but more a about crosses and promised lands burning’ in Hell and all that shit.

The old lady had pictures of Jesus or God or somebody up there on the plaster wall under a painting of President Roosevelt. Underneath the pictures was a clay statue of some praying hands. I know Jesus was important to the old lady, but I didn’t see where it fit in to my life, what since all I seemed to think about was them goddamn onions and the cook girl.

I told the old lady one time maybe we should have a little fun now and fuck the promised land and them stupid onions. She didn’t like that any one bit, and she slapped me. The next day there I was again, eating my bacon and trying to say I love you in Spanish, while looking at the mist rising off them goddamned fields. I was often amazed how something as pretty as an onion field could be in the first light if the morning, with the slow coming sunrise and the rising and swirling mist, could try again to kill me by four in the afternoon.

I figured, from the perspective of my handful of years, and five feet tall, that a row of onions was about a mile long, one way, maybe ten miles long. A weeder walked bent over the whole time, and don’t you dare miss a single goddamn weed. When you reached the row’s end, you’d turn around and weed the other side of the row. The whole process struck me as asinine. We’d pull out the tiny weeds by hand and throw them in a bag, then dump the bag back in a ditch bank at the row’s end, where they could grow again.

Big Joey, the farmer, was a big man with a big beer gut, and not too goddamn smart, but smart enough, I suppose. He smelled bad, like dirty pants and sweat. Not the same sweat smell as me and the cook girl. Big Joey smelled like it was a long time since he was clean. He took me with him in his truck one day and when I asked him where we was headed he said, “We are going to pick us up a load of wets,” and he said I was a good worker and I could be boss of them wets and get out of them sweaty hot fields, if I played my cards right.

I don’t play cards, and I didn’t say much, so I felt like a pussy, but as we rode in the truck, I was getting real mad. He called the cook girl a wet too and asked me if I liked her. Then he poked his fat dirty finger into my ribs, like we was pals. I didn’t like that he called her a wet, I didn’t like that one bit. I sat in that truck smelling Big Joey and felt my bare sunburned back running against the dry vinyl of the beat-up old trucks bench-seat. We picked up eight Mexican farm-hands, Joey’s ‘wets.’ Five of them was a family, mother, father and three kids, two about my age.

When we got back to the farm, Joey was being a real asshole to the new people, I found a two-by-four, about 5 feet long on the ground by one of the barns. I hauled way back, and slammed that board into Big Joeys kneecap as hard as I could. He buckled to the ground, and I walked away from them fucking onions for good.

He comes limping by the old lady’s house a few days later, standing on the tiny front porch, speaking to her though the wood framed screen door. He said he wasn’t going to call the cops because I was just a kid. I screamed out the cracked front window that he didn’t want the cops to come and see how he treated his hands, that’s why he wasn’t calling nobody. Then I yelled out louder, he better stop calling them wets before I bust his other knee.

That was the end of my time onion farming. I never did see the cook girl again, so that made me pretty sad. I don’t dare go nowhere near Big Joey’s farm. I think he’d probably kill me if I gave him half a chance.

The old lady said Jesus was mad at me for busting Big Joey’s knee. I figured if Jesus was siding with that asshole, I didn’t want anything to do with him neither. So that was pretty much the end of me and Jesus too.

These anti-depressants are kicking in with vivid dream-recollections as a twisted and kinky bonus. Like dirty fingers digging through rotted leaves and thin roots and twigs; wet dirt full of worms and the last century’s detritus.

I walked up to the cemetery on this sticky and rainy afternoon. The old Hillside cemetery, the one next to Little Paulie’s house. Paulie was a change of life baby. His parents were in their seventies when we were kids. They lived in a big old house, three stories tall, with dirty and cracked windows and books, every corner packed and stacked with old newspapers. The house was creepy in the daylight. But at night, deep in the night, tripping on acid it was flat-out terrifying. One night I became certain there were cadavers and spooks in the attic, and they told me to leave, and I never went back inside.

Little Paulie had a dog, Lobo, who was really the only one in that family who made a lot of sense to me. His father was a tired old man and just wanted to be left alone. His mom was kind, but always a little suspicious of me, like I was the one who was a bad influence on her little boy, when in fact I went to see Paulie mainly to buy drugs and paraphernalia. Some guys bought guns from Paulie, nothing big. Stolen rifles and handguns, mostly. Untraceable stuff, no serial numbers. Cheap Saturday night specials. I mainly liked his dog.

Up on the biggest hill on the graveyard grounds, under a wide and tall pine tree, was the grave of this kid named Royal H. Duck. He died about 1914. We adopted this dead kid into our crew, and we’d spend many summer nights up by his headstone drinking booze and smoking pot and fucking Middletown girls out in the weeds. Royal was only fourteen when he died and the night, we stumbled on his headstone I got sad for him. I assumed he must have had a pretty rough life, what with that name, and I assumed he probably spent a lot of his time fighting. I figured he didn’t have a lot of friends. I could relate to all that.

Sometimes I’d chew on bitter peyote buttons and try not to vomit and go sit alone and talk to Royal. On daytime visits occasionally the big maple tree next to his pine would be alive with a murder of squawking and cawing crows. The racket was terrifying and confusing. Sometimes I felt myself in the middle of a whirlwind, but within that din I could decipher words. Not so much words as thoughts my brain spliced together as words. There is a fair to middling chance I’m crazy. I never disputed that. A thousand cawing and clicking crows. The noise was terrifying. Royal never said much, what with being dead and all. But he told me to listen to the caws, not to trust Little Paulie.

That next summer I took a trip with Paulie up to New England, Boston actually. He convinced me to drive a trailer up there for him. I didn’t know what was in the load. My job was to drive and not ask a lot of questions. I figured it involved guns and really didn’t care one way or the other. My assumption was the guns were going to Boston, and then find their way overseas, maybe into Ireland, but I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to know.

I knew Little Paulie’s dad was involved with the Republican Army back in Ireland. Someone told me once that even their last name was fake, and that his dad was involved in some kind of operation here, from the house up by the cemetery between New York and Boston and Belfast.

I’m mostly of Irish decent and I know I should give a fuck, but to be truthful I didn’t. Most of the people I knew from Ireland were as sick of the Orangemen as they were of the RA and bridges exploding and the killing.

I pulled the trailer onto a dead-end street near Beacon Hill. Paulie, who followed me the entire way on a motorcycle, pulled right up to the cab. I jumped on the back, and we took off down Route 93 fast and hot for the Pilgrim Highway and Plymouth. We stopped at a place called Bert’s Bar, south of town near some place called Poverty Point. I remember ordering a shot of tequila and a beer. That’s about all I recall.

I woke up face down in the surf, bare ass naked and freezing. It was August and still pretty hot during the day, but the ocean was freezing cold. I stood up, now fully aware of my nakedness, and realized I was alone. I felt like I was tripping again, or still tripping from last night.

That was both a good thing and a pretty bad thing. Being naked and tripping on acid outside is a bit of fun in the moment until the reality and necessity of the situation confronts you. The conflicting thoughts of reality can turn out to be quite overwhelming and terrifying. Acid is funny like that. In one minute, everything is all shiny and new—an adventure, then it all goes to shit, and you can’t think or connect two thoughts that make any sense at all. I thought I quit smoking, but my brain was craving the bitter taste of nicotine. In some universe I saw myself as some acid-head, truck-driving Marlboro man.

I saw a diner across Route 44. Slouching and sneaking I hid behind a stone wall until I saw no cars, and ran my ass as fast as I could, barefoot and naked to the back door of the place, banging with my fist on the wood framed screen door. I’d not seen my face yet in a mirror, but by the look on the young waitresses face I could tell I looked worse than simply being naked. She was kind, she laughed a little and asked me simply, “What the fuck…” I think I managed something witty like, “I know, right?”

She found me a couple of dirty aprons and I wrapped them around my waist. In the bathroom mirror, I saw I had two black eyes, and my nose was pretty swollen, but not broken. The waitress, she said her name was Lorelei, but everyone called her Lorie, was a pretty girl, nineteen or twenty with curly blond to brown hair. She snuck me some eggs and coffee and she sat with me on the back porch in the coastal sunshine. I was fascinated by the beach sand on the black top walkway, thinking there was a deeper meaning to everything that was in front of me. I was forever looking for some deeper meaning. I finished my eggs and coffee and handed Lorie back my dishes. She was kind and funny and had a pretty smile.

Her uncle owned the diner, a fellow mick, named Colm. Lori introduced me to him. I told him my story, as well as I could recollect it. He let me work in the kitchen for a week, and he brought me some old jeans and shirts to wear and a dirty old pair of Converse All-Stars. After a week, I’d made enough money to buy myself a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and a denim jacket and a bus ticket home.

I was in the kitchen saying goodbye to Colm and thanking him for his help. When I saw a cloud of dust and heard a loud bike pull into the parking lot. For a moment the view out to Route 44 and the ocean was lost to the dust devil.

Colm and his niece had literally saved my life, and they didn’t ask questions. Even when Colm got wind that the trailer was loaded with guns and the ultimate destination. He let it go and left me alone. I’d slept that week in the back-room office of the diner. I’d wanted Lorelei to join me back there, but it was ok and probably better she didn’t.

I didn’t pay much attention to the motorcycle. Out by the cash register I allowed myself one last look at the wall of pies and cakes that Colm and his wife made early every morning. Looking so good it hurt to turn away, behind their protective wall of chrome and clean glass. I wanted to say goodbye to Lorie, when I heard an unmistakable voice ordering eggs over easy and make sure the eggs sat on the white bread toast. Paulie ate that every day of his fricken life, he acted like he invented eggs on toast.

In one swooping motion, I grabbed him by his greasy ponytail, gave him a quick gut punch, dragged his ass out the diner’s glass front doors, adorned with little pilgrims and the sign that read, Welcome to Plymouth, Massachusetts. I tossed him over the fragile wrought-iron railing that made the handrail for the short three steps leading to the entrance. By then Paulie was sputtering some crap about coming back to find me. On his way down off the steps, he hit a rock with his head, knocking himself out. I pondered stealing his big Triumph Bonneville but Paulie was the kind to call a cop, not to come after me and settle stuff on our own. With my dirty Converse All-Stars and my left foot, I pushed the bike over on its side, and I walked out of Plymouth for the last time and toward the bus station.

I got an email the other day from Paulie. We’ve grown old without ever again speaking. He says” I hear you’re a writer now?” And some other trivial crap.

I say, “I’ve always been a writer. Why?”

He typed, “I’m curious what you write about?”

“Anything and everything, Paulie. Old days in Middletown, stuff like that. Some days, like today, I write about nothing at all… but, you know what, Paulie? Royal Duck was right about you all along!”

We are working on another free book, a collection of essays, from 2016 to present. I’m not sure if I’ve evolved much as writer in the past seven years, I think, at best, I’m just grumpier.

I enjoyed writing this piece, it was the foundation for the book The Truth Is In The Water. You can get it here for free, if you’d like. https://books.williamlobb.com/freebies

He wakes up early, squinting at sunlight raging through grimy windows and ripped white curtains, yellowed from years bathed in cigarette smoke.

The room was cold. The sticky sweat of summer faded too quickly to this frigid morning.

He reached down to the floor, found yesterday’s shirt, still buttoned halfway down, and pulled it on over his head. Reaching in the pocket he found his Lucky Strikes and his Zippo lighter.

Hacking and coughing, standing and stepping on an upturned beer bottle cap, cutting the bottom of his foot, he swears. From his words it would appear Jesus must have dropped it there.

Slightly limping he finds his way into the dark and cold kitchen. The old woman had made coffee hours before she left for town to work her factory job. An ancient, slightly rusted and brown stained percolator turned off, the remaining black mud-like drink hours gone cold. He fills a glass he finds – probably, mostly clean – from an assortment in the sink and drinks it.

Grabbing his fiddle he walks to porch, the sunlight sets the dying summer grasses and weeds and trees ablaze.

Lighting another Lucky Strike and holding it in his teeth he brings the fiddle to his chin.

He plays a Celtic, bluegrass ode to the warm sun and the blue sky.

Down the dirt road comes the sound of a banjo, from another porch, another’s morning rising to life in these hills.

As the notes lilt from his bow on strings his existence changes. The tune of fiddle and the banjo fuse into melody.

Transformed again to a young man full of wonder and thirst and hunger for great things, he plays on.

For years, decades, I’ve heard the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds was transformative. A classic that must be listened to. I’ve read about it being compared to Sgt. Pepper’s and Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Like a piece of 1960s art that had to be experienced and savored at least once whole and in its entirety.

I’ve been using Amazon music for the past year. Yeah, I know Jeff Bezos, evil empire, you’re a purist and vinyl is better blah, blah, blah and on and on. I don’t care. I like the app because I can find and listen to literally any song or album ever recorded. Last week I was listening to some pretty obscure 1930s Leadbelly stuff.

But back to Pet Sounds. I finally decided I’d put it on while I did some writing work. Am I missing a gene? It’s been bugging me all week. I got through the first three tracks of teenage angst, and I had to turn on some Tom Waits. I know there are more pressing issues in everyone’s life, but what the fuck!

I always liked—not loved—the Beachboy’s sound. And I get the Phil Spector hook. It sounds good, but I guess I was expecting more depth. I do that unintentionally, and it bugs me. It’s like when I read Hemingway or Steinbeck, often for the third or fifth time or twentieth time. I’m always looking for deeper meaning. Maybe some books is just a good story, by a truly talented writer, maybe this is just a good album with some good songs and I’m overthinking. I overthink…

I’ve wondered if other generations did this: In the 70s we’d go to the record store to buy an album and spend hours deciding, studying the covers, then finally we’d take the record home and play it until the grooves wore thin, analyzing the words, the covers, the musicians.

Dylan and the Beatles were good for the whole “what does this mean” stuff. I guess it’s just a habit. Maybe it’s just a good song, after all.

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“It was the way the fadin’ late afternoon sun caught the side of her face, and made her skin glow like fire, and her eyes danced with little sparkles, like gold or maybe diamonds. It was May, I think, maybe June. She wore a fancy dress full of yellow flowers and blue clouds and she looked like one of them women in the magazines that ladies read, the one’s full of clothes and shoes and all that horseshit. The women who looked just as pretty with their clothes on, as the girls in the magazines I kept under my bed.

“I stood there with the shovel in my hand still tryin’ to learn the value of a hard day’s work, that’s what my daddy said I needed to learn.

“He said that to me before he run off. I never know’d my daddy real good. That’s about all he ever told me.

“It wasn’t the work in that sweaty sun that pissed me off, James, not half as much as the nickels they threw me as the boss called me a ‘good worker.’ The one day I told the boss a ‘worker’ was a fuckin’ bee, and I was a man, and the boss said, ‘Get your worthless ass back down in that goddamn ditch,’ and I did.

“That’s the day I put my head down, James.

“That day I knew the nickels was never going to buy me nothing’ but another pair of boots to wear a hole clean through and not a pair of clean pants, fancy enough to wear for that pretty lady, with the sun on her face, and the sparkly eyes, to ever notice me.

“That’s the day I started to hate the mud-slop ditch as much as the goddamn boss and his nickels. That’s the day I almost climbed out of the muddy hole and hit the boss upside the head with that fuckin’ pointed shovel and walk off to claim my goddamn life. Instead, that was the day I decided to stay in the ditch with my wet boots and dungarees with the patches on the knees and nod and smile when the boss walked by. And dig that spade into the rock and clay soil. Jesus fuck, like any man right in the mind could be happy in a ditch, with a pick and shovel.

“That’s the day I decided to let them own me and let the lady with the sun on her face and sparkling eyes and the flowery dress fade to a memory that haunted me all the rest of my days. Then came the day I realized my back was too sore to work the shovel anymore and all my bones creaked like some old sailin’ ship must have creaked when it was way too long out to sea. Scarin’ them sailors their boat was comin’ apart at every nail and riggin’

“Feelin’ that wood handle on them burnin’ callouses of my hand I realized it wasn’t some old ship creakin’, but me comin’ apart.

“And that’s the day I died. But I died a lot of days before they throw’d me in that hole. Bo and Ronnie and Dick and them other boys with shovels stood around my hole, drinkin’ warm beers, and they said I was a good man. But the boss, he never said I was a good man, he said I was a good worker; that’s what the fuckin’ boss said.”

-Mose Tester The Berry Pickers