May 2006 Archives

I went through my first two years of college scared to death and feeling like a moron.  The tone was set in that week of indoctrination.  I had read Walden 2 pretty carefully, and, as I said, I had thoughts about it, though I was not sure I had the right ones, the ones I was supposed to have.  Overall, I thought, you know, that a world controlled along rational guidelines by scientists was not an entirely bad idea.  I am speaking here, to be sure, of ideas.  The book seemed to me sort of dumb at another level, or let’s say it was dumb if it was anything other than pure speculation.

For example, in a rational universe, people would say, cigarettes are bad for you. They kill people; therefore we should ban the sale of all cigarettes. That’s pretty damn logical and right there you have the problem.  People are too stupid to know their own self interests; they are ignorant and self-centered.  Also self-destructive.  If people were rational they would have all already decided not to smoke on the basis of a response to the evidence.  So people were too dumb, stupid, and self-centered for them to ever go for Walden 2.

That’s sort of what I thought, although perhaps not quite as articulately as I have put it here.  Finally, the time for discussing the book came around.  I was in a room with about 15 other people I didn’t know and a professor.  I gave up almost immediately on the idea I was going to say anything.  These people were smart and they were articulate, and they didn’t mind being in the spotlight.  They didn’t say just yes or no or this is what I think the author means.  They immediately lit into what they thought about the book, and they didn’t like it.  The best I could gather was that Skinner was an evil bastard who would strip persons of their rights and their freedom.

I felt bad.  I let myself down that day.  I got snowed under.  I was for rights too, and being a teen-age existentialist, nothing was more important than freedom.  I just didn’t understand what I was getting into.  Just as I didn’t understand my reaction to the word “lifestyle.”  

I don’t think I can think of any other moment in my life when I remember the first time I heard a word.  But I can remember that time.  I can remember where I was sitting in the room, over towards the windows, with the afternoon light slanting in.  I was in my first ever “English” class, a special one for majors like myself, and the Professor had asked some question maybe about abortion, and a student said, “That’s a lifestyle choice.”  I had heard the word, but not seen the speaker.  But I turned round to see who it was, as the teacher indicated that was the correct response.

My reaction was involuntary and strong.  I was angry and disgusted.  A life was not a fucking lifestyle.  Deciding whether or not to have an abortion was not a fucking lifestyle choice.  I mean back then abortion was illegal.  I couldn’t imagine that any of the people I had known who might have had to get one would have seen getting one as a lifestyle choice.  It would have been a grueling, horrible and debilitating decision, and you might not have been able to get one at all.

So I let myself down again.  I didn’t say anything.  I mean what was I going to say?  I hadn’t heard the word before.  I didn’t know the fucking word existed, so I didn’t have any rational objection to it.  All I could have said was something like, “Lifestyle!  Lifestyle!  Who the fuck dreamt up that abomination!  Lifestyle my fucking ass.” 

Hell, I was already having problems fitting in.

The college I went to had a five day indoctrination before you actually started classes.  I got a list of activities and such,and also we were supposed to read a book for discussion purposes, B.F. Skinner’s Walden 2.  I couldn’t figure out the 2 part because I didn’t know about Walden 1 yet, but I read it anyway, immediately, of course in my eagerness for higher education.  I got the feeling they had assigned the book for some reason and that I was supposed to think something about it, but I wasn’t sure what.

To me, the idea of a society constructed along rational, scientific principles didn’t sound all that bad.  I read a bit more too about the Skinner box, this plastic box, with air conditioning, and other features that made life more comfortable for an infant.  Like, in the box, you didn’t have to wear diapers because of the special absorbent pads and air condition that would dry the baby off so that you cut down on diapher rash.  And you didn’t have to worry about the infant rolling out of the box onto the floor or having something fall on it because it had a plastic lid too.

Skinner’s idea was that people are animals that adjust to their environment and that if their environment is screwed up they will accordingly become screwed up.  But if their environment is constructed according to scientific principles there was less chance of that happening.

Given what I already knew about my infancy, I figured I might have been better off raised according to scientific principles since I had been raised in a pretty fucked up environment.  I was born early—as I have already noted—with jaundice, and then my mother’s breasts caked so that it was painful for her to breast feed me, so she took to feeding me by bottle according to the clock for her own personal convenience and to spare her nipples wear and tear.  And since I still got hungry and cried a lot, she concluded I was “excessively needy.”  I think I would have done better with a Skinner’s box.

Maybe a lot better because, according to the old lady who is not to be trusted, I had shown no signs of being ready to walk and she had gone off to the kitchen or probably to the bathroom and I suddenly got up and WALKED straight out of the room, down a little corridor, and put my hands directly on one of those old fashioned wall heaters thus burning the living shit out of them.  Then, according to the old lady, she took me to a nurse who put cotton balls or strips on my hands, and taped them up, so that when all the blisters burst they had to go through and pull out strands of cotton that got stuck in the pus.

So according to the old lady the first time I took that elemental assertive step known as WALKING I burnt the shit out of my hands.  

Lord knows what damange this did to my primal psyche.

The college I went to had a five day indoctrination before you actually started classes.  I got a list of activities and such,and also we were supposed to read a book for discussion purposes, B.F. Skinner’s Walton 2.  I couldn’t figure out the 2 part because I didn’t know about Walton 1 yet, but I read it anyway, immediately, of course in my eagerness for higher education.  I got the feeling they had assigned the book for some reason and that I was supposed to think something about it, but I wasn’t sure what.

To me, the idea of a society constructed along rational, scientific principles didn’t sound all that bad.  I read a bit more too about the Skinner box, this plastic box, with air conditioning, and other features that made life more comfortable for an infant.  Like, in the box, you didn’t have to wear diapers because of the special absorbent pads and air condition that would dry the baby off so that you cut down on diapher rash.  And you didn’t have to worry about the infant rolling out of the box onto the floor or having something fall on it because it had a plastic lid too.

Skinner’s idea was that people are animals that adjust to their environment and that if their environment is screwed up they will accordingly become screwed up.  But if their environment is constructed according to scientific principles there was less chance of that happening.

Given what I already knew about my infancy, I figured I might have been better off raised according to scientific principles since I had been raised in a pretty fucked up environment.  I was born early—as I have already noted—with jaundice, and then my mother’s breasts caked so that it was painful for her to breast feed me, so she took to feeding me by bottle according to the clock for her own personal convenience and to spare her nipples wear and tear.  And since I still got hungry and cried a lot, she concluded I was “excessively needy.”  I think I would have done better with a Skinner’s box.

Maybe a lot better because, according to the old lady who is not to be trusted, I had shown no signs of being ready to walk and she had gone off to the kitchen or probably to the bathroom and I suddenly got up and WALKED straight out of the room, down a little corridor, and put my hands directly on one of those old fashioned wall heaters thus burning the living shit out of them.  Then, according to the old lady, she took me to a nurse who put cotton balls or strips on my hands, and taped them up, so that when all the blisters burst they had to go through and pull out strands of cotton that got stuck in the pus.

So according to the old lady the first time I took that elemental assertive step known as WALKING I burnt the shit out of my hands.  

Lord knows what damange this did to my primal psyche.

I got to know BJ bussing tables.  We got to talking and she had a sense of humor.  And then she went away for a year to Germany because she was a German major. And then she came back and we got to talking some more, and then necking, and dry humping and whatnot.  And that might have just gone on forever because I was afraid of getting her pregnant and just couldn’t bring myself to ask if she was on the pill.  I was also afraid of venereal diseases, but after I got to know her a bit I figured she wouldn’t give me one of those or at least tell me if she had one.

But we studied together and one night she went off to the john and left her diary, I guess you would call it, sitting there.  And I didn’t have to reach out or move it or anything to read that she had recorded that she had been taking the pill for over a month.  And after that things preceded apace, and I was able to unburden myself of the terrible stigma of my virginity albeit, if I am to believe other guys, rather late but still somewhat in the ballpark for what might be called “normal.”

I was terribly concerned about being “normal” since I was pretty sure I wasn’t.  But the idea that I might want to fuck a woman just to get rid of my virginity troubled me.  That seemed like using a person to satisfy your needs, and I didn’t want any woman I knew to think I had used her just to get rid of my virginity.  That felt awful.  I didn’t get drunk and go to parties, so I didn’t have an opportunity for casual sex and besides I was incapable of casual sex.  I mean a guy who worries that a woman might feel used if he has sex with her to get rid of his virginity is too screwed up for casual sex.  

But I was pretty horny and that overcame any compunctions I had about using a woman to get rid of my virginity.  Besides I liked BJ.  She was smart and liked to laugh and anybody who is a German major has got to have a bit of a tormented side too.  Just my cup of tea, the tormented side I mean.  I liked too that, when she had gone to Germany, she really had insisted on going to Germany, and not some place where everybody spoke English.  Instead she stayed with a German family that hardly knew English and nearly had a nervous breakdown for her troubles.

 Afterwards I felt pretty good for a while.  In fact, a professor said, Nick, what’s going on, you seem in a better mood.  I didn’t know any professor had noticed my mood and I figured I must have been in a pretty vile one if people could actually see the change.  I wasn’t going to tell her I had just got laid.

That lasted for a little bit.  But then things got complicated again.  Because having sex with a woman that you know brings about an increased degree of intimacy whether you want it or not.  Getting laid and losing my virginity I saw was a pyrrhic victory.  I hadn’t really changed any.  Things were as fucked up as ever but more complicated.  Before I got laid, I knew at least where I was headed, but afterwards I had no idea where we were going.

Hindsight they say is 20/20.  But really it’s not.  Or let’s say it depends on what you are looking at or for.  I have spent a long time looking and reviewing and contemplating to come to the conclusion—or sort of conclusion—that the persistent angst I felt at college was not entirely the result of my having no social skills, or being emotionally stunted, or being tortured by my inability to get rid of my virginity, like it was the plague or something, but at least partly from my just not fitting in.

I attended a relatively exclusive, tiny, liberal arts college that affluent middle class people sent their kids to.  I was a poor white.  That’s why I got all the free money I got to go there.  I was like part of their quota for poor white people, and it was no skin off their nose because the government gave them money to help people like me. Naturally, I didn’t know or think of myself as a poor white person.  I didn’t really notice even that only a tiny percentage of us worked in the student union and that alone put me in a different category.

 That was part of the deal I got.  The college made sure I got a job to cover my books and stuff like that.  I didn’t mind, really.  I worked 20-25 hours a week, and that was nothing.  All I did was go to classes and study, so working in the student union was a break and good for a little exercise especially when I worked washing dishes.  Sometimes I didn’t wash the dishes; sometimes I bused the tables after everybody ate.  

Sometimes I worked the line tending the tea, the coffee, the milk and making sure the deserts didn’t run out. The soft drinks were out in the open so I didn’t have to mind those unless one ran out. I wore a sort of super-starched white smock, I guess it would be called, and a floppy version of a chefs hat.  I didn’t like the hat thing at all, but was happy they didn’t make me wear a hair net. 

So the sophisticates who were too good for soda pop, would look at me and say, “Tea, please.”  And I would get a cup and a saucer and put hot water in the cup, naturally, and place a tea bag on the saucer and they would say, “Thank you.”  And I would say, “You’re welcome.”  And somebody would say, “Coffee please.”  And I would do it all over again except I would put coffee in the cup rather than hot water, and so on for twenty minutes or so, till most of the stragglers came in.  By that time, people were leaving and I would go out with a cart and start picking up the slop they had left behind.  The amounts of wasted food I could not believe.

While most of my peers constantly complained about the dorm food, I didn’t.  Well, I did so I could fit in, but really I liked it better than home food because a) there was a lot of it and b) there was more variety.  Once I was eating with a group of guys and I said, “Damn. This is good.”  And jabbing my fork at it, “What the fuck is it?”  The guy across from me, the guy who later went to jail rather than be drafted, laughed and said, “Lamb.”  The laugh was good natured; a laugh of recognition, or rather non-recognition, like, “Who the hell is this guy?” 

 I didn’t know anything about Chinese food either; I mean I knew of course that the Chinese ate food and that it was called Chinese food.  But I hadn’t eaten any of it.

I have wasted a good deal of time in my adult life looking for the mythical tomato of my youth.  Now at the stores, you can buy things that resemble tomatoes.  But the tomato of my youth was so juicy the skin was about to burst, and when you cut it the smell filled the room.  Once I grew some beefsteak tomatoes that almost reached the mark.  We had a hot summer, but the next year when I tried again, the crop was covered in the most god awful worms I have ever seen.

Such is the farmer’s life.

Once we visited Uncle Baxter in Georgia.  I don’t know whose Uncle he was exactly, but we were related somehow.  He lived out in the middle of nowhere.  We drove along a paved road for a long time and then we drove off  on a dirt road for a long time.  The land was all Uncle Baxter’s and he rented it out to blacks.  Finally we got to Uncle Baxter’s house.  It didn’t have a lick of paint on it and was lifted up off the ground.  Underneath the house was a pack of dogs.

They came yipping and snarling out into the yard, and boy, you knew, you had better stop.  So we did and they stopped too but still yipping and snarling till Uncle Baxter came out and called them off.  I guess living off like that Uncle Baxter was scared of strangers or something what with the dogs and right inside over the front door was not one but two loaded firearms.  Maybe he was worried about being the only white person around and the landlord for many black people—landlords being universally hated. 

Uncle Baxter showed us around the place while Mrs. Baxter made us up a light lunch.  We sat down to ham that had come straight out of their smokehouse and biscuits that Mrs. Baxter had whipped up on the spot and sliced tomatoes right from their garden.  And a little pan gravy from frying the ham if you wanted it.  That was one of the best lunches I ever had.  And the tomatoes! Well, they were real tomatoes straight from their garden where they had been a few minutes before we ate them.

Sometimes you have just got to be there; there’s no other way.  Ham straight from your own smokehouse is completely different from the hams you buy at the store. The same for a tomato.   If you grow corn, you learn that the sugars in the corn begin to change within minutes of having been picked. So first you get the water boiling and then you pick the corn and shuck it and turn off the heat and just sort of dip the corn in the hot water and it will taste like nothing you had ever had before. 

The same with ham from your own smokehouse or tomatoes straight from your own garden.  Most of us don’t know, these days, what anything “really” tastes like or even if there’s a “real” way for anything to taste.

Having arrived in CA in the mid-50s my family witnessed the great boom in development.  Things were relatively stable in Casa De Ora till the mid-sixties.  A small tract went up on our hill.  And in the 70’s the truck farmer out back sold his land for a fortune and houses went in there too.

The top soil in that area varied from about six inches in depth to, depending on the spot, a couple of feet.  Below the topsoil were rock and that stuff we called leche, meaning white like milk, a kind of soil left over from when the whole area had been under water.  You couldn’t grow anything in that stuff.  The developers came in and would terrace the land for their houses and in one afternoon clear off the top soil that had taken maybe a couple thousand years to get there.  And then they would truck in topsoil and put it around the houses so people could grow insane lawns.

One year, during my time in the basement, a white tailed kite, a kind of hawk, showed up towards spring and settled in on one particular branch of one particular tree in a gulley down back.  I guess they called it a kite because it would fly up, face into the wind, and hang there like a kite especially towards evening.  When it spotted something, it would fold its wings and drop like a damn stone and disappear in the weeds.  And then it would pop back up out of the weeds sometimes with a mouse and sometimes with nothing.  Had it not been for that bird I would have had no idea how many mice were in those weeds.  

Then it would go to its particular spot on the particular branch of its particular tree.  I observed this spot through a telescope.  It was stained from the bird’s kill.  I don’t really know how the damn bird did it, but having settled in with its prey it would gut the mouse and start to pecking at the entrails almost immediately.  

When fall started to settle in, the bird left and went lord knows where; and amazingly it came back to that particular spot and that particular tree and that particular branch for five years in a row.  In the second or third year, I started waiting for the bird in the spring, wondering where it was and would it show up.  And when it did show up, I felt satisfaction.

But one summer, the developers came and with their bulldozers starting filling in the gulley area where the bird had its tree.  I watched as the dirt piled up and up and finally toppled the bird’s tree.  It had been off hunting and I swear, when it came back, that it flew exactly in SPACE to the spot where that tree had been and was no more.  It tried to land in SPACE and began to fly in a troubled manner looking for its tree that lay on its side maybe 15 feet below the spot now in space where the bird always landed. 

I don’t know why but I found the whole thing fucking heartbreaking.  I wanted to say, stupid bird, stupid bird, go away.  Your tree is not there.  But it kept trying to find the tree and finally it did.  It even went to its particular spot on its particular branch.  But now it was way too close to the ground.  That day it left and never returned.

I wrote a short story about the incident trying partly to explain to myself why it had affected me so.  I mailed it off and the editor wrote back that it was one of the most overdrawn and hysterical (in the unfunny sense) story he had ever read.  Obviously, I had taken some creative writing courses—which I hadn’t—and had taken from them the worst possible lessons.  And as a final gratuitous insult, said I had the worst pseudonym he had ever seen.

Having arrived in CA in the mid-50s my family witnessed the great boom in development.  Things were relatively stable in Casa De Ora till the mid-sixties.  A small tract went up on our hill.  And in the 70’s the truck farmer out back sold his land for a fortune and houses went in there too.

The top soil in that area varied from about six inches in depth to, depending on the spot, a couple of feet.  Below the topsoil were rock and that stuff we called leche, meaning white like milk, a kind of soil left over from when the whole area had been under water.  You couldn’t grow anything in that stuff.  The developers came in and would terrace the land for their houses and in one afternoon clear off the top soil that had taken maybe a couple thousand years to get there.  And then they would truck in topsoil and put it around the houses so people could grow insane lawns.

One year, during my time in the basement, a white tailed kite, a kind of hawk, showed up towards spring and settled in on one particular branch of one particular tree in a gulley down back.  I guess they called it a kite because it would fly up, face into the wind, and hang there like a kite especially towards evening.  When it spotted something, it would fold its wings and drop like a damn stone and disappear in the weeds.  And then it would pop back up out of the weeds sometimes with a mouse and sometimes with nothing.  Had it not been for that bird I would have had no idea how many mice were in those weeds.  

Then it would go to its particular spot on the particular branch of its particular tree.  I observed this spot through a telescope.  It was stained from the bird’s kill.  I don’t really know how the damn bird did it, but having settled in with its prey it would gut the mouse and start to pecking at the entrails almost immediately.  

When fall started to settle in, the bird left and went lord knows where; and amazingly it came back to that particular spot and that particular tree and that particular branch for five years in a row.  In the second or third year, I started waiting for the bird in the spring, wondering where it was and would it show up.  And when it did show up, I felt satisfaction.

But one summer, the developers came and with their bulldozers starting filling in the gulley area where the bird had its tree.  I watched as the dirt piled up and up and finally toppled the bird’s tree.  It had been off hunting and I swear, when it came back, that it flew exactly in SPACE to the spot where that tree had been and was no more.  It tried to land in SPACE and began to fly in a troubled manner looking for its tree that lay on its side maybe 15 feet below the spot now in space where the bird always landed. 

I don’t know why but I found the whole thing fucking heartbreaking.  I wanted to say, stupid bird, stupid bird, go away.  Your tree is not there.  But it kept trying to find the tree and finally it did.  It even went to its particular spot on its particular branch.  But now it was way too close to the ground.  That day it left and never returned.

I wrote a short story about the incident trying partly to explain to myself why it had affected me so.  I mailed it off and the editor wrote back that it was one of the most overdrawn and hysterical (in the unfunny sense) story he had ever read.  Obviously, I had taken some creative writing courses—which I hadn’t—and had taken from them the worst possible lessons.  And as a final gratuitous insult, said I had the worst pseudonym he had ever seen.

Mr. Smith and his family shared a property line with the Whites; though “share” with its hippy-dippy overtones is probably not the right word.  The two families warred constantly. 

I don’t know if it had anything to do with the war or not, but I have to mention that Mr. Smith’s house was oddly situated on his lot.  His putative front door pointed directly out onto the White’s property; mere feet separated his front door from their property.  To get to the front door, you had to walk along the side of the front to get to the front door. I never saw anybody use that front door.  People came in from the street; that’s where the driveway was.  It terminated in the back of the house.  So you’d park the car in the drive way and enter through the back door which was the de facto, if not de jure, front door of the house.

But as I said the families warred.  The Whites did not like the animals that Mr. Smith kept out back, and they didn’t like it either that his backward was a mess, with pieces of cars and old tires sticking out of the weeds. They especially did not like the geese.  Mr. Smith’s old dog died and instead of replacing it with another dog, he bought three geese that he had heard made good watch animals.  These suckers were big and if you came onto the driveway they would come at you making violent geese noises and snaking their ugly pea brained heads at you.  One guy drove his car onto the drive way, Mr. Smith said, and before he could do anything the geese had pecked paint right off the car.

 Mr. Smith claimed the Whites threw their garbage onto his property and that their son Richie that everybody beat up except me was using his telescope to look through the windows of his house.  And what do you know but somebody started leaving obscene letters addressed to his daughter under their putative front door.  These pretty graphically described what the author of the letters wanted to do with Mr. Smith’s daughter sexually.

 So Mr. Smith stood watch one night and caught Richie sticking a letter under the door.  He had been apparently using his telescope in inappropriate ways and had over stimulated himself or something.  Richie was under 18 so he didn’t go to jail or anything; instead he had to go to counseling so that he could learn the error of his ways.

Mr. Peace—whose son Richie had stuck in his one testicle with a pencil--worked as a volunteer policeman on the weekend, doing crowd control and stuff like that.  He caught wind of the Richie affair and through police contacts got hold of the actual file on Richie.  He had heard that Richie was applying to a military academy; so he wrote a letter to all of the military academies and attached portions of Richie’s file.  Mr. Peace said he considered it his patriotic duty to make sure perverts like Richie did not serve in our military.

 Richie did not attend any of the military academes; whether Mr. Peace’s letters had anything to do with that nobody will ever know.

Perhaps every one is prone to it—the attempt to feel and assert that one is superior to somebody.  To all appearances the low man on our local neighborhood totem pole was little Richie White, the guy everybody, except me, beat up. 

Please understand I could have beaten him up.  One day he was there; I had to go into the house to see a man about a horse, and told Richie to stay OFF MY BIKE.  No sooner do I turn around than he jumps on it.  I knock him over; he’s like a paper bag.  I assume the beat the shit out of Richie White posture by jumping on his chest.  And I look at the guy and see him slobbering and snorting and wincing and I haven’t even hit him yet.  I got up and said, “Just go home, will you.”  And he did.

But one guy might have qualified as lower than Richie because he was funny looking and kids are not kind to strange looking people.  Fred Peace had been born a bit different.  For one thing he had been born with terrible eye sight; he had these huge coke bottle lens glasses and you really couldn’t see his eyes swimming around in those things.  And he had this very light, too fleecy hair, and skin that looked sort of leathery with little tiny bumps all over it. And he had no eyebrows to speak of. Something had gone a little tiny bit off in the genetic factory.  Clearly he was human but distinctly odd and pretty small too.

He got picked on, of course.  But after elementary school anyway people stopped it.  There was something about him that just took the fun out of it.  For one thing, he was remorselessly polite.  If somebody hit him in the teeth, he was as likely to say as not, “I apologize if my teeth got in the way of your fist.  I hope I did not damage your knuckles.”  So if you got to beating on him, you found yourself looking at this guy who was not going to beg, or flinch, or cry out in pain, or holler for help or anything.  He was just going to fucking take it because at some level he felt the situation was completely hopeless and there was just no use in whining about.  It was like whatever troubles he had with his genetics had taught him that nobody is in control and that whatever happened there was no point at all in being frightened.

Fred was a Boy Scout like me, and I liked him alright.  It was impossible to have a conversation with him because he really didn’t have much to say.  But he was a good companion if you didn’t want to talk.

The first year we went to high school we didn’t have what would be our high school yet, so they bussed us to another one.  People wore black leather jackets and such there, and there were people called “hoods.”  So one afternoon coming back on the bus,  Richie White, just as Fred is going to sit down, sticks up his pencil just where Fred is going to sit down, and the pencil goes right through the pants and hits Fred in the scrotum.  Fred like jumps up, he doesn’t yell or anything but tears start to run out from under his glasses. 

And somebody across from Richie hits him right in the side of the head and his glasses go flying and Richie says he didn’t mean to and it was an accident, and Fred you are alright aren’t you.

What a dickhead. 

People said that when Mr. Peace got home and heard what had happened to Fred he had to be restrained by Mrs. Peace and Fred from going down the Whites and beating the shit out of Mr. White and little Richie.  Because more was going on here than met the naked eye.  Maybe because of those genetic issues only one of Fred’s testicles had descended.  And that goddamn pencil had gone right into the one that had descended, though the doctor had told them that it would be all right..  Still the family jewels and the line of descent had been threatened by that errant pencil as wielded by one Richie White.

LBJ, they say, could meet somebody once and remember his name forever.  Not so with me;  I can be introduced to somebody and five minutes into a conversation not have the faintest idea what his name is.  I am lousy with the names of other people probably because I have insecurities about my own name.  First comes the Nick part.  Wait, actually, first comes the William part because my first name is William after my father.  So when I am making plane reservations or something like that and give my legal, credit card name they sometimes, with excessive familiarity, take to calling me Bill.

I don’t like being called Bill.

And for most of my life in the parts of the country where I have lived, “Nicks” have been very few to none.  Perhaps because the name was unfamiliar, I would introduce myself and people would say, “Dick, did you say?”  Or “Pleased to meet you, Rick.”  I thought maybe I was saying the name too softly because of what followed it, “Tingle.”  So I practically took to bellowing “Nick,” but I still got the Rick or Dick deal.

Then came the “Tingle” part.  I think about 2000 Tingles live in the USA.  We are not that common, true.  So I could understand having to repeat that.  But be damned if I can understand why people can’t spell it.  Is that T….I…, they would say, and so I took to saying my name is ‘NICK!!!         Tingle, rhymes with Jingle or Dingle; spelled “gle” and not “gel” which properly speaking is something a person puts on his hair.”

And there was that stinking commecial for dandruff shampoo.  You could tell it was working, the commercial went, because “the tingle tells you.”  So practically everytime I heard it, I would yell at the TV, “Well, this mother fucking tingle isn’t going to tell you a goddamn thing.”  Or words to that effect.

My best friend in college roomed with the only black guy in our class.  His name was Wilbert, and I called him Wilber for nearly a year and a half till he exploded and yelled directly into my face, “WilberT.  With a T.  Wilbert.”  I apologized and felt bad for a week.  I guess I just didn’t hear the “T.”  I had never heard the name Wilbert before.

Once Wilbert and I rode back to San Diego on the same Greyhound Bus.  As I was saying goodbye to him, our fathers came up.  His father was a bit shorter than mine; mine was white and his was black.  But they were dressed exactly the same way.  In khaiki shirts and pants and with steel tipped work shoes.  This was a common working class uniform at that time, a left over, I expect, from soldering in WWII; Sears sold the pants and shirts real cheap.  The uniforms made them look like twins.  

While, as I have said, my father was no philosopher king.  He did say four things in my presence, if not directly to me, --folk or class wisdom, I guess I would call it—that stuck with me over the years and that have given me reason to ponder in an attempt to understand my father’s zietgiest as well as my own.

Once, he sang:

 Skeeter fly high, skeeter fly low
If that skeeter bite my peter
That skeeter ain’t gonna fly no mo

Well, this isn’t wisdom exactly, but I pondered it wondering when a person would give a skeeter a chance like that to bite his peter.  We forget so easily! Our own Heritage.  These are the verses of a people accustomed to pissing outdoors in thick skeeter country.  Like Orlando, Florida, in 1955.  The land of a thousand lakes, or as we dubbed it on our swing through in 1955, the land of several trillion skeeters.

He also said:

 “Same shit, different bucket.”  This is a saying of rather universal dimensions, seeing that it can be applied to any two things—or pieces of shit—that are the same but have different packaging.  This might be said for example of whatever difference there is between a Big Mac (piece of shit “a”) and a Carl’s Junior burger (piece of shit “b”).  Or of most so called celebrities say, Brittany Huston (piece of shit 1) and Hilton Simpson (piece of shit 2).  But I feel it most effectively applied, as my father did at the time he spoke it, to the two political parties.  It bespeaks, when coming from the mouth of a working person, the great distance he feels between the affairs of his daily life and the mucky-mucks up there on capital hill who cannot tell shit from shinola.

Additionally:

“Shit’s like cream.  It rises to the top.”  Considered aesthetically, the co-mingling of turd-like brownness with milk like whiteness (along with the suggestion that one might accidentally drink a turd along with one’s milk), this statement is somewhat disgusting.  But it is a point well made, even more so in our present day, where well packaged shit dominates the movie industry and men of the lowest, shit-like qualities, appear to run the country and the globe.  In fact, the theory expressed in this saying seems so representative of experience as to be irrefutable.

Finally, and mostly sadly and stocially:

“Life is making the best of a bad job.” In the literature I have read, working class people are, over and over again, described as realists.  This saying would certainly take the wind out of the sails of any idealist.  And once again, the distance of the working class person from the forces that control his destiny is suggested.  He works a job he did not create.  He did not plan it, he did not finance it, he will make no money from; he knows moreover that the job is ill-designed, tossed together, constructed from inferior materials, and  probably completely unnecessary.  The one hope one has is a personal hope.  If one is not to be irrevocably stained and ruined by the bad job, if one is not to lose all dignity, one must do one’s best.  If there is any honor, that’s it.

Perhaps along with my tooth pick legs, and my great regularity, I inherited from the old man, as representative of his class and times, a dark realism that when brought into contact with my idealism produces an admixture of rank pessimism.

Who knows?

His back had seized up he said, and he couldn’t straighten up.  Then he sat down at the kitchen table and ate his lunch from the paper bag because nothing was going to disturb his routine.  He munched in his Fritos while old lady called to make an appointment with a doctor. He came back still bent at 90 degrees.  The doctor had said that the only thing to do was to get him on his back resting in traction.  The  doctor said it might take 4 weeks, even longer for him to straighten up.

 I am not a fucking ingrate.  I might not have much positive to say about the old man as a human being; but he was a good and steady worker.  Seeing him knocked out of commission like that made me feel vulnerable and rightfully so.  He was the bread winner.  The old lady hadn’t worked since WW2 and she didn’t drive.  Also according to the old lady, we were always teetering on the brink of destitution.  She was an expert at poor mouthing, and if you asked anything about the family money, she wouldn’t tell you or she would lie.

 One hot summer afternoon the old lady told me to go into their bedroom and collect the glasses in there the old man had been using.  He loved canned lemonade.  So I went in.  The room was close and hot and stuffy, and the old man was asleep with his big belly sticking out from under his t-shirt and half of his old, pale and gnarly looking penis hanging out from under the stretched out elastic of his underpants.  He was snoring and drooling.  Flies buzzed over him because of all the sticky lemonade glasses around.

I got this horrible feeling that he was never, ever going to get.  The guy had just died and gone to pig heaven.  I don’t mean he had died really, but he had found pig heaven right here on earth. 

But after about six weeks he got up and went back to work.  His back never seized up like that again.  But when ever he sat for while, the back would stiffen up.  When he got up, he would give out a groan and sort of launch himself out of the chair.  About half way across the room he would straighten up, and if he knew you were watching and he had it in him, he would let out a fart.  

Farting was his highest form of humor.  He was a good farter, so why not.  I remember hearing a comedian say if something makes people laugh keep doing it till they stop.  I had stopped laughing a long time ago, but if his farts irritated the old lady, I still enjoyed it as a form of masculine bonding, I guess.  About the only thing I inherited from my old man, aside from my toothpick legs, was a vigorous and robust bowel.  I am incredibly regular.  Once when I was constipated and couldn’t shit for three days, I thought I was going to fucking die.

And let me tell you what, more than once I wished I had a shotgun to give him to see if he was as good as his word. 

 When I read Waiting for Godot I decided that Beckett must have been in our house or lived in some stinking suburb in sunny SoCal.  Where nothing fucking ever happens.  Instead people plant lawns—can you believe it—and then the grass grows—well, what do you fucking expect—and when it gets TOO long—whatever the fuck that may be-- and then you fucking actually CUT the lawn—in my case with a totally non-powered push lawn mower—so that it is the RIGHT LENGTH—and then the fucking shit GROWS RIGHT BACK.  And sweet god in heaven, you have to cut it again, and again, and again endlessly until you or the fucking lawn dies, whichever comes first.

Whoever thought of the so-called lawn was fucking insane or had a lot of servants to do his dirty work.  Because not only was I required to cut that little piece of fucking shit assed lawn, I had to pick up the DOG poop from it.  I hated to pick up that fucking dog poop.  Keeping a dog in a tiny little lawn area is another idea dreamed up by some fucking stupid person.  Where else then is the fucking dog going to poop but on the fucking insane lawn?  I ask.  And you have to pick it up because the DOG poop actually kills the grass.  And if you have a female dog, her piss will kill the grass.

And then in the winter, the lawn would die out, after all my work, mostly of its own accord, and I would let the poop just sit there till sometimes it became covered with green fungus.  There’s no sight quite like green fungus on dog poop on a dead lawn.  Our neighbors had a better idea.  They had a dog but they didn’t have a lawn out back—like us civilized people; they just had dirt and in the middle of that dirt they had driven a spike and attached to that spike was a chain about twenty feet long and attached to the other end of the chain was their dog.  A bull dog. 

It would lie around in the dirt sleeping or licking its own ass.  And every once in a while it would walk to the end of its chain, point its asshole away from the spike and poop.  I would look over the fence and see in our neighbor’s backyard a perfect circle of dog poop.  It was quite amazing, that circle of dog poop.  That dog knew his geometry.

I can say authoritatively that the old man never talked to or with me about anything.  Not about politics.  Or cars.  Or women (thank god for that!) Or even sports.  Come to think of it he wasn’t really interested in sports.  That may be because he never played any.  They had sports in his high school; the basketball coach asked him to try out for the team because he was six feet tall.  But he couldn’t do that.  He was needed at home to work.  He was not graduated from high school till he was 21 because he got kicked back three grades; not because he failed but because he missed more than 30 days of class per school year.  That was a law they had to stop farmers from keeping their children at home to do field work.

He was out picking peaches one summer in that sweltering heat, working his butt off I imagine, and he fainted.  They revived him and he went right back to work, but it happened again the next day.  He was working the orchard of one of the big land owners in the area, and this man, I forget his name, said, “Damn, that boy ain't cut out for farm work.”  And he offered to pay the old man’s way to Clemson if he would major in engineering.  So off to Clemson went the old man who up till that time had been studying by the light of a kerosene lamp, and he flunked out immediately though he got an "A" in blacksmithing.

That was the extent of his education.  He did read a little in later years, mostly detective fiction with a little smut in it and Zane Grey western type books.  I don’t know if he could write.  I got one hand written letter from him and that was it.  According to the old lady it took him three hours to get those couple of pages down.  He couldn’t spell for shit.  When I last saw him, he was demented and said God had been giving him spelling quizzes and then he said a word god had asked him to spell and then he spelled it incorrectly.  I can only hope God was not a harsh grader went it came to spelling.

 Every boy wants to look up to his father and not because the father feeds him but because of some quality in the father like, maybe, being a good father.  But my father wasn’t one of those.  Or maybe the boy will look up to the father because the father is real strong or because other people look up to his father because of what he does or his place in society.  My mother told a story that Queen Elizabeth had sent a messenger down to Dorset requesting that my mother’s grandfather come to court to be the Queen’s blacksmith.  He didn’t go but sent his son.  And I remember having a fantasy that the President would call upon my father to do some special brick work in the white house.  Because as I said, a boy wants to look up to his father.  He wants to be able to say with pride, “That’s my dad.”  But the President never called.

I remember driving through the Bronx in the mid-80s.  All over the place they were knocking down old ten or twenty story apartment buildings.  Many of them were actually made out of Brick!  Twenty story structures, brick from top to bottom.  It hurt in a particular way to know those buildings were going to be knocked down.  Those buildings will never be replicated.  Not because of the cost of the brick, but because of the cost of the labor.  It hurt to think that all the human energy compressed in those buildings would simply disappear into thin air with one blow from a wrecking ball.

I’d be out back watering the garden of an evening, and Mr. Hunter would come out and amble over and lean on the fence and start to talking.  One evening he has just seen something on the news about drug dealers crossing the border, and he launches into a harangue about the evil of drugs, and said that what he would do, should he catch any drug dealers crossing the border, was line them up and shoot them on the spot. 

Most of the time, when he launched into one of his idiotic opinions, I was not inclined to say much of anything because, as I said, he was six feet six and weighed about 320 and really there’s no point in making trouble with a neighbor over the USA’s drug policy. But if I didn’t say anything at all, I worried that he might think, since he knew I had a college degree, I felt too superior to even respond to his idiotic opinions, and I didn’t want to do that because I knew he had a severe inferiority complex.  So I said, well, lining them up and shooting them like that might be a violation of their civil rights.

 He goes like, huh?—like that idea had never crossed his mind.  Well, then, what would you do?  He wanted to know.  I said I didn’t have the foggiest though lining them up and shooting them on the spot made good sense except for the civil rights issue.

While talking to Mr. Hunter about political issues made me nervous, he could be a good talker if you got him to telling stories.  Nowadays I can’t find people who tell good stories.  I guess people are in too much of a rush, and Mr. Hunter’s story telling skills were developed and polished down in Mississippi where people had time for such things.  Now you just have to get to the point ASAP, as people say, but his stories were all about taking as long as possible to get to the point.

Working at the zoo, he had a chance to observe all the animals and the people there.  He liked to tell one story about the monkey cage, and he would describe the monkeys that lived there and then he would talk about the tourists who came to see the monkeys and then he would—apologies to the ladies if any were present—talk about the monkeys throwing their shit at the tourists.  And he went on and on about this one monkey—chimpanzee for those more technically inclined--that was one sure shooting shit slinger (apologies to the ladies).  He was one dead eye dick and especially did not like having his picture taken because he payed special attention to people with cameras. 

So Mr. H. one day saw this fellow fling a piece that completely covered the camera of this Japanese gentleman and also got stuck between this his glasses and his eyeballs, and the monkey did this all without even breaking his wrist.  And the point or punch line to the story, aside from paying tribute to one straight shooting shit slinger, was Mr. Hunter’s complete confondation and utter amazement that the monkey was able to achieve such accuracy and force without even breaking his wrist. Mr. Hunter’s consternation, almost childlike amazement, at what he had observed served somehow to infuse and to conceal the fact (apologies to any ladies present) he had been telling a story about a shit throwing monkey.

 I have observed since, watching the Discovery Channel, that chimps can be just sitting there and suddenly heave a rock with considerable force underhanded without even breaking the wrist.

Much is written these days about the breakup of the family, all the divorces and alternative family styles.  But I must say, from my very limited experience, that the old way was not all that hot. I would be out of an evening for a stroll up and down the street enjoying a postprandial puff, and I’d look into the windows of the houses as I passed and observe the dim light of the TV flickering in the living room, and think that each one of those places was a god damn insane asylum.  What’s that song, “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors?”  Well, thank god for that.

 For example, while Mr. Hunter had a sunny chain jerking story telling side, he was, according to Mrs. Hunter, a fucking bear to live with.  He had rages and sometimes would pick her up by the shoulders and bang her against the wall.  This was no small thing because Mrs. Hunter was six foot two and thick boned.  Also, poor Mrs. Hunter had not only the big baby to attend to but four little Hunters all with orange red hair, red freckled faces, and big bones.  She said that she would put a ham down in the middle of the table and when dinner was done the whole damn ham would be gone except for the bone.

Mr. Hunter was your nuclear family type and for a long time resisted Mrs. Hunter going to work it being a man’s duty to bring home the bacon or, in their case, the entire ham. But the more you fed the kids the bigger they got and the more they needed to keep growing and it sure did look like every one of them, even the girls, was going to top out well over six feet.  So Mrs. Hunter, who had a nursing degree, finally had to go to work  at a nearby hospital.

Eventually, she made more money that Mr. Hunter because, while he wouldn’t have put it that way, he was pretty much a glorified animal janitor.  He told a story and made it sort of funny by saying the gorilla compound had been made for gorillas and not people because the only way into the place was up from the bottom through a trap door and every time he opened it to go into the compound he had no idea what manner of gorilla piss and shit was going to come pouring down on him.  If you think about it for a minute, a job that involves getting covered in gorilla shit and piss cannot pay much.

So to preserve his manhood Mr. Hunter insisted Mrs. Hunter sign over her pay check to him.  And when they went to get groceries together, as they always did ever Saturday morning, he would be the one to pull a wad of bills out and pay the cashier.  At one point Mrs. Hunter went to a counselor to try to save their marriage, and I was happy to hear that but not so happy when she told me she was going to a Christian Counselor and what they did was sit on bean bags and pray together for God’s guidance.

Richie White, the kid everybody beat up on the Boy Scout camping trips, was the kid nearest to me on the hill that was my own age.  So sometimes I would go down to his house, and we would go to his garage that was filled up from one end to the other with this giant Lionel Train layout. 

Actually I had never quite grasped the attraction of the Lionel train; once you set it up and run it a couple of times to see if you could get it to run it got old pretty fast.  But Richie would insist on running hi setup a couple of times; it was pretty amazing. Trains cris-crossed all over the place, and Mr. White had made little houses and stores and trees. After that we would do some Boy Scout shit together.  Richie wasn’t so bad as long as you weren’t trying to beat him up and didn’t mind the snot running out of his nose all the time.

One time we were doing some sort of Boy Scout shit that involved pocket knives because I was hacking at something, slipped, and stuck the blade right into the fatty ball of my thumb.  For a split second I can see all the layers of different types of skin and muscle all laid out in nice, neat rows, and then the thing fills up with blood and then the blood overflows into the cup of my hand.  So I walk up the stairs and kick the screen door to the kitchen a couple of times, all the time for some reason holding my hands together to cup the blood, though at about this point the blood was overflowing.  Mrs. White opens the door, grasps the situation, says not to worry about dripping blood, drags me over to the sink, turns roaring hot water into the wound, followed by something that makes me want to scream, wipes the wound and then lashes the sides of it together with a butterfly bandage.  That should do it, she says, and you won’t need stitches either.

I got to hand it to the woman, but she did a good job.  Straight forward, absolutely sure of what she was doing, and quick about it.  And she was right about not needing the stitches.  But I was maybe the only person on the whole hill who had anything good to say about her.  Her little Richie, she let everybody know, was a genius.  He had crawled early and walked early and talked early and read early and then they tested him and he came out Genius.  He was going to be a Genius scientist, so they bought him all sorts of science stuff, like chemistry sets, and microscopes, and a real nice telescope for examining the stars.  Her life’s purpose was to defend and protect her little genius.

One day she hears this screaming and yelling and knows, because she has heard it a number of times before, that somebody is beating up on little Richie.  She comes out just as Mr. Hammet, who lived in the house a little down the hill and across the street from hers, was trying to pull the boys apart.  He has little Richie by the scruff of the neck, and she, screaming don’t you dare lay a hand on my boy, leaps right onto Mr. Hemmet’s back. He jumps and she slides off but not before getting a grip on his t-shirt and, as she fell to her butt, nearly ripped it clean off of him.

Such behavior did not endear Mrs. White to her neighbors.  They all thought she was loony tunes.  And this wasn’t the only time.  Another time a father had been trying to pull his son off of Richie and she bit him in the thumb.  He said she had actually broke the skin and that he was going to sue her or something for assault with a deadly weapon.  But he never did.

Being a Boy Scout required some memorization.  For example, I had to recite the following oath:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

I don’t think I gave a second thought to what I was saying, though now I can see I was completely unqualified to be a Scout.  I did think about the Scout Law because it was difficult to keep straight.

A Boy Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

I kept forgetting parts of that or the order of it anyway.  And it seemed like an awful lot of things for a person to be.  I already had to deal with the Ten Commandments.  And even back then I could see I had problems in the Obedience Department, also in the Cheerful area; being Thrifty was easy since I didn’t have any money.  And as for the Clean part I have always had problems in the personal hygiene area maybe because I spent the first ten years of my life without a bathroom.

Mostly though Boy Scouts was about going on camping trips three or four times a year, and having Monday night meetings in the cafeteria of the local elementary school.  One year I was the boy leader of the whole damn troop.  During this time I began to develop my particular leadership style.  Sometimes, I would have to get the whole damn troop stand in a line.  So I would be upfront and I would order them to stand in line and I would do it in such a way as to suggest: really I don’t give a good goddamn whether you stand in line or not but “they” have told me to do this and if you don’t do it I will get my ass in a sling, so please stand in line.

You give some people a little power and it goes straight to their head.  They think the power is their power (even thought it has been given to them) and actually get upset if somebody doesn’t respond to “their” power.  Petty bureaucrats act like that; without the power they have been given, they would be like nothing but a zero.  So in my first year in college, we could only get one piece of meat, whatever it was, for dinner, and if you went back and asked for a second piece from the server ladies they would get their panties in an uproar because you were challenging their power.

Power always comes from above and if it goes to your head it infantilizes you.

I got as high as Life Scout in the organization; nobody knows about that rank because it’s the one below Eagle Scout.  I couldn’t ever become Eagle Scout because you had to have a life saving swimming merit badge which meant jumping in the water and pretending to save drowning people.  I wasn’t likely to get that because I couldn’t swim.  Actually, I shouldn’t have gotten beyond 1^st class scout because I couldn’t swim.  But my parents actually paid for swimming lessons for me, and the guy giving the lessons finally had mercy on me and let me get the swimming merit badge by doing it on my back rather than on my face like I was supposed to. No way was I going to be able to save people while swimming on my back.

I really don’t know what the fucking big deal was about swimming.  Back in South Carolina nobody knew how to swim.  We were landlocked and nobody had swimming pools.  Maybe getting me to swim was a way of raising the status of the whole family or something.  I just couldn’t put my face in the water to do the crawl.  Once back in SC we had gone on a family outing.  A rare thing.  Because it was blazing hot they took us down to the Enoree River near Clinton to cool off in the water.  This was a very old river that twisted this way and that.

I took about 10 steps out into the old Enoree River and whap I fall into a hole made by its swirling currents.  I went straight down, and I felt like I do today when I fall; I just sort of relaxed and went with the flow because there wasn’t much I could do about it. I mean I didn’t know how to swim.  I sort of knew the situation was dire and then I was distracted by my life passing before my eyes just like they say it does when you are drowning.  This didn’t last long because my life was pretty short.  I was about 4 and then things went dark and before I knew it somebody had grabbed me by the hair. 

A guy had been standing there with this pants rolled up to the knee, and he had looked over and seen me, and then he had looked away for a while, and then he looked back and saw I had disappeared, and then he saw what looked like movement under the water and he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me straight up. 

And the way the old lady acted you would have thought she was the one who nearly drowned.  It was boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo, and she wouldn’t stop so once again I had fucked up.  I remember sitting in the back of that car and saying, “Mommy, Mommy, I am all right. I am all right.”  But it was still boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo.  

I spent way too much energy over the years trying to make that woman feel better.  But she was like that hole in the Enoree River —bottomless.  You could try and try to make her feel better but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. 

And that’s why years later I couldn’t put my face in the water to get that fucking merit badge.

I don’t know how I got in the Boy Scouts.  I am pretty sure I was not consulted, and when the old man got involved so he could go hang out with other adult males on the camping trips, doing whatever the hell they did in their big tent, I was stuck.

The high light of the camping trips—aside from getting to crap in the great outdoors which brought back fond memories for me—was somebody or other beating up on Richie White.  Like the whole Troop or maybe it was Pack took turns at beating him up.  He was short and scrawny and wore glasses and had a greasy lank of black hair that flopped across his forehead that made me wonder if Hitler as a kid had looked like that. Also he was constantly snorting, with snot running from his nose, and when he talked he sprayed.  

 And he was sneaky and perverse.  In Boy Scouts you get merit badges for doing things like tying knots or cooking a meal; getting those badges is how you move up in the organization.  So one time Richie’s turn to get his cooking merit badge came around, and somehow he managed to cook up green eggs.  So first, Richie denied they were green; they were maybe a little “greenish.”  So kids started like yelling look at the fucking things.  Greenish! My ass.  

And then he said it wasn’t his fault something must have been wrong with the eggs.  And then people said like fuck it man you cooked the fucking eggs and they came out green.  And then he said they were good to eat even if they were green.  And people said, well, fuck it, then, you eat them.  Go ahead and eat.  So Richie stuck his fork in them but he couldn’t eat them he said with everybody looking at him.  

A couple minutes later you hear this screaming and yelling out in the bushes.  Somebody is beating up Richie.  And there was one of my Patrol, I guess it was, sitting on Richie's chest and beating him about the head and shoulders because, the guy said, Richie had said he had eaten the eggs and then the guy saw the eggs lying right there in the bushes.  So he had decided to beat on the lying mother fucker.

I was the leader of my Patrol, a smaller group within the Troop; every Patrol had its own name, like Wolfs, or Bears, or something.  I don’t remember the name of my Patrol but I was the leader of it.  So I said, we can eat cereal instead because I knew we had those little boxes of cereal and I knew we had milk.  So we sat around in the dirt and ate cereal; that calmed down things a bit.  But they decided that since Richie had eaten all the eggs himself that he wouldn’t get any cereal.  So Richie sat there and started to holding his stomach and groaning that he had a stomach ache.  I really understood why the guys wanted to beat on him.

Richie was the kind of kid you catch with his arm in the cookie jar, and he would say, you were mistaken.  His arm was not in the cookie jar, even though he was standing there plain as day with his arm in the cookie jar.  But you play that game too often and you can start believing it yourself.

Probably the best car I have ever owned was a 1953 Buick Roadmaster.  By “best” I mean it was the best used car I have ever owned at the date when it was first sold, back in 1953.  Howard Hughes owned one so it had to have been expensive.  Mine had a straight 8—eight cylinders in a row.  It had a radio that didn’t work, and a bunch of buttons across the dash that were supposed to adjust the suspension hydraulically for the kind of surface you were driving on: rough, smooth, bumpy road.  Those didn’t work either.

 I got the car from Roland. He had been busted for pot and was going to the county work farm for six months.  I asked him was there no way he could get out of it, and he laughed and said he was caught red handed and dead to rights having sold directly to an undercover cop.  He was parting with his earthly possessions and he had some debts he said to pay off before going in and ask did I want the Buick, owned he said by an old lady.  I drove it around, no black smoke came out the pipe, and the oil was pretty clean.  So I offered him 100 dollars—which I thought was low—and he said, I’ll take it.

 One day I was out front working on something on that car and the next door neighbor, Mr. Hunter, came over and said mighty nice car and started talking about the cars he and his buddies had back in Hattisburg, Mississippi.  Yep, he knew that car because it had a special suspension.  He and his buddies would get on the ends of that car and get it to bouncing clean off the ground, and one night he had his buddies bounced one of those cars into an alley sideways.  You should have seen the owner’s face he said.

 And he had a car like that too, not that one exactly, but one like it, and to save on gas he had figured out how to turn the engine off more than a mile away from home.  He would get up speed and top this hill, and shut off the engine and it would fly down the hill passed the Miller place, and passed the old abandoned gas station where as a child he bought Nihi Grape Soda, and down a gulley and up the other side, which was always a bit touch and go, and the car would roll right up the drive and stop right in front of the house without him even putting his foot to the brake.  Damn amazing, I said.

Mr. Hunter worked down at the zoo taking care of the gorillas maybe because he was about the size of one.  He was 6 feet six and maybe 330.  He still had the thick southern accent.  And I was sitting around maybe two hours later when it came to me like a bolt out of the blue that he had been jerking my chain with that car story.  What cued me was that last bit about not even having to touch the brake.  Mr. Hunter liked to spin a yarn.  I doubt the backbone of the story was original, but he filled it up with so much local color as he went along that you pretty much suspended disbelief without knowing it and maybe his being six six and 330 helped too, because I wasn’t about to call him a liar had I any suspicion he was pulling my chain.

I drove that car for a year during the time I worked as an assistant manager in training at a Newberry’s Department Store.  But then towards the end of 1973, the Arab Oil Embargo hit and the price of gas went from 25 cents a gallon or so to a dollar or a dollar and a quarter.  I hadn’t paid any attention till then but that Roadmaster got 11 miles to a gallon.  And it wasn’t easy to get gas either.  Cars stretched around the block to get gas and then they went to the odd number, even number license plate system where people with odd numbered license plates went on odd number days and people with even numbered license plates went on even number days.

So I had to park my luxury vehicle down back with the other wrecks, and I went back to driving the 59 Plymouth Station Wagon.  Eventually, one of my brothers sold the Roadmaster to a car collector for 400 dollars.

Our little bit of California was called Casa De Ora. That wasn’t the official postal name but that’s what we called it.  Back in the 20’s they had tried to put a tract out there.  You could still see the layout for streets, and as you drove towards where the tract was supposed to be, on both sides of the roads were brown turd like mounds of plaster of paris with the words Casa De              Ora spelled out on them in gold lettering.  I guess they were supposed to suggest a gateway into Casa De            Ora.

Just beyond the gates, stores had sprung up on both sides of the road.  The stores were set back from the road leaving a dirt area for a person to park his car in front of the store whatever it was: a couple of gas stations, a bar, a drugstore, a barber shop, another bar, an independent market, a car mechanics place, and later on the Hires root beer barrel.  The root beer barrel was made out of metal, shaped like a barrel,  painted to look like a barrel and about ten feet high.  The root beer barrel didn’t last as a root beer barrel for very long.  Next,  it was a chicken barrel, and then a fish and chips barrel, and finally, before it was torn down, it was for a long time a Mexican food barrel.

The houses on our street that headed up the side of the hill had all been independently built.  No tract homes, one looking like the other.  You figured that people who had come out our way to live—and we were the boonies back then—either didn’t have much money or were attempting to escape their past.  In some cases, I think both.  Half of the deep south seemed to have moved out our way, to where they could have a little “elbow room,” that being very important, and a little bit of land on which to recreate the southern lifestyle.

Peope kept big gardens, and sometimes livestock, pigs and an occasional cow.  Chickens too, but they were frowned upon because of the racket.  People stuck up “out buildings,” a tradition in the south. We had outbuildings and also collected cars down back as was also a southern tradition. At one point, we had three cars out back with anis weed growing all around them.

But one day, this man in a uniform came to our door. He said he was from health and sanitation and showed us his papers.  He said we had to get rid of the cars out back.  Something about this guy annoyed me, so I said, “Why.”  Because vermin might be growing there, he said.  Vermin? I said, are you talking about rats.  Because I have never seen a single rat down there.

The guy didn’t look at me but handed a warning citation to the old man. As the guy walked back up towards the road I said as loudly as I could without yelling, “Vermin! I haven’t seen any damn vermin down there!” But the old man and the old lady sort of slunk off; I think they were embarrassed.

I don’t know why I wasn’t.  I thought it was funny, and the guy had pissed me off by using the word vermin when he meant “rats.”  The dark shadow of civilization in the form of bureacratic double speak had just passed over the area. 

Fuckers.

Besides Miss Tuttle, the other teacher who seemed to feel I could write was Mr. Moore, my senior English teacher.  He never said he thought I could write, but he did nominate me for that national essay contest for high school seniors.   So maybe I can infer something from that. 

He was a thin little man who wore sweaters and a bow tie, and like Miss Tuttle, who had gone to Columbia, Mr. Moore was east coast educated having been graduated from Princeton.  He was a Captain in the Army in WWII and came back changed.  This may explain his having ended up at a teacher at a nowhere high school in California.  Or it could have been his drinking problem that started after the war. 

Still, he rode me about my writing and graded me harder than anyone because he knew I was going to college.  I remember getting a B+ on a long research paper.  I had worked hard on that baby.  It was supposed to be on some historical figure; so my colleagues, lacking any imagination, wrote about Washington or Florence Nightingale or Madame Curry.  I wrote about Titus Oates, 17^th century perjurer and sodomite, a man who according to a poll of British Historians was the “worst Briton of the 17^th century.”

Maybe Mr. Moore thought I was being a wise ass by picking Titus Oates, but the name alone was enough to fascinate me, and I had come upon my interest legitimately.  I had been pursuing one of the volumes of our 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and came across the final lines of an entry that read, something like, whereupon he lived out the rest of his years in the country where his house became known for unholy and unnatural acts.  I wanted to know more about this person and so first familiarized myself with Titus Oates and the gun power plot I believe it was called.  

Titus started his career of crime by being dismissed from the Anglican clergy for blasphemous drunkenness and suspicion of sodomy. He established himself as a world class lier by concocting a whole series of lies suggesting that Catholics had intentions upon the throne and was first rewarded for his efforts with a 600 pound pension.  Later, when power shifted, he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to repeated floggings that should have killed him.  But they didn’t; whereupon part of his pension was restored, following a legal action, and he retired to the country to continue his unnatural doings.

So maybe I was being a bit of a wise ass.  

Mr. Moore’s class also furnished me one of the few high school moments that I remember with any warmth.  One Monday morning he turned to us and said, “And just who the heck are these Beatles.”  This was in many ways an unprecedented moment.  I don’t recollect a teacher ever having asked his students a real question,  who asked it moreover in a spirit of curiosity and out of a desire to learn something about the lives of his students.  We sat more or less dumbfounded.  I could see he was going to let the question drop, but since it was my job in that class to answer all questions nobody else would or could, I raised my hand and said, “The best rock and roll band ever.”

Maybe, really, it’s no big deal.  As that horrible song said, we are all just dust in the wind.  Or as that Dawkins—not Darryl, that was Chocolate Thunder—says we are just big watery bags that exist solely that genes may replicate themselves.  I don’t know, if I am gene, I would find some simpler way to recreate myself than by using great watery bags that, on top of everything else, have the curse of consciousness.  So maybe there is no purpose, or maybe there is one but we can’t see it.  I don’t know.  But some people seem a lot more purposeful than others.

 Rosco (short for a long Polish surname) was among the latter.  I don’t know how I got to know him exactly.  He was a year ahead of me in school, but he lived close by on the other side of the hill.  I guess he liked me because he would come over and just appear in our little front yard sitting on a wall right outside the front room window.  He never called ahead and when he arrived he didn’t knock either, but somebody was always passing by that window and they would see Rosco out there, and yell, Nick, Rosco is here.

 I would go out and there Rosco would be.  I didn’t know why he was there exactly and it didn’t help any that he gave the appearance of a stray balloon that had decided to settle in our front yard.  Rosco was taller than me and rounded all over.  He had a round head and a round bland face that didn’t show anything if there was anything to show beyond that bland face.  He wasn’t retarded or anything; he just gave off the impression that he didn’t know where or why he was.

I mean when he came over we never did anything.  Be damned, if I was going to ask him in the house, because then I would never get rid of him.  I would ask him how he was, and he would say he was fine or he had just eaten dinner.  And then I’d ask him what he had eaten for dinner, and it would be like, nothing special.  Trying to get him to talk was like pulling teeth, so then I would launch into talking for maybe 10 or 20 minutes straight and I would get the feeling I was going to pass out because it felt as if, talking to him, I were trying to inflate, or keep from deflating, some giant swimming pool apparatus.  After I had talked myself into torpor, I would say I had to study or something and he would go off just as he had come.

Once or twice maybe I went over to Rosco’s house.  He had a couple of younger brothers who were not rounded.  I went over only when Mr. Rosco was not there.  I got the feeling Mr. Rosco scared the Brothers Rosco shitless.  We would go down to their huge basement, and we would hear their mother playing piano music upstairs.  She was always playing the piano.

Downstairs in that basement, as Rosco said, they had everything necessary to re-create the world.  They had machines and tools of all kinds.  They had a big kiln for making pottery and expensive machine tools—I mean the kind of tools that are used to create the parts for other tools, like milling tools, I think they are called, and another machine that made screws.  

And at the back of the basement was a really big door with a lock on it.  One day Rosco decided to open it for me; you could see doing that made the younger brothers nervous, like they weren’t supposed to or maybe what was inside made them nervous because, while there was space for people, it was filled with supplies, food and water and everything wrapped in a kind of paper (oil paper maybe) I had never seen, and at the very back of that a row of rifles all strung together with a chain and locked up.  We can’t touch the rifles, Rosco said, as if I were just dying to touch their rifles.

And as I was leaving they showed me around the side of the house a regular big old garbage truck that their father had bought and was remodeling and reinforcing with extra layers of metal so that after the bomb had gone off they would have something to ride around in.

I made up this little story to explain things to myself.  Mr. Rosco had been in the military in Poland and had killed people and seen people killed in World War 2 and knew how people could kill each other.  He had seen masses of bodies piled high.  Maybe he was a Nazi and he had come to America with his young bride, who bore him three sons, and then went insane and played the piano all the time.  And then he set about preparing himself and his sons for the day when everything, but them, would end.

Maybe the little story helped to explain Rosco to me or maybe what I had seen scared me and I needed a little story to explain that.  It got so I just dreaded hearing somebody yell, Nick, Rosco’s here.

Being that my father was a farmer, albeit a rank failure as one, maybe I inherited some man of the soil genes because starting in junior high and through high school and later when I was living in the green room, I was appointed keeper of the family garden.  We had a whole .5 acre down back, so the garden wasn’t exactly a modest affair. 

I would start preparing the soil in March when it would be all clumped and hard to work from the rains.  That dirt had a lot of clay in it, but I would turn it over and then make a trip to the chicken shit place and dump the chicken shit all over what I had turned.  In early April the soil dried and became workable. 

I planted zucchini and corn seeds, and being a worried wart, I was all the time coming to see if they were coming up or not.  Cause if they didn’t come up when they were supposed to the timing might be off for the summer heat.  So one evening I am sitting there admiring my handy work, and  right before my eyes the finely worked earth around a young and healthy look zucchini bud starts to move and then the whole zucchini disappeared right before my eyes.

Fucking gophers!

I had tried about everything to tame them except poison, not because I was ecologically conscious but because I didn’t want to take the risk of poisoning my self some how.  I had tried the various folk methods.  I stuck hoses in their holes and ran water for hours but to no avail.  Once the area behind the garden sank down and once the water went into a neighbor’s yard.  Then I did the thing with car flares, and went around sticking them in the holes till it looked like the backyard was about to become a volcano.

 The only thing that really “worked” or seemed to produce concrete results was a gopher trap.  So seeing my zucchini disappear I went out and bought a new one.  It looked like a rat trap, though much bigger, and had teeth designed to clamp down and break the gopher’s neck.  I was careful with those damn things.   You’d put some cheese or something on it as bait and then jam the trap as far as you could in a hole, and then come out the next morning, pull the thing out by its chain and see if you’d had any luck.

I swear that particular summer I was like the Great White Hunter of Gophers.  Every morning I hooked something.  I would pry open the jaws and throw the corpse over into our neighbor’s back yard which was all covered with weeds.  I mean they wouldn’t notice it.  Then one day I pulled out the Moby Dick of gophers. This sucker was huge and it had reddish head hair and a reddish tuff beard just like me and the fucker wasn’t dead.

So I went and got a two pound hammer out of the back of the truck, and there I am about to perform the coup de grace when my little brother comes up and goes on, Is it still alive?  Are you going to kill it with that hammer?  Are you going to hit on the head? You know it looks like you? And I just sort of blew and said, would you get the fuck out of here, goddamn it to hell.  And—wham--as he walked off, looking hurt, I splattered the things head.

I apologized to my brother and said I don’t know why but I just got angry for some reason maybe because I felt hoisted on my own petard.

One Saturday morning during the summer I was working that punch press, I heard “Purple Haze” on the radio and thought, wow, what the fuck was that, and did something I had never done before or since.  As soon as the song was over, I got in my trusty old Plymouth and went out and bought the Jimi Hendrix Experience (“Have you ever been experienced, not necessarily stoned but beautiful”) immediately.  The problem was though, I didn’t have stereo, but 3 or 4 groups of guys from my college were summering in that apartment building, so I went down stairs and knocked on one door, and asked if I could use their stereo so that I could hear all of this album.

So we sat around and listened to it once with guys coming and going; then we all got stoned and sat down and listened to it again.  I wanted to listen again, but I didn’t know these guys all that well.  So I thanked them and said, since I didn’t have  a stereo, they could keep the album if I could come down and listen to it once in a while. They said sure.

A couple weeks later I hear this knock at the door and one of the guys from the apartment downstairs was standing there, looking disheveled and wide eyed, and he said something like, look man I know you don’t have much money, and we only go through this life once, you know man, and well, here I would like you to have this, you know, it’s all one and what goes around comes around, like Karma, you know.  And I said something like while I was a bit short, I was doing OK, but he wouldn’t hear of it and handed me this big wad of money, and then he gave me a big fucking hug, like at a time when people didn’t go around hugging all the time.

This guy was on LSD, so I didn’t see any point in arguing with him, but thanked him and he went on his way.  I checked the roll; $500 mostly in 20’s.  I stashed the roll because I was pretty sure once he came down and started thinking about it he would want the money back.

 I never took LSD.  I was tempted.  Guys would come around saying they had like seen God; they had broken through to the other side and kicked open the doors of perception.  But other guys would come around and say they had seen snakes with teeth coming out of their friend’s asshole.  I just didn’t want to chance it.  I knew that my connection to what people called “reality” was pretty screwed up.  My consciousness was naturally altered and I really didn’t need any additional chemical imbalances.  

The guy held out, to his credit, for almost two weeks.  I mean it must have been a bit humiliating to give a guy $500 out of the fucking goodness of your heart and then come to ask for it back.  But he did looking pretty chagrined and wondered did I have any of that money left.  Sure I said and went back to the bedroom, took a 20 off the roll, and gave him the rest of it.  Thanks man, he said and started to make excuses.  It’s all there, I said because I could tell he was dying to count it, but, hey, I did use 20.  I’ll get it back to you if you want.

Oh, hell, no man, he said relieved to be able to keep up a pretense to generosity, you keep it.  My pleasure.

God, but I am one tactful guy!

This dates me, but when I went to college there was actually a beatnik there.  I think he was a graduate student, but he had a beard.  The only beard around.  So I and my friend, who also had a thick beard, decided to have a race to see who could raise a beard first.  I don’t remember who won, but I was sitting eating lunch and this kid from the class behind me sits downs and leans over and whispers, “You got any grass?”  I said yes, and he said, how much, and I said, I didn’t have bulk at the moment.  And not long after that another guy asked me the same question.

Apparently having a beard was like wearing a billboard that says, I sell grass.  So I decided to look into it and found out from my friend Bernard, who had pretty much dropped out by then and was getting by selling drugs and writing papers for people (he was a whiz-bang writer), that I could buy a pound of grass for 80 dollars.  I started doing the math.  A pound was 16 ounces and lids (an ounce) were going for 10 dollars.  I could like double my investment with one purchase, or said Bernard, you can smoke it.

I bought over the next six months 3 pounds of grass.  By today’s standards the quality was ridiculously poor—mostly seeds and stems. I bought a little scale and would weigh an ounce and put it in a plastic baggie.  I had no end of customers.  But the whole retail business was just too much for me.  

I would sit there looking at my baggies and get all worried that the stuff I was selling to X was nothing but seeds and stems, so I would take some of the good stuff from the stuff I was selling Y and then put it in X’s baggie.  Or I would take some of the really good stuff from my own stash and stick it in X’s baggie. And then I would get stoned and like fucking drive myself nuts about whether or not I was cheating somebody out of their ten bucks.

And then there was the risk factor.  I went to a really small college; I knew most of the faces there.  But those faces sometimes would bring along a friend who wanted to buy, and I didn’t like selling to people I didn’t know.  I had regulars I trusted but the whole thing was starting to spread, and I got telephone calls on the dorm phone.  And like I never got calls from anybody.  Like did I have some, and when would I have some, and sometimes, it would be a guy flipping out.  Idiots!  Like smoking a little dope was going to fry their brains.  But then I didn’t know what kind of mental problems these people might have, so I would have to sit there on the phone and calm them down or go meet them somewhere for a cup of coffee.

That was my one shot at doing retail.  The way I saw it people could make a hell of a lot of money in retail if they didn’t worry about being fair to each customer or weren’t concerned with possible negative side effects on their customer’s health and well being.  And then there was the “mark up.”  A 100% for doing nothing really, except worrying that is.  It just seemed too much like magic to me.  I was used to working for money.

 So I cut my beard and when people asked if I had any I told them to go see Bernard. 

 The summer between junior and senior year of college, three of us rented an apartment.  I needed money for rent, so I went to the unemployment office per usual and picked up a job quickly at a factory in Glendale for maybe 25 cents more than minimum wage.  The factory made earphones for headsets to be used by soldiers in Viet Nam.   Mostly women worked there doing the finely tuned digital stuff that women are supposed to be able to do well, soldering wires and the little speaker into a metal casing that was then covered with rubber.  I was hired to work with two Mexican American guys who were already there running a punch press.

Punch presses come in all shapes and sizes.  Our seven foot high jobs were run by a single operator.  You sat on the stool in front of the punch press, and in our case we then pulled, following a guide, a five inch wide strip of metal under the punch part of the press, and then you pushed a petal and the damn press would come down like with ten thousand pounds of force (crash!) and punch out the metal container that the electrical stuff would go into. Then you picked up the metal part and threw it into a container, and then you did it again, and again, and so on for eight fucking hours.

Working as a brick mason tender caused me great physical pain; working as an assistant manager of a Newberry’s Department store was an act of despair, but this damn machine was petrifyingly boring.  I couldn’t day dream because you had to busy your hands and be conscious of the machine or you might mash your whole hand.

Sometimes, I don’t know why, a young Mexican American woman with large breasts would work at a table across from me.  The press was in the way so I couldn’t see her face except now and then but when the press was up, as I adjusted the metal to its proper place, I could see her breasts.  So I would punch the press, up the press would go, I would look at the young woman’s breasts and then I would punch again.  Sometimes when I was looking, her movements would make her breasts sort of jiggle and that was a special treat.  

The two Mexican American youths got through the day smoking grass.  They started at the 10 o’clock break, reloaded at noon, and topped it off at the afternoon break.  They were friendly and ask me to join them, but I was afraid to.  They would start to talking in Spanish and laughing (a universal language) and I would get worried they were going to crush their hands.  The smaller skinny one was already married and a father of two; they had been fucking around and he got her pregnant and that was that.  The other guy was sort of fat but he was engaged, he said, to be married.  I was astonished, but I was a college boy.

I always go to work.  That’s my training.  So I went to that job every day, but one day it was just killing me.  I started to get a stomach ache.  Actually I think I convinced myself that I had a stomach ache.  So I went to the boss and said I was sick to my stomach.  I expected him to be annoyed, but he wasn’t even that.  Then go home, he said.  I didn’t want to go home.  I was in some sort of moody despairing place.  So I got in my old Plymouth, went to Griffith Park and lay down on the grass near the carousel and lit up a number.

I don’t know if it was the grass or the day or just me but laying there but I remember feeling that carousel was about the saddest thing in the whole fucking world.

When I was getting low on money, I would go down to the unemployment office and look for a day job or temporary fill in work.  Once I got a job driving around and administering medical questionnaires to people out the boonies, and another time I got a job at an egg factory.  Many, many eggs and not a chicken anywhere in sight.  But the eggs were brought in on racks in big trucks.  Then they were cleaned because they had chicken shit all over them.  Then they were candled to make sure the eggs weren’t bloody or didn’t have a little chicken in them.  These eggs were sold to people who make cookies and stuff like that, so who knows, maybe every now and then a person gets a little ground up chicken embryo in a cookie. 

Uuuummm, uuummm good!

Then the eggs were packed in big brown boxes because these particular eggs were being sent to feed the troops in Viet Nam.

The chicken factory was pretty far inland and hot.  I wasn’t there long enough to get to know the people; they were mostly women and Mexican Americans.  The main topic of conversation in the coffee room was how nobody could eat chicken any more.  Somebody would say, “I drove by this barbeque place and it smelled good.  But then I remembered it was chicken.”  Or:  “I haven’t touched a piece of chicken in a year.”  Or: “Even thinking about chicken makes me want to gag.”  I couldn’t quite figure it since there were no chickens there; but as I said the place was hot and was rank with the smell of chicken shit.

The other topic of conversation was the woman, who quite recently, got her hair caught in the conveyer belt and was scalped.  Contrary to popular belief, the act of scalping a person, though quite painful, does not kill a person, though I supposed if one remained scalped for very long infection would set in and one would die.  But they saved this woman’s scalp and they eventually got it back on her, though she had not returned to work.

I worked there for a couple of weeks I guess for minimum wage doing whatever they told me to do.  I helped unload the trucks.  The eggs came in flats that were stuck in racks that were about six feet high and had wheels on them, so you could push them around to where they had to go.  And I did a lot of sweeping and washing stuff down with a hose to keep down the stink.  I wanted to do the candling where you stood at the end of the line and a bright light would make the inside of the egg visible so you could tell if it had blood or not.  But I never go to do that job since it perhaps required an expertise I did not have.

One day, they had to move a truck away from the dock for some reason, and as they pulled it away, the truck went up a slight incline in the blacktopped lot, and all of a sudden rack after rack after rack of eggs came falling out of the back of the truck.  Somebody had forgotten to refasten the restraining chain.  Man what a mess.  The whole lot turned into a giant omelet and within a matter of minutes, it seemed, every fly within a square mile had gotten the message that plenty of food was available.  So I was sent out to hose and started to wash down the lot.

 I never saw the owner of the place.  It was run by the “foreman,” a skinny white guy who went around telling people what to do and how to do it.  When he saw that omelet, he went berserk.  He started swearing at the top of his lungs.  Spit came flying out of his mouth.  He picked up things and threw them.  H jumped up and down and pounded his feet on the pavement. He got red in the face and I thought he was going to have a fucking convulsion.  I had never seen anything like it.

I had heard the phrase “straw boss” and really hadn’t understood what it meant.  This guy was a straw boss; he gave orders like he was the boss, but the orders, whatever they were, really came from his boss.  He had no power but what his positioned conferred on him, and if things got fucked up, like with the omelet, he could scream and curse and maybe fire somebody, but he would be the one that ultimately got the shaft from his boss.  His fury arouse from his impotence.

Me, I hadn’t been anywhere near that particular truck.