I saw a headline a while back that just amazed me. In fact I laughed so damn hard the first time I read it, I almost couldn’t stop. Actually it was a guffaw, I guess, as laughing goes.
“President Obama Defends American Wars While Accepting Nobel Peace Prize.”
I almost guffawed as much when I heard that he was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. They reworked it a little, later in the day, to this:
“Nobel-Winning Obama Defends War In Call for Peace.”
In the first place, I didn’t know I could win the Heisman Trophy if I was just a spectator in the stands, but apparently I can win the Nobel Prize in Literature without writing much more than this blog, or, more literally, just thinking about writing it. Which would equally correspond to the amount of effort President Obama has made in the direction of world peace. But I digress. How in the hell can you defend war while accepting a PEACE PRIZE?
The world amazes me sometimes. The recent hullabaloo over the Arizonans protecting their borders by checking for proof of residency amazes me, for example. Oh my gawd the noise that created. Even before the bill was signed, President Obama was speaking out against it. But it was clear from the beginning that very few of the loudest pundits even understood what was in the bill. Arizona Senate Bill 1070 became law at 1:30 pm on the 24th of April, 2010 when Governor Jan Brewer signed it and suits were filed against the bill and it’s constitutionality at 1:31 pm. I don’t think any of the protestors in front of the Arizona Capital Building that afternoon had even read it at all. In the crowd’s defense, I don’t think it was widely available in Spanish yet. So word of mouth and the New York Times had distorted it to the point of ugly.
“The law, which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations, would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police the broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.”
Thank you, New York Times, April 23rd, 2010. (Who writes this stuff? Have you ever noticed that almost every paragraph in the Times ends with an editorial opinion in some form?)
Opponents were even comparing this to the internment of the Japanese during World War II. Like that had any basis for comparison to this, whatsoever. Most of the Japanese were not only legal immigrants, but most were born here.
What the bill did, simply, so you’all can understand it, was make it a state crime to be in the country illegally, just the same as it is a federal crime. Nothing new, same policy we’ve had forever, just allowing local law enforcement to be able to enforce it. See, police officers in a state with an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants (according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, my favorite oxymoron next to “military intelligence”) couldn’t enforce federal immigration laws. They were actually under policy to let them go even if they were sure they were illegally in the country. Seriously.
Now, under the new law, they have to ask for your DRIVER’S LICENSE if you’re stopped for any violation. Excuse me, but doesn’t this sound familiar? If you don’t have a driver’s license, you’re probably not here legally especially if you appear to be of Mexican (okay, we’ll use Hispanic if that’s more PC) descent, can barely speak English and do so with a heavy accent, and are in the state of Arizona. The only other reason you wouldn’t have your license is because it’s been revoked for some reason, or maybe you left your wallet at home. So now the Police and Sheriff’s Deputies are going to ask you for an alien registration document, or a passport. Again, it is illegal to be in this country without the proper documentation. Why the hell is that a problem? By the way, you’ll also be cited for driving without a license, you better have proof of insurance, don’t smoke in the Police Station, and why the hell do people in this country think driving is a right and not a privilege? .
It was already against the law in Arizona to knowingly hire illegal aliens (okay we’ll use “immigrants”) anyway. Now, you’re going to love this….
Ms. Jennifer Allen, Director of Border Action Network, (Wow, those initials are BAN, I wonder if they know that?) said on an NPR radio broadcast on May 13th, 2010:
“This bill is a fundamental – it’s an enormous affront on the basic rights and dignity that every person has in the state of Arizona, in the United States, and around the world.”
Holy shit. That’s big.
She goes on to say that the law is mean-spirited, unnecessary, and unconstitutional. Aw, I’m sorry it’s mean-spirited, but unconstitutional, are you mad? And, just to clarify, it was clearly and obviously necessary.
Of course the idea of passing this legislation is to save the state money from illegal immigrants tapping into the system for benefits like healthcare, and social security that they aren’t entitled, or, more accurately, have not paid any payroll taxes to support.
But Ms. Allen of “BAN” said, “It will, in fact, result in tens of millions of dollars of additional costs every single year for local law enforcement for training, for the court system, for the jails. It will require bringing on new public defenders, new prosecutors.”
Or, Ms. Allen, it might actually lower the number of ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS from Mexico that are in the state of Arizona, ILLEGALLY because it’s against the law. They won’t be saying, “No hara’ nada. Nada va a suceder. Vamos.” Loosely translated, “They won’t do nuthin’ to us. Let’s go.”
So that brings me to today’s question: “Do Squirrels Fart?”
This question was brought about by a widely distributed video of a squirrel saving the world. If you haven’t seen it, go to YouTube and search “squirrel fart.” It’s a gum commercial from Europe, I think, and involves a farting squirrel putting out a very large fire because of the minty-cool flavor of the gum. Immediately, controversy arose over whether squirrels actually farted and, like, for gawd sakes if this was actually plausible. Really? How about the idea that gum would cause a squirrel to fart?
The consensus was that if it eats and poops, it farts, but it didn’t seem to be that easy. People on the answer sites were questioning the validity of the answers.
All mammals have the ability to produce flatus because of the micro-flora bacteria and yeasts living in the gastrointestinal tract. However, the main constituent of air, Nitrogen, makes up the primary gas that is released during flatulence. Carbon dioxide is also present, as is lesser component gases methane and hydrogen. These latter are extremely flammable which is why we can “ignite” our flatulence with a BIC. This can be very dangerous as seen in other videos you can find on YouTube.
Now, if you have even a limited amount of exposure to Chemistry, you should know that these gases are odorless. So why the hell does a fart smell so bad? Well a 1984 study revealed that sulfur-containing compounds like hydrogen sulfide (that rotten egg smell familiar in Yellowstone Park) is responsible for the smell. And humans fall somewhere in the top end of the smell meter, starting with animals like cows that don’t eat meat and working down to meat-eating species like cats and dogs. The smell meter is based primarily on what we eat. So vegetarians, although they fart, would likely think their sh.. didn’t stink. Do you know any vegetarians you could test this theory on?
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is working on a program to collect cow farts (methane) and convert it into a bio-fuel similar to natural gas. Just think…..transit buses running on cow farts. I’ll bet it will end up costing more than natural gas, but it has the added flare of reducing the methane emissions in the atmosphere. In other words, it’s a GREEN concept.
Well, again I digress. The bottom line, squirrels fart. It doesn’t smell up the forest, and the likelihood of minty-cool farts putting out a forest fire, well come on, did you really believe it was possible?
Actually, I guess, no more possible than Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize while defending war, or Arizona passing a stricter immigration law without public dissent.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
One Night at the Circle K....
I worked the graveyard shift at a Circle K in Albuquerque, in a very high crime neighborhood, for longer than I should have, and shorter than I’d planned. I was divorced, attending the University of New Mexico, and the Circle K job was my only source of income. Minimum wage, 11 pm to 7 am, and some weekends. The Circle K was two blocks down the street from the 7- Eleven and right in front of the largest low-income housing project in the city. They had two employees working the graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven. Down at the Circle K it was just me. It got lonely down at the Circle K. After 2:00 am all you could hear were gunshots, an occasional scream, and sirens, lots of sirens.
The company logo is a red circle with the K in the middle attached to the bottom of the circle, like a branding iron. Circle K was started by past El Paso Mayor, Fred Hervey, in 1951, when he purchased three Kay’s Food Stores and changed the name. He wasn’t mayor at the time, but he did, later, serve two terms.
He moved the chain into New Mexico and Arizona shortly after he bought it, and now you’ll find a Circle K on almost every corner in every city in those states. By the time I was working as the night clerk at the Circle K on Kathryn Ave, there were over 2,100 stores, some even in Japan. By the early 90s, with acquisitions and new store openings, they had double that many. The stores were not franchised, and are still company owned. The company has gone through bankruptcy, been sliced up, reorganized and they are still the second largest chain behind the famous 7-Eleven Stores. You’ll often find them across the street from each other all over the Southwest. 7-Eleven had the “Big Gulp” and Circle K had the “Thirst Buster”, huge fountain sodas in cups so big you could hardly hold onto them, and they cost about 79 cents.
There is a well-known line in the film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” where Keanu Reeves’ character, Ted “Theodore” Logan, says “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” Believe me, from my own experience, there was a lot of that going on.
One night, on my way to work at the Circle K, I saw a body in the street. It was lying face down in the street, by the curb, at the park. My expert skills of observation went into action, red plaid shirt on the body, denim trousers, no shoes, male, 40 or more years of age. As I drove slowly by the site I noticed three people dart into the bushes in the park. That changed my mind about stopping, although I had originally wanted to stop and offer aid. Still not something you would wisely do in this neighborhood, even if you saw blood, and I hadn’t.
As soon as I arrived at the Circle K to start my shift, I called the police. Told them about the body in rushed sentences, what I knew about the man lying in the street and that I had seen several people running into the bushes in the park. Maybe the perpetrators, but I couldn’t describe them other than they looked young, like teenaged. They agreed to check on it, and I went to work at the checkout, which involved more theft prevention than actually ringing up sales.
For the minor theft prevention I used an axle from a tricycle that I found on the side of the building one night. The axle, when slammed on the counter, made enough of a statement to stop the average candy-bar theft. Although, most of these juvenile delinquents worked in groups, so scaring one wasn’t going to necessarily deter the group. My favorite “group” was the tall kid in a trench coat that walked in with his three buddies. The leader stood in the front of the aisle, facing the register, with the coat open wide to block my view, and he would just stare at me like I didn’t know what was going on behind the open trench coat. In the rear, the lieutenants grabbed as many candy-bars as they could and walked around to the other side of the aisle, also out of view but within a few feet of the front door. Almost on command they would all hit the door, and run up the block, me in chase with the tricycle axle to the end of the parking lot. Screaming obscenities and racial slurs after them.
The graveyard shift got its name from a rather bizarre job in; you guessed it, the cemetery. Back in the day, a couple of centuries ago, they didn’t have very good ways of being sure that a person was really dead. So they would bury them with a string, tied at the surface to a bell. If the poor guy woke up a little claustrophobic, he could ring the bell topside, get someone’s attention, and wait to be dug up. That’s if he had all his faculties and didn’t start screaming in terror. This vigil for the sound of the little bells was run twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, and the attendants that worked the cemetery day and night were said to work the graveyard shift. But then again, that could all be total bunk as some insist, and instead the term just came into being to describe the work shift from about midnight to eight in the morning. It’s just a creepy time to be up on a regular day, and only creepy people tend to show up during those hours.
Speaking of creepy, I used to give the security guard, Max, from the low-income housing project behind me, all the FREE coffee he could drink. I wanted him around as much as possible. I didn’t really like him much. We didn’t have much in common to talk about. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. But he did have a real, loaded, gun. I didn’t think he was going to be much help if he actually had to use it, but it was a silent force in the holster; shiny, deadly. Had a certain deterrent effect and gave me comfort.
Max would walk his rounds and come down to the store every hour and 13 minutes. He could then spend 17 minutes hanging out with me, having a cup of coffee and thumbing through the girlie magazines. Those magazines were kept behind the counter and you had to ask for the new issue of “Playboy”, “Penthouse”, “Hustler”, or one of the more cleverly named titles. The magazines of that nature are all enclosed in a clear shrink-wrap to prevent minors from viewing them. If you look, you’ll find the back magazine in every rack, in every Circle K, has the shrink-wrap removed. Security guards, cops, free coffee and reading material to keep them around. The police cruiser showed up every two hours like clockwork.
Oh yeah, back to the police. I called them at about 1:00 am to see if they would give me any information about the body by the park. I was transferred to a case detective that wanted to know who I was, why I was calling, where I was calling from, and on and on and on. Ten minutes later when I got done answering questions, I finally got to ask one of my own, did they know any more about the body on the street by the park. The officer started to laugh, more like a snicker.
“Yeah, a couple of boys playing a pretty good prank I guess. You were lucky. Most of the drivers coming down the street were faced with the body in the middle of the street. Had to slam on the brakes and swerve and stuff,” he said between chuckles. “ You musta got there too soon after the last incident, and they dropped the dummy and run into the bushes.”
Man, I figured I would know a dummy from a real body, but then it was dark. I thanked the officer and he said something stupid like, “keep up the vigilance, and let us know if you see any more bodies out there.” And there were. Creepy people, things afoot, at the Circle K.
One Night at the Circle K, this Oriental guy comes in the store. Starts looking around and I watch him closely. Don’t trust him. Finally after searching for awhile he comes up to the counter.
“You got any lie balls?” he says.
“What?”
“Lie ball.” He says it really slow, then really fast. “Lie ball. Lie ball.”
“What the fuck is a lie ball?” I asked.
He points up at the ceiling of the store. “Lie ball. Lie ball.” He’s screaming it now.
“No we don’t have any lie balls,” I said. “We don’t carry ‘em.”
“Lie Balls,” he screams again. “L I E….B A L L S!”
All of a sudden the one over my head went off, “Oh, you mean light bulbs.”
“Yeah, lie balls.” He smiles and I walk him over to the rack where the light bulbs are. He looks at a couple packages, checks the price, and puts them back on the rack.
“You awful proud of lie balls,” he said and stormed out without buying any.
One Night at the Circle K, I had a hand in saving a life. At least I’d like to think so, even though I never got any credit or recognition for it, and, I guess, I never really sought any. Somewhere around 3:00 am, shortly after Max had left on another round, a very attractive, twenty-something female stumbled into the store and staggered around the front by the doors, looking out the windows like she was being chased. I was used to the occasional drunk coming in for a pack of cigarettes or a cup of coffee. Sometimes they were attractive females like this, usually not. The bars closed at two around here, and the ones that were still there at last call, would normally be in the state that this girl was, who was now letting the counter hold her up and she was staring at me. She was wearing one of those fake rabbit fur coats, the multi-colored ones, and black suede ankle boots with high heels. She had dozens of those little bracelets that jingle incessantly, on both arms, and she was digging in her purse.
“Can you help me please?” She was a little short in her tone, and I didn’t have an immediate desire to help her, other than out of the store. “I need you to call my psychiatrist.” She handed me a business card with the name, Stephen P. Schaffer, Psychoanalyst and a local phone number. I wasn’t sure if the “doctor” was legit from his card. Plain white, black letters, no professional associations or degrees noted. He could have gotten his training by taking correspondence courses. Anybody can call themselves a psychoanalyst, a counselor, a hypnotist, hypnotherapist, psychotherapist. It’s generally not regulated.
“Why don’t - you- call him?” I handed her the card back. She was clearly drunk, or on drugs, or way past sober anyway. I noticed her eyes were almost black and then realized it was her pupils. They were huge, dilated to the very edge of the iris so you couldn’t even tell what color her eyes were.
“Please”, she stammered and spittle dripped from her mouth, “Please. I need you to call him and tell him what I’ve done.”
“What the hell have you done?” I shot back, maybe a little too brisk. She immediately started to cry and shake. But she hadn’t passed out, so we were still good.
“Call him and tell him I took the whole bottle of these,” she handed me an empty prescription bottle without the top. The physician on the bottle was Stephen P. Schaffer, and I couldn’t even pronounce the name of the drug on the label. “And, I swallowed them all with a fifth of vodka,” she said. “Call him. Please. I need help,” she whined.
That might become an understatement, is what I was thinking. I called the number on the business card, watching the girl sway back and forth and waiting for her to crumple to the floor. I got an answering service. “This is an emergency,” I screamed at the operator. “I need to talk to the doctor now!”
“One moment please,” she said. There was an emphasis on the first syllable, she held the “PLEE” a little long and ended with the “UZ”. I waited what seemed like a few minutes, although it was probably only seconds, and a man’s voice broke through the music on hold. “Can I help you?”
I tried to explain as best I could that this woman had walked into the Circle K and wanted me to call him and tell him that she had overdosed a bottle of pills and chased it down with vodka. He immediately sounded alarmed. I still didn’t even know the girl’s name. A minor detail, but he seemed to know who I was talking about. Either he had only one patient, or he was expecting this.
“Call 911, NOW, and keep her moving, walk her around. How many pills did she take?”
“How the hell should I know? She handed me an empty bottle”, I told him. “It could be one or however many were left in there, I don’t know. What should I do?”
Now you’re probably wondering who was waiting on the customers while all of this was going on……Nobody. They were kind of helping themselves. The one or two that had come in, had gone to the shelves or the cooler, gotten what they wanted, and just walked out when they saw I was on the phone.
I hung up and dialed 911. Told them I had a drug overdose and the doctor had been contacted, and gave them all the location. They wanted me to stay on the line and I told them I needed to walk this girl around, so I left the phone on the counter. Then I grabbed the girl and started walking her around the store. We circled the store maybe three times before the paramedics arrived. Now we were the neighborhood center of attention. A crowd began to gather from the low-income apartment complex at three o’clock in the goddamn morning. Amazing what a set of flashing red lights can do.
I gladly turned the girl over to the paramedics; they put her in the ambulance and didn’t move for over an hour. They worked on her right there in the parking lot. Started pumping her stomach and stabilizing her before they finally transported her to the UNM Medical Center. Didn’t even bother to run the siren when they finally left with her. There was no car in the parking lot, so I don’t know how she got there. After all the hoopla was over, I noticed she had left her purse on the counter. Thought that was odd, that the paramedics and police didn’t want to know if she had any identification. I sure did.
The name on the driver’s license said Marcy Abrahms. She was 22. From out of state, obviously a student. Geology major actually. I discovered that from her suicide note. It was folded neatly in her purse, and was going on to five pages of notebook paper, both sides, before she stopped. That’s probably when the alcohol and pills kicked in and she panicked. I looked for money. I was a starving student myself. There wasn’t any. The rest of the purse contents were things like makeup, and pens, a checkbook, and some odd paperclips, mints, gum, things like that.
I wouldn’t have taken the money anyway. I was doing pretty well at the Circle K, eating microwave meals, ice-cream, candy, chips, had reading material, and was stealing cartons of cigarettes. That was cutting my expenses quite a bit. Every Wednesday night I would load a carton of smokes in the truck under the passenger door mat. Not that I was afraid I would be searched, but they had these “Secret Shoppers” that, it was rumored, would look through your vehicle windows (they knew your car plate) to try and catch you with unpaid merchandise from the store. The really funny thing about that was we clerks knew who the “spies” were and when they came in. They were too obvious.
I went to the hospital the next afternoon to deliver the purse to Ms. Marcy Abrahms. I knew a lot more about her now than I did the night before. She was, of course, being jilted by her boyfriend, a graduate student in Geography. She spent pages lamenting about how she missed his touch, how she knew she wasn’t good enough for him, how much she had loved him……from what I could gather he was a bit older than she was……well, you get the idea. I felt a little guilty about reading the suicide note, but it was hard to put down. I had put everything back in the purse the way I found it, and put it on the truck seat. The secret shopper was in that morning, so I wonder what he thought when he looked in the window and saw a purse?
It wasn’t hard to find her at UNM Medical Center. They gave me the room without question. I was under the impression, for some reason, that they didn’t just let anybody visit someone in the hospital, especially attempted suicides. I probably thought that because I don’t go to hospitals much. I don’t like them. People die there, and they don’t need little bells to confirm it anymore.
I walked into the room, with the purse under my arm. Marcy, who looked like hell, was sitting up in the bed in one of those gowns with no back to them.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the dude from the Circle K last night. Remember?”
She looked at me standing in the doorway and said, simply, “No.”
“Well I brought back your purse. Thought you might need it. Wanted to make sure you were okay.”
She looked away from me and mumbled something. Could have been “thanks,” not really sure. Her body language said, “Get the hell out of here!” So I walked over and handed her the purse. She grabbed it out of my hand, I turned and left. She never asked what happened to her suicide note so maybe she didn’t remember.
One night at the Circle K, a stabbing victim walked in. He didn’t look like anything was bothering him when he walked past the checkout and went to the coffee machines, which were directly behind me. He was holding his stomach, but I didn’t see any blood. He started pouring a cup of coffee and I went over there just to check on what he was doing, because, like most of the graveyard shift, he was creepy.
All of a sudden he says to me, “I’ve been stabbed! I’m gonna bleed to death.” He lifts up his shirt and shows me a slash in his stomach. It appeared to be a wound caused by a knife. Still didn’t see much blood, but he was able to make some appear on his “white” T-shirt as he compressed the wound in simulated pain. I say this because it was clear that the cut had coagulated a long time ago, maybe even days. Human blood takes approximately 15 minutes to fully coagulate. It separates into serum and red blood cells. This wound didn’t look like it happened just 15 minutes ago.
“You want me to call 911?”
“Sure,” he says again, “I’ve been stabbed. Hurts bad.” Frankly it wasn’t a very good acting job, but he was in a stabbed state.
There was another phone right behind me on the wall in the hallway, so I dialed 911 and told them I had a male, around 45-50, with a minor stab wound in his abdomen, asking for medical assistance. The girl on the other end of the line took my name and verified the address of the store, and said they would dispatch paramedics in a few minutes. I hung up the phone and looked for the victim, but he had left the store, with the cup of unpaid for coffee.
I saw him walking across the parking lot down Kathryn Ave toward the 7-Eleven. Interestingly enough it wasn’t an ambulance that showed up a few minutes later, but a police cruiser. One of my “regulars” came in.
“Where’s the stabbing victim?” he asked.
I told him that he left. Walked down toward the 7-Eleven. Officer Lambert then went on to tell me about this vagrant that stabs himself every few days so he can get himself arrested and get a free meal and a warm bed. He was filling up his coffee mug at the coffee station. I told him the guy wasn’t bleeding that much, if at all and Officer Lambert said that he would be when he opened the surgical scar again to make it look like a stab wound. Creepy.
One night at the Circle K, I was sitting there flipping through the latest issue of “Hustler” or something like that and this kid about fifteen or sixteen walks in. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 2:30 AM. I usually didn’t “read” the magazines until after I had checked the gas level in the underground storage tank out front, which I had to do at midnight, so I knew it was pretty late for this guy to be up even before I looked at the clock. You used a marked wooden stick to measure the level of the gas, and I was surprised that over two hours had gone by since I had been out there doing it.
In the front of the store, by the door, was a standing rack that had bags of piñon nuts of different quantities and varieties. It was about four feet high and resembled a metal pine tree.
Just like the rio in Rio Grande River means river, and you’re technically saying river twice if you say the Rio Grande River, the same is true of saying piñon nuts. Piñon (pin yone) is Spanish for pine nut. The name originates from Spanish explorers in the 1500s, who named the tree Pino Piñonero, or “nut-bearing pine.” A piñon pine can be more than 500 years old, and may live as long as 1,000 years. They’re not very tall trees. One legend is the tree used to be a towering pine, but God put a curse on the tree, after Jesus was crucified on a cross. The idea being that no piñon could ever be used to make one big enough to use for that purpose. I don’t know, nice story if it works for you.
Every seven years there is a bumper crop of piñon nuts, and all you have to do is lay burlap bags at the base of the tree, tie a rope to the top part of the trunk, and shake the tree like crazy. Mounds of nuts will fall from the cones. You just scoop them up in the bags and move on to the next tree. Generally, in the off years it’s pretty difficult to harvest the nuts which grow inside the pine cones, so they’re a pretty pricey commodity. A delicacy of sorts. The bags at the front of the store, some roasted, some roasted in red chili, some raw, were priced from $5.98 a bag and up. They were prepared by a small vendor in Santa Fe who kept them stocked and paid Circle K a space fee and a markup on the suggested retail price. A full tree of the nuts probably had a wholesale price in excess of $900.00 but that was all pretty much labor.
So like I was saying, this kid comes in and stands by the piñon nut “tree” and spins it a couple of times. Looking for, what I assume, a particular size, price or variety of the treat. I never stopped to think that maybe this kid didn’t have the minimum $5.98. All of sudden, he picks the whole tree up off the floor and backs out the door with it. I jumped the counter screaming at him to stop. By the time I hit the door he was around the corner of the building and heading up the street to the apartments, shedding bags of nuts as he went.
I ran back into the store and called 911. “Somebody just stole a whole rack of piñon!” I screamed into the phone. “The whole damn rack.” I described him as best I could and the direction he was heading. I figured he’d be pretty easy to spot. Now I had to go through the paperwork involved in a known shoplifting. Always a fun thing. Extra work.
About an hour later, a cop that I didn’t know, not one of my regulars, showed up at the store asking if I was the guy who reported the piñon theft. I confirmed that I was.
“I didn’t see anybody running up the street with any piñon,” he said. “How much wood did he take? That shit’s pretty heavy.”
So this officer was driving around looking for a kid carrying bundles of piñon firewood that were stacked in the front of the store under the front windows. They weighed easily 25 pounds a bundle. A running kid might have made off with two at the most. I told him it was a rack of nuts, expensive roasted nuts, and that the kid had taken the whole rack and run off with it. I didn’t bother to ask if he had seen a kid running down the street with that, which would have seriously looked a little out of the ordinary. I just got my police report to put with the shoplifting report.
“Thanks,” I said, “would you like a free cup of coffee?” And then I reached over and picked up my magazine off the rack.
You ever see those signs out front of a convenience store that say, “Cash Register Has Less Than $20. Clerks Do Not Have Safe Combination.” Trust me, it’s not always true. Well the first part, the fact we don’t have the combination…..totally true. It’s a drop safe. The store manager is the only one with the combination. They don’t work graveyard.
What the clerk does is count the big bills, log the amount, then roll them up and put them in a pill bottle that you drop down a steel tube. The possibility that clerks get lazy or busy and don’t drop all the excess bills down the tube every time the register gets over $20, highly likely. A smart thief will watch this busy period. Mill around the story awhile until all or most everyone is gone, stand out of sight, maybe even just outside the front door, and wait for the clerk to open the drawer and take out the twenties, and maybe even a fifty or a hundred, although it clearly says on the counter “NO BILLS OVER $20!” That counting phase, while the till is open, is when you make your move.
One night at the Circle K, I was playing my usual catch-up with the drop safe, when I spotted a guy watching me through the front glass of the store. “Fuck,” I thought, “I’m about to get robbed.”
My heart started pounding out of my chest and I jammed the till shut with my hip, grabbed a pill bottle, rolled the bills I had in my hand as fast as I could and shoved them down the tube, never letting my eyes off the guy now moving towards the door. He was about 5’10”, thin, maybe 30s, the required black hoody pulled up over his head, and he had both his hands in the front pouch pocket of the hoody. He was in the store now walking towards the counter. I thought my heart was going to bust right through my rib cage.
“Hey man, you got any spare change?” Interesting way to phrase a hold up, “spare change.”
“No,” I said and gulped more loudly than I wanted to.
Right about then a car pulled up in front and the headlights illuminated a tattered backpack leaning up against the trash can out front. The guy didn’t go for his “gun”.
This guy was a homeless guy. The air expelled out of my lungs so fast I sounded like an inner-tube hitting a sharp knife.
“You want a free cup of coffee?” I asked.
Ultimately I got fired from the Circle K. Shortly after the piñon theft, we got a new District Manager, a little wimp who thought himself an over important man. A “suit” with a short person syndrome. He decided to solve the inventory losses at the Kathryn store by firing everyone that worked there. He got the day-crew with his secret shoppers first, and then he got me at 6:43 AM for not ringing up a pack of cigarettes. I was extremely busy and just put the money in the till. I rang the sale up on the register, two sales later so the till would balance at the end of my shift. The contention was that we were all stealing money by not ringing up the purchases every so often, and then pocketing any overage at the end of the shift when we balanced the drawer. Good idea, I guess, hadn’t thought of it, but got accused of it just the same.
“Short Fuck” as he came to be known to me, just couldn’t reconcile the fact that the theft of an entire rack of expensive nuts might have a negative effect on his inventory. The constant shoplifting with no security cameras taping in the store, the customers who got a drink out of the cooler and then walked right out with it, the cars that drove away from the pump after leaving a stolen credit card at the counter, the kid in the trench coat, the clerk who ate every meal, snacked and supplied his nicotine habit with store inventory, and the gallons of free coffee, just didn’t seem to figure in to his inventory losses. No, by god, it was clerks stealing money out of the till. One of the day-shift clerks had been with the store for 13 years. Short Fuck fired her the second day he was there.
So on the day I got my call to go down to Corporate HQ and to bring my two white shirts with the red Circle K brand over the pocket, I was pretty certain what was up. I walked into the conference room and Short Fuck was sitting in the middle of a small conference table, back against the wall. If he sat back in the chair, his feet wouldn’t touch the floor, so he was sitting on the edge of the high back chair. I took a seat across from him. He had his briefcase opened on the table and began rummaging around in there pulling out a register tape and a Secret Shopper Report.
“How long you been with Circle K, uh?”……he didn’t know my name. He was looking all over the paperwork to find a name. Finally he got it…….”Leonard,” he said.
“About a year,” I answered. “Name’s Len,” I added for effect.
“Leonard, do you know what this is?” he asked holding up the strip of register tape.
“Len. Yeah, it’s a register tape.”
“On this register tape,” and he laid it down in front of me and pointed to three entries highlighted in yellow, “are the three items purchased by this secret shopper on the night of July 14th, at 6:43 AM. The problem is the secret shopper also bought a pack of cigarettes. But it’s not rung up here as you can see.”
“Are you accusing me of stealing?” I screamed at him. “You think I’m some flunky? If I was going to steal from you, I’ve got much better ways of doing it, and you wouldn’t even come close to catching me.” As I mentioned earlier I had been helping myself to food and cigarettes for some time now. “Give me that receipt,” and I grabbed it out of his hands before he could react.
“See, right here. Two sales down. The cigarettes are rung up,” I explained pointing. “The cash drawer balanced at the end of the shift.”
“How do I know that wasn’t another customer purchase?”
“You don’t,” I said, “I’m just telling you I rang up the secret shopper’s smokes. You think we don’t know who your damn secret shoppers are? How many people you think wait until you’ve rung up the sale, give change, then ask for a pack of cigarettes before you close the cash drawer? You think the normal person does that? A normal person asks for the cigarettes first because it’s what they came in for in the first place. Shit, your secret shoppers are so easy to spot you might as well paint them purple.”
“We’re going to have to let you go.” He said it smugly. Almost enjoying it, but when he passed the official incident report over for me to sign, I shoved it away and stood up.
“I’m not signing a goddamn thing,” I said leaning over the table at him. His expression changed from smugness to fear. “You can kiss my ass.”
“You won’t get your final check,” he said quickly. “You have to sign the release to get the check.”
“What’s the check for, one fucking day? You think you pay me enough to give a shit about one fucking day? Fuck you,” I screamed and shoved the conference table across the room, up against his chest setting him back in the high back chair, and blocking him against the wall. Kind of looked like a toddler in a big high chair. I pitched the two shirts at him and hit him in the face. Gave him another “fuck you,” and walked out. I got the check in the mail about a week later. It was for one day in the amount of $20.81 after taxes.
About a week later, someone drove by the Kathryn Ave Circle K and shot out all the top windows with a semi-automatic weapon. No one was hurt, but that would have seriously given me a stroke. I thought to myself then that things happen for a reason.
One night at the Circle K, about a month later, there was a robbery. Probably during a count for a safe drop, the new guy, an Iranian exchange student working the graveyard shift, was paralyzed by a gunman. The clerk was ordered to lay face down on the floor while the perp got the money out of the till. Then he picked up the cash register and threw in on the clerk lying on the floor. They didn’t weigh very much, but he threw it hard enough and hit him just right so that it crushed some vertebrae and damaged his spinal column. Basically broke his back. The gunman was pissed that the till only had about $20 in it and the Iranian student on the floor didn’t know the combination to the drop safe like the sign out front said.
I was, by then, working the graveyard shift at the Western 6 Motel about a mile away, in a locked office with bullet proof glass. Heard a lot of sirens that night, and read about it later in the paper. As far as I know, they never caught the guy. Without the aid of a secret shopper and a Short Fuck that wanted to solve his inventory problem, that could have been me.
I stopped by the Circle K one night on my way home to get a pack of cigarettes. There were two clerks working the graveyard shift, probably a new security policy. I also noticed video surveillance cameras inside the store next to the concave mirrors in the corners. I got a soda out of the cooler and some Twinkies. I waited for the clerk to ring them up, give me change, and before he slammed the till shut, I said, “Oh, I need a pack of Carlton’s.” He reached up to the overhead rack, handed me the pack, and I gave him the $1.25 out of my change. He put it in the till and slammed it shut without ringing up the sale.
The company logo is a red circle with the K in the middle attached to the bottom of the circle, like a branding iron. Circle K was started by past El Paso Mayor, Fred Hervey, in 1951, when he purchased three Kay’s Food Stores and changed the name. He wasn’t mayor at the time, but he did, later, serve two terms.
He moved the chain into New Mexico and Arizona shortly after he bought it, and now you’ll find a Circle K on almost every corner in every city in those states. By the time I was working as the night clerk at the Circle K on Kathryn Ave, there were over 2,100 stores, some even in Japan. By the early 90s, with acquisitions and new store openings, they had double that many. The stores were not franchised, and are still company owned. The company has gone through bankruptcy, been sliced up, reorganized and they are still the second largest chain behind the famous 7-Eleven Stores. You’ll often find them across the street from each other all over the Southwest. 7-Eleven had the “Big Gulp” and Circle K had the “Thirst Buster”, huge fountain sodas in cups so big you could hardly hold onto them, and they cost about 79 cents.
There is a well-known line in the film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” where Keanu Reeves’ character, Ted “Theodore” Logan, says “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” Believe me, from my own experience, there was a lot of that going on.
One night, on my way to work at the Circle K, I saw a body in the street. It was lying face down in the street, by the curb, at the park. My expert skills of observation went into action, red plaid shirt on the body, denim trousers, no shoes, male, 40 or more years of age. As I drove slowly by the site I noticed three people dart into the bushes in the park. That changed my mind about stopping, although I had originally wanted to stop and offer aid. Still not something you would wisely do in this neighborhood, even if you saw blood, and I hadn’t.
As soon as I arrived at the Circle K to start my shift, I called the police. Told them about the body in rushed sentences, what I knew about the man lying in the street and that I had seen several people running into the bushes in the park. Maybe the perpetrators, but I couldn’t describe them other than they looked young, like teenaged. They agreed to check on it, and I went to work at the checkout, which involved more theft prevention than actually ringing up sales.
For the minor theft prevention I used an axle from a tricycle that I found on the side of the building one night. The axle, when slammed on the counter, made enough of a statement to stop the average candy-bar theft. Although, most of these juvenile delinquents worked in groups, so scaring one wasn’t going to necessarily deter the group. My favorite “group” was the tall kid in a trench coat that walked in with his three buddies. The leader stood in the front of the aisle, facing the register, with the coat open wide to block my view, and he would just stare at me like I didn’t know what was going on behind the open trench coat. In the rear, the lieutenants grabbed as many candy-bars as they could and walked around to the other side of the aisle, also out of view but within a few feet of the front door. Almost on command they would all hit the door, and run up the block, me in chase with the tricycle axle to the end of the parking lot. Screaming obscenities and racial slurs after them.
The graveyard shift got its name from a rather bizarre job in; you guessed it, the cemetery. Back in the day, a couple of centuries ago, they didn’t have very good ways of being sure that a person was really dead. So they would bury them with a string, tied at the surface to a bell. If the poor guy woke up a little claustrophobic, he could ring the bell topside, get someone’s attention, and wait to be dug up. That’s if he had all his faculties and didn’t start screaming in terror. This vigil for the sound of the little bells was run twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, and the attendants that worked the cemetery day and night were said to work the graveyard shift. But then again, that could all be total bunk as some insist, and instead the term just came into being to describe the work shift from about midnight to eight in the morning. It’s just a creepy time to be up on a regular day, and only creepy people tend to show up during those hours.
Speaking of creepy, I used to give the security guard, Max, from the low-income housing project behind me, all the FREE coffee he could drink. I wanted him around as much as possible. I didn’t really like him much. We didn’t have much in common to talk about. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. But he did have a real, loaded, gun. I didn’t think he was going to be much help if he actually had to use it, but it was a silent force in the holster; shiny, deadly. Had a certain deterrent effect and gave me comfort.
Max would walk his rounds and come down to the store every hour and 13 minutes. He could then spend 17 minutes hanging out with me, having a cup of coffee and thumbing through the girlie magazines. Those magazines were kept behind the counter and you had to ask for the new issue of “Playboy”, “Penthouse”, “Hustler”, or one of the more cleverly named titles. The magazines of that nature are all enclosed in a clear shrink-wrap to prevent minors from viewing them. If you look, you’ll find the back magazine in every rack, in every Circle K, has the shrink-wrap removed. Security guards, cops, free coffee and reading material to keep them around. The police cruiser showed up every two hours like clockwork.
Oh yeah, back to the police. I called them at about 1:00 am to see if they would give me any information about the body by the park. I was transferred to a case detective that wanted to know who I was, why I was calling, where I was calling from, and on and on and on. Ten minutes later when I got done answering questions, I finally got to ask one of my own, did they know any more about the body on the street by the park. The officer started to laugh, more like a snicker.
“Yeah, a couple of boys playing a pretty good prank I guess. You were lucky. Most of the drivers coming down the street were faced with the body in the middle of the street. Had to slam on the brakes and swerve and stuff,” he said between chuckles. “ You musta got there too soon after the last incident, and they dropped the dummy and run into the bushes.”
Man, I figured I would know a dummy from a real body, but then it was dark. I thanked the officer and he said something stupid like, “keep up the vigilance, and let us know if you see any more bodies out there.” And there were. Creepy people, things afoot, at the Circle K.
One Night at the Circle K, this Oriental guy comes in the store. Starts looking around and I watch him closely. Don’t trust him. Finally after searching for awhile he comes up to the counter.
“You got any lie balls?” he says.
“What?”
“Lie ball.” He says it really slow, then really fast. “Lie ball. Lie ball.”
“What the fuck is a lie ball?” I asked.
He points up at the ceiling of the store. “Lie ball. Lie ball.” He’s screaming it now.
“No we don’t have any lie balls,” I said. “We don’t carry ‘em.”
“Lie Balls,” he screams again. “L I E….B A L L S!”
All of a sudden the one over my head went off, “Oh, you mean light bulbs.”
“Yeah, lie balls.” He smiles and I walk him over to the rack where the light bulbs are. He looks at a couple packages, checks the price, and puts them back on the rack.
“You awful proud of lie balls,” he said and stormed out without buying any.
One Night at the Circle K, I had a hand in saving a life. At least I’d like to think so, even though I never got any credit or recognition for it, and, I guess, I never really sought any. Somewhere around 3:00 am, shortly after Max had left on another round, a very attractive, twenty-something female stumbled into the store and staggered around the front by the doors, looking out the windows like she was being chased. I was used to the occasional drunk coming in for a pack of cigarettes or a cup of coffee. Sometimes they were attractive females like this, usually not. The bars closed at two around here, and the ones that were still there at last call, would normally be in the state that this girl was, who was now letting the counter hold her up and she was staring at me. She was wearing one of those fake rabbit fur coats, the multi-colored ones, and black suede ankle boots with high heels. She had dozens of those little bracelets that jingle incessantly, on both arms, and she was digging in her purse.
“Can you help me please?” She was a little short in her tone, and I didn’t have an immediate desire to help her, other than out of the store. “I need you to call my psychiatrist.” She handed me a business card with the name, Stephen P. Schaffer, Psychoanalyst and a local phone number. I wasn’t sure if the “doctor” was legit from his card. Plain white, black letters, no professional associations or degrees noted. He could have gotten his training by taking correspondence courses. Anybody can call themselves a psychoanalyst, a counselor, a hypnotist, hypnotherapist, psychotherapist. It’s generally not regulated.
“Why don’t - you- call him?” I handed her the card back. She was clearly drunk, or on drugs, or way past sober anyway. I noticed her eyes were almost black and then realized it was her pupils. They were huge, dilated to the very edge of the iris so you couldn’t even tell what color her eyes were.
“Please”, she stammered and spittle dripped from her mouth, “Please. I need you to call him and tell him what I’ve done.”
“What the hell have you done?” I shot back, maybe a little too brisk. She immediately started to cry and shake. But she hadn’t passed out, so we were still good.
“Call him and tell him I took the whole bottle of these,” she handed me an empty prescription bottle without the top. The physician on the bottle was Stephen P. Schaffer, and I couldn’t even pronounce the name of the drug on the label. “And, I swallowed them all with a fifth of vodka,” she said. “Call him. Please. I need help,” she whined.
That might become an understatement, is what I was thinking. I called the number on the business card, watching the girl sway back and forth and waiting for her to crumple to the floor. I got an answering service. “This is an emergency,” I screamed at the operator. “I need to talk to the doctor now!”
“One moment please,” she said. There was an emphasis on the first syllable, she held the “PLEE” a little long and ended with the “UZ”. I waited what seemed like a few minutes, although it was probably only seconds, and a man’s voice broke through the music on hold. “Can I help you?”
I tried to explain as best I could that this woman had walked into the Circle K and wanted me to call him and tell him that she had overdosed a bottle of pills and chased it down with vodka. He immediately sounded alarmed. I still didn’t even know the girl’s name. A minor detail, but he seemed to know who I was talking about. Either he had only one patient, or he was expecting this.
“Call 911, NOW, and keep her moving, walk her around. How many pills did she take?”
“How the hell should I know? She handed me an empty bottle”, I told him. “It could be one or however many were left in there, I don’t know. What should I do?”
Now you’re probably wondering who was waiting on the customers while all of this was going on……Nobody. They were kind of helping themselves. The one or two that had come in, had gone to the shelves or the cooler, gotten what they wanted, and just walked out when they saw I was on the phone.
I hung up and dialed 911. Told them I had a drug overdose and the doctor had been contacted, and gave them all the location. They wanted me to stay on the line and I told them I needed to walk this girl around, so I left the phone on the counter. Then I grabbed the girl and started walking her around the store. We circled the store maybe three times before the paramedics arrived. Now we were the neighborhood center of attention. A crowd began to gather from the low-income apartment complex at three o’clock in the goddamn morning. Amazing what a set of flashing red lights can do.
I gladly turned the girl over to the paramedics; they put her in the ambulance and didn’t move for over an hour. They worked on her right there in the parking lot. Started pumping her stomach and stabilizing her before they finally transported her to the UNM Medical Center. Didn’t even bother to run the siren when they finally left with her. There was no car in the parking lot, so I don’t know how she got there. After all the hoopla was over, I noticed she had left her purse on the counter. Thought that was odd, that the paramedics and police didn’t want to know if she had any identification. I sure did.
The name on the driver’s license said Marcy Abrahms. She was 22. From out of state, obviously a student. Geology major actually. I discovered that from her suicide note. It was folded neatly in her purse, and was going on to five pages of notebook paper, both sides, before she stopped. That’s probably when the alcohol and pills kicked in and she panicked. I looked for money. I was a starving student myself. There wasn’t any. The rest of the purse contents were things like makeup, and pens, a checkbook, and some odd paperclips, mints, gum, things like that.
I wouldn’t have taken the money anyway. I was doing pretty well at the Circle K, eating microwave meals, ice-cream, candy, chips, had reading material, and was stealing cartons of cigarettes. That was cutting my expenses quite a bit. Every Wednesday night I would load a carton of smokes in the truck under the passenger door mat. Not that I was afraid I would be searched, but they had these “Secret Shoppers” that, it was rumored, would look through your vehicle windows (they knew your car plate) to try and catch you with unpaid merchandise from the store. The really funny thing about that was we clerks knew who the “spies” were and when they came in. They were too obvious.
I went to the hospital the next afternoon to deliver the purse to Ms. Marcy Abrahms. I knew a lot more about her now than I did the night before. She was, of course, being jilted by her boyfriend, a graduate student in Geography. She spent pages lamenting about how she missed his touch, how she knew she wasn’t good enough for him, how much she had loved him……from what I could gather he was a bit older than she was……well, you get the idea. I felt a little guilty about reading the suicide note, but it was hard to put down. I had put everything back in the purse the way I found it, and put it on the truck seat. The secret shopper was in that morning, so I wonder what he thought when he looked in the window and saw a purse?
It wasn’t hard to find her at UNM Medical Center. They gave me the room without question. I was under the impression, for some reason, that they didn’t just let anybody visit someone in the hospital, especially attempted suicides. I probably thought that because I don’t go to hospitals much. I don’t like them. People die there, and they don’t need little bells to confirm it anymore.
I walked into the room, with the purse under my arm. Marcy, who looked like hell, was sitting up in the bed in one of those gowns with no back to them.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the dude from the Circle K last night. Remember?”
She looked at me standing in the doorway and said, simply, “No.”
“Well I brought back your purse. Thought you might need it. Wanted to make sure you were okay.”
She looked away from me and mumbled something. Could have been “thanks,” not really sure. Her body language said, “Get the hell out of here!” So I walked over and handed her the purse. She grabbed it out of my hand, I turned and left. She never asked what happened to her suicide note so maybe she didn’t remember.
One night at the Circle K, a stabbing victim walked in. He didn’t look like anything was bothering him when he walked past the checkout and went to the coffee machines, which were directly behind me. He was holding his stomach, but I didn’t see any blood. He started pouring a cup of coffee and I went over there just to check on what he was doing, because, like most of the graveyard shift, he was creepy.
All of a sudden he says to me, “I’ve been stabbed! I’m gonna bleed to death.” He lifts up his shirt and shows me a slash in his stomach. It appeared to be a wound caused by a knife. Still didn’t see much blood, but he was able to make some appear on his “white” T-shirt as he compressed the wound in simulated pain. I say this because it was clear that the cut had coagulated a long time ago, maybe even days. Human blood takes approximately 15 minutes to fully coagulate. It separates into serum and red blood cells. This wound didn’t look like it happened just 15 minutes ago.
“You want me to call 911?”
“Sure,” he says again, “I’ve been stabbed. Hurts bad.” Frankly it wasn’t a very good acting job, but he was in a stabbed state.
There was another phone right behind me on the wall in the hallway, so I dialed 911 and told them I had a male, around 45-50, with a minor stab wound in his abdomen, asking for medical assistance. The girl on the other end of the line took my name and verified the address of the store, and said they would dispatch paramedics in a few minutes. I hung up the phone and looked for the victim, but he had left the store, with the cup of unpaid for coffee.
I saw him walking across the parking lot down Kathryn Ave toward the 7-Eleven. Interestingly enough it wasn’t an ambulance that showed up a few minutes later, but a police cruiser. One of my “regulars” came in.
“Where’s the stabbing victim?” he asked.
I told him that he left. Walked down toward the 7-Eleven. Officer Lambert then went on to tell me about this vagrant that stabs himself every few days so he can get himself arrested and get a free meal and a warm bed. He was filling up his coffee mug at the coffee station. I told him the guy wasn’t bleeding that much, if at all and Officer Lambert said that he would be when he opened the surgical scar again to make it look like a stab wound. Creepy.
One night at the Circle K, I was sitting there flipping through the latest issue of “Hustler” or something like that and this kid about fifteen or sixteen walks in. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 2:30 AM. I usually didn’t “read” the magazines until after I had checked the gas level in the underground storage tank out front, which I had to do at midnight, so I knew it was pretty late for this guy to be up even before I looked at the clock. You used a marked wooden stick to measure the level of the gas, and I was surprised that over two hours had gone by since I had been out there doing it.
In the front of the store, by the door, was a standing rack that had bags of piñon nuts of different quantities and varieties. It was about four feet high and resembled a metal pine tree.
Just like the rio in Rio Grande River means river, and you’re technically saying river twice if you say the Rio Grande River, the same is true of saying piñon nuts. Piñon (pin yone) is Spanish for pine nut. The name originates from Spanish explorers in the 1500s, who named the tree Pino Piñonero, or “nut-bearing pine.” A piñon pine can be more than 500 years old, and may live as long as 1,000 years. They’re not very tall trees. One legend is the tree used to be a towering pine, but God put a curse on the tree, after Jesus was crucified on a cross. The idea being that no piñon could ever be used to make one big enough to use for that purpose. I don’t know, nice story if it works for you.
Every seven years there is a bumper crop of piñon nuts, and all you have to do is lay burlap bags at the base of the tree, tie a rope to the top part of the trunk, and shake the tree like crazy. Mounds of nuts will fall from the cones. You just scoop them up in the bags and move on to the next tree. Generally, in the off years it’s pretty difficult to harvest the nuts which grow inside the pine cones, so they’re a pretty pricey commodity. A delicacy of sorts. The bags at the front of the store, some roasted, some roasted in red chili, some raw, were priced from $5.98 a bag and up. They were prepared by a small vendor in Santa Fe who kept them stocked and paid Circle K a space fee and a markup on the suggested retail price. A full tree of the nuts probably had a wholesale price in excess of $900.00 but that was all pretty much labor.
So like I was saying, this kid comes in and stands by the piñon nut “tree” and spins it a couple of times. Looking for, what I assume, a particular size, price or variety of the treat. I never stopped to think that maybe this kid didn’t have the minimum $5.98. All of sudden, he picks the whole tree up off the floor and backs out the door with it. I jumped the counter screaming at him to stop. By the time I hit the door he was around the corner of the building and heading up the street to the apartments, shedding bags of nuts as he went.
I ran back into the store and called 911. “Somebody just stole a whole rack of piñon!” I screamed into the phone. “The whole damn rack.” I described him as best I could and the direction he was heading. I figured he’d be pretty easy to spot. Now I had to go through the paperwork involved in a known shoplifting. Always a fun thing. Extra work.
About an hour later, a cop that I didn’t know, not one of my regulars, showed up at the store asking if I was the guy who reported the piñon theft. I confirmed that I was.
“I didn’t see anybody running up the street with any piñon,” he said. “How much wood did he take? That shit’s pretty heavy.”
So this officer was driving around looking for a kid carrying bundles of piñon firewood that were stacked in the front of the store under the front windows. They weighed easily 25 pounds a bundle. A running kid might have made off with two at the most. I told him it was a rack of nuts, expensive roasted nuts, and that the kid had taken the whole rack and run off with it. I didn’t bother to ask if he had seen a kid running down the street with that, which would have seriously looked a little out of the ordinary. I just got my police report to put with the shoplifting report.
“Thanks,” I said, “would you like a free cup of coffee?” And then I reached over and picked up my magazine off the rack.
You ever see those signs out front of a convenience store that say, “Cash Register Has Less Than $20. Clerks Do Not Have Safe Combination.” Trust me, it’s not always true. Well the first part, the fact we don’t have the combination…..totally true. It’s a drop safe. The store manager is the only one with the combination. They don’t work graveyard.
What the clerk does is count the big bills, log the amount, then roll them up and put them in a pill bottle that you drop down a steel tube. The possibility that clerks get lazy or busy and don’t drop all the excess bills down the tube every time the register gets over $20, highly likely. A smart thief will watch this busy period. Mill around the story awhile until all or most everyone is gone, stand out of sight, maybe even just outside the front door, and wait for the clerk to open the drawer and take out the twenties, and maybe even a fifty or a hundred, although it clearly says on the counter “NO BILLS OVER $20!” That counting phase, while the till is open, is when you make your move.
One night at the Circle K, I was playing my usual catch-up with the drop safe, when I spotted a guy watching me through the front glass of the store. “Fuck,” I thought, “I’m about to get robbed.”
My heart started pounding out of my chest and I jammed the till shut with my hip, grabbed a pill bottle, rolled the bills I had in my hand as fast as I could and shoved them down the tube, never letting my eyes off the guy now moving towards the door. He was about 5’10”, thin, maybe 30s, the required black hoody pulled up over his head, and he had both his hands in the front pouch pocket of the hoody. He was in the store now walking towards the counter. I thought my heart was going to bust right through my rib cage.
“Hey man, you got any spare change?” Interesting way to phrase a hold up, “spare change.”
“No,” I said and gulped more loudly than I wanted to.
Right about then a car pulled up in front and the headlights illuminated a tattered backpack leaning up against the trash can out front. The guy didn’t go for his “gun”.
This guy was a homeless guy. The air expelled out of my lungs so fast I sounded like an inner-tube hitting a sharp knife.
“You want a free cup of coffee?” I asked.
Ultimately I got fired from the Circle K. Shortly after the piñon theft, we got a new District Manager, a little wimp who thought himself an over important man. A “suit” with a short person syndrome. He decided to solve the inventory losses at the Kathryn store by firing everyone that worked there. He got the day-crew with his secret shoppers first, and then he got me at 6:43 AM for not ringing up a pack of cigarettes. I was extremely busy and just put the money in the till. I rang the sale up on the register, two sales later so the till would balance at the end of my shift. The contention was that we were all stealing money by not ringing up the purchases every so often, and then pocketing any overage at the end of the shift when we balanced the drawer. Good idea, I guess, hadn’t thought of it, but got accused of it just the same.
“Short Fuck” as he came to be known to me, just couldn’t reconcile the fact that the theft of an entire rack of expensive nuts might have a negative effect on his inventory. The constant shoplifting with no security cameras taping in the store, the customers who got a drink out of the cooler and then walked right out with it, the cars that drove away from the pump after leaving a stolen credit card at the counter, the kid in the trench coat, the clerk who ate every meal, snacked and supplied his nicotine habit with store inventory, and the gallons of free coffee, just didn’t seem to figure in to his inventory losses. No, by god, it was clerks stealing money out of the till. One of the day-shift clerks had been with the store for 13 years. Short Fuck fired her the second day he was there.
So on the day I got my call to go down to Corporate HQ and to bring my two white shirts with the red Circle K brand over the pocket, I was pretty certain what was up. I walked into the conference room and Short Fuck was sitting in the middle of a small conference table, back against the wall. If he sat back in the chair, his feet wouldn’t touch the floor, so he was sitting on the edge of the high back chair. I took a seat across from him. He had his briefcase opened on the table and began rummaging around in there pulling out a register tape and a Secret Shopper Report.
“How long you been with Circle K, uh?”……he didn’t know my name. He was looking all over the paperwork to find a name. Finally he got it…….”Leonard,” he said.
“About a year,” I answered. “Name’s Len,” I added for effect.
“Leonard, do you know what this is?” he asked holding up the strip of register tape.
“Len. Yeah, it’s a register tape.”
“On this register tape,” and he laid it down in front of me and pointed to three entries highlighted in yellow, “are the three items purchased by this secret shopper on the night of July 14th, at 6:43 AM. The problem is the secret shopper also bought a pack of cigarettes. But it’s not rung up here as you can see.”
“Are you accusing me of stealing?” I screamed at him. “You think I’m some flunky? If I was going to steal from you, I’ve got much better ways of doing it, and you wouldn’t even come close to catching me.” As I mentioned earlier I had been helping myself to food and cigarettes for some time now. “Give me that receipt,” and I grabbed it out of his hands before he could react.
“See, right here. Two sales down. The cigarettes are rung up,” I explained pointing. “The cash drawer balanced at the end of the shift.”
“How do I know that wasn’t another customer purchase?”
“You don’t,” I said, “I’m just telling you I rang up the secret shopper’s smokes. You think we don’t know who your damn secret shoppers are? How many people you think wait until you’ve rung up the sale, give change, then ask for a pack of cigarettes before you close the cash drawer? You think the normal person does that? A normal person asks for the cigarettes first because it’s what they came in for in the first place. Shit, your secret shoppers are so easy to spot you might as well paint them purple.”
“We’re going to have to let you go.” He said it smugly. Almost enjoying it, but when he passed the official incident report over for me to sign, I shoved it away and stood up.
“I’m not signing a goddamn thing,” I said leaning over the table at him. His expression changed from smugness to fear. “You can kiss my ass.”
“You won’t get your final check,” he said quickly. “You have to sign the release to get the check.”
“What’s the check for, one fucking day? You think you pay me enough to give a shit about one fucking day? Fuck you,” I screamed and shoved the conference table across the room, up against his chest setting him back in the high back chair, and blocking him against the wall. Kind of looked like a toddler in a big high chair. I pitched the two shirts at him and hit him in the face. Gave him another “fuck you,” and walked out. I got the check in the mail about a week later. It was for one day in the amount of $20.81 after taxes.
About a week later, someone drove by the Kathryn Ave Circle K and shot out all the top windows with a semi-automatic weapon. No one was hurt, but that would have seriously given me a stroke. I thought to myself then that things happen for a reason.
One night at the Circle K, about a month later, there was a robbery. Probably during a count for a safe drop, the new guy, an Iranian exchange student working the graveyard shift, was paralyzed by a gunman. The clerk was ordered to lay face down on the floor while the perp got the money out of the till. Then he picked up the cash register and threw in on the clerk lying on the floor. They didn’t weigh very much, but he threw it hard enough and hit him just right so that it crushed some vertebrae and damaged his spinal column. Basically broke his back. The gunman was pissed that the till only had about $20 in it and the Iranian student on the floor didn’t know the combination to the drop safe like the sign out front said.
I was, by then, working the graveyard shift at the Western 6 Motel about a mile away, in a locked office with bullet proof glass. Heard a lot of sirens that night, and read about it later in the paper. As far as I know, they never caught the guy. Without the aid of a secret shopper and a Short Fuck that wanted to solve his inventory problem, that could have been me.
I stopped by the Circle K one night on my way home to get a pack of cigarettes. There were two clerks working the graveyard shift, probably a new security policy. I also noticed video surveillance cameras inside the store next to the concave mirrors in the corners. I got a soda out of the cooler and some Twinkies. I waited for the clerk to ring them up, give me change, and before he slammed the till shut, I said, “Oh, I need a pack of Carlton’s.” He reached up to the overhead rack, handed me the pack, and I gave him the $1.25 out of my change. He put it in the till and slammed it shut without ringing up the sale.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Oh Henry, Call Dr. Pepper, I'm Gonna Have a Baby Ruth
One of my favorite jokes goes like this: Do you know how to catch a polar bear? Well, you cut a hole in the ice and line the edge with peas. When the polar bear stops to take a pea, you kick him in the ice hole.
I’m sorry, but I can’t keep a straight face when I tell that joke. I laugh harder than anyone that hears me tell it, of course, because I think it’s hilarious. There are better jokes, I’m sure, but there are two things I like about this one. One, I can remember it and two, well………., okay only one thing. Sometimes when I tell this joke in a “tough” room, I’m the only one that’s laughing, but that’s okay, because I think it’s funny.
I can’t remember jokes very well. Sometimes, I can remember the whole entire joke and forget the punch line, or remember the punch line and not how to get to it. I have to write stuff down. Sometimes, if I write it down immediately I can remember it for awhile. I have books and books of jokes, and quotes, and witticisms, but I can’t remember any of them without looking them up. And it’s not an age thing either. If I had a line in a play, I wouldn’t be able to remember it, even if it was just one line. I would need off-stage prompting or queue cards.
I’m amazed by actors that memorize entire scripts and then repeat lines verbatim, even ad-libbing some of the dialogue to fit the character. Me, flash cards…..without them I would be reading most of my lines looking at my hands because that is where the dialogue would be written. It’s interesting to watch Presidents and other public speakers pretend that they are reciting a speech from memory when they are actually reading it from a high-tech teleprompter being projected on what appears to be bullet-proof panels on either side of the podium. Abraham Lincoln probably didn’t read the Gettysburg Address from the envelope he wrote it on, but I’ll bet he kept his notes close by, like in his hand.
I used to carry a joke around in my wallet (besides the lack of actual money that you won’t find in my wallet, which is, indeed, a joke) about a chain of events concerning a fly, a fish, a fisherman, a bear, a cat, and a cheese sandwich, because I could never remember it to tell it, and I thought it was hilarious. Goes something like this, and you’ve probably heard it before:
One day at a fishing hole on the river, there was a fly buzzing over the water.
A fish swam by and saw the fly, and thought to itself, “If that fly drops six inches, I’ll be able to jump high enough to get it and finally have some dinner.
A fisherman sitting on the bank saw the fly and thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and a fish jumps for it, I’ll snag the fish with my net and finally catch something.”
The fisherman had a half of a cheese sandwich left and started to eat it.
Behind the fisherman, hiding behind a tree, was a bear. The bear thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and that fish jumps to get it, that fisherman will grab his net, snag it, then I’ll snatch it from him and finally get some dinner.”
Next to the fisherman, hiding in a bush, was a field mouse. The mouse thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and a fish jumps for it, that fisherman will drop his cheese sandwich so he can grab the net and I’ll get me some cheese.” The mouse didn’t see the bear.
A cat was behind the field mouse watching the scene, and the cat thought, “If that fly drops six inches and the fish jumps for it, and the fisherman drops his sandwich to get his net, and the mouse goes for the cheese, I’ll sneak up on that mouse and catch him.” The cat didn’t see the bear either.
Sure enough, the fly dropped six inches, the fisherman dropped his sandwich to get the net, the fish jumped and he snagged it, and the mouse ran to get the cheese. The bear ran down the hill to steal the fish. The cat pounced on the mouse, but missed, lost its balance, rolled down the bank and ended up in the river.
The moral of the story is: When the fly drops six inches, the ….well it’s something about the cat falling into the river. You figure it out.
I’ve struggled with this joke-telling-memory-problem for years. I’m jealous of all those people that can just roll them off their tongues, and the crowd laughs, and I say, “I’ve got to remember that one.” But I never do. I like to think I have wit, I guess it’s just not quick.
My brother is a quick wit. He once said of my two divorces from the same woman that at least my x-wife was a good housekeeper. “She kept the house both times,” he chuckled. I think he writes his own material.
I just heard this one the other day. “My friend just slept with his third cousin. He was real upset about it. I told him if it upset him so much he should stop counting them.”
Here’s a popular joke genre, the genie joke:
A woman was walking along a beach when she stumbled upon what looked like a genie’s lamp. She picked it up, rubbed it on the side, and sure enough a genie appeared.
The amazed woman asked if she got three wishes.
The genie said he was sorry, but due to the current economy, the layoffs, and downsizing and low wages in third-world countries, and the lack of US car sales, and fierce genie competition he could only offer her one wish.
“So what’ll it be?” the genie said.
The woman didn’t hesitate.
“If I only get one wish, then I want peace in the Middle East. See this map? I want these countries to stop fighting with each other. I want all the US soldiers to come home.”
The genie looked at the map and said. “Lady! These countries have been at war with each other for thousands of years. I’m good, but not THAT good! I don’t think peace is possible in this region. It can’t be done. You’ll have to make another wish.”
The woman thought for a minute, and then said, “Well, I’ve never been able to find the right man. You know one that’s considerate and fun, likes to cook and helps with the housecleaning, is good in bed and gets along with my family, doesn’t watch sports all the time, and is faithful. That’s what I’ll wish for, a good mate.”
(I’m sure you know where this is going.)
The genie let out a long sigh and said, “Okay, let me see that fucking map again.”
When I lived in New Mexico we had Española jokes. They were like, Aggie jokes, or Pollock jokes, or whatever. They went like this:
Why can’t they have a living manger scene at Christmas in Española? Because they can’t find a virgin and three wise men. A camel they can find.
Or, what do you call a guy in Española in a three-piece suit? The defendant.
Or, even worse, in Española they think four-on-the-floor is a double date. You get the idea.
One of my favorites is, the Española football team was going to Albuquerque to play Albuquerque High. They saw a sign on the highway that said “Albuquerque Left” so they went home.
Okay, it’s a groaner, but I think it’s funny. I’ve got nothing against people that live in Española, a small community northeast of Santa Fe, but for some reason they’ve become the butt of jokes. I don’t even know anyone from there. But you could insert any person, group, place or nationality in the place of Española.
Have you ever come up with your own joke? I haven’t. I can say with some certainty that I have never written a joke. I would guess that joke writers obviously exist, but they must be the most plagiarized writers in the world. Have you ever heard of a joke writer suing someone for using their jokes at a happy hour? Maybe there’s some strange copyright on a joke or something. But then maybe it’s because a lot of jokes run on the same base structure and well, like this……
A man seeking a job as a sheriff’s deputy in a border town was being interviewed. The Sergeant doing the interview says, “Your qualifications all look great, but we have to give you an attitude suitability test. We can’t accept you until you take that test.”
The Sergeant slides a service revolver on the desk towards the candidate and says, “Take this pistol, go out and shoot six illegal aliens, six meth dealers, six Muslim extremists, and a rabbit.”
“Why the rabbit,” the candidate says.
“Great attitude,” the Sergeant replies, “When can you start?”
There are a lot of golf jokes, and sexist jokes, and blonde jokes, and Aggie jokes, and racist jokes like that one above, and like I said, genie jokes. Everyone’s heard and told a genie joke, I guess it’s easy to relate to what you would wish for if given the opportunity, and how naturally it would get screwed up by how you asked the genie to grant the wish.
Guys and gals who write jokes for a living have to be some special breed of person. First you have to come up with the funny story. Then you have to hope that everyone else thinks it’s funny. Some subjects are just easy to put in a joke, like farts, and sex, and minorities, and gee, whatever other “funny” material there is. A fart by and of itself can get a lot of laughs regardless of the room without saying a word. Works really well in church, but you usually can’t take credit for it.
The internet has increased joke-telling efficiency. I get emailed an average of 6.35 jokes per day. Most of them aren’t that funny, but the ones you think are funny will get forwarded, and the best part is you don’t have to remember the joke, but you’re still basically telling it.
Here’s my all-time favorite joke. It was told to a group at an Italian restaurant, which was fitting because of it’s subject. The joke teller was a David Lettermen clone. Literally, and his delivery was just as good. He was an Assistant Credit Manager for Delta Faucet though, not a stand-up comic. Here’s how it goes, the short version:
Mario and Luigi were at the bar having a few drinks and the subject turned to women’s breasts, as it often does, and then specifically to Mario’s wife’s breasts.
“Imma tellan ya,” Luigi finally says, “I woulda giva you fifty-a bucks to see-a yer wife’sa tits.”
Well Mario gets a little bent out of shape about Luigi’s confession, “I doughna thinka you shoulda be talkin’ abouta my wife’sa titsa like-a that,” he says. “I’mma gonna kicka yer ass!”
Needless to say, the party breaks up and Mario goes home to his wife.
“Yer notta gonna believa whatta Luigi a-said,” he tells her. “He saidda he woulda give-a fifty-a bucks to see-a yer tits.”
Mario’s wife tells him that maybe that’s not such a bad idea. They could use the money. Luigi, after all is a friend, not like its some stranger looking at her bare breasts. So she convinces Mario to go back and tell Luigi that it’s a deal.
So Mario goes back to the bar and finds Luigi and takes him home. His wife bares her breasts and (here’s where the joke gets visual) Luigi takes them in each of his hands and fondles them and says, “I doughna know!”
Then he does it again (the joke teller cups his hands out in front of him and slightly twists from side to side) and says, “I doughna know!”
Finally Mario can’t stand it anymore. “Whatta ya meana you doughna know?! Whatsa wronga witha my wife’sa tits?!”
“I doughna knowa where I’mma gonna getta fifty-a bucks!”
Yeah, well I think it’s hilarious.
So last night my wife and I are watching a movie called “Leatherheads.” Not important except that the football field in this 1925 spoof of the beginnings of professional football had advertisements around the stands for candy bars and things. There was Oh Henry, and Baby Ruth, and Beechnut Cigarettes, and my wife was reading them out loud. The next thing I know my wife turns to me and says, “Oh Henry, call Dr. Pepper, I’m having a Baby Ruth.” I thought I was going to die.
One of the best laughs I ever had was lying in bed one night, both of us having trouble going to sleep and I said, nonchalantly, “Honey, you want some snew?”
“What’s snew?” she asked.
“Nothing, what’s snew with you?” I guess I’m not ready to give up my day job.
I’m sorry, but I can’t keep a straight face when I tell that joke. I laugh harder than anyone that hears me tell it, of course, because I think it’s hilarious. There are better jokes, I’m sure, but there are two things I like about this one. One, I can remember it and two, well………., okay only one thing. Sometimes when I tell this joke in a “tough” room, I’m the only one that’s laughing, but that’s okay, because I think it’s funny.
I can’t remember jokes very well. Sometimes, I can remember the whole entire joke and forget the punch line, or remember the punch line and not how to get to it. I have to write stuff down. Sometimes, if I write it down immediately I can remember it for awhile. I have books and books of jokes, and quotes, and witticisms, but I can’t remember any of them without looking them up. And it’s not an age thing either. If I had a line in a play, I wouldn’t be able to remember it, even if it was just one line. I would need off-stage prompting or queue cards.
I’m amazed by actors that memorize entire scripts and then repeat lines verbatim, even ad-libbing some of the dialogue to fit the character. Me, flash cards…..without them I would be reading most of my lines looking at my hands because that is where the dialogue would be written. It’s interesting to watch Presidents and other public speakers pretend that they are reciting a speech from memory when they are actually reading it from a high-tech teleprompter being projected on what appears to be bullet-proof panels on either side of the podium. Abraham Lincoln probably didn’t read the Gettysburg Address from the envelope he wrote it on, but I’ll bet he kept his notes close by, like in his hand.
I used to carry a joke around in my wallet (besides the lack of actual money that you won’t find in my wallet, which is, indeed, a joke) about a chain of events concerning a fly, a fish, a fisherman, a bear, a cat, and a cheese sandwich, because I could never remember it to tell it, and I thought it was hilarious. Goes something like this, and you’ve probably heard it before:
One day at a fishing hole on the river, there was a fly buzzing over the water.
A fish swam by and saw the fly, and thought to itself, “If that fly drops six inches, I’ll be able to jump high enough to get it and finally have some dinner.
A fisherman sitting on the bank saw the fly and thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and a fish jumps for it, I’ll snag the fish with my net and finally catch something.”
The fisherman had a half of a cheese sandwich left and started to eat it.
Behind the fisherman, hiding behind a tree, was a bear. The bear thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and that fish jumps to get it, that fisherman will grab his net, snag it, then I’ll snatch it from him and finally get some dinner.”
Next to the fisherman, hiding in a bush, was a field mouse. The mouse thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and a fish jumps for it, that fisherman will drop his cheese sandwich so he can grab the net and I’ll get me some cheese.” The mouse didn’t see the bear.
A cat was behind the field mouse watching the scene, and the cat thought, “If that fly drops six inches and the fish jumps for it, and the fisherman drops his sandwich to get his net, and the mouse goes for the cheese, I’ll sneak up on that mouse and catch him.” The cat didn’t see the bear either.
Sure enough, the fly dropped six inches, the fisherman dropped his sandwich to get the net, the fish jumped and he snagged it, and the mouse ran to get the cheese. The bear ran down the hill to steal the fish. The cat pounced on the mouse, but missed, lost its balance, rolled down the bank and ended up in the river.
The moral of the story is: When the fly drops six inches, the ….well it’s something about the cat falling into the river. You figure it out.
I’ve struggled with this joke-telling-memory-problem for years. I’m jealous of all those people that can just roll them off their tongues, and the crowd laughs, and I say, “I’ve got to remember that one.” But I never do. I like to think I have wit, I guess it’s just not quick.
My brother is a quick wit. He once said of my two divorces from the same woman that at least my x-wife was a good housekeeper. “She kept the house both times,” he chuckled. I think he writes his own material.
I just heard this one the other day. “My friend just slept with his third cousin. He was real upset about it. I told him if it upset him so much he should stop counting them.”
Here’s a popular joke genre, the genie joke:
A woman was walking along a beach when she stumbled upon what looked like a genie’s lamp. She picked it up, rubbed it on the side, and sure enough a genie appeared.
The amazed woman asked if she got three wishes.
The genie said he was sorry, but due to the current economy, the layoffs, and downsizing and low wages in third-world countries, and the lack of US car sales, and fierce genie competition he could only offer her one wish.
“So what’ll it be?” the genie said.
The woman didn’t hesitate.
“If I only get one wish, then I want peace in the Middle East. See this map? I want these countries to stop fighting with each other. I want all the US soldiers to come home.”
The genie looked at the map and said. “Lady! These countries have been at war with each other for thousands of years. I’m good, but not THAT good! I don’t think peace is possible in this region. It can’t be done. You’ll have to make another wish.”
The woman thought for a minute, and then said, “Well, I’ve never been able to find the right man. You know one that’s considerate and fun, likes to cook and helps with the housecleaning, is good in bed and gets along with my family, doesn’t watch sports all the time, and is faithful. That’s what I’ll wish for, a good mate.”
(I’m sure you know where this is going.)
The genie let out a long sigh and said, “Okay, let me see that fucking map again.”
When I lived in New Mexico we had Española jokes. They were like, Aggie jokes, or Pollock jokes, or whatever. They went like this:
Why can’t they have a living manger scene at Christmas in Española? Because they can’t find a virgin and three wise men. A camel they can find.
Or, what do you call a guy in Española in a three-piece suit? The defendant.
Or, even worse, in Española they think four-on-the-floor is a double date. You get the idea.
One of my favorites is, the Española football team was going to Albuquerque to play Albuquerque High. They saw a sign on the highway that said “Albuquerque Left” so they went home.
Okay, it’s a groaner, but I think it’s funny. I’ve got nothing against people that live in Española, a small community northeast of Santa Fe, but for some reason they’ve become the butt of jokes. I don’t even know anyone from there. But you could insert any person, group, place or nationality in the place of Española.
Have you ever come up with your own joke? I haven’t. I can say with some certainty that I have never written a joke. I would guess that joke writers obviously exist, but they must be the most plagiarized writers in the world. Have you ever heard of a joke writer suing someone for using their jokes at a happy hour? Maybe there’s some strange copyright on a joke or something. But then maybe it’s because a lot of jokes run on the same base structure and well, like this……
A man seeking a job as a sheriff’s deputy in a border town was being interviewed. The Sergeant doing the interview says, “Your qualifications all look great, but we have to give you an attitude suitability test. We can’t accept you until you take that test.”
The Sergeant slides a service revolver on the desk towards the candidate and says, “Take this pistol, go out and shoot six illegal aliens, six meth dealers, six Muslim extremists, and a rabbit.”
“Why the rabbit,” the candidate says.
“Great attitude,” the Sergeant replies, “When can you start?”
There are a lot of golf jokes, and sexist jokes, and blonde jokes, and Aggie jokes, and racist jokes like that one above, and like I said, genie jokes. Everyone’s heard and told a genie joke, I guess it’s easy to relate to what you would wish for if given the opportunity, and how naturally it would get screwed up by how you asked the genie to grant the wish.
Guys and gals who write jokes for a living have to be some special breed of person. First you have to come up with the funny story. Then you have to hope that everyone else thinks it’s funny. Some subjects are just easy to put in a joke, like farts, and sex, and minorities, and gee, whatever other “funny” material there is. A fart by and of itself can get a lot of laughs regardless of the room without saying a word. Works really well in church, but you usually can’t take credit for it.
The internet has increased joke-telling efficiency. I get emailed an average of 6.35 jokes per day. Most of them aren’t that funny, but the ones you think are funny will get forwarded, and the best part is you don’t have to remember the joke, but you’re still basically telling it.
Here’s my all-time favorite joke. It was told to a group at an Italian restaurant, which was fitting because of it’s subject. The joke teller was a David Lettermen clone. Literally, and his delivery was just as good. He was an Assistant Credit Manager for Delta Faucet though, not a stand-up comic. Here’s how it goes, the short version:
Mario and Luigi were at the bar having a few drinks and the subject turned to women’s breasts, as it often does, and then specifically to Mario’s wife’s breasts.
“Imma tellan ya,” Luigi finally says, “I woulda giva you fifty-a bucks to see-a yer wife’sa tits.”
Well Mario gets a little bent out of shape about Luigi’s confession, “I doughna thinka you shoulda be talkin’ abouta my wife’sa titsa like-a that,” he says. “I’mma gonna kicka yer ass!”
Needless to say, the party breaks up and Mario goes home to his wife.
“Yer notta gonna believa whatta Luigi a-said,” he tells her. “He saidda he woulda give-a fifty-a bucks to see-a yer tits.”
Mario’s wife tells him that maybe that’s not such a bad idea. They could use the money. Luigi, after all is a friend, not like its some stranger looking at her bare breasts. So she convinces Mario to go back and tell Luigi that it’s a deal.
So Mario goes back to the bar and finds Luigi and takes him home. His wife bares her breasts and (here’s where the joke gets visual) Luigi takes them in each of his hands and fondles them and says, “I doughna know!”
Then he does it again (the joke teller cups his hands out in front of him and slightly twists from side to side) and says, “I doughna know!”
Finally Mario can’t stand it anymore. “Whatta ya meana you doughna know?! Whatsa wronga witha my wife’sa tits?!”
“I doughna knowa where I’mma gonna getta fifty-a bucks!”
Yeah, well I think it’s hilarious.
So last night my wife and I are watching a movie called “Leatherheads.” Not important except that the football field in this 1925 spoof of the beginnings of professional football had advertisements around the stands for candy bars and things. There was Oh Henry, and Baby Ruth, and Beechnut Cigarettes, and my wife was reading them out loud. The next thing I know my wife turns to me and says, “Oh Henry, call Dr. Pepper, I’m having a Baby Ruth.” I thought I was going to die.
One of the best laughs I ever had was lying in bed one night, both of us having trouble going to sleep and I said, nonchalantly, “Honey, you want some snew?”
“What’s snew?” she asked.
“Nothing, what’s snew with you?” I guess I’m not ready to give up my day job.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Boy Toys
Remember when you were a kid and Christmas seemed like it would never get here? To make it worse, they let you out of school for Christmas break, and you didn’t have anything to do to pass the time except wait for Christmas to come. Sure, Mom would try to come up with activities to keep us out of trouble. Popping corn and forcing us to sit for hours with a needle and some string to make garland. You count ten popcorns and then you string on a cranberry. Of course your big sister would rat on you and you’d get in trouble for eating two popcorns for every one you managed to string on without sticking your finger. I can hear her now, “Mom, he’s eating the popcorn!”
Mom’s next project would be to cut strips of red and green construction paper and instruct us how to glue together endless paper chains to be used to decorate the living room. Red tissue paper bells that folded out from two flat bell-shaped pieces of cardboard that clasped together were hung in between the arches of paper chain. We had been making paper chains for years, but there always seemed to be a need for more. “Mom, he’s using too much glue!” In my defense, the glue came in little bottles with rubber tops and if you pressed a little too hard on the paper with the rubber top you couldn’t control the flow of glue very well.
When we finally got to decorating the tree, the only thing I was allowed to put on the tree, along with the smaller kids, was the tinsel. Seems I had logged too many broken ornaments to be trusted with that task. We had to wait for the lights to be put on, and then the garlands and the miles of paper chains and the ornaments and then we tinselers were put into service. We were expected to put one strand of tinsel on a branch at a time. The shorter ones would work on the bottom and the taller ones worked the higher branches. Even though I’m sure it looked better, I’m just as sure Mom made us do it one strand at a time because it took longer. Putting tinsel on a tree, one strand at a time can take hours even with five, six or seven of us doing it as the tinseler population increased over the years. “Mom, he’s clumping it!” You don’t see tinsel on Christmas trees much anymore.
Needless to say, I ultimately got into trouble anyway, numerous times, and not just for wasting glue, eating popcorn meant for garland, or clumping the tinsel. I was threatened with Santa not even bothering to fly over the house, let alone leave me that special present I had been waiting for all year. I can’t tell you the number of times I was afraid that Santa wasn’t going to show, but somehow, he always did. I think my mother either lied about that naughty and nice list or Santa didn’t have a good memory. Or maybe on Christmas Eve you just got a commutation regardless of what petty crimes you might have committed. Parents start the “threatening” the first day of Christmas vacation though. “Santa Claus is watching you. He knows what you did and he’s marking it down.” Total crap, but we were afraid not to believe it. Funny how we were only reminded about this Santa tallying stuff during the final two weeks before Christmas. I think it would have been helpful to point this out at other times during the year as well.
When you’re an adult you spend the month of December trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for everything, and Christmas is always the day after tomorrow. Whatever happened to Christmas Clubs? You know that special bank account that you would start in January and deposit a little each week in anticipation of a small Christmas fortune available in December. I guess if I would have had a Christmas Club account this year I would have cashed it out in August to make the car payment anyway, and I’d still be trying to figure out how I was going to pay for Christmas. Christmas has become a major expense item that needs a year of careful planning. Something I have never been able to do. Christmas, with luck, gets paid off just in time for Christmas to come again. When we were kids we saved our meager allowances, or shoveled walks, or did extra chores to fund our Christmas gift giving. I wonder if anyone needs their sidewalk shoveled.
What do I want for Christmas? When you’re a kid that thought process starts long before the temperatures drop, the snow falls and you have to break out the rubbers. Yeah, we called them rubbers, and if you had the kind with a zipper up the middle, you were a sissy. You had to have the buckle rubbers to be cool. My mom, of course, bought me zipper rubbers. I’m sure she got a hell of deal on them, but her excuse had been that they were the only kind they had left. Girls wore zipper rubbers that came in yellow, or red, or green. Guys wore buckle rubbers that came in black. At least my zipper rubbers were black. I avoided wearing rubbers as often as I could. I still remember the taunts I received about the zippered rubber boots even from my “best” friend.
The method of closure wasn’t really that important anyway because you left them unbuckled (or unzipped) most of the time because it was easier to stuff your pants legs into them. Even if someone didn’t notice that you had on zipper rubbers though they’d find out because you could buckle together buckle rubbers and sling them over your shoulder on the way home from school. You couldn’t do that with zipper rubbers. You had to carry them in your hand. You were less likely to lose a buckle rubber for the same reason. You buckled them together in the cloak room to keep the pair intact. A zipper rubber could get separated from its left or right and you could spend a lot of time trying to match up a right or left zipper rubber with the other sissy’s rubbers in the cloak room.
I still marvel today that my parents were able to afford Christmas. I have three brothers and three sisters. We didn’t have three-page lists of what we wanted for Christmas like my clever grandson, Connor Michael Burton. In his phone message to Santa you could hear him turning the pages as he reeled off the things he wants for Christmas this year. My favorite item on his list was “any type of boy toy”, kind of covering all the bases for anything he might have left off the list, and it got me to thinking about those special Christmas gifts I had gotten over the years. We were allowed to pick one thing. We always got more, but we got to ask for one special “big” thing.
One year it was a bike of course. The coolest 26 inch Schwinn, two tone beige bike on the block. That was when bikes had fenders and headlights that worked on C batteries. In the summer we would add a motor sound to our bikes with playing cards and clothespins. You could get six or eight cards on each wheel and get a fair chuck chuck sound. Mom would start having trouble winning at Solitaire and realize that a few cards were missing from the deck. That usually didn’t go over well.
I spent a lot of my lawn mowing money on patch kits and inner tubes for that bike. I always seemed to have a flat tire. I got pretty good at changing bike tires over the years. You had to use two screwdrivers in tandem to stretch the tire back over the rim without sticking one of them through the brand new inner tube, which happened a time or two. If that happened, you started over and got out the patch kit.
I had some pretty good wrecks on that bike. Once when I was riding Jeff Hartman on the back, he got his foot stuck in the spokes and I went flying over the handlebars landing and sliding down the sidewalk on my face. I woke up several hours later lying on the couch with Dr. Booth looming over me. The first words out of my mouth were, “Is my bike okay?” I wasn’t supposed to be riding people on the bike, but the fact that I didn’t suffer any permanent damage probably had something to do with me not getting in too much trouble. As soon as I was allowed outside I went straight to the garage to check on the bike. Some bent spokes and some scratches on the handlebar were all it had suffered.
I got hit by a car once, on the way to school, by one the teachers. She didn’t see me or I didn’t see her as she came out of the intersection in front of the school. I ran right into the front fender of the Buick and went flying on to the hood of her car. I remember looking through the windshield at her shocked face, lying there spread eagle on her car, my face pressed to the glass. I didn’t suffer a scratch. I don’t think Mrs. Redding ever quite recovered.
The most embarrassing mishap on the bike happened on the way home from football practice one fall afternoon. I had slung my cleats over the handlebars and headed down Burkitt Street. As I began crossing Main Street the right cleat caught in the front spokes and locked the wheel. I went flying over the handlebars head first, again, and landed in the middle of the street. The light changed and four lanes of traffic started honking. Some kindly old gentleman jumped out of his car, having seen the entire performance, and wanted to know if I was okay and helped me walk my crippled bike back to the curb. I learned how to straighten spikes a lot when I was a kid, but I don’t think my wheels were ever really round after that.
I rode that bike for well over ten years, but secretly wanted the 3-speed English Racer that I had asked Santa to bring me.
Another year I asked Santa for a miniature tape recorder. My Dad had one of the bigger reel to reel recorders and it had always fascinated me. I remember I said “Grace” for him on one of his “Christmas Radio Shows” that he was always putting together at Christmas. I didn’t think it sounded like me when played back, but everyone else he recorded sounded like them. When I got older we would trade “Radio Shows” at Christmas, instead of greeting cards. We would MC the shows, tell jokes in between recorded acts, interview special “guests” and pretend, for example, that Bing Crosby was in the kitchen after just having sung “White Christmas” on the show. He was, of course, on the record player. But it was fun and had really started those many years earlier when I got the miniature Sony tape recorder.
My first major recording after, “Testing, testing, testing” (you always said it three times for some reason) was the 1968 Sugar Bowl game between the unbeaten WAC Champion Wyoming Cowboys and LSU. I sat in front of the TV and held the microphone in front of the speaker for the entire game. I have it all on tape, somewhere.
I can remember how excited we all were that the Cowboys were in the Sugar Bowl. The game was televised coast to coast in color! We had a black and white set. Wyoming led for most of the game, up 13 to nothing at half-time, then sophomore, Glenn Smith, came off the bench and became the first sophomore in Sugar Bowl history to win the MVP. They beat us 20 to 13. Smith ran for 74 yards in 16 carries and scored the winning touchdown on a 1 yard run. We never scored another point. Glenn Smith finished his career at LSU without ever starting a game. I sat there for two hours holding a microphone to the speaker of the TV and I never played it back. It’s probably still around here somewhere. I lost interest in the tape recorder shortly after.
Another year I got one of those Hockey games where the players are connected to 5 levers on each side of the game. An oversize puck is dropped in the center and by pulling and twisting the levers in turn, the three inch metal players can pass, backcheck, carom the puck and shoot on goal. One of the pucks was magnetic for a more controlled game and the other had a ball bearing in the center for a more fast-paced game. Within a few hours Christmas Day I was deadly with the ball bearing puck. I could control the puck to the Center and slam the shot on goal before anyone could react. Most importantly, before my Dad could react. I beat him game after game. Finally, late that day, in sheer frustration he ripped one of the controls right out of the game trying to block a shot. In fairness to my Dad, he fixed it later, but I was a bit upset that my greatest game of all time lasted less than a day before it was broken….by an adult.
The most amazing gift I ever received from Santa was a photographic enlarger. It was the kind of gift that was clearly out of my parent’s price range. I didn’t ask for it, because I knew by that time how Christmas worked, who Santa really was, and how expecting something as expensive as a Bogen 35mm Enlarger was just ridiculous.
I had built a darkroom in the basement in the old coal room. I was developing my own black and white film and printing test sheets by laying the negatives on a piece of photo paper and exposing it to light. Then developing and fixing the sheet. An enlarger was the next logical addition.
On Christmas morning (we opened presents right after midnight Christmas Eve) I was handed a small shirt box, expecting just that when I opened it, but inside was a folded piece of paper and on it was written in my Dad’s perfect printing “Go To The Dining Room.” I walked into the dining room, flipped on the light, and there on the table was a Bogen 35mm Enlarger. I was absolutely, totally speechless. I couldn’t figure out how in the world this had happened. How in the world anyone knew what I really wanted for Christmas for one thing. How in the world my parents could afford it. I was just amazed. I probably never thanked my Dad near enough for that gift, but I learned later in life, when I managed those same Christmas surprises for my own kids, what that feeling is like. There is no better feeling in the world.
I was in the basement coal room almost the entire day and there was no heat down there. I made it upstairs for Christmas dinner and to say “Grace”. Saying Grace had been my job since I had first memorized it when I was eight.
“Bless us oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.” The same way I said Grace on the reel to reel that Christmas day on my Dad’s “Radio Show” recording and didn’t sound at all like me.
Mom’s next project would be to cut strips of red and green construction paper and instruct us how to glue together endless paper chains to be used to decorate the living room. Red tissue paper bells that folded out from two flat bell-shaped pieces of cardboard that clasped together were hung in between the arches of paper chain. We had been making paper chains for years, but there always seemed to be a need for more. “Mom, he’s using too much glue!” In my defense, the glue came in little bottles with rubber tops and if you pressed a little too hard on the paper with the rubber top you couldn’t control the flow of glue very well.
When we finally got to decorating the tree, the only thing I was allowed to put on the tree, along with the smaller kids, was the tinsel. Seems I had logged too many broken ornaments to be trusted with that task. We had to wait for the lights to be put on, and then the garlands and the miles of paper chains and the ornaments and then we tinselers were put into service. We were expected to put one strand of tinsel on a branch at a time. The shorter ones would work on the bottom and the taller ones worked the higher branches. Even though I’m sure it looked better, I’m just as sure Mom made us do it one strand at a time because it took longer. Putting tinsel on a tree, one strand at a time can take hours even with five, six or seven of us doing it as the tinseler population increased over the years. “Mom, he’s clumping it!” You don’t see tinsel on Christmas trees much anymore.
Needless to say, I ultimately got into trouble anyway, numerous times, and not just for wasting glue, eating popcorn meant for garland, or clumping the tinsel. I was threatened with Santa not even bothering to fly over the house, let alone leave me that special present I had been waiting for all year. I can’t tell you the number of times I was afraid that Santa wasn’t going to show, but somehow, he always did. I think my mother either lied about that naughty and nice list or Santa didn’t have a good memory. Or maybe on Christmas Eve you just got a commutation regardless of what petty crimes you might have committed. Parents start the “threatening” the first day of Christmas vacation though. “Santa Claus is watching you. He knows what you did and he’s marking it down.” Total crap, but we were afraid not to believe it. Funny how we were only reminded about this Santa tallying stuff during the final two weeks before Christmas. I think it would have been helpful to point this out at other times during the year as well.
When you’re an adult you spend the month of December trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for everything, and Christmas is always the day after tomorrow. Whatever happened to Christmas Clubs? You know that special bank account that you would start in January and deposit a little each week in anticipation of a small Christmas fortune available in December. I guess if I would have had a Christmas Club account this year I would have cashed it out in August to make the car payment anyway, and I’d still be trying to figure out how I was going to pay for Christmas. Christmas has become a major expense item that needs a year of careful planning. Something I have never been able to do. Christmas, with luck, gets paid off just in time for Christmas to come again. When we were kids we saved our meager allowances, or shoveled walks, or did extra chores to fund our Christmas gift giving. I wonder if anyone needs their sidewalk shoveled.
What do I want for Christmas? When you’re a kid that thought process starts long before the temperatures drop, the snow falls and you have to break out the rubbers. Yeah, we called them rubbers, and if you had the kind with a zipper up the middle, you were a sissy. You had to have the buckle rubbers to be cool. My mom, of course, bought me zipper rubbers. I’m sure she got a hell of deal on them, but her excuse had been that they were the only kind they had left. Girls wore zipper rubbers that came in yellow, or red, or green. Guys wore buckle rubbers that came in black. At least my zipper rubbers were black. I avoided wearing rubbers as often as I could. I still remember the taunts I received about the zippered rubber boots even from my “best” friend.
The method of closure wasn’t really that important anyway because you left them unbuckled (or unzipped) most of the time because it was easier to stuff your pants legs into them. Even if someone didn’t notice that you had on zipper rubbers though they’d find out because you could buckle together buckle rubbers and sling them over your shoulder on the way home from school. You couldn’t do that with zipper rubbers. You had to carry them in your hand. You were less likely to lose a buckle rubber for the same reason. You buckled them together in the cloak room to keep the pair intact. A zipper rubber could get separated from its left or right and you could spend a lot of time trying to match up a right or left zipper rubber with the other sissy’s rubbers in the cloak room.
I still marvel today that my parents were able to afford Christmas. I have three brothers and three sisters. We didn’t have three-page lists of what we wanted for Christmas like my clever grandson, Connor Michael Burton. In his phone message to Santa you could hear him turning the pages as he reeled off the things he wants for Christmas this year. My favorite item on his list was “any type of boy toy”, kind of covering all the bases for anything he might have left off the list, and it got me to thinking about those special Christmas gifts I had gotten over the years. We were allowed to pick one thing. We always got more, but we got to ask for one special “big” thing.
One year it was a bike of course. The coolest 26 inch Schwinn, two tone beige bike on the block. That was when bikes had fenders and headlights that worked on C batteries. In the summer we would add a motor sound to our bikes with playing cards and clothespins. You could get six or eight cards on each wheel and get a fair chuck chuck sound. Mom would start having trouble winning at Solitaire and realize that a few cards were missing from the deck. That usually didn’t go over well.
I spent a lot of my lawn mowing money on patch kits and inner tubes for that bike. I always seemed to have a flat tire. I got pretty good at changing bike tires over the years. You had to use two screwdrivers in tandem to stretch the tire back over the rim without sticking one of them through the brand new inner tube, which happened a time or two. If that happened, you started over and got out the patch kit.
I had some pretty good wrecks on that bike. Once when I was riding Jeff Hartman on the back, he got his foot stuck in the spokes and I went flying over the handlebars landing and sliding down the sidewalk on my face. I woke up several hours later lying on the couch with Dr. Booth looming over me. The first words out of my mouth were, “Is my bike okay?” I wasn’t supposed to be riding people on the bike, but the fact that I didn’t suffer any permanent damage probably had something to do with me not getting in too much trouble. As soon as I was allowed outside I went straight to the garage to check on the bike. Some bent spokes and some scratches on the handlebar were all it had suffered.
I got hit by a car once, on the way to school, by one the teachers. She didn’t see me or I didn’t see her as she came out of the intersection in front of the school. I ran right into the front fender of the Buick and went flying on to the hood of her car. I remember looking through the windshield at her shocked face, lying there spread eagle on her car, my face pressed to the glass. I didn’t suffer a scratch. I don’t think Mrs. Redding ever quite recovered.
The most embarrassing mishap on the bike happened on the way home from football practice one fall afternoon. I had slung my cleats over the handlebars and headed down Burkitt Street. As I began crossing Main Street the right cleat caught in the front spokes and locked the wheel. I went flying over the handlebars head first, again, and landed in the middle of the street. The light changed and four lanes of traffic started honking. Some kindly old gentleman jumped out of his car, having seen the entire performance, and wanted to know if I was okay and helped me walk my crippled bike back to the curb. I learned how to straighten spikes a lot when I was a kid, but I don’t think my wheels were ever really round after that.
I rode that bike for well over ten years, but secretly wanted the 3-speed English Racer that I had asked Santa to bring me.
Another year I asked Santa for a miniature tape recorder. My Dad had one of the bigger reel to reel recorders and it had always fascinated me. I remember I said “Grace” for him on one of his “Christmas Radio Shows” that he was always putting together at Christmas. I didn’t think it sounded like me when played back, but everyone else he recorded sounded like them. When I got older we would trade “Radio Shows” at Christmas, instead of greeting cards. We would MC the shows, tell jokes in between recorded acts, interview special “guests” and pretend, for example, that Bing Crosby was in the kitchen after just having sung “White Christmas” on the show. He was, of course, on the record player. But it was fun and had really started those many years earlier when I got the miniature Sony tape recorder.
My first major recording after, “Testing, testing, testing” (you always said it three times for some reason) was the 1968 Sugar Bowl game between the unbeaten WAC Champion Wyoming Cowboys and LSU. I sat in front of the TV and held the microphone in front of the speaker for the entire game. I have it all on tape, somewhere.
I can remember how excited we all were that the Cowboys were in the Sugar Bowl. The game was televised coast to coast in color! We had a black and white set. Wyoming led for most of the game, up 13 to nothing at half-time, then sophomore, Glenn Smith, came off the bench and became the first sophomore in Sugar Bowl history to win the MVP. They beat us 20 to 13. Smith ran for 74 yards in 16 carries and scored the winning touchdown on a 1 yard run. We never scored another point. Glenn Smith finished his career at LSU without ever starting a game. I sat there for two hours holding a microphone to the speaker of the TV and I never played it back. It’s probably still around here somewhere. I lost interest in the tape recorder shortly after.
Another year I got one of those Hockey games where the players are connected to 5 levers on each side of the game. An oversize puck is dropped in the center and by pulling and twisting the levers in turn, the three inch metal players can pass, backcheck, carom the puck and shoot on goal. One of the pucks was magnetic for a more controlled game and the other had a ball bearing in the center for a more fast-paced game. Within a few hours Christmas Day I was deadly with the ball bearing puck. I could control the puck to the Center and slam the shot on goal before anyone could react. Most importantly, before my Dad could react. I beat him game after game. Finally, late that day, in sheer frustration he ripped one of the controls right out of the game trying to block a shot. In fairness to my Dad, he fixed it later, but I was a bit upset that my greatest game of all time lasted less than a day before it was broken….by an adult.
The most amazing gift I ever received from Santa was a photographic enlarger. It was the kind of gift that was clearly out of my parent’s price range. I didn’t ask for it, because I knew by that time how Christmas worked, who Santa really was, and how expecting something as expensive as a Bogen 35mm Enlarger was just ridiculous.
I had built a darkroom in the basement in the old coal room. I was developing my own black and white film and printing test sheets by laying the negatives on a piece of photo paper and exposing it to light. Then developing and fixing the sheet. An enlarger was the next logical addition.
On Christmas morning (we opened presents right after midnight Christmas Eve) I was handed a small shirt box, expecting just that when I opened it, but inside was a folded piece of paper and on it was written in my Dad’s perfect printing “Go To The Dining Room.” I walked into the dining room, flipped on the light, and there on the table was a Bogen 35mm Enlarger. I was absolutely, totally speechless. I couldn’t figure out how in the world this had happened. How in the world anyone knew what I really wanted for Christmas for one thing. How in the world my parents could afford it. I was just amazed. I probably never thanked my Dad near enough for that gift, but I learned later in life, when I managed those same Christmas surprises for my own kids, what that feeling is like. There is no better feeling in the world.
I was in the basement coal room almost the entire day and there was no heat down there. I made it upstairs for Christmas dinner and to say “Grace”. Saying Grace had been my job since I had first memorized it when I was eight.
“Bless us oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.” The same way I said Grace on the reel to reel that Christmas day on my Dad’s “Radio Show” recording and didn’t sound at all like me.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure
Chapter 3 – We Christen Thee Titanic
Charles A. Manson stood in the doorway of the 33 1/2’ Southwind beaming, his fat belly swelled out with pride, straining the front of his shirt.
“I told ya she’d start right up, runs like a top, nothing wrong with this baby.” I was guessing he was more excited about the fact that it did start right up, at least in front of me.
He said he would leave the charger on it for a while to make sure the batteries were good. “We’ll put new ones in if they don’t hold a charge.”
From “new” I assumed “different” and coming from the pile of batteries that was just inside the gate where the man and the battery charger had emerged.
“So, we ready to make a deal? This one isn’t going to last long, and we’re practically giving it away.”
I would later remember that statement vividly and think that they probably couldn’t have given it away, let alone find a sucker like me that was willing to actually pay money for it.
“I guess,” I replied. I was figuring that my credit wasn’t good enough to get the loan anyway so I had nothing to lose but the rest of my afternoon going through the motions of buying the Southwind. Filling out the credit application, waiting for the credit check to come back, talking about the N.A.D.A. suggested retail price for a “pristine” 1982 Fleetwood Southwind, 33 ½ foot with all the options. Well, there were some options missing. It did have an awning, a 3-way refrigerator, a driver’s side entrance door, air conditioning on the roof and a dash AC that didn’t work, but we didn’t know it at the time. You can’t live in Arizona without air conditioning and literally very few did until air conditioning was invented. After AC it became one of the fastest growing parts of the country.
Anyway, that was the list of options, and the N.A.D.A. book said it was worth $12,000 in its current excellent condition, low mileage and new rubber all around. Charlie looked it up himself, but declined to show me the book page where he got the information. One epic RV adventure later, I checked the N.A.D.A. book myself for that big box on wheels and it clearly showed an average retail of $3,065.73. Pretty close, and with a slight profit, to the amount that Mr. Manson was telling me would be required for the down payment. But then, I was just expecting to be told that the loan didn’t go through, and so I told him I had the $4,000 and I did.
“Okay,” he said. “How do you want to give me that four thousand, check, cash, credit card?”
“I’ll be writing a check,” I said, “but you’ll have to give me a couple of days to move the funds from my savings account.”
He didn’t think that would be a problem, just that we wouldn’t be able to pick up the coach until it cleared, and he had to check out all the systems anyway before he could, in good conscience, let us drive her cross country. Then he wanted to know when we wanted to pick her up.
“Don’t I have to fill out a credit application,” I asked a bit confused?
Charles A. Manson, turned around and pointed to the sign above his head behind his desk that screamed out, “Good Credit, Bad Credit, No Credit, We’ll Give You Credit.” Funny how I hadn’t noticed that before.
“Don’t need that,” he said, “just sign this retail contract right here. We’ll finance the balance at 15.3%. It’s all detailed right here.” And he pointed to the barely legible standard contract entries detailing the total cost, down payment, financed amount, total interest, total financed amount, monthly payment and late fee. I didn’t remember Charlie making all those calculations, but there they were.
I turned to my wife, hoping she would put a stop to this insanity. “Well, hon, what do you think?”
She didn’t even pause. “I think we should we do it,” she said. And Charles Manson smiled what looked to me like a very wicked smile.
So we wrote the check. I made my wife do it because I have a real problem writing checks with one zero, let alone three. We signed the contract and told Charlie we would pick up the coach the first week in April. I’d like to think it was April 1st, because it would fit the story real good, but it was probably that Saturday, the 5th,1997. That day may live in infamy. I reminded Charlie again that I wanted the windshield fixed and he said he would. I didn’t however have a “Due Bill”, that list of things the dealer promises to do before delivery, but I didn’t think about that then, just took Charles Manson’s word for it. I did have a contract that said I was buying this “As Is” and without that due bill, you have no proof that anything other than that was agreed upon.
Early on Saturday, we went down to Desert RV and picked up the 33 ½ foot Class A motor home that we had been wanting for years. Charlie went through all the systems with us, showed us the repaired windshield, went through the engine compartment, and showed me where to put in the coolant, where to check the oil and the transmission fluid. He just walked us all over that Southwind and we were feeling pretty confident after a while that we knew how everything worked. An hour or so later we were tooling down Benson Highway on the way home, trying to keep the monster between the white lines and wondering how the hell I was going to park it at the house. We had been on the road about 10 minutes.
All of a sudden an incredibly loud rushing sound started up and built into a louder and louder roar, like the sound of a jet engine when an airplane takes off. Almost as loud too and I couldn’t hear or talk to my wife sitting in the seat next to me across the engine cowling where the noise was coming from.
“What the fuck is that?” I screamed in her direction.
“I don’t know,” I heard her yell back, faintly.
Just as quickly as it started it wound down and stopped.
“What the hell do you think that was?” I said it in a normal speaking voice.
“I don’t know,” she said again, “but it’s stopped.”
Well, I guess that made it all right, because it didn’t do it again as we maneuvered the coach down the narrow streets of the mobile home park and pulled up in front of our house. There was barely enough room to pull around us on the street and the front of the coach was up in the small grass patch we had in the front of the double wide, the rest on the driveway, half over the curb. Within seconds our neighbor’s across the street, Mel and Mary, came running out of their house. Their two girls followed.
“Weeeuw,” Mel whistled, “What the hell did you do? That thing is big, ain’t it?” I was looking out at him through the sliding glass window on the driver’s access door.
“Easy to drive though, like driving a Cadillac,” I said, acting like I was an expert.
I wonder why everything big you drive is described like driving a Cadillac? I’ve never driven a Cadillac. I was in one once, and I remember it feeling like driving down the highway sitting on your living room sofa. This was like that, only you were on a recliner chair instead of a couch and you could even cross your legs under the bus-like steering wheel.
“Reminds me of the Titanic from that TV show, Trapper John MD,” Mary says.
Dr. “Trapper” John McIntyre of MASH fame worked with a Dr. George Alonzo “Gonzo” Gates. Gonzo was a resident surgeon at San Francisco Memorial and he lived in a rusted but, by all appearances, functioning Winnebago that he lived in out in the hospital parking lot. He called it the “Titanic”. He often spent time on the roof drinking and relaxing in lounge chairs. I immediately envisioned myself doing that on the trip. It was never determined during the run of the show whether the Winnebago could move, and where he was getting his utilities for that matter.
My wife jumps right in. “Yeah, that’s it, we’ll name it the Titanic. Perfect.”
Charles A. Manson stood in the doorway of the 33 1/2’ Southwind beaming, his fat belly swelled out with pride, straining the front of his shirt.
“I told ya she’d start right up, runs like a top, nothing wrong with this baby.” I was guessing he was more excited about the fact that it did start right up, at least in front of me.
He said he would leave the charger on it for a while to make sure the batteries were good. “We’ll put new ones in if they don’t hold a charge.”
From “new” I assumed “different” and coming from the pile of batteries that was just inside the gate where the man and the battery charger had emerged.
“So, we ready to make a deal? This one isn’t going to last long, and we’re practically giving it away.”
I would later remember that statement vividly and think that they probably couldn’t have given it away, let alone find a sucker like me that was willing to actually pay money for it.
“I guess,” I replied. I was figuring that my credit wasn’t good enough to get the loan anyway so I had nothing to lose but the rest of my afternoon going through the motions of buying the Southwind. Filling out the credit application, waiting for the credit check to come back, talking about the N.A.D.A. suggested retail price for a “pristine” 1982 Fleetwood Southwind, 33 ½ foot with all the options. Well, there were some options missing. It did have an awning, a 3-way refrigerator, a driver’s side entrance door, air conditioning on the roof and a dash AC that didn’t work, but we didn’t know it at the time. You can’t live in Arizona without air conditioning and literally very few did until air conditioning was invented. After AC it became one of the fastest growing parts of the country.
Anyway, that was the list of options, and the N.A.D.A. book said it was worth $12,000 in its current excellent condition, low mileage and new rubber all around. Charlie looked it up himself, but declined to show me the book page where he got the information. One epic RV adventure later, I checked the N.A.D.A. book myself for that big box on wheels and it clearly showed an average retail of $3,065.73. Pretty close, and with a slight profit, to the amount that Mr. Manson was telling me would be required for the down payment. But then, I was just expecting to be told that the loan didn’t go through, and so I told him I had the $4,000 and I did.
“Okay,” he said. “How do you want to give me that four thousand, check, cash, credit card?”
“I’ll be writing a check,” I said, “but you’ll have to give me a couple of days to move the funds from my savings account.”
He didn’t think that would be a problem, just that we wouldn’t be able to pick up the coach until it cleared, and he had to check out all the systems anyway before he could, in good conscience, let us drive her cross country. Then he wanted to know when we wanted to pick her up.
“Don’t I have to fill out a credit application,” I asked a bit confused?
Charles A. Manson, turned around and pointed to the sign above his head behind his desk that screamed out, “Good Credit, Bad Credit, No Credit, We’ll Give You Credit.” Funny how I hadn’t noticed that before.
“Don’t need that,” he said, “just sign this retail contract right here. We’ll finance the balance at 15.3%. It’s all detailed right here.” And he pointed to the barely legible standard contract entries detailing the total cost, down payment, financed amount, total interest, total financed amount, monthly payment and late fee. I didn’t remember Charlie making all those calculations, but there they were.
I turned to my wife, hoping she would put a stop to this insanity. “Well, hon, what do you think?”
She didn’t even pause. “I think we should we do it,” she said. And Charles Manson smiled what looked to me like a very wicked smile.
So we wrote the check. I made my wife do it because I have a real problem writing checks with one zero, let alone three. We signed the contract and told Charlie we would pick up the coach the first week in April. I’d like to think it was April 1st, because it would fit the story real good, but it was probably that Saturday, the 5th,1997. That day may live in infamy. I reminded Charlie again that I wanted the windshield fixed and he said he would. I didn’t however have a “Due Bill”, that list of things the dealer promises to do before delivery, but I didn’t think about that then, just took Charles Manson’s word for it. I did have a contract that said I was buying this “As Is” and without that due bill, you have no proof that anything other than that was agreed upon.
Early on Saturday, we went down to Desert RV and picked up the 33 ½ foot Class A motor home that we had been wanting for years. Charlie went through all the systems with us, showed us the repaired windshield, went through the engine compartment, and showed me where to put in the coolant, where to check the oil and the transmission fluid. He just walked us all over that Southwind and we were feeling pretty confident after a while that we knew how everything worked. An hour or so later we were tooling down Benson Highway on the way home, trying to keep the monster between the white lines and wondering how the hell I was going to park it at the house. We had been on the road about 10 minutes.
All of a sudden an incredibly loud rushing sound started up and built into a louder and louder roar, like the sound of a jet engine when an airplane takes off. Almost as loud too and I couldn’t hear or talk to my wife sitting in the seat next to me across the engine cowling where the noise was coming from.
“What the fuck is that?” I screamed in her direction.
“I don’t know,” I heard her yell back, faintly.
Just as quickly as it started it wound down and stopped.
“What the hell do you think that was?” I said it in a normal speaking voice.
“I don’t know,” she said again, “but it’s stopped.”
Well, I guess that made it all right, because it didn’t do it again as we maneuvered the coach down the narrow streets of the mobile home park and pulled up in front of our house. There was barely enough room to pull around us on the street and the front of the coach was up in the small grass patch we had in the front of the double wide, the rest on the driveway, half over the curb. Within seconds our neighbor’s across the street, Mel and Mary, came running out of their house. Their two girls followed.
“Weeeuw,” Mel whistled, “What the hell did you do? That thing is big, ain’t it?” I was looking out at him through the sliding glass window on the driver’s access door.
“Easy to drive though, like driving a Cadillac,” I said, acting like I was an expert.
I wonder why everything big you drive is described like driving a Cadillac? I’ve never driven a Cadillac. I was in one once, and I remember it feeling like driving down the highway sitting on your living room sofa. This was like that, only you were on a recliner chair instead of a couch and you could even cross your legs under the bus-like steering wheel.
“Reminds me of the Titanic from that TV show, Trapper John MD,” Mary says.
Dr. “Trapper” John McIntyre of MASH fame worked with a Dr. George Alonzo “Gonzo” Gates. Gonzo was a resident surgeon at San Francisco Memorial and he lived in a rusted but, by all appearances, functioning Winnebago that he lived in out in the hospital parking lot. He called it the “Titanic”. He often spent time on the roof drinking and relaxing in lounge chairs. I immediately envisioned myself doing that on the trip. It was never determined during the run of the show whether the Winnebago could move, and where he was getting his utilities for that matter.
My wife jumps right in. “Yeah, that’s it, we’ll name it the Titanic. Perfect.”
If you haven't already figured it out, we name all our vehicles. Our current vehicles, a 2008 Toyota FJ is Burgie because of her burgandy color, and the 1999 Ford F-350 Dually we just traded in was The Hulk because it was big and green. The new 2008 Tundra Limited is still waiting for a moniker.
“Okay,” I said, “I’d break a bottle of Coors Light over her bumper and say, ‘We Christen Thee Titanic’, but the bumper would probably fall off and it would be a waste of beer.”
A few minutes later, while we were giving the “tour”, I caught a glimpse of the park manager out the front windshield, leaving what appeared to be my front porch, and walking off quickly, trying not to be seen. I walked over to the porch later and retrieved the letter which was stuck between the jamb and the screen door. The gist of it was that we could not park the Titanic in front of our house and we would have to move it immediately. It was against the park rules. We figured that, hell we knew that it was against the rules to park a motor home on the street. We fought with the managers every day about something that was against the "rules", but cheeeeeeez, the Titanic had only been docked for 15 minutes. He must have seen us drive in and typed our name on the letter as we were driving to our space. Maybe it had leaked out that we were bringing a motor home on the property and he had the letter already prepared. I started to wonder who the leak was, Mel, no he would never tell. Someone Mel told? I would never find out but I knew they weren't that efficient in posting notices of violations. At any rate we would discuss with them the need to have the motorhome parked there for short periods so we could load it, we had already arranged a place to store it.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure
Chapter 2 – New Rubber All The Way Around
Manson sat in the middle of the faded blue fold-down sofa, his arms outstretched, his legs stretched out across the blue kitchen-type carpet, almost filling up the entire space. The carpet was not original or new. He revealed damp pools of sweat in wide circles under both arms. The top of the sofa was now soaking it up too. Sweat was running off his forehead like a dripping faucet. He repeatedly pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead with it. It was getting hot already in the desert southwest, and, even in March, it was pushing 90s this late in the afternoon. It was pushing 200 degrees inside this box with wheels.
I sat in the passenger seat of the rig, which was a love-seat of sorts, a blue vinyl two-seater high back that could be turned around to face the sofa and also could be reclined into a bed, “for a tike”, as Charlie put it. I was watching my wife look and touch.
“This baby’ll sleep 10 easy,” he had said earlier.
I only saw beds for maybe four and a small kid, if you counted the love-seat. Maybe he was talking about putting sleeping bags on the floor. Like those tents they tell you will sleep up to eight. You have to lay out the sleeping bags and the sleepers according to a precise diagram to even remotely attempt to fit eight people in the tent. They don’t tell you how to get the eight people into the tent and into the sleeping bags, which will clearly take some sort of plan. They don’t explain how you would get out of the tent, if you need to take a leak in the middle of the night for example, either.
Barb is walking around inside the 6’ 8” X 30’ interior box. She sits on the queen-size mattress that takes up the entire bedroom area in the back, and looks around, pleased, then down the aisle, through the open door, at me way up twenty-some feet in the love seat. I’m watching her, following her with my eyes. She steps in and out of the bathroom quickly, not much to see in there, toilet, sink, medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet is clearly not one of the original components, and not designed for the RV industry, so it looks out of place. The bathroom door shuts but she can’t get it to latch, so she gives up. The tub and shower stand alone on the other side of the aisle, and there is nothing that shuts this bathroom area off from the rest of the living space. Presumably someone could be watching TV….. wait, there’s no TV. I just notice it. Not even a place where a TV might have been. I see there’s a “custom made” plaque of sorts, where TVs go in the newer coaches, in the center of the area above the windshield and the roof, with three circular needle gauges about three inches in diameter, a temperature gauge, a barometer, and a compass. None of them appear to work. The temperature needle, I notice, is off the grid, so it might be working. It feels like its well over its maximum possible reading, in the coach. She pulls the shower curtain aside and checks out the tub.
Next she looks over the small L-shaped kitchen with the three-burner stove and the little oven. She pulls the oven door down, looks in. This obviously reveals a non-appropriate situation by the look on her face. She does the same to the micro-wave, a forty-nine dollar Target add-on probably bought at a garage sale. The micro-wave shelf is a hastily built box, stained a color that isn’t even close to the rest of the cabinetry. The cabinets above and below the sink all have a mismatched assortment of latches and pulls. She opens each one and looks in. She tries to open the little slatted window over the sink but the knob appears to be stripped and turns with no effect. There are broken and missing slats in the mini-blind covering it also.
Next to the tub, on the other side of the aisle, is a built-in wardrobe with two drawers underneath. She pulls out one of the drawers and has difficulty forcing it back shut. I make a mental note that the drawer slides are obviously damaged, maybe missing. She opens the wardrobe doors and looks in. Next to that is a three-way refrigerator.
“This refrigerator works on propane, 12V battery, or 110 house current depending on the switch you set it on,” is how it was explained by Charlie. Ultimately, I think it worked on 110 only, if at all.
She opens that too though, and I’m sure she almost passes out from the stench, but she tries not to show it. In my case, I’m not sure if the new stench is coming from the refrigerator she just opened or what’s sitting on the sofa. Both are down-wind of me. She flips up the shelf at the end of the counter and it falls right back down on its hinge. This would give her an additional ten inches of counter space if it had stayed up, making a total of two feet of usable counter space, maybe, but very difficult to walk down the aisle without bruising a hip. The kitchen and bath area are covered with a fake wood floor, also not for the RV industry, and not original.
Finally, the inevitable words come out of her mouth.
“I really like this one.”
That was all she said. I didn’t really like this one much at all. It was too big. It had clearly seen better days, and even worse, I was to find out later. It had a lot of “extras” that were not, shall we say, engineered correctly. It did only have 54,000 miles on the odometer though. Not bad for a 15-year old coach, less than 4,000 miles a year. I was going to have to succumb to the illusion that the mechanical on this Southwind was maintained better than the interior of the coach.
There were a lot of things on this coach that might not work properly, even though Charlie promised that everything would work when we drove off the lot. For one big thing, there was a one and a half inch gap above the windshield on the passenger side, and it looked like the glass was ready to fall out of the opening completely. A good push would have sent the huge piece of glass shattering to the gravel parking lot below.
“Gonna have to fix that,” I said.
‘Of course, no problem, we were going to fix that anyway,” Charlie shot back.
“I don’t know,” I start. I’m talking to Barb. “Lot of work here.”
“I know, but we can do it,” she said. “Mostly just needs to be cleaned up.”
Eternal optimism, if we just clean it up it will be good as new. This place was going to take a lot more that just a sponge, a mop and a bucket, a lot more.
I got up and walked outside to check out the exterior. Manson grunted himself up and followed me. You could tell he was happy about getting back outside. Then he said it again.
“New rubber all the way around, lotsa miles left in those tires, that’d cost ya a thousand by itself.”
The tires did look new; they at least looked shined up. They all had air. Each of the six of them has about 100psi, for future reference.
The outside of the Southwind was clean but had a dingy, un-waxed look.
“You can wax this right up,” Charlie says when I bring it up. “Just been out in the sun a lot. You’ll get it to look like new.”
I glance over the huge exterior surface of the coach and think that if I ever get this to look like new, it will kill me for the effort.
Well I figured I better ask, since we seemed to be sidestepping this issue, “does it run?”
“Sure it runs, starts right up.” Mr. Manson seemed offended. I dare I question that it would run.
My wife is walking around the coach and is at this very moment on the other side, away from me.
“I’ll just go get a key and be right back.” He disappears into the sales shack.
My wife comes around from the back of the motor home. “So what do you think?” she says.
In my head, I think we’re crazy, but I say something else. “It could work.” Pause. “We can probably afford the down. Did he say how much it was?” Pause. “I wonder how much the payments will be?” Long pause. “It does have new tires.” My wife doesn’t answer any of these queries.
Manson comes waddling back with a key on what looks like a hotel key ring. Big orange oval with a number on it, Room 237 I think.
He climbs back into the coach with a grunt or two and plops down in the driver’s seat. The big coach sways. I follow him in and watch him as he, inserts the key, pushes the shift into park, and turns. Nothing. He turns the key back then tries it again. I could hear a few faint clicks and then nothing.
“Battery’s dead, been sittin’ out here too long. I’ll get her plugged in and the batteries will charge up just fine. You should keep it plugged in anyway when you have it parked, just to make sure you have a full charge in the batteries.” Another lesson on the proper care and operation of the motor home, from Charles Manson, whom I am now convinced has never owned one of these.
He left out the part about motor homes having two, sometimes three DEEP CELL batteries. “DEEP CELL” translates into “fucking expensive”. In fact the most expensive batteries you can find, and, at the moment, I just believe that all they need is to be charged.
Charles Manson, sweat pouring from his brow again, yells out into the junkyard.
“Kurt, bring that charger up here and get the Southwind hooked up. Batteries are dead.”
A short, bent over, old man appears from the shadows, through the gate, pulling a large industrial battery charger, the cord unraveling and falling behind him as he goes. It’s plugged in somewhere back in the abyss of motor home parts and pieces, in a lean-to shed that will, I’m certain, ignite with the smallest of sparks, and has no business having power run to it. Certainly a Code issue. He hooks it up and, I assume, sets it to start the engine, because Charlie goes back in and, in a few brief seconds, the beefy V8 roars to life. It runs.
Manson sat in the middle of the faded blue fold-down sofa, his arms outstretched, his legs stretched out across the blue kitchen-type carpet, almost filling up the entire space. The carpet was not original or new. He revealed damp pools of sweat in wide circles under both arms. The top of the sofa was now soaking it up too. Sweat was running off his forehead like a dripping faucet. He repeatedly pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead with it. It was getting hot already in the desert southwest, and, even in March, it was pushing 90s this late in the afternoon. It was pushing 200 degrees inside this box with wheels.
I sat in the passenger seat of the rig, which was a love-seat of sorts, a blue vinyl two-seater high back that could be turned around to face the sofa and also could be reclined into a bed, “for a tike”, as Charlie put it. I was watching my wife look and touch.
“This baby’ll sleep 10 easy,” he had said earlier.
I only saw beds for maybe four and a small kid, if you counted the love-seat. Maybe he was talking about putting sleeping bags on the floor. Like those tents they tell you will sleep up to eight. You have to lay out the sleeping bags and the sleepers according to a precise diagram to even remotely attempt to fit eight people in the tent. They don’t tell you how to get the eight people into the tent and into the sleeping bags, which will clearly take some sort of plan. They don’t explain how you would get out of the tent, if you need to take a leak in the middle of the night for example, either.
Barb is walking around inside the 6’ 8” X 30’ interior box. She sits on the queen-size mattress that takes up the entire bedroom area in the back, and looks around, pleased, then down the aisle, through the open door, at me way up twenty-some feet in the love seat. I’m watching her, following her with my eyes. She steps in and out of the bathroom quickly, not much to see in there, toilet, sink, medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet is clearly not one of the original components, and not designed for the RV industry, so it looks out of place. The bathroom door shuts but she can’t get it to latch, so she gives up. The tub and shower stand alone on the other side of the aisle, and there is nothing that shuts this bathroom area off from the rest of the living space. Presumably someone could be watching TV….. wait, there’s no TV. I just notice it. Not even a place where a TV might have been. I see there’s a “custom made” plaque of sorts, where TVs go in the newer coaches, in the center of the area above the windshield and the roof, with three circular needle gauges about three inches in diameter, a temperature gauge, a barometer, and a compass. None of them appear to work. The temperature needle, I notice, is off the grid, so it might be working. It feels like its well over its maximum possible reading, in the coach. She pulls the shower curtain aside and checks out the tub.
Next she looks over the small L-shaped kitchen with the three-burner stove and the little oven. She pulls the oven door down, looks in. This obviously reveals a non-appropriate situation by the look on her face. She does the same to the micro-wave, a forty-nine dollar Target add-on probably bought at a garage sale. The micro-wave shelf is a hastily built box, stained a color that isn’t even close to the rest of the cabinetry. The cabinets above and below the sink all have a mismatched assortment of latches and pulls. She opens each one and looks in. She tries to open the little slatted window over the sink but the knob appears to be stripped and turns with no effect. There are broken and missing slats in the mini-blind covering it also.
Next to the tub, on the other side of the aisle, is a built-in wardrobe with two drawers underneath. She pulls out one of the drawers and has difficulty forcing it back shut. I make a mental note that the drawer slides are obviously damaged, maybe missing. She opens the wardrobe doors and looks in. Next to that is a three-way refrigerator.
“This refrigerator works on propane, 12V battery, or 110 house current depending on the switch you set it on,” is how it was explained by Charlie. Ultimately, I think it worked on 110 only, if at all.
She opens that too though, and I’m sure she almost passes out from the stench, but she tries not to show it. In my case, I’m not sure if the new stench is coming from the refrigerator she just opened or what’s sitting on the sofa. Both are down-wind of me. She flips up the shelf at the end of the counter and it falls right back down on its hinge. This would give her an additional ten inches of counter space if it had stayed up, making a total of two feet of usable counter space, maybe, but very difficult to walk down the aisle without bruising a hip. The kitchen and bath area are covered with a fake wood floor, also not for the RV industry, and not original.
Finally, the inevitable words come out of her mouth.
“I really like this one.”
That was all she said. I didn’t really like this one much at all. It was too big. It had clearly seen better days, and even worse, I was to find out later. It had a lot of “extras” that were not, shall we say, engineered correctly. It did only have 54,000 miles on the odometer though. Not bad for a 15-year old coach, less than 4,000 miles a year. I was going to have to succumb to the illusion that the mechanical on this Southwind was maintained better than the interior of the coach.
There were a lot of things on this coach that might not work properly, even though Charlie promised that everything would work when we drove off the lot. For one big thing, there was a one and a half inch gap above the windshield on the passenger side, and it looked like the glass was ready to fall out of the opening completely. A good push would have sent the huge piece of glass shattering to the gravel parking lot below.
“Gonna have to fix that,” I said.
‘Of course, no problem, we were going to fix that anyway,” Charlie shot back.
“I don’t know,” I start. I’m talking to Barb. “Lot of work here.”
“I know, but we can do it,” she said. “Mostly just needs to be cleaned up.”
Eternal optimism, if we just clean it up it will be good as new. This place was going to take a lot more that just a sponge, a mop and a bucket, a lot more.
I got up and walked outside to check out the exterior. Manson grunted himself up and followed me. You could tell he was happy about getting back outside. Then he said it again.
“New rubber all the way around, lotsa miles left in those tires, that’d cost ya a thousand by itself.”
The tires did look new; they at least looked shined up. They all had air. Each of the six of them has about 100psi, for future reference.
The outside of the Southwind was clean but had a dingy, un-waxed look.
“You can wax this right up,” Charlie says when I bring it up. “Just been out in the sun a lot. You’ll get it to look like new.”
I glance over the huge exterior surface of the coach and think that if I ever get this to look like new, it will kill me for the effort.
Well I figured I better ask, since we seemed to be sidestepping this issue, “does it run?”
“Sure it runs, starts right up.” Mr. Manson seemed offended. I dare I question that it would run.
My wife is walking around the coach and is at this very moment on the other side, away from me.
“I’ll just go get a key and be right back.” He disappears into the sales shack.
My wife comes around from the back of the motor home. “So what do you think?” she says.
In my head, I think we’re crazy, but I say something else. “It could work.” Pause. “We can probably afford the down. Did he say how much it was?” Pause. “I wonder how much the payments will be?” Long pause. “It does have new tires.” My wife doesn’t answer any of these queries.
Manson comes waddling back with a key on what looks like a hotel key ring. Big orange oval with a number on it, Room 237 I think.
He climbs back into the coach with a grunt or two and plops down in the driver’s seat. The big coach sways. I follow him in and watch him as he, inserts the key, pushes the shift into park, and turns. Nothing. He turns the key back then tries it again. I could hear a few faint clicks and then nothing.
“Battery’s dead, been sittin’ out here too long. I’ll get her plugged in and the batteries will charge up just fine. You should keep it plugged in anyway when you have it parked, just to make sure you have a full charge in the batteries.” Another lesson on the proper care and operation of the motor home, from Charles Manson, whom I am now convinced has never owned one of these.
He left out the part about motor homes having two, sometimes three DEEP CELL batteries. “DEEP CELL” translates into “fucking expensive”. In fact the most expensive batteries you can find, and, at the moment, I just believe that all they need is to be charged.
Charles Manson, sweat pouring from his brow again, yells out into the junkyard.
“Kurt, bring that charger up here and get the Southwind hooked up. Batteries are dead.”
A short, bent over, old man appears from the shadows, through the gate, pulling a large industrial battery charger, the cord unraveling and falling behind him as he goes. It’s plugged in somewhere back in the abyss of motor home parts and pieces, in a lean-to shed that will, I’m certain, ignite with the smallest of sparks, and has no business having power run to it. Certainly a Code issue. He hooks it up and, I assume, sets it to start the engine, because Charlie goes back in and, in a few brief seconds, the beefy V8 roars to life. It runs.
Monday, October 27, 2008
The Subtle Signs of Spring
Tony Hillerman died last Sunday. He was 83. He died from what was reported as pulmonary failure. The lungs fill with fluid and you stop breathing, but it’s all related to congestive heart failure. Tony had survived two heart attacks and surgeries for prostate and bladder cancer. In his last years he was losing his eyesight, hearing, and had rheumatoid arthritis so advanced that it made it very difficult for him to continue pounding on his keyboard, but he did. I think I’ve read most every book he wrote, and have recommended him to countless others.
But what makes Tony Hillerman special to me, and why I am, maybe, more affected by his death, is I had the pleasure of taking classes from him at the University of New Mexico. He was an integral part of the Journalism Department when I attended undergraduate classes there in the early 1980s. I had him for several core classes. He was a past executive editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican and started his journalistic career as a reporter and editor for the Borger News-Herald in Borger, Texas. He also worked for the Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Oklahoma, and related a lot of stories about his days with United Press International in Oklahoma City. Tony later became head of the Journalism Department after I had graduated.
One class I had with him, on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10:00, was one geared towards editorial and column writing. Professor Hillerman would have us write short pieces every week about any subject, which he would then review, grade, and pass around for all the students to read if he thought they were good enough to share. Only one of my submissions was copied for the class that semester, as I remember. Each week, on Friday, after passing out the work, he would take us, individually, out in the hallway, and give us feedback on our effort for the week.
One spring day on my way to school, I drove by this rather rotund lady bending over pulling weeds out of her flower garden, with, as I put it in the later piece, “Her posterior pointing heavenward and casting a shadow the length of the lawn.” It was a column about the subtle signs of spring, and I was rather proud of it.
Tony had, of course, read all my work. I know he did because I’ve still got his copious notes in red pencil all over the now yellowed typed copies. You paid attention to his critique because he was a published author, a mystery writer. He would later be President of the Mystery Writers of American, and winner of their Grand Master Award. He would also win the Golden Spur Award from Western Writers of America, among others.
So that Friday, after all the stories had been graded and returned, and the reading for the period passed out, Professor Hillerman called me out to the hallway about half-way through the session. He said that this was the best thing he had read of all my work and he emphasized that I should stick with humor writing. He went on to say that good humor writers are hard to find but usually an easier road to success, and that I could be “The next Mark Twain.” Oh yes, he said it, and for years I wanted to believe that he thought I was good enough to be the next Mark Twain. He didn’t say Royko, or Rooney, he said Twain. Of course, I think we all know what he probably meant, in context. I would settle for being the next Jean Shepherd, Robert Fulghum, Patrick McManus, or Tom Bodett, those being some of my personal favorites.
Speaking of favorites, one of my favorite Hillerman novels is one of the few that does not take place on the Navajo Reservation, “A Fly on the Wall.” In this book, the lead character is newspaper reporter, John Cotton, who stumbles onto a story of government corruption after the mysterious death of a friend and fellow reporter. We end up in New Mexico, though, in the end, fly-fishing on the Brazos River, where John Cotton is almost murdered. It was one of Hillerman’s earlier books, and we never got another book with John Cotton as a character. It didn’t get good reviews, but, I still count it as one of my favorites.
We did get several novels with two of his more famous characters, Lt. Joe Leaphorn, and Jim Chee. Professor Hillerman told us during one class session of how he had to buy back those characters so he could use them again. He had made the mistake of selling full rights to a studio for a movie that never materialized. He said all he could think of at the time was how excited he was that they were going to make a movie out of his book, how he was about to become rich, and he trusted his agent. The latter mistake he didn’t make again. After a few years of nothing from the studio, he decided to write another book surrounding his characters, and that is when he found out that he no longer held the rights to them, even though the studio had no intention of going forward with the movie. So for a price that Tony Hillerman indicated was a “bunch of money”, and a hard lesson, he bought his own characters back so he could include them in future books.
Four of the Navajo mysteries did make it to film. The first, “The Dark Wind”, which starred Lou Diamond Phillips, was supposed to be a theatrical release in 1991. However it was never shown in theatres and went directly to video. I remember there was a lot of controversy during the filming in New Mexico centered on the use, or lack of use, of native actors in major roles. In 2002, PBS’s Mystery, aired “Skinwalkers”, and “Coyote Waits” in 2003. “A Thief of Time” was the last film made of Hillerman’s work and aired in 2004.
Tony Hillerman was a decorated war hero too. He was a member of the 103rd Infantry Division that sailed from New York in convoy four months after D-Day on Oct 6, 1944. On October 20th they entered the port of Marseilles, in the south of France. Known as the Cactus Men, they were the first Allied troops to enter the port following the German withdrawal. The Germans had defended it strongly following D-Day in June.
The 103rd committed into it’s first action on Nov. 11, 1944 near St. Die. From there they began a six-month campaign, covering 500 miles up the eastern side of France, spending Christmas and New Year’s in foxholes, and finally making contact with the 5th Army in May of 1945 in Austria. It was during this campaign, at Lorraine-Alsace, that Professor Hillerman was severely wounded having both of his legs shattered. He returned to Oklahoma with a Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. He always walked a bit labored, although few of us knew why.
So another in a line of people that have had an impact on my life is gone. He leaves the world better for having been in it, and a legacy of over 20 books and numerous citations to his credit. He was a success. He was acclaimed. I’m blessed to have had the opportunity to know him.
I have to admit I haven’t worked very hard to attain that expectation of being the next Mark Twain, but I haven’t given up yet.
But what makes Tony Hillerman special to me, and why I am, maybe, more affected by his death, is I had the pleasure of taking classes from him at the University of New Mexico. He was an integral part of the Journalism Department when I attended undergraduate classes there in the early 1980s. I had him for several core classes. He was a past executive editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican and started his journalistic career as a reporter and editor for the Borger News-Herald in Borger, Texas. He also worked for the Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Oklahoma, and related a lot of stories about his days with United Press International in Oklahoma City. Tony later became head of the Journalism Department after I had graduated.
One class I had with him, on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10:00, was one geared towards editorial and column writing. Professor Hillerman would have us write short pieces every week about any subject, which he would then review, grade, and pass around for all the students to read if he thought they were good enough to share. Only one of my submissions was copied for the class that semester, as I remember. Each week, on Friday, after passing out the work, he would take us, individually, out in the hallway, and give us feedback on our effort for the week.
One spring day on my way to school, I drove by this rather rotund lady bending over pulling weeds out of her flower garden, with, as I put it in the later piece, “Her posterior pointing heavenward and casting a shadow the length of the lawn.” It was a column about the subtle signs of spring, and I was rather proud of it.
Tony had, of course, read all my work. I know he did because I’ve still got his copious notes in red pencil all over the now yellowed typed copies. You paid attention to his critique because he was a published author, a mystery writer. He would later be President of the Mystery Writers of American, and winner of their Grand Master Award. He would also win the Golden Spur Award from Western Writers of America, among others.
So that Friday, after all the stories had been graded and returned, and the reading for the period passed out, Professor Hillerman called me out to the hallway about half-way through the session. He said that this was the best thing he had read of all my work and he emphasized that I should stick with humor writing. He went on to say that good humor writers are hard to find but usually an easier road to success, and that I could be “The next Mark Twain.” Oh yes, he said it, and for years I wanted to believe that he thought I was good enough to be the next Mark Twain. He didn’t say Royko, or Rooney, he said Twain. Of course, I think we all know what he probably meant, in context. I would settle for being the next Jean Shepherd, Robert Fulghum, Patrick McManus, or Tom Bodett, those being some of my personal favorites.
Speaking of favorites, one of my favorite Hillerman novels is one of the few that does not take place on the Navajo Reservation, “A Fly on the Wall.” In this book, the lead character is newspaper reporter, John Cotton, who stumbles onto a story of government corruption after the mysterious death of a friend and fellow reporter. We end up in New Mexico, though, in the end, fly-fishing on the Brazos River, where John Cotton is almost murdered. It was one of Hillerman’s earlier books, and we never got another book with John Cotton as a character. It didn’t get good reviews, but, I still count it as one of my favorites.
We did get several novels with two of his more famous characters, Lt. Joe Leaphorn, and Jim Chee. Professor Hillerman told us during one class session of how he had to buy back those characters so he could use them again. He had made the mistake of selling full rights to a studio for a movie that never materialized. He said all he could think of at the time was how excited he was that they were going to make a movie out of his book, how he was about to become rich, and he trusted his agent. The latter mistake he didn’t make again. After a few years of nothing from the studio, he decided to write another book surrounding his characters, and that is when he found out that he no longer held the rights to them, even though the studio had no intention of going forward with the movie. So for a price that Tony Hillerman indicated was a “bunch of money”, and a hard lesson, he bought his own characters back so he could include them in future books.
Four of the Navajo mysteries did make it to film. The first, “The Dark Wind”, which starred Lou Diamond Phillips, was supposed to be a theatrical release in 1991. However it was never shown in theatres and went directly to video. I remember there was a lot of controversy during the filming in New Mexico centered on the use, or lack of use, of native actors in major roles. In 2002, PBS’s Mystery, aired “Skinwalkers”, and “Coyote Waits” in 2003. “A Thief of Time” was the last film made of Hillerman’s work and aired in 2004.
Tony Hillerman was a decorated war hero too. He was a member of the 103rd Infantry Division that sailed from New York in convoy four months after D-Day on Oct 6, 1944. On October 20th they entered the port of Marseilles, in the south of France. Known as the Cactus Men, they were the first Allied troops to enter the port following the German withdrawal. The Germans had defended it strongly following D-Day in June.
The 103rd committed into it’s first action on Nov. 11, 1944 near St. Die. From there they began a six-month campaign, covering 500 miles up the eastern side of France, spending Christmas and New Year’s in foxholes, and finally making contact with the 5th Army in May of 1945 in Austria. It was during this campaign, at Lorraine-Alsace, that Professor Hillerman was severely wounded having both of his legs shattered. He returned to Oklahoma with a Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. He always walked a bit labored, although few of us knew why.
So another in a line of people that have had an impact on my life is gone. He leaves the world better for having been in it, and a legacy of over 20 books and numerous citations to his credit. He was a success. He was acclaimed. I’m blessed to have had the opportunity to know him.
I have to admit I haven’t worked very hard to attain that expectation of being the next Mark Twain, but I haven’t given up yet.
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