maybe 8:30 is a little late to start drinking on a work night when i have to wake up at six the next day, but to use the retort of an old acquaintance: who's to say? besides, the rubber checks we were issued were still rejected at the bank today so i won't feel too bad about going in to work a little on the shot side, if not still partially drunk. a not-so-esteemed colleague (can fellow plumbers really be deemed "colleagues," or is that strictly a professional term?) of mine phoned the union hall this afternoon after we found out we weren't getting our money again and shit hit the fan. the local's business manager, or president for all intents and purposes, called our boss and threatened him with some pretty serious shit if our checks are still no good by noon tomorrow. he will be pulling all ten or eleven men from the shop and telling them not to return to their jobsites until paid; moreover, the double-time rule will finally be put in effect, which means we will be receiving double our wage an hour for sitting at home until the money is there. this part of the contract has never really been enforced before, at least not in the last fifteen years when times were good and money flowed in the construction business as readily as lube does in the porn industry. it's sort of ridiculous to assume that someone who can't afford one week's payroll can afford to pay his men double-time for sitting at home, though. besides, if we aren't on the job and working the general contractor will get fed up with our absence and fear that the project will be held up, thus leading to another plumbing contractor being hired. this could easily put my boss out of business. great: a wonderful trip to the unemployment line, a journey to the bottom of the list of men waiting to be called out to work, and a separation from the guys i've grown to love over the last nine months. that's what it comes down to really, the bonds formed between the men you sweat and laugh with every day in the name of a dollar for a beer and a roof over your head. it's hard to imagine working with any other group of people at this point, especially after the horror stories i hear about some of the assholes in the local. i've been lucky enough to be taken under the wings of a couple great individuals who truly care about me and look forward to seeing me every day as much as i look forward to seeing them. that makes so much of a difference, i can finally see where the whole "brotherhood" aspect of unions comes into play now, especially since i haven't spoken to my biological father since november. i went through a lot of hard times since then and needed to bounce my thoughts and feelings off sane adults who may or may not have been there before, and i was never made to feel like a pussy. say what you like about construction workers, they're not all as rough around the edges as they're made out to be. some of them just wound up in the trade, like me, which is a relief. don't pour your heart out on coffee break in front of the others unless you want to be ridiculed mercilessly for reasons of machismo and tradition, but get somebody half-way decent alone towards the end of the day in a crawlspace or in the passenger seat of their truck during lunch break and you'd be surprised how honest and helpful they can be. one man comes to mind more than the others i've worked with, my thirty-seven-year-old partner from the last job. i've mentioned him before and won't bore you with details. suffice it to say he got me through a lot just by listening attentively and sharing parts of his own fucked up life with me. the inside jokes we have are priceless and some of his clever phrases, such as "good talk," have even overflowed into my personal life and corrupted my friends' vocabularies. my current foreman (who is probably going to try to marry me off to his fat daughter again since he finally overheard that i've been single for a few months now) is insanely jealous of this other guy and pokes fun at me for having such a good friendship with a guy who's fourteen years older than me. he has me call the other guy about important things (like our checks being no good) since he knows my call won't be forwarded to voicemail like someone else's will. he busts balls, but deep down he understands what it is that my buddy sees in me, even if i don't, and looks out for me just as much in his own way. i tried to explain all of this to my stepdad during our drunken heart-to-heart shop-talk session when i went to the catskill mountains last week and i think he got it. i told him that this year i'll be buying three father's day cards, but none of them will be for my actual father. my stepfather is the obvious recipient, the others being the other mechanics previously mentioned. i won't make it blatant for good reason (extreme criticism without prejudice), i'll get their adresses from the secretary at the union hall. i just want them both to know that they've made my life better in their own ways, and that i appreciate them, and that their kids are lucky. i wish i could have a dad like that. fuck, i wish i could have a dad that could talk to me about something other than jesus for five minutes.
three beers means i earned a cigarette break. it sucks smoking alone now since my best friend moved home, but i suppose i should get used to it. smoking alone, living alone, growing old alone...yeah. the frogs in the pond down the hill made it not quite as lonely, but then the chupacabra crashing through the woods ruined the mood. walking back in wasn't a pleasant experience since there is about two weeks' worth of cat shit in my roommate's cat's litter box and the smell followed me upstairs. not my cat, not my responsibility, not my fault she didn't clean it today like she told me she would, not my fault if and when it magically "escapes" through an open window (just kidding). i'll light a stick of incense and hope the stench goes away. good times. three fresh cans of yuengling sit on my desk next to the keyboard and offer the promise of a brief escape, a short burst of creativity fueled by the honesty-inducing liquid courage. the condensation from the cans is forming a puddle on the wooden desktop, but since when do plumbers believe in coasters? and since when do i consider myself a plumber? what happened? where was i?
father-figure complexes aren't the only type of relationships formed by working with such a unique group of individuals; i've also made a friend in a fellow apprentice. he's eight years older than me, married with three kids, but is still young at heart and likes to drink and have a good time. a few weeks ago he invited me to join him on a trip down to dover, delaware to see the Nascar races. i have no interest in racing or sports or anything like that, but he said it's basically a massive campsite of tailgate parties so i figured what the hell. the tickets for both races, scheduled for this past weekend, cost a total of one hundred fifty dollars a head. i gave him they money last week at the bar and thought it was a wise investment. little did i know that our combined bad luck would multiply exponentially to frank the living shit out of us. it was one disaster after another, which i will try to convey as clearly as possible. beer with me. shit, i mean "bear." freudian slip.
ok, so thursday night he calls me up saying his minivan is fucked and his mechanic can't fix it. we pretty much abandon any thought of going since our cars aren't lrage enough to fit us comfortably along with the coolers and camping gear we'd need. plus, if the vehicles we drive to work in broke down five hours away we'd be royally fucked. we showed up to work friday looking pretty down in the dumps and told the foreman and the other mechanic we were just going to eat the one-fifty we each had paid for the tickets and call it a wash. they called us crazy and said we should take one of the company vans down there instead. it was the solution i'd been hoping to hear, but didn't want to mention. little did we know how much better off we would've been if we'd just eaten the fucking buck fifty and found another way to amuse ourselves this weekend. we made a list of all the things we thought we'd need during our lunch break and bid farewell to our coworkers. i was going to go home, get packed, pick up the van from the shop, and drive out to my buddy's house to load the stuff and take off for delaware. we had it allllllll figured out. right.
well, let me tell you, it was not fun driving that silverware drawer with wheels through jersey traffic on a friday during rush hour. the clowns who live in that terrible state can't drive worth shit to begin with, and it didn't make it easier that i was behind the wheel of a van with a blindspot bigger than al sharpton's hard-on at a watermelon convention. (the fifth beer is hitting me now, it's nice. warm fuzzies and "stadium arcadium" by the peps. delicious.) we made it down there in about four-and-a-half hours. the main drag was loaded with drunken redneck buffoons stumbling down sidewalks and riding around in trucks. scantily clad daisy duke lookalikes frollicked through the streets. it was wonderful! or so we thought. we stopped at a beer distributor and stocked up on enough beer for the night and the first half of the next day, filled the coolers with ice. he called his friends whom we were supposed to be staying with at the campsite and we designated a meeting place. the drunk, shirtless representative from that group rolled up on his bike at the specified location and we drove towards the campsite as he clung to the passenger side mirror. as we approached the gate of the campsite he proceeded to inform us that there might be a problem, which the attendants clarified further. this year, for the first time, a site could not be purchased without having an actual camper. this posed a serious dilemma because my mans and i (yeah, beer) rolled up in the big white company van with red lettering, not an RV or pop-up camper. we didn't even have a tent that'd fit two people, i was going to sleep on a mattress we'd thrown in the back of the van. we drove away from the campsite and headed for the walmart parking lot, the only place in town where we wouldn't be towed no matter what. it was shaping up to be a hell of a weekend, the imaginary cock suddenly presented itself in our respective asses. (that is probably the worst possible ending to a paragraph i've ever written, so i'll add this shit in parenthesis.)
paused the music, grabbed my beer, headed downstairs for another smoke. lit up, took a piss off my stairs into the front yard, chugged, jiggled, zipped up. took a few more drags, heard the chupacabra crashing through the woods again, got hit in the neck by a huge bug hovering under the porch light and was too buzzed to give a shit or do anything about it. contemplated the next paragraph, threw the butt in the makeshift ashtray, got three more beers from the fridge on the way to my room, started the music again. for fuck's sake, even the creative process has become predictable.
right, so my friend and i are drinkin' beer in the front seats of the van miserable as hell trying to figure out what to do. we get pissed at the guys we were supposed to be meeting for not telling us sooner than the campground's policy had changed. he considers approaching one of the rednecks in a camper parked at walmart and asking him if we can spend the night in his RV, i tell him to pump the brakes with the beer and start thinking logically. i suggest going to my cousin's house in central jersey since her mom's away and she had invited me there anyway. we could stay there and head down to the races at our leisure if we so desired. i call her up and she agrees that it's a good plan, but sounds a little tipsy. i ask if she is in fact drunk and she explains that she's been drinking at the bowling alley and plans on spending a romantic evening alone with her boyfriend since it's their anniversary. this puts my mans and i in a bit of a predicament because we can't show up at her place until tomorrow since she wants to bang out on the kitchen counter or whatever with her asshole boyfriend. great.
we find the cheapest looking hotel and go inside to ask what the deal is. the clerk at the front desk tells us that there is a two-night minimum and that it's $375 a night. we tell her it's too rich for our blood and i ask to use the bathroom since beer goes through me faster than vanilla ice goes through royalty checks. we leave and decide to head towards my cousin's place in jersey. we figured we can get a cheaper room there since it isn't as close to the races and capitalism won't rape us as badly. after an hour or so of driving we start to crave beer to wash the pain of failure away and start looking for the nearest cheap hotel. "econo lodge" sounds like a good choice. the indian manager, affectionately named "Habib" for our own entertainment, tells us he can give us a room for $110. i throw my credit card under the bulletproof glass divider and bask in the brief glory of being able to drink and sleep in a real bed as opposed to trying to catch some Z's in the front seat of the company van in the walmart parking lot. we walk up to our room and notice several black men in their twenties accompanied by a haggard white crackwhore in her thirties. she sees us cracking beer cans from our cooler and hanging out in front of our door and approaches us. she asks to buy a beer from me, i give one to her for free with the hope that she walks away. she does. we sit and drink on the walkway in front of our door and get close to running out of cigarettes. the negroes and crackwhore get kicked out of the hotel for causing a ruckus, we laugh and spectate from our strategically placed seats. the time comes for us to hike over to the truck stop up the road for more cigarettes and we encounter the darkest man i've ever seen. he makes some humorous conversation with the gas station attendant, whom he obviously knows, for awhile. he tells him he wants a bic lighter, and to find some pussy. we tell him about the crackwhore but he declines. he asks us if we want him to bring "some pussy" back to us after he finds it. we decline. the walk back to the hotel is quiet as we both think about how badly that next brew is needed. we set up shop again in front of our door watching cars pass by on the highway. the hoodlums ejected from our hotel wind up at the hotel across the highway. we watch them from a distance. the crackwhore gets in a cab. it makes a u-turn and stops in the middle of the six-lane highway next to the divider. the cabby ejects her and peels out. we see her crouched in the road for twenty seconds gather her belongings, cars whizzing by and just missing her. part of me wants to go help her, but part of me realizes she's too far away and too far gone. i sit and watch and cringe and she finally gets out of the road, though a mac truck almost mowed her down as she swaggered across the lanes back to the hotel. a state trooper pulls into the parking lot and asks what room we're in from the window of his car. we tell him and he nods and drives around the corner to park. we guess that Habib called the cops on the black dudes/crackwhore. he storms up the stairs and heads right for the room they were in. my friend has the camera ready. twenty minutes later the cop walks out with the last remaining black guy in cuffs, head down. my friend snaps a picture as they walk away. we realize at this point that the camera i bought will not be used to document fun, happy times, but key points in the ridiculous and miserable journey that we had embarked upon. we kept drinking and passed out in comfortable beds and air conditioning around four in the morning. i woke him up at ten thirty so we could check out on time, there was a huge dead bug under his pillow. i was just glad the crackwhore didn't come knocking on our window looking for employment. we left and continued on towards my cousin's place in jersey.
i need another bogey. i hate these kinds of entries. i hate feeling like i have to tell a specific story. you won't get it unless you were there, pictures or no pictures. it just doesn't translate. i'd much rather sit here and spew seemingly meaningless references to seemingly meaningful events in my seemingly catastrophic life and make it fucking seem like it's all that bad. i dunno, it's just more fun somehow. this is like homework. but whatever, it's better than telling all of you individually the same story. cigarette, hold on.
that one was slightly less predictable, though still not totally out of character. a picture message, watching the smoke spiral away from me in the thick, humid night air, singing some altered brand new lyrics aloud to myself: "this is the end, i'm fuckin' miserable..." i just want to get through this tedious part so i can rant in the last few paragraphs. beer.
we arrived (i'm switching to past tense permanently now since present was becoming irritating) at my cousin's around one. she greeted us warmly and told us how to get to the beach. we headed to the shore and sprawled out on my cousin's immensely homosexual matching pink beach towels for a few hours. we downed a few beers while staring at the curvaceous (?) scenery and laughing at the guy jogging by in grape smugglers. it was a pleasant twenty degrees cooler due to the ocean breeze and our backs sighed in relief at not being seated in the front of the goddamn van.
"snow" by the chili peppers just came on. it reminds me of that coworker i wrote about in detail before. we used to turn this song up and sing it under our breath as we plumbed the shit out of some houses. funny how some songs instantly bring you back. it's odd to even want to be brought back to something.
my cousin's friend kenny met up with us for dinner and i instantly liked him. great sense of humor, quick-witted and intelligent. kenny and my cousin seemed to have some real chemistry, despite the "friends" title. it was obvious that he had the hots for her, and since he was recently single i made a mental note to vouch for him later on when i got to speak to her alone at the bar. which was a really fun bar. we went to some place called red bank in a ritzy area of the jersey shore and partied it up. i started with a gin and tonic and switched to bacardi and coke. i drink the latter when i'm in a "let me try to break the self-fulfilling prophecy" sort of mood. it's the drink of choice of one of both grandfathers i never met. my dad's old man used to stay up until four in the morning at his tavern drinking bacardi and cokes and then come home to raise hell. even the dog would hide under the bed. my dad was the favorite whipping post, that's why he magically found jesus late in life and abandoned reality. anyway, it's the drink i revert to when i want to take on the challenge of preventing history from repeating itself, if that makes sense. i can handle that puerto rican rum it without being a dick, at least in that sense. right. good talk.
some broads at the bar were checking me out but i wasn't drunk enough to talk to them yet. they kept throwing glances my way and i kept downing cocktails to build up the courage and/or stupidity to talk to them. once i did i was pleasantly surprised; they were from the czech republic and spoke in broken english. i started "spitting game" (not really) and was on the ball for a few minutes when my buddy came to back me up. he helped talk me out of the awkward silences and backed up whatever i said, we played it well, textbook. we found out that they were both nannies (hot) and were about to be deported in a month because their visas were expiring. i mentioned that marrying an american would solve that problem, then asked how their domestic skills were. it was funny. they said they were good cooks. i asked what czech food was like. they said it's heavy and fattening. "that explains the thunder thighs," i told myself. they asked what we do for a living and we told them we were union plumbers. they heard the P-word, spoke to eachother in their dirty european pig latin for the first time, and suddenly had to leave the bar. good talk. (i intentionally ended the last two paragraphs with "good talk," so don't think you caught me.)
and the cigarette break gets more ridiculous. i walked downstairs and turned back towards the pantry to get a cookie so the chocolate goodness would make the cigarette taste better, strode past his drumset and tapped the toms with my fingers. lit up and started torching the monstrous moths with my lighter. they flew in my general direction and attacked me and i flailed around like a retard. i think a small moth flew into my beer but i'm not sure. whatever, more protein. on second thought, let me pour this one into a glass just to be sure. no moth. damn. i'm hallucinating already.
we had a few more drinks and the couple we were hangin' with wanted to try another bar. we walked up the street to this fancy looking club, only to be rejected by the large-style negro in a tux with the security earpiece. my friend and i were dressed in shorts and t-shirts since we packed thinking we'd be going to the races, there was no way we'd be allowed into that club dressed like that. i walked out and was summoned back ten seconds later by my friend. he told me he paid the bouncer twenty bucks and everything was gravy. we walked upstairs towards the way too loud dance music only to feel even more out of place. the guys were all wearing suits, the girls were wearing prom dresses. everyone there seemed to be strung out on designer drugs and i was waiting for wesley snipes to charge in and start shooting vampires. a cocktail cost ten bucks and coronas were six and i got molested by some women dancing near the bar. the nerdiest man i've ever seen was dancing in the whitest fashion ever with five women groping him, probably because he's either rich or a drug dealer. i laughed and walked back to the table where my cohorts were seated. new jersey is gay and last call is at two in the morning. the lights went on so we bought one more round, downed it, and went back to the streets where we belonged.
yeah yeah yeah we were driven back to my cousin's and passed out. we woke up eight hours later and were politely kicked out since she had studying to do and her dad was coming by. we considered going to the beach again but opted not to since it was cloudy and we just wanted to get home after such a random weekend. we found out that sunday's race was cancelled anyway and didn't care. we should've just eaten the one fifty and not gone at all, but we made the best of it and had fun. it just cost us almost $500 instead of $150. whoops. it could've been worse, though, had we tried to stay in delaware. sunday's race was rained out anyway and there was no way we were going to stay until monday when it was rescheduled for. also, a truck in a toll both just next to ours was rear-ended right next to us. if we had chosen that lane the damn work van would have been damaged and we'd have some questions to answer. really, if you think about it, the boss should have paid us two eager apprentices for all the free advertising that the big white billboard with wheels spread throughout three states.
i got back home that night and tried to write some nonesense about it but...
[yuengling in a pint glass is perhaps one of the sexiest things ever. the red tinge of the beer, the beautiful head. god, this really is my favorite beer.]
...i got an unexpected text and fell for it. she wanted to meet for coffee. i said i couldn't do it in public, it could end badly if i got upset or if sincere words were exchanged next to some fruitcake drinking a chai tea. she (foolishly) agreed to come over to my place again since he's gone and she was either out with her boyfriend or too oblivious to realize who was there. i wasn't drunk, but i felt like it. i sat in my car and waited to hear that last smashing pumpkins song as i smoked some filter. she pulled up at the perfect time and i imperfectly stumbled my way out of my car. it was on, i was done. i set myself up for failure because i needed to.
[keep in mind that i'm ten beers deep and have to wake up in under six hours and don't give a fuck. whatever happens from here on out is what i subconsciously wanted. maybe.]
she walked into my room like she never left the place, i wished she'd never left the place. i told her my stupid delaware/new jersey story. she counterswung with her albany story. i didn't want to hear, i told her. she told me she didn't do anything, it didn't matter. i thought of her in the bars and in the apartments and in the grasp of guys somehow less worthy than me and felt sick. i made her stop for awhile, but when it came back up i let her go with it. sometimes i like to suffer. it makes for a good memory, at least a more poignant one. bring it on. she didn't, she really didn't do anything warranting vomit on my behalf. at least she didn't tell me. i don't care how much fucked up shit goes down, thinking about someone else touching the person you slept next to for that long will make you want to curl up and die. and i did. into my pillow. one cough-tear at a time. i tried to touch her to make it feel ok again but she wasn't receptive. she shrugged away and left me hangin', she dodged my hand seeking hers, she made it known that she just came to talk about trivial bullshit. i wanted to sleep next to her so bad. i missed having that warm, sleek body there. god, you don't even know what it's like.
[you piss and pour another beer into the pint glass. you drink two-thirds of it and stare into the glass and feel ashamed of being able to finish a beer in three sips. you kick the piss bottle to the side and remember emptying it twice tonight. you glance sideways at the dust ruffler and think of how easy it'd be, how quick, how legendary.]
ah fuck, i'm almost done with twelve and my zipper's down. who put the bright eyes on? balls.
i kissed her back through her shirt, she smelled like her sweet sweat and it killed me. i just wanted to have the privelege of knowing what she felt/tasted/smelled like again. i gave that privelege away though, and pretended like it was for the best. oh lord. you miss her and you know it, though you'll lie and say otherwise to their faces. down your beer, pour the last one. you fucking fuck.
do it. pussy. do it. your zipper's still down. you're too drunk to care. and you just looked across the hall and the room's empty. go fuck yourself. do it. and you sit here staring at your black socks battling the inevitable like a self-made martyr without a cause.
i snapped a few to kill the roll against her will, but missed the best one as she left. i smoked the last marlboro as she pulled out, presumably forever. she told me no good came of us because she is terrified of men now and i am miserable. that's when i had to muffle it with the pillow. i had ruined another great one, even though she denied it and said she's happy. forced to live with another casualty, forced to repeat the same fate over and over. and she never answered that question, if she still does or not, and said it's irrelevant. but it's not, it makes all the difference. i took her silence as consent. i mumbled something along those lines as she shut her car door. she got me good.
this is the time in the show when you'd go [edited to avoid guilt] and [ditto], but you can't anymore so you stack your twelve empty beer cans in columns of three and make the best of it.
i just heard the thunder, or maybe it was them coming for us. go for a smoke and cool out, kid. you're way too high strung right now.
you were way too drunk on your last smoke break. you weren't a participant anymore, just a victim of the elements. the thunder roared and the lightning flashed and the smoke spiraled and the bugs bounced off you like kamikaze pilots and you couldn't do a damn thing about it. you may or may not have heard the chupacabra crashing through the woods again. something about your grandma, that's how you wanted to end it.
yeah yeah. the old lady was cute as usual tonight when i swung by my mom's house. i snuck up on her as she finished folding my clothes. i hid in my old room and stuck my head around the corner. she laughed to herself as she tried to figure out how to fold a sleeveless t-shirt of mine. i snickered quietly and kept watching for a minute. she took such great care in every crease and rubbed every piece of fabric smooth as she stacked them, even the boxers. i walked in and tossed the clothes she'd folded into my basket. she told me to be careful so as not to ruin her folds. she told me it's the one thing she can do to help. i told her i understand. i have one thing i can do to help, too, at least help myself. it's called drunken writing. i'm sorry if it sucked. it was honest. goodnight.
currently reading:
"the days run away like wild horses over the hills" by charles bukowski.
proofreading this twelve hours later was no easy task, especially since the typos and random emotional outbursts increased as the alcohol consumption did. definitely didn't make it to work today. i shut my alarm off and woke up again ten minutes before i had to be there. i was still drunk and it's a half-hour drive and i'd only gotten five hours of sleep. my check was still no good anyway and i figured i could use the day off to run some errands. i'm sure the voicemail message i left revealed my true state, but i don't care. if drinking alone and ranting for five hours late into the night makes it somehow better then that's what i'm going to do. if the problems won't go anywhere, the pipes sure won't.
