Honest  Entertaining  Funny  

Carharttacopia
October 16th, 2006

The guy was a craneLatice Boom operator, giant booms, heavy arms tracing huge invisible arcs in the sky performing ballets of steel girders balanced like the arms of some God sized mobile, creaking, swinging freely.  The very definition of crushing danger.  He had the rough face and dirty brown carhartt jacket to prove it, and the regulation, uniformly sized brown stubble on his face and pate almost as if his whole head were covered with a thin brown Brillo pad.  When I shook the guy's hand, it felt almost as if my own had been swallowed by a sandpaper covered blood pressure cuff hooked up to a shop compressor with a broken regulator.

His daughter was oddly hairy, covered with zits and had almost no social graces: she displayed that strange demeanor seen only in high school kids trapped between the world of children and the world of adults.

The longer I talked to both of them the more I liked them.  He had an interesting sense of humor and a quick smile and an incredible knowledge of cars.  She was sweet and treated her father with such respect I couldn't help but admire her.

We stood in line together for almost two hours waiting to buy computers at a sale run by our local high school.  It was a great deal.  They were selling computers for five dollars a piece and word had traveled fast, the line was enormous.

Behind me stood a young man with an incredible mane of hair that flowed about his scalp and down his shoulders like black lava erupting from his head.  For the first hour we stood in line, every five minutes he would answer his cell phone and shout, "BOSWORTH!  Bosworth.  It's Bosworth I tell you.  No, I told you he was in the bathroom."  And then he would hang up, answer his phone five minutes later and shout the same thing all over again.  It would have been annoying if it hadn't been so delightfully odd and entertaining.

After that hour his phone stopped ringing.  He must have quickly bored.  Almost immediately he said something to me, or rather us.  The father and daughter and I were standing together in a group with a lady who was, technically, in front of us.  He sort of strolled up with his hands in his pockets and asked us if we had any beer.  We were in the parking lot of the high school mind you.  "Dudes, do any of you have any beer?"

I couldn't believe my ears.  I knew the crane operator was going to tear this kid's head in half and sprinkle his brains on the grass as fertilizer.  He'd just finished telling us a story about how he had this second job for a while throwing 80 pound bags of Morton Safety Salt up onto dump trucks.  I gritted my teeth and squinted my eyes shut in anticipation.  I held my breath.  The crane operator reached into his jacket.  Jesus, maybe he was going to pull a knife on this guy.  Visions ala psycho flashed through my mind, his arm plunging up and down with the knife, blood running down the storm drain while violins screeched like angry cats on crack.  I made ready to take off running or hit the deck.

 

"Sure man," he said, pulled an ice cold bud out of his coat, popped it open and handed it to the kid.  The lady from in front of us asked him, "You got any more in there?"

"Sure, you want one?"

"No," the lady replied. "I don't really like beer."

"Whaduhyuh like?" He asked.

"Um, white wine.  I bet you haven't got any bottles of wine in there do you."

"Nope, but I got this thing.  I just grabbed it outuhduh fridge.  I think it's some kind uh wine or something.  I think it was my wife's or something.  It's been in there forever so I just grabbeder before I trucked on over here.  Thought someone might wanter."  He pulled a can of some sort out of his pocket and handed it to the lady.

"You've got to be freakin kiddin me.  This is a can of chardonay.  I've never seen anything like this."

"I don't suppose you have any Dewer's in there Dewer you?"  I was amazed at my own cleverness.  I was even more amazed when he pulled one of those little hotel room, fridge bar, bottles of Sothern Comfort from the nether regions of  his jacket.  It wasn't scotch, but heck, I didn't have any water anyway and any storm in a port.  We had been waiting in line for an hour and it hadn't shorted all that much.  I was in serious need of some distraction.  By this time the kid with the lava hair had finished his first beer and recieved another from inside the guy's carhartt.  His daughter had also received a can of hot chocolate that heated itself up when you pressed a little button on the bottom and shook it up.  I was tempted to ask him if he had any pizza in there, but I was afraid he might, and I didn't really want pizza from inside his dirty crane operators carhartt.  Booze in a can or bottle was one thing and pizza was another.

"Hey do you have any pizza in there?"  The lady with the can of wine asked.

"No, but I do have some candy."  He produced a GIANT bag of assorted candy bars with pictures of ghosts and witches on it.  I helped myself to about 20 or so.  I began to wonder if perhaps he weren't a much thinner man than he appeared.

We stood in line for another hour and during that time he produced four more beers, a big bag of cheese and cracker Combos and three more little bottles of Sothern Comfort.  About five people before we got to the front of the line a lady with a bunch of money came out and told us that they were out of computers and that we could get our money back.  We had been required to prepay for the computers we were no longer going to receive.  When she got to the crane operator and asked for his ticket in order to give him his money back, he said "No, I never bought one.  I didn't come here for a computer.  We knew there would be a lot of people here waiting in line and we decided they might like to have a party."

And then his daughter and he got into their truck and drove off.  And, sadly, I never asked him what his name was.