twenty-nine

“Guy can build a Geiger counter out of a fuckin’ coconut but they can’t build a boat and go home? Come on. He don’t wanna go home! He’s living in paradise and fuckin’ both them broads! Who’d want to go home?”

We were watching a television placed on a high shelf in Al’s office. I sat in a beat-up black desk chair on wheels and sipped my second orange Nehi. Al was stretched out on a couch, his lone foot in a black sock and propped up on a pillow. His crutch was laid out on the floor next to the couch, parallel to his body. We were passing the time, waiting for Al’s nephew Norman (who he called “Ab-norman, the dumbest thing on two legs”) to return from his break. It was getting later and later and Al finally determined that his nephew wasn’t coming back and the two of us would have to handle getting the amplifier down off the van and into his shop.

We set up a big wooden ramp from the lip of the van’s cargo hold to the greasy floor of the garage.

“There’s a hand truck right outside my office.”

I grabbed it and wheeled it up the ramp. Then I tried to jimmy its edge underneath the amplifier, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

“Wait for me. I’ll show you,” Al said as he started to hobble his way up the ramp. But the angle of the ramp was pretty steep and halfway up Al’s equilibrium started to give way. He gripped his crutch with two hands, tapping it hard against the wooden ramp and then hopping on his leg. He alternated these two movements in rapid succession, tapping (more like slamming) the crutch down onto the wood and then hopping on his leg. Tap, hop, tap, hop, tap, hop; pogoing himself higher up the ramp in quick spurts. It was a desperate, almost graceful display of strength and coordination; a perverted Fred Astaire number.

Just as he reached the top, the rubber tip of his crutch managed to get caught in the small gap where the ramp and the van met. The sudden stop of his forward thrust pushed him off balance. I reached for Al but was too late.

His foot slipped and his leg went flying up. His back flopped hard on the ramp, then he rolled and tumbled all the way down, landing in a violent heap on the cold concrete floor.

One of the lenses of his glasses was shattered and he had ripped a tear along the whole length of his good pant leg, exposing the white jockey shorts beneath.

“Motherfucker!!!! . . . That cocksucking shitbag!!! . . . Can’t rely on any-goddamn-body!!!”

“Are you okay?” He could have broken his neck the way he fell.

“Heads up their cuntlapping faggot asses!!!” His face and neck were bright red.

I put my shoulder under his arm and tried to help him upright.

“Gimme the goddamn thing.” He thrust his head toward the top of the ramp. The crutch was still lodged in the gap. It stood there straight and erect like the flag in a golf hole. Al leaned against the back of the van and I ran up the ramp to free the crutch from where it was stuck. I gave it to Al as fast as I could.

“Goddamnit to hell . . . Heads up their shit-stained asses!!!!” he screamed as he wiped the sweat off his face with a handkerchief. Suddenly he froze and his eyes went wide as they fixed on something behind me.

Norman’s timing could not have been worse. To add insult to injury, the unfortunate nephew was happily stoned and sipping a milkshake as he arrived. He was a short kid, not much older than me.

“Where the fuck were you? You son of a goddamn bitch!!” Al shouted so loud, so concentrated with rage, it created a bolt of static electricity that made the left side of his thinning head of hair stand straight up.

“Wh-what’s the matter, Uncle Al? What happened?” Norman responded as his buzz quickly evaporated.

“What happened?!!! I almost broke my ass because of you, that’s what fuckin’ happened.” Al raised the crutch high in the air and Norman cowered and covered his head. I was sure Al was about to split it open like a watermelon.

“No! Please no, Uncle Al,” Norman pleaded, sounding like a bad actor.

“Doing your fuckin’ job!! I almost killed myself, you rotten cuntbag, doing your fuckin’ job!!!” Al swung the crutch but missed by a mile. It was deliberate. He could have hit him with his eyes closed.

“No, no, no, no, no!!!” Norman squealed in a high voice, his hands still covering his head. “Please . . . no, no, no, no . . .” He was breathing heavy, hyperventilating, as he begged his uncle to spare him. He had every right to be afraid, of course, but there was something in the way he expressed his fear that made me think he was faking it.

Al took another big swing and a miss, but this time Norman fell to the floor like he’d been hit.

“No, no, no, no . . . please!!! . . . Uncle Al . . . no!!!” He continued his performance, which didn’t seem to be out of mockery or disrespect to Al. I don’t know what it was but I didn’t believe it. There was something very Kabuki about it. Or at least what I imagined Kabuki to be like.

“Dope-smoking piece of shit . . . just like your father!” Al poked Norman in the ribs with the crutch. But it was a very gentle poke, I mean he barely touched him at all.

“Owwwwww!” Norman wailed as if he’d been shot with a bow and arrow. “Owwww!!! No!!!!” He was curled up on the floor and started sobbing and whimpering. It was the worst acting I had ever seen. Worse than the wrestlers on Channel 9.

“Sorry, Uncle Al . . . so sorry . . . so, so sorry . . .”

“I should crack your goddamn hophead skull.” Al poked him again, this time on his butt. But it might have been even lighter than the first poke. And once again Norman reacted like he’d been pierced with a red-hot iron rod.

“Owwwww! . . . Aaaaaaaahhh! . . . Nooooo! . . . I’m so sorry.”

“Should shove it right up your dirty fuckin’ ass, you ungrateful retard!!!”

I started to think that this was some kind of very bizarre routine and it wasn’t the first time this exchange had happened between them. There was a very stilted, rehearsed quality to it.

“You want more, shitheel? ’Cause I got more.”

“Noooo. Nooo, please. Please, Uncle Al . . .”

“Tell me what an asshole you are.”

“I’m an asshole, Uncle Al.”

“Tell me what a shitbag you are.”

“I’m a shitbag, Uncle Al.”

“A what?”

“An asshole shitbag.”

As their play got more pathetic and grotesque, I noticed that Al had opened a gash on his leg.

“Your leg’s bleeding.” I was glad to interrupt the high school dramatics. Al looked at me and I pointed to his leg.

“Get me some Band-Aids, shithead!” He tapped Norman on the shoulder with the crutch.

This time Norman didn’t scream bloody murder. He just sniffled, got to his feet, and walked quietly to the office.

“And the Mercurochrome!!” he shouted to his nephew. Then he held his handkerchief to the wound, peered at me, and said: “Stay away from drugs.”

I nodded.

“Lemme get this under control, then we’ll get the thing down and you can go.”

“Take your time,” I said.

Norman reappeared with a bunch of paper towels, some Band-Aids, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Al cleaned and disinfected his wound and bandaged himself up while poor Norman and I got to work on the amplifier. He was incredibly strong for someone his size and we got the amp onto the hand truck and down the ramp without much trouble.

“Okay. One, two, three, four, five. And that’s for you.” Al counted out five hundred-dollar bills into my palm, and shoved ten singles into my shirt pocket. “You’re gonna bring me the case, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” I lied again. I had no intention of coming back at all.

“Tonight. Before midnight.”

“Okay.”

“And tell freakshow that Al said, Go fuck yourself.”

“I will.”

“You will?”

“Yeah.” I looked at the floor, then toward the office where Norman sat slumped in the desk chair picking his nose.

“You’ll get fired if you do. Don’t say that. Just make sure he gives you the case. I need the case. He has it but he gets so stoned that he forgets. It’s always like that with him, with half of the rejects I deal with. I should send my numbnuts nephew to work for him. Two peas in a pod.”

Al shook my hand, then as I climbed into the van he said, “How ’bout a Nehi for the road?” Before I could answer he shouted to Norman: “Hey! Get off your ass and get the kid an orange soda!”

Norman was now picking his teeth with the same finger that was just up his nose. He didn’t even bother to turn his head toward us. “Get it yourself, old man,” he said casually, the show now over.

Al looked at me and shook his head with the tiniest hint of a grin. “No respect. Kids today . . . no respect at all,” he muttered as he hopped to the fridge.