Concrete Columbia

It's been a while since I've spent much time in the Columbia city and able to brush elbows with some of it's inhabitants. One of my favorite 'zines (Wiener Out) once described the city as hosting 'only children...with food stains on their face and/or clothing'. For some reason, I've always loved that description, and happen to find it true on most drives through the more rural districts. Immediate apologies to anyone reading or friends of those who have come from this city and lead perfectly normal lives. -You are the exception to my lop-sided opinion on this area.

Well, "Wiener Out" was correct on the description of street mongers of this town in the late nineties and early twenties. But, I would like to remind readers that since then, the children have grown up, and now have children of their own with the food and candy stains. They walk the streets anxious for more ketchup and teeth rotting sugar snacks.

We were doing some concrete work downtown, and the manager of the job, who I was working for told me that "they would have a piece of equipment" for me to use, when it came time to spread stone for our sub-grade. This scared me a little bit, because usually other people's 'equipment' is half-assed and not serviced properly and hence...dangerous. I would have rather used a familiar piece of equipment for the minor excavation, or hire a reliable service to do the work. It seems everyone that we work for these days is "not looking to spend a lot of money on this project", and at the end of the day, that means that they will be finding shitty ways for themselves to save money and make things more of a pain in the ass for me...us.

He gave me the number for "Joe the tractor Guy" and told me that if Joe tells me he'll be in here an hour, he really means two. I figured that we would need the tractor (not my choice of equipment for grading...most are very in-efficient and weak) sometime after lunch, so I called Joe around 10:00 am and told him to bring it 'after lunch'.

"Well there's no way that I can be there until 12:00, or a little after!" -Joe hollered into the phone at my request.

"That's great! No, that'll be just fine...We'll take lunch around 11, then we will be back for whenever you get here" I said.

"....Uh...Ok...It won't be until after 12..." Joe told me again. Maybe lunch time to him was around 6 in the evening, or ...I don't know. 12 sounded great to me, and he was acting like I was nuts.

We had a terrible lunch a Subway, but were entertained to pieces by a cowboy across the street who has an interesting relationship with a corvette parked in front of his house. He sits on the porch, and occasionally comes out to the car and opens the door, sits in it...rolls down the window...rolls up the window...gets out...opens the trunk...looks in it...closes it...opens it again...grabs a can of paint...puts it on the curb...shuts the trunk...goes back to the porch...comes back to the car...opens the hood...grabs the paint...paints something under the hood...

I'm telling you we could watch this man and the car for hours on end. I was constantly wiping tears from my eyes with a Subway napkin, while eating tasteless food and choking on cherry coke.

We ate and got back to the job site, because I didn't want to be late for Joe. I've never met him, but he sounded kind of dick-head-ish on the phone and I didn't want to piss him off. Of course, he was not there when we got back and we continued working (well after 12, as he had said).

Eventually, a crappy Chevy truck(aren't they all crappy?) comes ripping into the parking lot, followed by a diesel chattering Massey Ferguson, topped by a man whom I assumed was Joe.

Joe held his chin high, and mistook himself for Crazy horse. He held the reigns and lowered the idle whilst breathing heavily out his nose. This was no palfrey, no cart horse or pack mule he attained, but a red steaming charger. The idle now murmured and he hit the kill switch, as he has a thousand times.

Joe is a ketchup stained Colombian who still wears the same sweat pant/sneaker combo that he wore on the day he quit middle school. The pants are tight on the ankle and loose on the knee. A faded t-shirt has holes around the belly button, and I can only imagine what it smells like. I bet it smells like disease chased with whiskey diarrhea.

His cohorts left him quickly to talk around the hood of the Chevy. They made jokes that are not worth typing, and would more than likely make my readers dumber. The larger of the two men had a childish mohawk and his teeth looked like corn kernels. They yelled at each other about who had who's lighter, while dining on hot dogs and kit kat. The skinnier man wore no shirt and a backwards grease covered hat. They disappeared into a warehouse to let the sugar kick in.

Have you ever tried to have a completely normal conversation with someone, and they look at you like they want to kill you? If so, you have had a conversation with Joe. He sort of resembles "Ogre" from 'Revenge of the Nerds', but has a real psycho path air about him.

Joe wanted to kill me for some reason and tried to do so with his intense glare. I asked simple questions about the tractor's basic operations, and he gazed at my flesh, wanting to bury me.

He took the key for the tractor from a large ring of keys and stuck it into the ignition. I thanked him, and he glared at me one more time before heading to the ware house for sugar snacks. He disappeared into the shadows of shelves and I'm assuming he joined fatty and skinny.

I operated the red 'steaming' charger for about three minutes before deeming it a 'piece of shit' and granted Ollie a wish to go home without doing minor grading for me. I told him "Dude...this thing is a piece of shit. This is going to take forever...you can head out if you want and we can do the fine grading of the stone in the morning before the concrete gets here." He saw the struggle and was eager to head home bound via Lancaster's coolest Volvo.

I ran the Massey Furgesson for about ten more minutes, picking up stone from the pile and dumping into the formed areas for sub-grade below the to-be-poured wheel chair ramp. Together, the tractor and I struggled for power and efficiency. At one point, I felt a presence, and sure enough, to my left was Joe...with the physco stare in hand. I idled down the machine enough to hear him say "Sure beats putting it in there by hand, don't you think?". I nodded and said something stupid. I was nervous because he scared me. Maybe he heard my complaints about his family's pride and joy tractor. He left as eerily as he had appeared and I continued with my operation.

Sure enough, before I was done, the fuel gauge read empty, and I had to tell Joe before running this hunk of junk dry. For those of you who don't know...running a diesel engine clear of fuel can be a pain in the ass for re-starting. Don't run a diesel dry...

I told Joe about the fuel situation and he...gave me the look like he wanted to kill me. "Look, dude...I gave them a price to do the ramp...not to bully around the stone with someone else's tractor that I would be expected to fuel up! I had to buy the stone and that wasn't part of the deal...I don't have fuel...you're about to fucking run out." I told Joe and suddenly his glance changed and he was very mad at someone else. "Sorry, dude, but this thing was about fucking empty when it got here...I've got other things to do besides fill other people's fuel tanks."

Joe stormed around the lot with his hands in the air cursing some man. He brought me fuel. He apologized for some reason. I did not tell him how much I hated his tractor.