Odds and Evens

oil embargo

Probably the best car I have ever owned was a 1953 Buick Roadmaster.  By “best” I mean it was the best used car I have ever owned at the date when it was first sold, back in 1953.  Howard Hughes owned one so it had to have been expensive.  Mine had a straight 8—eight cylinders in a row.  It had a radio that didn’t work, and a bunch of buttons across the dash that were supposed to adjust the suspension hydraulically for the kind of surface you were driving on: rough, smooth, bumpy road.  Those didn’t work either.

 I got the car from Roland. He had been busted for pot and was going to the county work farm for six months.  I asked him was there no way he could get out of it, and he laughed and said he was caught red handed and dead to rights having sold directly to an undercover cop.  He was parting with his earthly possessions and he had some debts he said to pay off before going in and ask did I want the Buick, owned he said by an old lady.  I drove it around, no black smoke came out the pipe, and the oil was pretty clean.  So I offered him 100 dollars—which I thought was low—and he said, I’ll take it.

 One day I was out front working on something on that car and the next door neighbor, Mr. Hunter, came over and said mighty nice car and started talking about the cars he and his buddies had back in Hattisburg, Mississippi.  Yep, he knew that car because it had a special suspension.  He and his buddies would get on the ends of that car and get it to bouncing clean off the ground, and one night he had his buddies bounced one of those cars into an alley sideways.  You should have seen the owner’s face he said.

 And he had a car like that too, not that one exactly, but one like it, and to save on gas he had figured out how to turn the engine off more than a mile away from home.  He would get up speed and top this hill, and shut off the engine and it would fly down the hill passed the Miller place, and passed the old abandoned gas station where as a child he bought Nihi Grape Soda, and down a gulley and up the other side, which was always a bit touch and go, and the car would roll right up the drive and stop right in front of the house without him even putting his foot to the brake.  Damn amazing, I said.

Mr. Hunter worked down at the zoo taking care of the gorillas maybe because he was about the size of one.  He was 6 feet six and maybe 330.  He still had the thick southern accent.  And I was sitting around maybe two hours later when it came to me like a bolt out of the blue that he had been jerking my chain with that car story.  What cued me was that last bit about not even having to touch the brake.  Mr. Hunter liked to spin a yarn.  I doubt the backbone of the story was original, but he filled it up with so much local color as he went along that you pretty much suspended disbelief without knowing it and maybe his being six six and 330 helped too, because I wasn’t about to call him a liar had I any suspicion he was pulling my chain.

I drove that car for a year during the time I worked as an assistant manager in training at a Newberry’s Department Store.  But then towards the end of 1973, the Arab Oil Embargo hit and the price of gas went from 25 cents a gallon or so to a dollar or a dollar and a quarter.  I hadn’t paid any attention till then but that Roadmaster got 11 miles to a gallon.  And it wasn’t easy to get gas either.  Cars stretched around the block to get gas and then they went to the odd number, even number license plate system where people with odd numbered license plates went on odd number days and people with even numbered license plates went on even number days.

So I had to park my luxury vehicle down back with the other wrecks, and I went back to driving the 59 Plymouth Station Wagon.  Eventually, one of my brothers sold the Roadmaster to a car collector for 400 dollars.

Casa De Ora

Our little bit of California was called Casa De Ora. That wasn’t the official postal name but that’s what we called it.  Back in the 20’s they had tried to put a tract out there.  You could still see the layout for streets, and as you drove towards where the tract was supposed to be, on both sides of the roads were brown turd like mounds of plaster of paris with the words Casa De              Ora spelled out on them in gold lettering.  I guess they were supposed to suggest a gateway into Casa De            Ora.

Just beyond the gates, stores had sprung up on both sides of the road.  The stores were set back from the road leaving a dirt area for a person to park his car in front of the store whatever it was: a couple of gas stations, a bar, a drugstore, a barber shop, another bar, an independent market, a car mechanics place, and later on the Hires root beer barrel.  The root beer barrel was made out of metal, shaped like a barrel,  painted to look like a barrel and about ten feet high.  The root beer barrel didn’t last as a root beer barrel for very long.  Next,  it was a chicken barrel, and then a fish and chips barrel, and finally, before it was torn down, it was for a long time a Mexican food barrel.

The houses on our street that headed up the side of the hill had all been independently built.  No tract homes, one looking like the other.  You figured that people who had come out our way to live—and we were the boonies back then—either didn’t have much money or were attempting to escape their past.  In some cases, I think both.  Half of the deep south seemed to have moved out our way, to where they could have a little “elbow room,” that being very important, and a little bit of land on which to recreate the southern lifestyle.

Peope kept big gardens, and sometimes livestock, pigs and an occasional cow.  Chickens too, but they were frowned upon because of the racket.  People stuck up “out buildings,” a tradition in the south. We had outbuildings and also collected cars down back as was also a southern tradition. At one point, we had three cars out back with anis weed growing all around them.

But one day, this man in a uniform came to our door. He said he was from health and sanitation and showed us his papers.  He said we had to get rid of the cars out back.  Something about this guy annoyed me, so I said, “Why.”  Because vermin might be growing there, he said.  Vermin? I said, are you talking about rats.  Because I have never seen a single rat down there.

The guy didn’t look at me but handed a warning citation to the old man. As the guy walked back up towards the road I said as loudly as I could without yelling, “Vermin! I haven’t seen any damn vermin down there!” But the old man and the old lady sort of slunk off; I think they were embarrassed.

I don’t know why I wasn’t.  I thought it was funny, and the guy had pissed me off by using the word vermin when he meant “rats.”  The dark shadow of civilization in the form of bureacratic double speak had just passed over the area.

Fuckers.

casa de ora

Titus Oates

Besides Miss Tuttle, the other teacher who seemed to feel I could write was Mr. Moore, my senior English teacher.  He never said he thought I could write, but he did nominate me for that national essay contest for high school seniors.   So maybe I can infer something from that.

He was a thin little man who wore sweaters and a bow tie, and like Miss Tuttle, who had gone to Columbia, Mr. Moore was east coast educated having been graduated from Princeton.  He was a titus oatesCaptain in the Army in WWII and came back changed.  This may explain his having ended up at a teacher at a nowhere high school in California.  Or it could have been his drinking problem that started after the war.

Still, he rode me about my writing and graded me harder than anyone because he knew I was going to college.  I remember getting a B+ on a long research paper.  I had worked hard on that baby.  It was supposed to be on some historical figure; so my colleagues, lacking any imagination, wrote about Washington or Florence Nightingale or Madame Curry.  I wrote about Titus Oates, 17th century perjurer and sodomite, a man who according to a poll of British Historians was the “worst Briton of the 17th century.”

Maybe Mr. Moore thought I was being a wise ass by picking Titus Oates, but the name alone was enough to fascinate me, and I had come upon my interest legitimately.  I had been perusing one of the volumes of our 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and came across the final lines of an entry that read, something like, whereupon he lived out the rest of his years in the country where his house became known for unholy and unnatural acts.  I wanted to know more about this person and so first familiarized myself with Titus Oates and the gun power plot I believe it was called.

Titus started his career of crime by being dismissed from the Anglican clergy for blasphemous drunkenness and suspicion of sodomy. He established himself as a world class lier by concocting a whole series of lies suggesting that Catholics had intentions upon the throne and was first rewarded for his efforts with a 600 pound pension.  Later, when power shifted, he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to repeated floggings that should have killed him.  But they didn’t; whereupon part of his pension was restored, following a legal action, and he retired to the country to continue his unnatural doings.

So maybe I was being a bit of a wise ass.

Mr. Moore’s class also furnished me one of the few high school moments that I remember with any warmth.  One Monday morning he turned to us and said, “And just who the heck are these Beatles.”  This was in many ways an unprecedented moment.  I don’t recollect a teacher ever having asked his students a real question,  who asked it moreover in a spirit of curiosity and out of a desire to learn something about the lives of his students.  We sat more or less dumbfounded.  I could see he was going to let the question drop, but since it was my job in that class to answer all questions nobody else would or could, I raised my hand and said, “The best rock and roll band ever.”

Terror Breeds Terror

abomb

Maybe, really, it’s no big deal.  As that horrible song said, we are all just dust in the wind.  Or as that Dawkins—not Darryl, that was Chocolate Thunder—says we are just big watery bags that exist solely that genes may replicate themselves.  I don’t know, if I am gene, I would find some simpler way to recreate myself than by using great watery bags that, on top of everything else, have the curse of consciousness.  So maybe there is no purpose, or maybe there is one but we can’t see it.  I don’t know.  But some people seem a lot more purposeful than others.

 Rosco (short for a long Polish surname) was among the latter.  I don’t know how I got to know him exactly.  He was a year ahead of me in school, but he lived close by on the other side of the hill.  I guess he liked me because he would come over and just appear in our little front yard sitting on a wall right outside the front room window.  He never called ahead and when he arrived he didn’t knock either, but somebody was always passing by that window and they would see Rosco out there, and yell, Nick, Rosco is here.

 I would go out and there Rosco would be.  I didn’t know why he was there exactly and it didn’t help any that he gave the appearance of a stray balloon that had decided to settle in our front yard.  Rosco was taller than me and rounded all over.  He had a round head and a round bland face that didn’t show anything if there was anything to show beyond that bland face.  He wasn’t retarded or anything; he just gave off the impression that he didn’t know where or why he was.

I mean when he came over we never did anything.  Be damned, if I was going to ask him in the house, because then I would never get rid of him.  I would ask him how he was, and he would say he was fine or he had just eaten dinner.  And then I’d ask him what he had eaten for dinner, and it would be like, nothing special.  Trying to get him to talk was like pulling teeth, so then I would launch into talking for maybe 10 or 20 minutes straight and I would get the feeling I was going to pass out because it felt as if, talking to him, I were trying to inflate, or keep from deflating, some giant swimming pool apparatus.  After I had talked myself into torpor, I would say I had to study or something and he would go off just as he had come.

Once or twice maybe I went over to Rosco’s house.  He had a couple of younger brothers who were not rounded.  I went over only when Mr. Rosco was not there.  I got the feeling Mr. Rosco scared the Brothers Rosco shitless.  We would go down to their huge basement, and we would hear their mother playing piano music upstairs.  She was always playing the piano.

Downstairs in that basement, as Rosco said, they had everything necessary to re-create the world.  They had machines and tools of all kinds.  They had a big kiln for making pottery and expensive machine tools—I mean the kind of tools that are used to create the parts for other tools, like milling tools, I think they are called, and another machine that made screws.

And at the back of the basement was a really big door with a lock on it.  One day Rosco decided to open it for me; you could see doing that made the younger brothers nervous, like they weren’t supposed to or maybe what was inside made them nervous because, while there was space for people, it was filled with supplies, food and water and everything wrapped in a kind of paper (oil paper maybe) I had never seen, and at the very back of that a row of rifles all strung together with a chain and locked up.  We can’t touch the rifles, Rosco said, as if I were just dying to touch their rifles.

And as I was leaving they showed me around the side of the house a regular big old garbage truck that their father had bought and was remodeling and reinforcing with extra layers of metal so that after the bomb had gone off they would have something to ride around in.

I made up this little story to explain things to myself.  Mr. Rosco had been in the military in Poland and had killed people and seen people killed in World War 2 and knew how people could kill each other.  He had seen masses of bodies piled high.  Maybe he was a Nazi and he had come to America with his young bride, who bore him three sons, and then went insane and played the piano all the time.  And then he set about preparing himself and his sons for the day when everything, but them, would end.

Maybe the little story helped to explain Rosco to me or maybe what I had seen scared me and I needed a little story to explain that.  It got so I just dreaded hearing somebody yell, Nick, Rosco’s here.

Gopher!

Being that my father was a farmer, albeit a rank failure as one, maybe I inherited some man of the soil genes because starting in junior high and through high school and later when I was living in the green room, I was appointed keeper of the family garden.  We had a whole .5 acre down back, so the garden wasn’t exactly a modest affair.

gopher trapI would start preparing the soil in March when it would be all clumped and hard to work from the rains.  That dirt had a lot of clay in it, but I would turn it over and then make a trip to the chicken shit place and dump the chicken shit all over what I had turned.  In early April the soil dried and became workable.

I planted zucchini and corn seeds, and being a worried wart, I was all the time coming to see if they were coming up or not.  Cause if they didn’t come up when they were supposed to the timing might be off for the summer heat.  So one evening I am sitting there admiring my handy work, and  right before my eyes the finely worked earth around a young and healthy look zucchini bud starts to move and then the whole zucchini disappeared right before my eyes.

Fucking gophers!

I had tried about everything to tame them except poison, not because I was ecologically conscious but because I didn’t want to take the risk of poisoning my self some how.  I had tried the various folk methods.  I stuck hoses in their holes and ran water for hours but to no avail.  Once the area behind the garden sank down and once the water went into a neighbor’s yard.  Then I did the thing with car flares, and went around sticking them in the holes till it looked like the backyard was about to become a volcano.

 The only thing that really “worked” or seemed to produce concrete results was a gopher trap.  So seeing my zucchini disappear I went out and bought a new one.  It looked like a rat trap, though much bigger, and had teeth designed to clamp down and break the gopher’s neck.  I was careful with those damn things.   You’d put some cheese or something on it as bait and then jam the trap as far as you could in a hole, and then come out the next morning, pull the thing out by its chain and see if you’d had any luck.

I swear that particular summer I was like the Great White Hunter of Gophers.  Every morning I hooked something.  I would pry open the jaws and throw the corpse over into our neighbor’s back yard which was all covered with weeds.  I mean they wouldn’t notice it.  Then one day I pulled out the Moby Dick of gophers. This sucker was huge and it had reddish head hair and a reddish tuff beard just like me and the fucker wasn’t dead.

So I went and got a two pound hammer out of the back of the truck, and there I am about to perform the coup de grace when my little brother comes up and goes on, Is it still alive?  Are you going to kill it with that hammer?  Are you going to hit on the head? You know it looks like you? And I just sort of blew and said, would you get the fuck out of here, goddamn it to hell.  And—wham–as he walked off, looking hurt, I splattered the things head.

I apologized to my brother and said I don’t know why but I just got angry for some reason maybe because I felt hoisted on my own petard.

Not Necessarily Stoned

One Saturday morning during the summer I was working that punch press, I heard “Purple Haze” on the radio and thought, wow, what the fuck was that, and did something I had never done before or since.  As soon as the song was over, I got in my trusty old Plymouth and went out and bought the JimiJimi Hendrix Experience (“Have you ever been experienced, not necessarily stoned but beautiful”) immediately.  The problem was though, I didn’t have stereo, but 3 or 4 groups of guys from my college were summering in that apartment building, so I went down stairs and knocked on one door, and asked if I could use their stereo so that I could hear all of this album.

So we sat around and listened to it once with guys coming and going; then we all got stoned and sat down and listened to it again.  I wanted to listen again, but I didn’t know these guys all that well.  So I thanked them and said, since I didn’t have  a stereo, they could keep the album if I could come down and listen to it once in a while. They said sure.

A couple weeks later I hear this knock at the door and one of the guys from the apartment downstairs was standing there, looking disheveled and wide eyed, and he said something like, look man I know you don’t have much money, and we only go through this life once, you know man, and well, here I would like you to have this, you know, it’s all one and what goes around comes around, like Karma, you know.  And I said something like while I was a bit short, I was doing OK, but he wouldn’t hear of it and handed me this big wad of money, and then he gave me a big fucking hug, like at a time when people didn’t go around hugging all the time.

This guy was on LSD, so I didn’t see any point in arguing with him, but thanked him and he went on his way.  I checked the roll; $500 mostly in 20’s.  I stashed the roll because I was pretty sure once he came down and started thinking about it he would want the money back.

 I never took LSD.  I was tempted.  Guys would come around saying they had like seen God; they had broken through to the other side and kicked open the doors of perception.  But other guys would come around and say they had seen snakes with teeth coming out of their friend’s asshole.  I just didn’t want to chance it.  I knew that my connection to what people called “reality” was pretty screwed up.  My consciousness was naturally altered and I really didn’t need any additional chemical imbalances.

The guy held out, to his credit, for almost two weeks.  I mean it must have been a bit humiliating to give a guy $500 out of the goodness of your heart and then come to ask for it back.  But he did looking pretty chagrined and wondered did I have any of that money left.  Sure I said and went back to the bedroom, took a 20 off the roll, and gave him the rest of it.  Thanks man, he said and started to make excuses.  It’s all there, I said because I could tell he was dying to count it, but, hey, I did use 20.  I’ll get it back to you if you want.

Oh, hell, no man, he said relieved to be able to keep up a pretense to generosity, you keep it.  My pleasure.

God, but I am one tactful guy!

Retail

This dates me, but when I went to college there was actually a beatnik there.  I think he was a graduate student, but he had a beard.  The only beard around.  So I and my friend, who also had a thick beard, decided to have a race to see who could raise a beard first.  I don’t remember who baggiewon, but I was sitting eating lunch and this kid from the class behind me sits downs and leans over and whispers, “You got any grass?”  I said yes, and he said, how much, and I said, I didn’t have bulk at the moment.  And not long after that another guy asked me the same question.

Apparently having a beard was like wearing a billboard that says, I sell grass.  So I decided to look into it and found out from my friend Bernard, who had pretty much dropped out by then and was getting by selling drugs and writing papers for people (he was a whiz-bang writer), that I could buy a pound of grass for 80 dollars.  I started doing the math.  A pound was 16 ounces and lids (an ounce) were going for 10 dollars.  I could like double my investment with one purchase, or said Bernard, you can smoke it.

I bought over the next six months 3 pounds of grass.  By today’s standards the quality was ridiculously poor—mostly seeds and stems. I bought a little scale and would weigh an ounce and put it in a plastic baggie.  I had no end of customers.  But the whole retail business was just too much for me.

I would sit there looking at my baggies and get all worried that the stuff I was selling to X was nothing but seeds and stems, so I would take some of the good stuff from the stuff I was selling Y and then put it in X’s baggie.  Or I would take some of the really good stuff from my own stash and stick it in X’s baggie. And then I would get stoned and like drive myself nuts about whether or not I was cheating somebody out of their ten bucks.

And then there was the risk factor.  I went to a really small college; I knew most of the faces there.  But those faces sometimes would bring along a friend who wanted to buy, and I didn’t like selling to people I didn’t know.  I had regulars I trusted but the whole thing was starting to spread, and I got telephone calls on the dorm phone.  And like I never got calls from anybody.  Like did I have some, and when would I have some, and sometimes, it would be a guy flipping out.  Idiots!  Like smoking a little dope was going to fry their brains.  But then I didn’t know what kind of mental problems these people might have, so I would have to sit there on the phone and calm them down or go meet them somewhere for a cup of coffee.

That was my one shot at doing retail.  The way I saw it people could make a hell of a lot of money in retail if they didn’t worry about being fair to each customer or weren’t concerned with possible negative side effects on their customer’s health and well being.  And then there was the “mark up.”  A 100% for doing nothing really, except worrying that is.  It just seemed too much like magic to me.  I was used to working for money.

 So I cut my beard and when people asked if I had any I told them to go see Bernard.

Punch Press

 The summer between junior and senior year of college, three of us rented an apartment.  I needed money for rent, so I went to the unemployment office per usual and picked up a job quickly at a punch pressfactory in Glendale for maybe 25 cents more than minimum wage.  The factory made earphones for headsets to be used by soldiers in Viet Nam.   Mostly women worked there doing the finely tuned digital stuff that women are supposed to be able to do well, soldering wires and the little speaker into a metal casing that was then covered with rubber.  I was hired to work with two Mexican American guys who were already there running a punch press.

Punch presses come in all shapes and sizes.  Our seven foot high jobs were run by a single operator.  You sat on the stool in front of the punch press, and in our case we then pulled, following a guide, a five inch wide strip of metal under the punch part of the press, and then you pushed a petal and the damn press would come down like with ten thousand pounds of force (crash!) and punch out the metal container that the electrical stuff would go into. Then you picked up the metal part and threw it into a container, and then you did it again, and again, and so on for eight fucking hours.

Working as a brick mason tender caused me great physical pain; working as an assistant manager of a Newberry’s Department store was an act of despair, but this damn machine was petrifyingly boring.  I couldn’t day dream because you had to busy your hands and be conscious of the machine or you might mash your whole hand.

Sometimes, I don’t know why, a young Mexican American woman with large breasts would work at a table across from me.  The press was in the way so I couldn’t see her face except now and then but when the press was up, as I adjusted the metal to its proper place, I could see her breasts.  So I would punch the press, up the press would go, I would look at the young woman’s breasts and then I would punch again.  Sometimes when I was looking, her movements would make her breasts sort of jiggle and that was a special treat.

The two Mexican American youths got through the day smoking grass.  They started at the 10 o’clock break, reloaded at noon, and topped it off at the afternoon break.  They were friendly and ask me to join them, but I was afraid to.  They would start to talking in Spanish and laughing (a universal language) and I would get worried they were going to crush their hands.  The smaller skinny one was already married and a father of two; they had been fucking around and he got her pregnant and that was that.  The other guy was sort of fat but he was engaged, he said, to be married.  I was astonished, but I was a college boy.

I always go to work.  That’s my training.  So I went to that job every day, but one day it was just killing me.  I started to get a stomach ache.  Actually I think I convinced myself that I had a stomach ache.  So I went to the boss and said I was sick to my stomach.  I expected him to be annoyed, but he wasn’t even that.  Then go home, he said.  I didn’t want to go home.  I was in some sort of moody despairing place.  So I got in my old Plymouth, went to Griffith Park and lay down on the grass near the carousel and lit up a number.

I don’t know if it was the grass or the day or just me but laying there but I remember feeling that carousel was about the saddest thing in the whole fucking world.

The Egg Factory

When I was getting low on money, I would go down to the unemployment office and look for a day job or temporary fill in work.  Once I got a job driving around and administering medical questionnaires to people out the boonies, and another time I got a job at an egg factory.  Many, many eggs and not a chicken anywhere in sight.  But the eggs were brought in on racks in big trucks.  Then they were cleaned because they had chicken shit all over them.  Then they were candled to make sure the eggs weren’t bloody or didn’t have a little chicken in them.  These eggs were sold to people who make cookies and stuff like that, so who knows, maybe every now and then a person gets a little ground up chicken embryo in a cookie.

Uuuummm, uuummm good!

Then the eggs were packed in big brown boxes because these particular eggs were being sent to feed the troops in Viet Nam.

The chicken factory was pretty far inland and hot.  I wasn’t there long enough to get to know the people; they were mostly women and Mexican Americans.  The main topic of conversation in the coffee room was how nobody could eat chicken any more.  Somebody would say, “I drove by this barbeque place and it smelled good.  But then I remembered it was chicken.”  Or:  “I haven’t touched a piece of chicken in a year.”  Or: “Even thinking about chicken makes me want to gag.”  I couldn’t quite figure it since there were no chickens there; but as I said the place was hot and was rank with the smell of chicken shit.

The other topic of conversation was the woman, who quite recently, got her hair caught in the conveyer belt and was scalped.  Contrary to popular belief, the act of scalping a person, though quite painful, does not kill a person, though I supposed if one remained scalped for very long infection would set in and one would die.  But they saved this woman’s scalp and they eventually got it back on her, though she had not returned to work.

I worked there for a couple of weeks I guess for minimum wage doing whatever they told me to do.  I helped unload the trucks.  The eggs came in flats that were stuck in racks that were about six feet high and had wheels on them, so you could push them around to where they had to go.  And I did a lot of sweeping and washing stuff down with a hose to keep down the stink.  I wanted to do the candling where you stood at the end of the line and a bright light would make the inside of the egg visible so you could tell if it had blood or not.  But I never go to do that job since it perhaps required an expertise I did not have.

One day, they had to move a truck away from the dock for some reason, and as they pulled it away, the truck went up a slight incline in the blacktopped lot, and all of a sudden rack after rack after rack of eggs came falling out of the back of the truck.  Somebody had forgotten to refasten the restraining chain.  Man what a mess.  The whole lot turned into a giant omelet and within a matter of minutes, it seemed, every fly within a square mile had gotten the message that plenty of food was available.  So I was sent out to hose and started to wash down the lot.

 I never saw the owner of the place.  It was run by the “foreman,” a skinny white guy who went around telling people what to do and how to do it.  When he saw that omelet, he went berserk.  He started swearing at the top of his lungs.  Spit came flying out of his mouth.  He picked up things and threw them.  H jumped up and down and pounded his feet on the pavement. He got red in the face and I thought he was going to have a fucking convulsion.  I had never seen anything like it.

I had heard the phrase “straw boss” and really hadn’t understood what it meant.  This guy was a straw boss; he gave orders like he was the boss, but the orders, whatever they were, really came from his boss.  He had no power but what his positioned conferred on him, and if things got fucked up, like with the omelet, he could scream and curse and maybe fire somebody, but he would be the one that ultimately got the shaft from his boss.  His fury arouse from his impotence.

Me, I hadn’t been anywhere near that particular truck.

 

 

candling