Marked Men

"They tell me you play the guitar," he said in a rather gruff voice.

"Yessir, I play a bit," I said. After all George and I had been practicing every day for about a month or two and we had mastered the C, Am, F, and G chords.  These chords were used in many early rock and roll songs.  Maybe we thought we would be the next rock and roll duo.  Anyhow, girls liked  rock and roll singers. On this day George and I had gone up to Mrs. McAllister's store for a Coke and a pack of Nabs when we saw old man Kelley. Mama had always called him that. I don't know why. She said he played at dances when she was younger and he was sitting on a nail keg by the stove

"Let me see your hands," he demanded.

"What?" I answered in surprise.

"C'mon, let me see your hands, palms up," he insisted.

"Okay," I said obligingly.  Mama had taught me to be respectful to older folks, Mr. Kelley was well over fifty, and to me anybody over thirty was old.

"You ain't no picker, boy!" he said. His  gold capped tooth caught the light and sparkled when he spoke.

I didn't know what to say, but I knew better than to argue.  (Mama taught me that too!) I just stared at this tall angular man with thinning reddish gray hair in faded bib overalls and chambray shirt.

"Maybe I could see your hands so I would know what a guitar picker's hands should look like," I said.

"Aw right," he said looking down at me over his sharp pointed nose with pale gray eyes. He held his hands out in front of me, and the first thing I noticed was that part of his middle finger on his left hand was missing.

"Sir, how'd you lose part of that finger?" I asked.

He lifted his hand and examined the place where once the fingernail and the end of the finger had been. "Every craft leaves its mark," he said.  "I build houses, and I lost that finger when I was putting the roof on old preacher Gadsdin's house.  Been a long time ago now."

Later, I started thinking about what he had said concerning trades leaving their mark, and I figured what he said was true. I remembered that I had seen a film one time about race car drivers, and each of them had a limp, because they had gotten some bones broken in a wreck on the racetrack. When I was a kid you could always spot a long haul truck driver by his arms. Yes, they would be big for muscling those big trucks around before the advent of power steering, but the left arm would have a suntan.  The right arm would not.  Men who did hard labor with their hands always had callouses, but pencil pushers did not.  When I worked in textile mills in my youth I noticed that certain jobs left their mark on the worker.  For example, spinning frame doffers were small quick men who developed a permanent stoop from their job.  My father was a cloth doffer in a cotton mill, and he had a huge overdeveloped muscle on the left side of his back. Years of carrying rolls of cloth weighing over  one hundred pounds caused the muscle to become enlarged.   Once, I shook hands with a swordmaker in Toledo, Spain.  I could feel that he was missing part of a finger.

Perhaps one of the most interesting marks I've ever seen was on an old retired electrician from a manufacturing plant. I was talking to him and some other older fellows once at an old mill village cafe. As he picked up his Coca-Cola in the small glass bottle I noticed his hands.  "What happened to your hand?"  I asked.

He slowly set down the bottle and began to massage his right hand with his left. There were two huge callouses on the first joints of his index and middle fingers of his right hand. "Well," he said, "I'll tell you. You see I worked in that mill over there for over thirty years. I was the company electrician. We didn't have all those fancy meters and things in those days.  If you wanted to know if a circuit was hot, you just stuck your knuckles to it. If you got a tingle, you knowed it was live.  And that's how I got those big callouses, checking for current!"

Every trade does leave its mark, but what does that have to do with playing the guitar?  Well, Mr. Kelley saw that I didn't have the mark of a guitar player.  My finger tips did not have callouses!

A Little Bit off the Main Road

Wikipedia image

"I remember this well," I said as the tires made a crunching sound on the gravel of the rural road. We were driving in the piedmont area of South Carolina.  My family has lived there since the early 1700's, and I guess I still have roots there. On this day we had visited another family cemetery searching for information for Claudette's never ending quest for knowledge about our ancestors. The road was in deep shadow from the tall pines and assorted hardwoods. In early summer the weather was warm, and I could smell the scent of the pines through the open sunroof. The road seemed to be relatively untraveled.  I remembered a time when the tall pines were once fields of corn, oats, and some cotton. That seemed to have been a lifetime ago.

"Hey, let's stop!" I said somewhat excitedly as we passed a dilapidated country store, adding, "I remember this place."

"Doesn't look like much to me, " Claudette said.

"This was Papa J's* place," I answered with a fondness in my voice, "I spent a lot of time here."

"At a country store?"

"Yeah, but it was more than that."

"Oh, yeah?"she asked.

"Get  out. I'll show you around."

"It looks abandoned," she said with some reservation in her voice.

"I'm sure it is. Mama told me that old Joe Carter  died several years ago.  He didn't have any children.  He didn't even have a wife.  Some said he was too mean for any woman to put up with him. But he didn't seem that bad to me," I told her as I got out of the car.  "Bought many a dollar's worth of gas from that pump," I said motioning to the old gas pump near the "Pure" sign. "Do remember Pure Oil gas stations?"

"No, I don't think we had those in California," she said following me to the building.

It was a small cinder block building about thirty feet wide and maybe forty feet deep. The screen door advertising Colonial Bread hung on one hinge. I pulled back the screen and pushed on the wooden door. It made a screeching sound as it opened.

"I don't think we should be here," she said with a bit of trepidation adding, "It's trespassing!"

"Did you see a "No Trespassing" sign?" I asked.

'No...but..."

"Aw c'mon.  Where's you sense of adventure," (a bit of verbal prodding on my part).

"Okay, I'm right behind you," she said in resignation.

The room was full of dust and trash. Spider webs were everywhere, and I'm sure I heard a small rodent scurry away. There was enough light from the broken windows to make out the interior. To our right was the battered and rusty form of a Coca-Cola drink box, the kind they once had that you could serve yourself from. The pot belly stove was in the corner, but the stove pipe to the ceiling was missing. There were the remains of straight-backed chairs with ratty cane bottoms. This was the corner where the old-timers would while away their days smoking their pipes and playing checkers. There was a counter in front of the back wall extending almost the complete width of the room.  Behind it were some shelves that once held cans of pork 'n' beans, sardines, potted meat, and crackers. Fishermen would stop by and buy the these on their way to the lake.  I remembered that there was another drink box behind the counter where Papa J kept the cold beer, the coldest PBR's in the county, and under that counter he kept a sawed-off twelve gauge shotgun loaded with double ought buckshot.

"What a mess," Claudette said.

"I know.  Nobody's been in here in years," I added. "Now, let me show you this. Follow me."
I took her hand and led her through the door in the corner of the back wall into another room.
It was a lot like I remembered.  In the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling on a fabric covered electric cord, was a brass socket with a clear incandescent bulb. In the corner and against the wall were a few tables with straight-backed chairs. One of the tables was made of those huge wooden spools utility companies get underground cable on.  There was a Miller High Life neon sign on the wall near the back door. Opposite the Miller sign on the other side of the door was the jukebox.

"What a dump!" She said.

"It may be, but once upon a time on Friday and Saturday nights it rocked."

"You would hang out here?" she asked.

"Yeah.  I worked in the mill down the road. It's closed now but in those days two hudred people worked there.  After I worked second shift, that's four to twelve, I'd come by here to unwind on the way home."

"You must have been bad off."

I chose to ignore this comment.  "You gotta quarter?" I asked.

"What for?"

"I want to see if that old jukebox works," I said.

"Are you crazy?  That thing hasn't played in years.  But, if it will help get us back on the road, I'll give you a quarter," she said with resignation in her voice, a tone I rarely heard.

She put the quarter in my hand and I moved to the ancient jukebox. It was a Seeburg with chrome glass tubes on the front and mirrors inside. It had the buttons on the front and held a hundred songs. It was great and had provided most of the illumination in the room.  There was dust and spider webs all over it, and one of the glass tubes in the from was broken. But I could still read the names of the songs, though most were yellowed with age.  There was Runaway, Twist and Shout, My Girl, Ring of Fire, Louie Louie, Crazy, Only The Lonely, Runaround Sue, I Fall to Pieces, and many more.  "What do you want to hear?" I asked.

"Anything. Let's just get out of here.  I still think we're trespassing."

I dropped the quarter in the slot and banged on the side of the jukebox until I heard the quarter fall, then made my choices. As if by magic the old machine came to life. I watched in amazement as the mechanical arm selected the record and placed it on the turntable before the tone arm dropped on it, and it began to play. I turned to Claudette and said, "Let's dance."

She came into my arms as the Platters began to sing, "Heavenly shades of night are falling, it's twilight time...." I held her close and closed my eyes as we began to move with the music, "Out of the mist a voice is calling, it's twilight time..." In my mind's eye I could see the place as it once was. Over next to the juke box was that  woman in her late forties all painted up.  She only looked good at closing time. I don't even remember her name.  In the corner was Frankie Willingham and Sonny Pratt with their girl friends.  They were arguing as usual about who had the fastest car.  Before the night was over they'd decide who was faster on that straight stretch of Highway 11 called Fairlane Flats.  No doubt money would exchange hands.

Sitting alone was Virginia Grimesley, the building contractor's wife. She was once a high school beauty queen, and some twenty years later she still turned heads. Her husband Billy spent a lot of time out of town working. Everybody knew that Deputy Armstrong kept her company in her husband's absence.

That was Freddie Fisher by himself.  He was a pretty big guy with a beer gut, but there was a lot of muscle there too. He wore his hair long and combed back in a duck tail. With pointed nose and black rimmed glasses he usually had a sour look on his face.  Freddie was known to carry a pistol, a snub-nosed thirty-eight. I never saw him use it and didn't want to.

There were a few more folks there too, mostly men and women who'd just finished their shift at the mill and had a little lint stuck to their clothes. It was going to be a good night at Papa J's, I could tell. But then..."Together at last a twilight time." the record was over.  I opened my eyes.

I followed the lead of my best girl out the door.

Twenty minutes later we were going through a small town.  "Think we could stop at a 7 Eleven for a Pabst Blue Ribbon?"

She did not answer.

*The characters in this post are real but their names have been changed.

Body Slammed

Dear Tony,
You ain't gonna believe what I seen the other day! I was walkin' out the door and on my way across the front porch for another day at the shop. It was a purty sprang day and the dew was still on the first flowers.  But I was kinda draggin' a bit 'cause I'd stayed up late watching WWF wrestlin'.  I mean, those pro wrestling dudes are really bad.  I love that stuff! Had to fix my own breakfast though.  Darlene was kinda ticked off at me 'cause I stayed up late rather than goin' to bed when she did. You know how women are 'bout stuff like that. I don mind eatin' my own cookin' every now and agin.  I was almost to the end of the porch when I seen this ole bluejay leisurely

Wikipedia Photo

flying 'cross the driveway maybe ten feet off the ground.  Prob'bly lookin' for breakfast.  All of a sudden POW! He was hit in mid-air.  Body slammed to the ground.  Just like ole Nature Boy woulda done it in the ring back in the old days. He didn't know what hit him. It happened so fast. That jaybird landed on his side. I could see that big black "V" on his chest. That "V" didn't stand for victory that day. He looks up over his shoulder at the sparrow hawk that had him pinned down. That  little bitty hawk wasn't even as big as that jaybird.  But he had 'im down allright! I guess America's littlest hawk hadn't read that he was only 'sposed to eat bugs and such. Now he couldn't dive at 150 mph like his cousins the peregrine falcons but he had the same moves. He dived right down outa the sky and nailed that ole bluejay.
And you know what he did then?
He just sat on that old jaybird like he was sho nuff somebody. I believe he leaned back a stuck his chest out. Then he just flew away. Mr. Bluejay righted himself, shook hisself off and casually flew away to, but in a different direction.

I think there is a moral in this story but I'm not sure what.  Maybe, it means don't bite off more than you can chew.  But if you do just stick you chest out and look around at everybody just like you meant to do it!

See Ya'll Later,
Bubba