There are always a lot of water main breaks this time of
year. Seeing the men working in holes
dug in the road always makes me think of my old boss, Dirty John.
When I was in college, I worked full-time for the university’s
physical plant as a “student plumber.”
For the princely sum of $3.75 an hour, I, and my co-worker Abdul,
sometimes found ourselves up to our knees in the frigid, muddy water, digging
around the burst pipes so the union plumbers could be called in to complete the
job. Dirty John was making good wages of
course, but he was right there with us, cursing the cold, working as hard as we
did. He was about fifteen years older
than I was and had a bad back. He never
complained.
Most days, we were finished with work early, free to play
euchre while we fielded emergency calls from the school buildings and family
housing units. We laughed a lot, playing
as hard as we worked, occasionally cashing in all the abandoned soda bottles to
pay for for a feast from Domino’s Pizza.
Sometimes, I think it was the best part of the years I spent in
college. I was nineteen, being treated
like a man because I could be counted on to work like one.
Abdul was in a frat, which we visited occasionally, on the
clock and off. One night we attended a
bachelor party for Abdul’s brother, an evening I can’t forget no matter how
hard I try. When the beer ran out before
the entertainment had arrived, our spirits were kept high by passing around
fifths of liquor, of various types, taking a pull from the bottle and passing
it on to the next guy. I won’t discuss
the strippers…and you can’t make me…but the last thing I remember that night
was losing my lunch while leaning over the porch railing. Dirty John whispered into my ear between
heaves, “Don’t puke on my bike, Sport.”
He meant it. As I was not beaten
to a bloody pulp, I can only assume that I missed his Harley with my bazooka
barfs.
That is one story that we all shared. But we shared a lot of stories from our own
lives, trusting each other with information no one else knew. To my knowledge, no one ever betrayed a confidence. I intend to betray Dirty John’s today.
With no children of his own, Dirty John was fatherly, in his
way, towards his young charges. He didn’t
give advice or hugs. He didn’t loan us
money when we’d blown all of ours on a girl we’d met in a bar the night
before. He was just there, a constant presence,
someone who knew me well enough to walk up beside me when something went wrong
and say, “You fucked up, Sport.” It wasn’t
a condemnation. It was a question, as
in, “What are you going to do about it?”
One thing he didn’t like was being called “Crazy John”. It would be imperceptible to most, but to
those of us that spent a lot of time with him, we saw the pain in his eyes when
he heard the words. He would blink and
recover, responding with a smile, “That’s right, and I got papers to prove it.” And he did.
He showed them to me.
John had served in Vietnam.
He once told me, “Those were the greatest two years of my life, because
I got paid to shoot people.” He
described some of the horrors he had seen, adding, “I had pictures, but the
doctors took ‘em away from me.” He was
just another West Virginia boy who chose picking up a rifle over picking up a
coal shovel. I don’t know which would
have been better for him.
There were times when the stories where so sensational that
you had to doubt their veracity. And
then there were other times, like the day Abdul committed a minor infraction in
a card game, when John whipped out his buck knife and slashed him across the
hand, cutting him nearly to the bone along the lifeline, where the thumb met
the palm. It took twelve stitches to
close the wound. If Abdul had said a
word, John would have been fired the next day, but it didn’t happen. John’s contrition was immediate, though the
damage had been done.
Abdul graduated not long after the incident and I flunked
out a short time later. After leaving
school, I never saw John again. It was
shocking to hear, a mere seven years later, that John had died of a heart
attack at the age of forty-two. I’d
never made the fifteen-mile trip to visit him and recall the times we’d spent
in a hole dug in the road, the water pouring into the rubber boots that were
supposed to insulate us. I was told,
second-hand, that he had found love with a second wife and had two daughters
that he doted on. I hope that is true,
and that the years that followed our brief association were blissful.
I tell you all of that to tell you this…there is an election
coming up in a few days. There are a lot
of candidates telling you to “Support the Troops” that don’t support them with
their votes in Congress. We have to
remember that these soldiers, men and women, have put their lives on the line
and have scars we can’t see even after their physical wounds have healed.
Dirty John, wherever you are, I’m sorry I told some of your
secrets. Just know I did it with the
best of intentions. I miss you, for the
man that you were. I love you, for the
man you wanted to be. May every
returning soldier receive the care to which he or she is entitled.
We, as a country, may be stuck in a muddy hole right
now. But we can still climb out.
