Smitty was using his cigarette lighter as a flashlight to examine the many small reels of smut he had in his box. I thought that the name Smutty would be a more fitting moniker for the man and I chuckled at this revelation. But I knew it wasn’t funny and I wasn’t having any fun. I realized it was the pill taking its effect.
I made my drink. I was waiting for the lights to come back on but they never did. The record reached its end, the needle quietly spinning and skipping on a groove near the spindle. Smitty lifted the arm and dropped it where the first song started. We were about to be subjected to the same dreadful ELO all over again.
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
