Townies

Townies

By William J. Wood Jr.


We were townies. Tucson townies. High school antics were fresh in our memories and our visions of a comfortable middle class future were amorphous and mixed with visions of some kind of future that would be different from the bland complacency of the suburbs. So, since we didn’t have any real concrete goals, experiences had their own kind of value and needn’t be connected to anything.
It was the summer of Nixon’s impeachment. It was the summer I moved out of my parent’s house after drifting home at 2:00 a.m. and finding my mother waiting up for me, asleep in her rocking chair. It was so different than the freedom I’d had in a dorm room in Flagstaff, I had to move out and get my own place so I could breathe.
My friend from those dorm room days, Rube, aka Richard Rubinstein, had found a place on Flower, one of those neighborhoods that really looks like the desert because no one takes care of any landscaping. It was perfect for us. We could have parties all night if we wanted and no one noticed.
It was the summer I got a job at a door factory, PreFit Door. I always got jobs in the summer, because I wanted to think I was working my way through college, just like my father had. My father had risen from the poverty of small town Texas, growing up with a large family in white, plank-board houses. He was now manager of the Merrill Lynch office in Tucson. One day, when I was eleven, I was riding with him in one of his Cadillacs, or maybe it was the Buick Electra, and he told me I was almost twelve and I needed to think about finding a full time job in the summer, because he had always had jobs.
It wasn’t bad advice, nor was the goal of paying for one’s education. But, as time went by, I realized things were different in the American 70’s compared to the 40’s of my father’s youth. People no longer hired twelve-year-olds to sweep out their stores. There were laws against that. I spent a lot of time futilely looking for actual jobs before the age of fifteen. I ended up mowing lawns, selling flower seeds and throwing the Fort Worth Star Telegrams either into, or very close to, dark, pre-dawn porches.
So now I was in this cycle of working summers between college semesters so I could feel like I was paying for my education. I was only paying for a pitiful fraction of my education due to the disparity between college tuition and wages paid to nineteen-year-olds.
The PreFit job was a swing shift, three to eleven. Rube and I took Spanish class every morning at the University of Arizona, then he worked construction with his father’s crew and I went to the door factory. Often, when I got back to the Flower Street house after my shift the party was already underway. There was no lack of friends who were still stuck in family homes and needed a place to hang out and party. We’d get a keg and make sure the TV was on showing the daily review of the Nixon impeachment.
The factory bosses at PreFit must have liked my work ethic, because when they needed new employees on the swing shift, Dee, the day foreman, who was a spitting image of George Gobels, crew cut and all, asked me if I knew anyone wanting a job. I got my best friend from high school, Jay Goodhart to sign on. Soon, Jay’s brother Jaimie and a friend of his were working on our night crew.
We made doors to supply the never-ending sun-belt building frenzy. I brought the approrpriate blanks, oak, walnut or whatever, over on the fork lift and slid them on steel rollers into the butt router. Jaimie pushed a red button to make the three butt routers swing in and grind out the hinge plate reliefs. Then, Jaimie and I screwed in the hinges with power drivers and slid the door off the rollers to Jay and Ralph, who made the casings on angle-iron platforms.
The day shift caser was Terry, an unsmiling black dude, with dreadlocks. Just after Jay had started doing the casing job, Terry walked up to him at the shift change and said, “Don’t you be fuckin’ with my hammer.” We weren’t sure what Terry meant, since Jay had to use the power nailer to make the casings. Jay was worried about what would constitute “fuckin” with the nailer. He was very careful with it.
The foreman of the swing shift was Paul Dibello, an alcoholic living at a Halfway House. Dibello’s son had been killed in VietNam and he frequently inferred us that it was the cause of his alcoholism, but who knows. Dibello combed his salt-grey hair backwards with a slick, Bryl-Cream look. He was a large man and even though there was some alcoholic spindliness to his arms, he looked strong.
Dibello was deferential around Dee and the day shift, but as soon as they had gone and we had complete control of the factory, an evil leer would appear on his face and he would rub his hands together as if lusting for a carnal feast. “Alright you zit bitches, get to work. I’m going up to the office to masturbate. Eeeyiiyii did I have some great sex last night.”
We never knew if Dibello really did masturbate in the office. It didn’t matter. Dibello was beautifully different than any boss we’d ever had and we quickly morphed into a crack factory team that could run through our orders at twice the speed of the day shift. Dibello would occasionally come around during our frenzies and amuse himself with perverse discourse. Like, he’d look at Jamie and say, “I’d like to get you in the bathroom. Come on. Let’s go. You can be my zit bitch.” And Jamie would say something like, “Fuck off, you fucking perv.” And Dibello would howl with evil laughter, proud of his boys.
Dibello drove a faded, avacado-green Impala, that Jay dubbed the “monkey-shit green Impala.” Years later, we’d still report to each other possible sightings of the monkey-shit green Impala.
As we got faster and faster at turning out the door orders, we had more and more time on our hands. First, there were the fork lift races. If you really cranked hard on a fork lift, you could get it on two wheels. Dibello told us about seeing a guy crushed to death when his fork lift turned over. We laughed. He howled.
After a while, the day shift was in awe of us. They kept giving us bigger and bigger orders and we kept knocking them down with huge rows of assembled doors stacked up for the day crew to oogle at.
We took our breaks on a little loading dock outside the hot factory interior. Tucson cools down reliably at night and there’s nothing like that desert evening air to bring on the peaceful easy. The only worker not originating from my clique was Ralph, a laconic, soft-spoken doper who fit in well with our crew. Ralph was happy to share his dubes during our breaks. I don’t remember who finally got the idea to get the beers, but Dibello was quickly convinced to make a run into town and come back with some cold ones for his crack crew.
It was during our loading dock parties that Dibello entertained us with ribald tales from his greasy, cum-filled lifestyle. He knew how to spice up stories of hotel room conquests with Hustler-like panache that left our young imaginations and inexperienced groins throbbing. Dibello had a much more interesting life than we did. What really amazed us, was that he had not the slightest hint of guilt or shame.
As we got faster and faster on the assembly line, we had more and more time out on the loading dock. After a while, Dibello was bringing back cases instead of six packs. We tossed the empties on the factory roof. But drinking cases got old after a while. The buzz of cold beer only made us more fascinated by the real depravity available in the seedy downtown bars that Dibello inhabited.
I think Dibello was amused at seeing how far he could pied-piper us into his world. There was no hesitation on his part when one of us finally suggested that we take one of the trucks and go to one of his bars. We went to The Hurricane on Broadway.
Ralph didn’t want to go and Jamie and his friend were too young, so it was just Jay and me in the booth of the dim and smoky bar. A thin man with a large adam’s apple was singing Hank William’s songs on the stage. Another thin man was doing a strange, self-absorbed solo dance on the dance floor. This same exact setting was in place every time we came to The Hurricane. Rarely there would be a couple actually dancing with each other on the floor, but usually it was just the soused scarecrow.
The bartender came over and looked at us suspiciously. He didn’t think Jay and I were old enough to be in there. Dibello told him Jay was his son and he’d vouch for me too. The barman didn’t want to piss off Dibello, who was not only a regular, but was crazy and potentially violent.
The bar was, in reality, pretty boring, but it was fascinating to us as it was the portal to an X-rated life. We’d sit and sip our beers and watch the dancing zombie do his strange shuffle to Your Cheatin’Heart. Once, a friend of Dibello’s, a surly, stubble-faced drunk, walked up to the booth and stared violently at Jay.
“Who the hell is this?”
Dibello almost shouted. “Don’t get any ideas, you sordid son of a bitch.”
“I wanna know who this is.”
“He’s my son, goddamit. And he can outfuck you any day.”
That broke the spell.
“Why didn’t you say so.” The man offered Jay his hand. “Name’s Gene.”
We shook hands and Gene sat with us for a while in the booth, then left.
Once, one of Dibello’s girlfriend’s came over. She was not bad for a middle-aged lush. She told Dibello that she liked Jay, so Jay went back to the bar with Dibello after work. I don’t know exactly what happened, but Jay ended up with them at a sleazy hotel, where some kind of scene went down, but no sex.
One hot afternoon, I rumbled into the dirt parking lot at PreFit in my Volkswagon and saw a small volcano of empty beer cans by our loading dock. They’d sent a maintenance man on the roof to work on a vent fan. I figured we were all fired, but shuffled in anyway.
All the day shift guys, including the old, skinny black man, Pops, who was forever losing his sunglasses, were standing in a cluster, eyeballing each of us night crew guys. We had labelled our white, plastic hard hats with Night Crew in front and drawn lightening bolts on the sides. Dee was talking to Dibello in the little office near the entrance. We milled around the entrance and talked about how we were fucked now.
Finally Dibello came out and gathered us and then Dee came out. All the day shift guys were there looking serious. Dee, despite his five-foot stature under his blond crew-cut, projected authority. But his voice even sounded like Gorge Gobel’s, squeaky and high, and I had to concentrate at times to keep from laughing.
Dee gave us a serious, gym-locker-style talk. It was soon apparent that he was concerned, but, unbelievably, not actually angry. Dibello stood behind Dee, dwarfing the man, and, occasionally, almost grinned. After a while, I couldn’t believe what Dee was saying. He started out telling us that he liked beer, too. Hell, sometimes he would go home after work and have sixteen or eighteen beers himself. But, and he said this with great, serious emphasis, he NEVER came to work with a beer on him. That’s how he said it, “Boys, I NEVER come to work with a beer on me.”
In the end, it was a caring, sports-coach-like-lecture-with-a-wink about how we shouldn’t guzzle beer during factory work hours. It was OK if we went out after work and had a few. Of course, we shouldn’t take the factory trucks. They, the day crew, were proud of our performance. We got the impression that Dee was actually proud of the very amount of beers we’d packed away while still managing to out-work his day shift.
We went back to work after the day crew left. Same as before, me bringing the blanks on the fork lift, the butt-router doing it’s thing, Jamie and me slamming in the hinge screws and Jay and Ralph ka-chinging the cases together with their unfucked nail guns. Dibello seemed pleased, even though he was now on probation at PreFit. He had really taken the hit, but what could they expect from an alcoholic living in a Halfway House.
Soon, a cartoon appeared etched in the plywood by the toilet. It was the figure of a man with a crew cut. There was a beer can balanced on top of the crew cut. The caption said, “I never come to work with a beer on me.”
We worked out the rest of the summer at PreFit. There was still the loading dock and Dibello’s stories, but obviously things had peaked. The dream job was now just a dream. I quit when the semester started. Jay and Jaimie stayed on a little longer, but Dibello finally did get fired and then they left.
Rube and I got a new place closer to the University and now the parties were only on weekends and maybe not even that when finals approached.
Life was beautifully undull in those Tucson days. Rube and I later rented a place in a crumbling, green stucco building, that became “The Tarantula Arms”. It was condemned and we didn’t pay rent for a while. Once they found a body in the trunk of a car across the street. Dave and Scott came down from Portland and lived in the apartment across from ours. The girl’s domitory was just across the parking lot. Bob Estes’ friend, just out of the military, spent a whole week in my bedroom with a telescope scanning the dormitory for the rare beaver or, less rare, tit shot. I had to kick him out every night when I wanted to go to sleep.
We were townies and it would be years before we knew how good we’d had it.