Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 13
Hangin’ with the Old Man

I held on precariously, barely, my fingers clinging to the smallest ledges.
My feet scrabbling on ice, slipping off, then digging in again, then slipping off again.
I dare a look down, seeing the frozen water thousands of feet below.
Close my eyes, fingers loosening, feet flailing.
Open my eyes, look down, can’t believe it.
I’m slipping, can’t hold on, try to grab on,
fingertips bleeding, fingernails bending up, cracking off.
I start to slide…can’t look…sliding faster…screaming…scraping my skin off on the solid granite…
falling…falling…falling…

So, my father was retired and sitting home watching tennis and baseball, my mother her stories on afternoon TV; he watched his sports on the 19” TV in the living room and she on her own 13” in the bedroom.  Between his pension, the social security, and what was left from Bob’s life insurance policy and the sale of their house, they were in pretty good shape, possibly considerably better than when Pop was working all those years.

The apartment was small and my room was tiny but they were only charging me about $20 per week room and board so it was dirt cheap, but I would have to do something soon; what little money I had was dwindling away.  My mother’s Great Depression era sensibilities were still working on her expectations and I had to dance pretty lightly around here requirement that I get a job, any job.

I was starting to look for a tolerable job when my father had an idea; one that would change the way we thought about a lot of things.  Or maybe not; we were always looking for ways to beat the system and avoid work.  Like father, like son.

He had always had a great affinity for the whole New York Barge Canal system, was always talking about it, and we had spent many of my childhood days at the canal, one way or another.  He had been talking to old friends and heard that there was no reason you couldn’t take a canoe through the locks and do an extended trip.

So, we planned for weeks, got supplies, borrowed Roger and Sue’s nice Old Town canoe and embarked on our first long distance River/Canal canoe trip, just the two of us.

We threw the canoe on dad’s car, tossed the gear in the hatchback and drove the mile to the Hudson River right there in Waterford. We unloaded and I drove the car back home and hoofed it back to our departure point; we got in the laden canoe and set off on our voyage to Canada.

Pop couldn’t walk all that far or well anymore but he could sure sit in that canoe and paddle, paddle, paddle.  He was quite a bit heavier than I and sat in the back to steer and provide proper balance.  My job was to sit in front and keep us going steadily.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to be doing this, it requiring effort and perseverance.  But, dad really wanted to go, and it had been a long time since we’d been off on a jaunt together. So, buck it up, Tom, and stop moaning and let’s get on with it.  Mom, as usual, was just as happy to see us go, and with a token admonishment to be careful to both of us, and an extra one to me to be thinking about a job when I got back, we pushed off for who knew how long.

The river was much cleaner than it used to be when I was younger but it was still murky and somewhat smelly.  GE was dumping all kinds of chemicals and other crap into it and there was significant fertilizer and manure runoff from all the farms along the river. The surface was covered with a flotsam of sticks, grasses, sodden litter, rotting lumber, drenched pieces of clothing, banana peels, dead fish and almost any other article of disgusting garbage you could possibly imagine.  We had no intention of fishing because the mercury content of Hudson River fish made them inedible.  There were actual laws against eating these fish due to the likelihood you would be seriously poisoned.

We paddled out of the inlet, into the river proper and headed north under the Lansingburgh bridge.  I quickly got into the rhythm of paddling robotically, leaving my mind available for all the thoughts under the sun.  Dip, pull, dip, pull, stroke after stroke, on and on and on.  The day was bright and sunny with only a mild westerly breeze, hitting us at right angles so we didn’t have to fight it.  We were a few miles above the Federal Dam at downtown Troy and so were north of the northern effect of the Hudson Estuary tide, and consequently had nothing to fear in terms of fighting tide changes.

We knew from past experience that in good situations we were able to paddle around three miles an hour and sure enough, at the end of the first hour we hove up to the first lock between Waterford and Mechanicville.  As we understood it, the rule was that canoes would have to wait until a larger boat showed up before they would lock us through, but in practice, there were so few boats that no one made us wait unless they knew something was coming in the next 15 minutes or so.  We pulled up to a ladder and I scooted out and up the stairs to find the lock tender who immediately opened the lower gates to let us into the lock.

This was a first for my father and me and, as it turned out, a first for this lock tender, who had never locked a canoe through before, just as we had never locked through in a canoe before. The gates opened inward with great creaking and gear motor sounds, lots of rumbling, water swirling at the base, tossing us around a bit.  The lock had been empty, water squirting through the minute gap between the upper gates, so the sides of the lock weren’t all too dripping wet.  We paddled in and found the interior ladder to hold on to, and the gates grumbled closed with a final deafening clank as they met. 

This was a small lock, only about 22 feet deep, yet it felt like we were in a damp spooky canyon of slimy cement. The ladder was covered with slick algae and I held on for dear life, suddenly nervous.  I looked to pop for strength and there he was, wide eyed, mouth gaping, hands with a death grip on the gunnels of the canoe.

In addition to the gates up and down for boat access, there are the hidden gates buried underneath the walls that control the water.  The lock gate mechanisms are electric but there were no pumps to push or suck the water, all water levels are maintained by gravity and the fact that water levels off.  We heard the machinery grind and then saw the water bubbling up at the front of the lock, boiling up from where it had gushed through the upper subterranean gates.  I had worried that we would be seriously upset by turbulence but it was really minor and I had no trouble holding on to the slippery ladder as we rose with the level of the water in the lock.  The rise took about 5 minutes and before too long we had lifted to where we could see out of the lock.  The lock tender hallooed us and asked a number of questions about where we were heading, with a lot of ‘wows’ and ‘holy shits’ thrown in as we stated our agenda.  As we found the further north we went, people were just astounded that we would undertake such a trip.  So was I, now that I thought about it. What the hell were we doing?

The lock tender then opened the creaking upper gates, more water swirling in to finish the level off, and we glided on out of the upper end of the lock and continued on north towards Mechanicville.  Being almost noon, it was time to break out some cold ones so I gyrated myself around and opened the cooler to fish them out, tossing one back to Pop, who opened his with a hiss and an “Ahhhh!”.  We both turned out to be very adroit at holding opened bottles of Schmidt’s Beer sandwiched between our knees as we paddled.

Another forty-five minutes and we were at Lock 2 and the lock tender was already there waving us into the open lock, having gotten radio communication from down below.  It was late May and traffic had not built up to much yet, so we were a welcome respite from painting and other chores they had been assigned.  We locked through in about 15 minutes, after more obligatory wows and holy shits from this guy, and continued on north.  At the third lock, the dam was situated immediately next to it and, the water being high, we had quite a bit of turbulence as we headed for the open maw of the lock.  It too was open, the grinning keeper waving us in.  Fifteen minutes later we were beyond this one also, amazed at how easy this all was.

Another two miles got us up to Stillwater, Lock 4, and Canal Park.  Canal Park was a new idea to make the locks more tourist-friendly by setting up picnic areas on wide lawns near particular locks, inviting boaters to stop and rest awhile.  We planned to camp here and the lock tender offered to run us into town when he got off shift, but we had everything we needed and invited him and his relief over for beers.  He let us make a fire, we sat out under the stars, and as usual my father had to roust me out of a sweaty sleep the next morning before it got too close to noon.

We struck camp, reloaded the canoe and set off again.  The river was serene between Stillwater and Schuylerville.  We soon were passing Bemis Heights where the battle of Saratoga was fought, and we discussed how that battle was, and deserves to be, considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War.  We passed the farmland where the British forces were camped and saw the hills where the rabble that was the Continental Army surprisingly routed them.

It was a ten mile stretch to Schuylerville and as we got into town we stopped at the town docks for a rest and I ran into town to grab us some subs for lunch.  We went through the lock, beers between our knees, and headed up into the river toward Forts Miller and Edward.  We passed uneventfully through Lock 6 and pushed all the way on up to the town docks at Fort Edward, where the canal left the river. 

We set up camp, being watched closely by two old gentlemen with paper bags clasped between their knees.  My father, Mr. Gregarious, wandered over to say hi, stopped dead in his tracks by the stench of urine soaked pants and raw whiskey.  The crustier of the two croaked out, “Here’s an old fart and a young whippersnapper,” as greeting, and possibly as warning to his friend, who seemed to be snoozing on the bench.  Either way, he accompanied the statement with such a loud, ripe, wet sounding fart that we thought someone had just started up an old lawnmower nearby.  He smiled proudly and asked, “What about them apples, eh?”

We tried our best to find out from him where there might be a restaurant in town that we could eat at, but he couldn’t seem to get the gist of our questions, continuing his symphony of farts while calling my father and old fart, a dichotomy I found quite interesting.  In the end, I think they said they’d watch our stuff as we headed into town; we secured the campsite and gear as best we could and, my father’s difficulty in walking notwithstanding, we set off to hunt up supper.  Turned out there was a pretty good steakhouse about three blocks away, with ice cold drafts to boot, so we were happy and satisfied.

We got back to the docks and found a veritable militia of winos gathered around our tent, emptying our cooler of our remaining beer, and rooting in our duffle for snacks and such.  They were all in high spirits, completely unaware that they were stealing; we fended them off as best we could, and I hiked into town to replenish our stores while my father stood guard.  Toothless, bearded, piss drenched pants, and farting like they had sucked down 60 pounds of compressed helium each, they finally wandered off. Two of them fell into the river, bobbing around in the shallows for a while before we pulled them out and dragged them to the edge of the park, where they slept soundly for hours.

The next morning, we breakfasted on granola bars and smoked sausage as the local police recovered the drunks and stuffed them into the cruisers, grumbling about the smell of piss and the crud that they had to touch every morning lately.  We told them of the impromptu gathering and pilferage the evening before and they said, “Yeah, so what else in new?” and that was that.  So it goes for the sunset years in Fort Edward.

We launched, and in short order fetched up to the Fort Edward lock, locking through quickly again, and then set off up the canal cut on our way to Fort Ann and Woods Creek.  The day passed uneventfully, the canal narrow and bordered by marshes and woods, mostly.  Fort Ann had a bar and a gas station where we got coffee for dad and a beer for me and pushed on up to Whitehall.

Whitehall was originally called Skeenesborough and, believe it or not, is the birthplace of the American Navy.  It’s true; Benedict Arnold got here in the Summer of 1777 and directed his men and some shipwrights to build ships that could sail on Lake Champlain and counter the small British navy that was sailing with Burgoyne, leading to the Battle of Valcour, where the Americans got their butts kicked but slowed the British down enough to be able to make a stand at Saratoga.  Whitehall is at the extreme southern end of Lake Champlain and is where the Champlain Canal that we were paddling entered the lake, right north of Lock 12.

We had full intentions of camping at the lock in Whitehall and, in fact, pulled up to the dock of the Liberty Eatery and had a pretty damned good meal, and a few beers to fortify us.  We’d been on the water all day, dodging power cruisers and the occasional barge, so it took a bit to get our equilibrium, or land legs, back.  The whole time we ate, looking out on the boat basin, my father kept exclaiming that the restaurant was weaving back and forth, even before we had drunk our beer.  Silly him!

It was after dark by the time we were done eating and, not wanting to pitch our tents in the dark, instead just got into the canoe, locked through, and headed off north into the narrows of the lake.  The southern 10 miles or so of Lake Champlain is a snake-like waterway, winding in a natural cut of land, mostly cliffs and hills on the Vermont side and marshes on the New York side.  Even though we were on a huge lake, it was still the canal, it was pitch dark and we were concerned about meeting up with tugs and barges on the waterway.  We knew we’d see them OK, the problem was that they likely wouldn’t see us.  We paddled right up the middle of the channel to avoid reefs and swamps on either side and I kept my flashlight handy to shine if we saw a big boat.

Sure enough, an hour into the night, we heard the bow waves and saw the giant shadow looming towards us at what seemed like breakneck speed.  Pop quickly and deftly steered us out of the channel, barely in time, and the waves from the passing tanker tossed us about like a cork on the ocean.

We were headed to Putnam Station, about eight miles up the lake where my father’s friend Mortie had a camp that we had visited a few times over the years.  Pop had called Mortie from Whitehall and they were expecting us sometime before morning.  In the cadence of our paddle, we were moving very quietly as we approached Dresden.  Earlier we had been singing my father’s favorite barbershop quartet songs, but lately were just listening to the breeze in the trees and the croaks and flapping of the night birds, and dodging the bats that were feeding over the water.  Suddenly, through the rising mist, we saw fishermen up ahead, two boats, heard them chatting away about their miserable luck and their pain in the ass wives, blissfully unaware of our approach.  Quickly we were passing them a few feet away and they were so surprised that they nearly foundered.  Then one of them chuckled and said, as we receded, that he now understood how Arnold’s men had slipped past the British at Ticonderoga on that dark night long ago.

Soon we were outside the Dresden Station bay and confidently turned left out of the channel to head over to Mortie’s camp, which was situated well into the bay.  This bay had been filling with sludge for years and got shallower and shallower as we made for shore.  Then, the weirdest thing happened.  As I was trying to half paddle, half pole the canoe the last 50 yards to their dock, the bottom of the bay felt uneven and even seemed to be moving.  I took another stroke and something slapped my paddle right up out of the water.  My father dug in and the same thing happened to him.  Were we trying to paddle over Champ? 

Champ was Lake Champlain’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster and though we didn’t believe a word of the stories of the sightings, here it was, pitch black, out on the lake and something, definitely alive, was slapping at our paddles and, JESUS KEE KO, was nudging the canoe and we were tipping for Christ’s sake.  Adrenaline rushed through us and by an effort of will we calmed down and I broke out the flashlight and shined it off the port side of the canoe where all the commotion seemed to be.  I jabbed with my paddle here and there in the muck until I got slapped again and then I saw it; a school of huge carp were milling around the boat, getting supper off  the bottom, and all they were doing with us was shaking off our paddles whenever we hit one on its back.  With the light playing about the water, we could see hundreds of them, backs sticking up out of the shallow water, squiggling about like eels.

We continued on for about another ten feet until we were unquestionably mired in lake muck, the water about 3 inches deep at the most, the canoe drawing a tad more than that with its load.  We sat there, perfectly level, stuck, wondering what the hell to do.  We could see the camp about eighty feet away, saw Mortie and Ellie sitting watching TV, lights, sound, oblivious to us marooned out here in the lake.  I pressed my paddle down into the sludge and, with minimal effort was able to sink it a good two feet into the ooze and decided right then that there was no way in hell I was going to get out and wade.

Pop started bellowing for Mortie, who we knew didn’t really hear too well anymore.  Louder and louder, calls for help interlaced with the most inventive combination of ten letter words I had ever heard. I joined in, and after about fifteen minutes of increasing hoarseness, he finally heard us.  Came out on the dock and called out, “Is that you Leo?  I can’t see a Goddamn thing out there.”  We said it was us and he said that they hadn’t been able to use a boat at their dock in a few years and we had to back out if we could, and head up to the site of the old hotel, where they kept their boats.  If we couldn’t, we’d have to wade ashore from there (no way!) or sleep in the canoe until daylight when he’d figure something out.

We pushed and shoved with our paddles, grunted and cursed like the devil and after great effort were finally able to sort of back off the muck and get back to the feeding carp, who gleefully slapped at our paddles and rocked the boat as we passed.  Mortie met us at the Hotel landing, and I had to schlep all our gear a quarter mile down the gravel road to the camp and haul it in, four trips, tired as hell.  We plopped on chairs and slurped the cold beer that he thoughtfully provided.  Pop took the spare bedroom and I passed out on the couch, dead to the world.

The camp was on an extremely narrow slice of land between the lake and the train tracks.  The tracks were literally five feet away from, and six feet above the west wall.  Trains went by about five times a night, or maybe as many as thirty when you really needed to sleep, and rattled the whole place like a jet had just crashed through the roof.  I was asleep, then jolted awake by rushing locomotives, the camp shaking, glasses clinking, window sashes vibrating in their frames, my heart pumping, head throbbing, Mortie and Ellie slumbering peacefully.  Tired to death, I fell asleep as soon as the last car rocked off  and thirty seconds later, here comes another one, crashing on by, blowing its huge horn, chugging it’s breath through the screens, my couch jumping all over the living room, then faded into the distance, frog croaks again audible.  Sudden insistent clanging outside, things crashing around , wet plopping noises, what the hell is that; Mortie awake now, grabbing his gun, saying, “It’s just those raccoons at the garbage again,” and rushed out, firing at elusive bandits in the night.  Came back in, went back to bed and here comes another train; where do they all come from? I somehow got through the night and woke groggily to my father at me, “Tom, Jesus Kee Ko you can’t sleep all day, GET UP!”

It was a day of intermittent showers and we decided to wimp out and spend the day and another night at camp.  Trains aside, it was more comfortable than sleeping in a tent in the rain, and the beer was considerably colder, and Mortie had a car that could take us to more beer.  Plus, Ellie promised us a home cooked meal, and that did it.

Mortie bitched about how the bay was filling up and getting weedier and weedier, how he couldn’t understand it but those Goddamn bastard tree huggers kept telling him it was pollution, but he knew it wasn’t that, just that those bastards wanted to blame everybody else and not do anything to fix it.  That got me wondering so I walked outside to the shore and out on to his dock to look around, being freshly graduated from ‘environmental’ school.  What I saw was that particular type of parasite weed that fed and multiplied very well on a diet of animal or human excrement.  I told this to Mortie and he said, “There ain’t nobody shitting in the water here so you have to be wrong.”  Hmmm. 

The camp was built out over the water and he was proudly telling my father about how he had put in a new flush toilet a few years ago and had been able to stop using the old septic system, which was leaking like a sieve anyway.  Hmmm.  I wandered to the other side of the camp and sat on shore, smelling the faint tinge of sewage, figuring that the new sewer system was leaking or something when I heard somebody go into the bathroom.  Curious, I waited until the flush.  Splat, sploosh, phlumph, and the entire glop dropped from a pipe in the bottom of the camp directly into what was left of the bay.  No mystery here, except for the recurring example of how people can close their eyes to reality.  I decided I had better not say anything as we were guests, and he was looking at me suspiciously already.  No way would I ever fish or swim off his dock.

Our dinner was chicken and potatoes and bread.  White bread with butter, boiled potatoes, boiled whole chicken, no seasoning, no taste, I shouldn’t complain.  Mortie raved about this meat processor place in Whitehall where they got all their meat, and how great it was, and how he’d never buy meat anywhere else up here and wasn’t it great.  I was picking at the bones on my plate, pulled off a scab of meat and suddenly was staring at the unmistakable, undeniable skull of a fox on my plate.  I knew what fox skulls looked like, having studied them in Doc’s classes.  I had been eating off one.  Eating the meat off a fox skull!  YUCK!! Bleauck!!! Some seasoning would have helped, at least.  I got up, excused myself and went out to take a walk up the road, emptying my stomach in a clump of sumac.  Went back, all smiles, said dinner was great, thanks, and got some chips and beer.

We dragged our gear back to the canoe the next morning; it was still cloudy, but I was ready to LEAVE.  We said goodbye; I was convinced I would never visit again, and we headed north to Ticonderoga, about ten miles or so up the lake.

After about two hours of paddling, we spied a nice beach area on the New York shore bounded by excellent pasture, and decided this was a great place to take a break and have some lunch.  We pulled up and got out to stretch.  I saw lots of cowflop but it didn’t really register and we walked a way into the pasture, admiring flowers and soft grass. 

Abruptly, from over a rise, came a stampede of at least a hundred cattle, rushing right towards us.  We froze, shocked, speechless, immovable, scared thoroughly shitless, as the horde rushed down on our position like they were being chased by one of the big Carillion ships from Star Wars.  We stood our ground, having no time or strength to do anything else, certain death upon us, wishing our last rites, apologizing for all our sins, sure that in two seconds we would be summarily trampled to death. In an instant, the cows blew past us, headlong, brushing our sides, our teeth chattering, knees knocking, and they ran right into the lake as a body, throwing up massive spray and dispatching a huge wave towards the opposite shore.  Weak kneed, incredulous, we watched them take a leisurely drink, lapping the water, shuffling their hooves, and slowly rejoining us on shore.

All was well until from about ten feet away a giant bull, complete with ring in his nose, eyeballed us menacingly.  If we took a step, he took a step, if we stood still, he stood still, snorting, never taking his eyes off us, malevolent, focused, intimidating as hell.  We stood there stolidly for well over an hour, afraid to even sneeze, as his women gamboled around us, drank from the lake, splashed in the water and generally took their time.  We said, “Please go away cows,” in very small voices, over and over again, weakly, respectfully, the bull staring with red eyes looking like daggers.  In time, they started to amble away, back up over the rise, and Mr. Bull stayed until the last had gone, snorted one last snort and then backed away, slowly, daring us to move so much as a whisker.

Long after he was gone, I choked out, “Do you think we can go now?” and dad said he thought so, and we ever so slowly sidled back to the canoe, miraculously intact and un-dumped, and quietly eased it back into the water and then paddled away like madmen, no longer having to pee.

We passed Fort Ticonderoga, impressed by the view of Mount Defiant and the narrow channel, and a few minutes later the odiferous paper mill, smelling of sulphur and who knows what else, and continued on towards Crown Point, another eight to ten miles north.  A fair wind came up at our backs and pushed us along nicely; we were able to ease off on our paddling and cruise the lake, my father steering straight ahead until in no time we fetched up on the south shore of the point.  We were moving so well that we were shoved a good six feet up onto shore, completely on dry land, without needing to push ourselves in.

We stretched our legs and had a beer and then realized that launching back out into the lake and rounding the next point with that wind screaming as it was would be problematic.  We were way south of the state run Crown Point campground that we were aiming at.  There was nothing but to go for it, so we oriented the canoe on shore as best we could and struck out into the gale.  Rounding that point was about the hardest work I had ever done.  Pop had to concentrate on steering to keep the canoe headed properly so I supplied all the thrust.  I dug, and dug, and dug in that water, and slowly, painfully, and doggedly, we rounded the point and then again had the wind at our backs.  We swiftly blew by two more miles of shoreline until we got to the north end of Crown Point, just shy of the Champlain Bridge between Crown Point and Vermont.  We again were shoved unceremoniously up on shore and set off to get a campsite.

The caretaker was named Frank Hodgson and was just about the nicest, friendliest guy since my dad.  He immediately took a liking to us and warned us that there would be a three to four day ‘blow’ on the lake and he wouldn’t recommend us chasing off into that anytime soon, not in that there canoe thing.  The lake widened considerably, north of Crown Point, and would be rough for a canoe on good days, so we decided to lay low here at this nice comfortable campsite for as long as the storm took to blow itself out.  We even got the single Lean-To assigned to us, and good old Frank offered to run us into Port Henry for beer and other supplies as we needed.

It was windy for the next few days but didn’t really rain all that much and so we had a good, easy time, reading, laying around, quaffing copious quantities of beer, visiting the ruins of the revolutionary war and French and Indian War era forts, and playing poker with Frank and his helpers.  Frank decided that I should get a tour of the area and took me up to the abandoned mines at Mineville and Witherbee, showed me the slag heaps, and talked enthusiastically about Robert Garrow, from this area, who had killed a few hikers a coupled of years back, and had been big national news with an extended manhunt and all the good times that went with it.  I knew the story, of course, as I had been hiking solo the summer he made his kills and my mother had half expected me to be a victim.  So, Pop and I spent three lazy days at the campsite, and when the storm blew over, we took another look at the vast expanse of lake and decided that we shouldn’t brave it.  We called up Ron and he drove up in his big old Chevy Suburban to pick us up, with lots of comments about wimps and stuff like that.

We had used up the last two weeks of May and had some strange adventures and now it was time for me to decide what to do.  I was mentally done with the concept of school again so that option was out.  I did a bit of research and found that there were a few part time openings in the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and that this was the ‘new’ way to get a job:  put in three or four years of crappy part time work in multiple locations and then you’d be on the list for a full time job if and when one came up.  I thought, no way.  I looked in the papers and applied for a Resident Manager position at the local Glenmont Job Corp.  I got an interview, confident as hell, and then never heard a word about it again.  No way would I humiliate myself and call to follow up, no Goddamn way.  To hell with them.

I decided, again, that I was a great photographer and had a strong portfolio of the highest quality images available and so used the very last of my savings to have some prints made and matted and signed up for some local craft shows where I would sell my work.  I was able to do a three day show each week, hooking up with two different promoters, traveling around Eastern New York State and throughout Massachusetts.  I sold prints all right but barely made enough to pay expenses, and slept in my car a lot.  Dad had loaned me the money to buy a Pinto Station Wagon from a shyster used car dealer, and Bob DuPuis had invented an ingenious folding display rack that he built for me, which fit into the wagon perfectly, if one didn’t mind the legs next to one’s ears while driving. 

For extra income I hooked up with Manpower, a popular labor temp agency and got sent on some very interesting assignments. I was getting a dollar an hour over minimum wage, and in some cases I think it cost me more in lost health than I would have gotten if they paid me a hundred times the pay.  One memorable assignment was with a carnie outfit that rented small amusement rides to church bazaars, and I was sent to help them set up the rides at St. James Church in Albany.  A huge tractor trailer truck showed up and inside was stowed metal scaffolding, tools and crated cars and such, all the materials to erect a small roller coaster, Ferris wheel and a tilt-a-whirl.  The boss was a bleary eyed cuss, as were much of his regular crew, and the truck smelled strongly of urine soaked pants.  I figured out why, as the guys, who were throwing down beers right and left, waddled to the back of the trailer and pissed away, leaving sitting puddles of piss which they then tramped right through like there was nothing to it. They pissed on the scaffolding and the car crates, on anything that they could reach with their piddly streams. They pissed like horses and pissed again and again, more than they drank; I had never seen so much pissing in my life. The piss smell was so prevalent that I couldn’t understand how all these kids who would be riding the rides wouldn’t have to go puke, it was so bad.

After it was all up, I went to the bazaar and sure enough, the rides had that certain perfume about them, and I wanted to go puke, but no one said anything.  I have noticed in later years how that old stale pee smell permeated county fairs and the like, and now I know why.  I was called back to help dismantle the whole shebang and almost didn’t go but I really needed the money and what the hell anyway.  We were all friends by now, and I was invited to piss with the big dogs and leave my mark in all corners of the truck and on all the material.  I declined and they hated me then; this was an experience that would recur at various times in my life when I refused to piss with the guys.

I helped out in factories and warehouses and it was going OK; I wasn’t the regular employee, just there for a day or two and not much was expected of me and I didn’t get the same scrutiny that regular workers were subjected to.

A few weeks after the bazaar piss fest, I was assigned to help out at a farm; wasn’t told what I’d be doing, just report to this farm in Rensselaer County and help out for a day.  I got there at 7AM as directed and found that I was one of 20 workers hired. We all sat for about an hour, no information, waiting for some truck to arrive with whatever it was we were unloading.  It backed up and the boss went up to it and opened the doors and…

We had chickens! 

Thousands of chickens, eight to a 2x2x3 wire crate, clucking, hooting, cawing, pecking each other to bloody ruin and shitting themselves top to bottom.  The stink, the noise, a veritable symphony of chicken sounds and smells to overload the senses. Lucky we were outside.

They lined us up bucket brigade style and we handed the hundreds of crates screaming with live chickens into this long low shed.  The chickens pecked at our fingers, drawing blood and infecting us with avian diseases and a decided hatred of all things chicken.  It took the twenty of us over an hour to empty the truck and get the crates stacked six high in the shed against the far wall, and as the truck left we sat down to a shell shocked break.  Bloody hands, broken backs and disease infestation for about five bucks each in that first hour. 

It got better.

We became aware of rows upon rows of similar wire crates welded together with conveyors running on either side and underneath.  Each of these crates, like the ones currently stuffed with chickens, had a small cage door on the top about 8 inches square through which the chickens could be inserted or taken out.  We got divided into three distinct groups.  The first group got the cages from the wall and handed them to a worker of the second group who would extract the chickens from the crate and hand them on to someone from the third group who would in turn jam the chickens, all eight at once, into their final crate homes, all through these little hatches.

We were instructed, gravely, on the proper procedure for extracting and inserting chickens.  The second group worker, upon receiving a full crate, would set it down, hatch side up, open the hatch and collect all eight chickens into two hands, four chickens in each hand, holding them by one leg per chicken.  If this sounds difficult, you should try it sometime, you have no idea.  This worker would then pass off his handfuls of chickens to the inserters (I got to be an inserter!) and we would then stuff our chickens, one handful at a time, into these new stationary crates.  We were not to stand on ceremony, worrying about how this affected the chickens.  They wanted us to work fast; speed was all important.

So, in no time, here we were, grown men, four chickens in each hand, either walking to someone to hand them off or managing to grab all the chickens from someone without losing any and jam them down through a small hole, and presumably try to keep them alive.  I got good at it. It was easier than tennis and much easier than trying to get that ping pong ball past the high intensity fans in Knertney.

The cages that the chickens would live in were slightly larger than the shipping crates and the conveyers at each side brought in feed and water that they could peck at through the grates and the one underneath, well, you can figure out what that one sloughed away.

We held the chickens upside down and they craned their heads up to peck at our hands and deliver invective, cawing their discomfort and evident hatred with evil yellow eyes and sharp beaks.  Before long I was able to interpret what they were bleating at me, hearing, instead of chicken clucks, nasty and accusatory comments. “Bastard, leggo my leg you fuck, you shit, don’t stuff me down there, you asshole…”  Each one would gash my wrist and accuse me of horrible deeds: molestation, pedophilia, patricide, eating quiche, being a republican, all the worst crimes of humanity. They cawed at me, “Pervert!  Molester! Monster! Your mother wears army boots,” and the like.  I suffered guilt from association.  It mattered not that I told them I was only doing my job, they continued to eat away at my self image until I was ready to turn myself in to the nearest Sherriff’s Deputy as unfit to be loose in the world.  Buck, buck, buck, BUCKUH!

I began to hallucinate, seeing not chickens, but friends from my past, me cramming them into indecent situations.  I began to enjoy the pain I was causing, talking back to the chickens/friends, swearing at them, accusing them of deserving this fate, as they were godless scum, go ahead, peck away, you GODDAMN scum bastards. I cawed back at them, “Bastards! Pond Scum! Baby Killers! REPUBLICANS!!!”  It became personal, hatred bursting out in the electrified air, invective and allegory cycloning willy-nilly with the smell of blood and excrement and flying feathers.  We hated each other, those chickens and I, and in time, in a perverse way, that mutual hatred brought us together, as sufferers in common, innocent victims of an unfair world.  I grew to believe that we would rebel against a common enemy, brothers in arms, tilting at windmills, sweeping off the lemming cliffs together.

In time, I looked around me and saw my colleagues doggedly handling chickens with strange expressions, their mouths working, eyes bloodshot, bodies shaking.  We were each in our own hell.

We were at this for over five long hours and noted that we had filled up only half the crates when, of course, another truck showed up and we had to have at it all over again.  By this time, certain workers were disappearing, and soon there were only about twelve of us left, and we soldiered on, ending up working a 14 hour day, losing a few quarts of blood and earning a whopping eighty bucks for our labors.  But, it was better than tennis, brain damage notwithstanding.

Buckuhhhhh…….

After a while I wearied of Temp jobs.

The summer was waning into fall, we did our annual August Forked Lake trip, I felt wistful about not having to get to school, and other than lacerated hands and the joys of Manpower assignments and failing at my own business, I had nothing to show. Yeah, I knew I wouldn’t make it selling my photos, and this temp stuff left a lot to be desired. I needed to find something, as my parents were getting grumpy about my freeloading, though it seemed to me that I had been hard at work all summer.  So, I hit the want ads again and found a job.

I answered the ad for a company called New Jersey Motors.  They were based in Weehawken, New Jersey, right on the Delaware, and they remanufactured engines.  You had to say ‘Remanufactured,’ not ‘rebuilt,’ it was important, as I quickly found out at my interview.  They had a warehouse in Albany and the manager had just left to start a competing business, representing the only competitor in the field, and he took the inside salesman and the driver with him, so they had to restock people fast.  I was warm and could speak English and could start today and so was immediately hired for less than I thought they should pay me, but enough, anyway, to be minimally respectable…if I didn’t have to get my own apartment…if I didn’t plan to date too much…if I didn’t need to save anything…

For a month I was the company man in Albany, and learned quickly, not already being a motorhead and all.  John, the boss, who was temporarily on loan from the home office, did calls on customers and deliveries to try to keep the business from petering out.  Then we hired a driver, a nice amiable kid named Eric who had a few pet sayings that he repeated over and over again, and who was seriously involved with a women old enough to be his mother.  Whenever anyone would jump to a conclusion he would say, “Never assume because it makes an Ass out of U and Me, get it?”  He said this two or three times a day, and we worked together for a year and a half. 

We also met his Sarah.  Now, we were all like twenty-three or twenty-four, and Sarah had sons of eighteen and twenty.  She wore a lot of makeup, and was what I would consider to be unhealthy thin, with wrinkles and plastic hair.  Sorry, but there you have it.  She looked much older than the thirty-nine years Eric claimed, easily passing for someone in their mid fifties.  Eric used to sing that song, ‘When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard…everybody wants her…’ and John and I would roll our eyes and mutter, “Don’t worry, Eric, she’s safe with us.”  Otherwise it was a good, easy job and we all got along well.  A few months later we hired a new branch manager (John thought I wasn’t ready yet) named Jimmy and he came in with that, “Things are going to change around here,” attitude that had me ready to up and quit, but within two weeks he had eased into the rhythm, and not much ever changed at all.  Managers, you know?

So, I had another ‘nothing special job’ that was completely unrelated to anything I liked to do, but it gave me beer money and, after two raises, rent money for the apartment my mother was lobbying for.  I held off though, an idea I couldn’t bring up to her growing in my mind.  I cut back on the beer and eating out and saved every penny I could after paying my father back for the Pinto, which promptly started acting up, requiring a succession of repairs.

The following summer I spent every weekend in the Adirondacks, completely forgoing women and partying and the bars, husbanding funds and getting rugged.  I’d get home late Sunday night and shower up and then go hang out at work for the day and then take long walks at night, mostly to get out of the house and away from my mother’s understandable entreaties to get a place of my own.  I know my mother loved me and wanted the best for me, but her best and my best were completely unrelated at that time, and I didn’t plan to settle down so young.

That fall, I got a blast from the past in the form of a letter from Julie Armstrong who I hadn’t spoken to in close to a year.  Her parents had moved to Florida and she had followed a guy to North Carolina. They had broken it off and she was thinking about me and missed me.  It took me most of thirty seconds to fall back in love with her, and I immediately dashed off a letter telling her that I still loved her and would like to see her again.  That started a slew of long distance phone bills and an invitation for me to visit her in Asheville. I ponied up some of my savings and flew down to see her, and again, something had changed and she was less enthusiastic than I had hoped.  We spent a non descript long weekend together and she dropped me off at the airport, said, “Now don’t go getting all crazy again,” and wandered off long before the plane came.  I flew home, defeated by an enemy that I couldn’t seem to see, and whose methods and reasoning I couldn’t fathom.  It was nothing new.

We didn’t speak again for about three months until well into the winter when she called me, this time crying on the phone, saying she loved me and knew that now, and we should get together and maybe get married, and oh, Boo Hoo Hoo...  This time I held off falling for her for all of sixty seconds, and I cried for joy and pledged my life to her, and we made plans for her to fly up to see me and get engaged and so on and so forth.  She told me that I’d know from her expression how much she loved me, when I met her at the airport.  I got her a ticket and she came all right, and when she walked off the plane, what I saw wasn’t love but some kind of self consciousness.  My alarm bells went off, having lots of practice, but I rode with it, hope filling my heart.

We hardly kissed. I gave her my room, she locked the door. We looked at rings, but she couldn’t see anything she liked, and all in all, the whole weekend was odd.  I know I was probably excited and overbearing; I’m sure I was, I couldn’t yet help myself in these things. We parted with things unsaid, plans unmade, and my heart yet unbroken.  I dropped her off at the airport, prepared to wait until she was on the plane, but she said that I was busy and didn’t need to wait.  I waited anyway and she was definitely impatient to get off, getting herself a magazine to look at while I sat next to her under gathering clouds.

I called her and called her over the next few days, never getting her, and finally called her parents in Florida.  I talked to her Mom, asking if anything was wrong and all she said was, “You two have all the time in the world, no rush,” we hung up, and that was the last time I ever heard from or about Julie for another year. What was it about me that put her off so much? Was I that bad?

This all made my idea stronger, and by March I had given my notice at work, giving them a full two months to replace me, and me two more months of savings.  By the time mid May came around I had a few thousand dollars, had sold my car for a few hundred more, bade my parents farewell and set off cross country to seek my fortune.