24th

Let's see if we can replay this message.

There was the Bel Aire. Kerry got the wheels when she moved back home and, of course, because we'd gotten rid of the truck and the Pontiac convertible she was at her Ma's with no wheels.

At any rate, the Bel Aire was procured. I remember how her first job was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners and she destroyed Billy and Donna Engel's couch. Then she started working for Dr. Cunningham and that didn't go that long either before landing a job at Zenith where she met another Donna and then they predated Thelma and Louise and Booked It for the Coast.

The Christmas Miracle for this particular year was my going to the Hitchin' Post and Wooden Nickel. I was still ersatz hippie, Whole Earth, don't know if I was still subscribing the Rolling Stone--part of me likes to think I was--but I remember the pix was me in the living room at the house getting Christmas presents. I was the only one with child. That means that Jeremy was the only little boy grandchild though I think Mary's Amy would be born shortly thereafter.

They came on out with Uncle Frank. He was camping out with his sisters in South Sioux. What could he tell me? What did she say? Did she talk about me? What were the chances? These and a thousand same questions I had in my mind and I pitched a couple to Uncle Frank but he just more or less shrugged his shoulders.

I think I did get her to come down to the house. And then there was the Christmas tree--I probably had the lights strung up, sans popcorn strings--and there was the toys I got for James Jeremy. Maybe a Radio Flyer but I know it was a Tonka Toy truck that, eventually, he said was stolen form the beach at California.

So she came and left. An Uncle Frank was there. The vaunted Christmas 1973--oh what a time was this!

And now, three decades removed, there's a crowd at the house. And Meg gave the speech with tears in her eyes. She's also head injured too. Us brain damaged, we get choked up easy.

And now for Chapter 11. I lessened some of the impact cuz I told everyone and their mother I'd have a piece sometime this week in the paper.

And here's to you Dr. Mackiel!

Well, I hope you do read it. I hope Dr. Heck reads it. I hope that memory of the Christmas Miracle was as vivid for you as it is me.

Chapter 12



You Gothcer Teacher, You Gotcher Ironworkers: One Guys Recovery


Thank you very kindly the opportunity to consult with Mr. Hartnett. He is most interesting individual. Unfortunately, he does not appear to have been exposed to appropriate rehabilitation effort post recover. Many persons at this patient’s level of disability are unable to sustain themselves in any competitive employment situations.
Respectfully submitted,
Thom A. Korn, Ph.D., C.R.C.

Rodney said, at day’s end, “You comin’ tomorrow?”
“Oh yeah.”
But, bein’ the gumshoe detective that I was, I also noted that writing on the shithouse walls began to appear shortly after the cute as a button gal came on the job with her bright yellow Peter Kiewitt hardhat—that everybody wore—accept the ironworkers who had their own color and style of hardhat..
Julie her put up hair—she kind of looked like a farm lady with her hair done up—pullin’ the tractor and wagon load of corn down the lane like Mom did through the fields of praise—a lit filter cigarette dangling from her mouth as she lugged the vibrator around..
Julie had a pleasant face; her voice was a little deeper than I’d expected.
At any rate, the gist of the shithouse salvo was something like, “You guys with short penises stand closer so you won’t piss on your shoes.”
This, no doubt, was to impress the lady—who also used the same shithouse. Contractor Peter Kiewitt, in all their corporate billions and infinite wisdom and all their safety blah blah—the carpenters worked in the pouring rain, low visibility—don’t kid yourselves, it’s not about safety—didn’t have the foresight to provide one for her.
I remembered the next summer, working on a job in Lincoln, Hell’s Angel Rick had enough respect for women to tell the general contractor they’d better get one on the job for their female laborer.
“You don’t need to be usin’ ours,” Rick said to Jane in the shack during coffee break. “You can have one of your own.”
A laborer, the young gal had lunch and coffee with the ironworkers in their shack. A look of relief stole across her face. Jane was surprised. “I can?”
“Sure you can,” Rick said, leaning forward, his hands on the make-shift bench. “Don’t let those contractors get away with it.”
And sure enough, the next day, a female shithouse was parked wall-to-wall with the male one, a female figure head in the middle of the door to designate the difference.
At any rate, with Kiewitt as the general, the shithouse message arrived just after Julie’d come on the job. As mentioned, she used the same shithouse as we did, just like everyone else, albeit the only female tinkle into the brown mass below who, it was reasoned, might want to know that there were, of the 50 or so men on the job, those who possessed an organ that, it was further reasoned, would satisfy the only lady on the job more than say, a man with an organ that would fall shorter by comparison.
A shot came zinging across the bow a couple days later. It was query: “How would you know?” It was signed Shorty.
The original provocateur, the answer was amazingly simplistic. It ran as further advice: “Look down and see if there’s piss on your shoes. If there is, you haven’t stood close enough.”
The afternoon shithouse visit was immediately coming forthwith. I saw that the reply ,with a thick black marker, was heralded like a trumpet of swans. The debate was taken to a new level:
“Let me fuck your old lady and we’ll see who she calls. Shorty.”
This seemed to be the end of it all. Shorty had thrown down the gauntlet. That is, until one day there was a reprimand:
“Why don’t you two grow up?”
I also noted that on the uppermost corner of the shithouse wall where you could look out through the chicken-wire partition to look at a white wall that was not there a few weeks ago.
But, pondering the prospective authors, scanning hardhats that sat like domes on noble heads presented no immediate clues. Quite possibly, I think, watching the huge Manitowoc lowering a load of iron from a flatbed semi, it wasn’t two rival—if you will—penises vying for a lady’s affections but it could well have been two guys that did it for a joke.
They did it on every job they went on together.
Unemployed sociologists improving their cash flow. A research project, a dissertation. Who knows, it’s hard to say.
Or, it might have been the same guy, trying to be ironic as hell.
And the guy who wrote the reprimand, why, he too, might have been the same person. Double ironic. He might have been like the modern-day Hamlet who just so happened to be working construction in the Midwest just as his ancestors were practicing sword-fighting in Norway and hanging out with Fortinbras. Or Laertes.
Or, the new lady now ran the vibrator with such aplomb, such authority, sticking it into mounds of wet dark gray concrete. Was her real ancestor Ophelia?
All communiqués—save one—were written in pencil.
And, moreover—because they only appeared after she’d arrived—was it the pretty Kiewitt Ophelia scribing them?
The last diatribe to grace the shithouse walls was an angry salvo against Swain construction. They took the unkindest cut of all: the Swain company was described as “rat motherfuckers.”
And the words of wisdom from twenty years ago when I was working at the Powerhouse—the stalls covered with words of wisdom before the Manitowoc crane boom came crashing down in a gust of wind off the river, or so the story went, ironworkers pulling their pants up, rushing out of the shitthouses:
“He who writes these words of wit on shithouse walls/Wraps his shit in little balls.” Of course, while this repartee had stuck with me for all these years, I kept thinking something was missing. The Nucor turnaround job I usually started doing right after school go out supplied the missing rhyme: “He who reads these words of wit/Eats those lil balls of shit.”
Not only did one large piece of my missing life-puzzle fall into place, I knew who Shorty was.