|
Cable Guy before/after A pounding awakened me this morning. Its not my head.� No hangovers anymore.� Hmmm.� What the fuck? For some reason I was compelled to shoot out of bed, and throw on my navy blue structure pants and white cotton pocketed hanes t-shirt. The pants are from a friend, old and broken in, comfortable. I raced around the house.� It was the cable guy, two hours early. The cable guy was a squat man, burly like a fireplug, with sun-mottled hair and a wandering eye.� He reminded me of a cross between a warthog and a badger.� He was getting in his beat up pick-up truck with light on top. "Oh, had another job down at Tradewinds', they couldn't pay so I figured, I'd stop by here and see if anyone was around." Tradewinds is low income, and fixed income housing zoned so for whatever reason, and is the White Trash Central Headquarters in the area. [I have nothing against the poor of any ethnicity.�� I've drank from the same bottle as millionaires and the homeless.� But the reality is money doesn't buy class, nor does lack of it excuse rudeness or slovenly behavior.� The unfortunate truth is that sometimes, money excuses it.] Normally, I move out of bed for nothing and no man.� Sleep is sacrosanct to me, and should be to others in our fast paced, western internet go get-em now society. I stood barefoot, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. "Your parents home?" he asked. "No.� Are you the cable guy?"� I asked. "Yeah.� Are you eighteen?" he asked. This stopped me. "Are you eighteen?"� he asked again. "Yeah dude, c'mon in."� I said. He came in and was a whirlwind of action. "I'm gonna' ask you to help me, if you don't mind."� he said. Still bleary. "No, not at all."� I replied. And somehow I ended up leading him into the basement, his husky ass thumping down the stairs behind me.� I showed him where the cables ran. And then I went upstairs to eat.� A bowl of dried rice chex to start.� I'm on a new diet that's helping me control my health.� No milk or ice-cream.� No sweets.� It sucks, but it helps. And I sat and kind of stared out the window at the maple tree.� No sense in turning on the television. And then Darlene, the cleaning lady showed up, talking about NASCAR with a fervor that always makes me laugh inwardly. Its all we have to talk about, as she never really opens up about her life too much.� Which is fine.� I'm not the prying type, but if you want to tell me something, I'll listen.� It seems an easy way to share the love and consideration of attention. The cable guy had me pull some cable out of the floor.� I pulled and ended up shredding the coaxial cable. "It shredded.� You'll have to go into the crawlspace."� I said. "Okay, cheif."� he said. He 'cheifed' me. [For those unfamiliar with the 'cheif game', its this:� a measured form of disrespect common in the military and institutional settings.� At the treatment facility, it was common for one of the operations people to refer to the clients as 'cheif', as in, "C'mon cheif, brush those teeth," but the clients would never, ever refer to them as 'cheif', or they would earn disrespect points.� Basically, between guys its like flicking someone on the forehead with� your middle finger propelled by your thumb, and getting away with it is key.� I despise the cheif game, and rarely, if ever, get called cheif by anyone.] But he was pissed that he had to go into the crawlspace.� I don't blame him. I pushed the wire through so he would have something with which to work, got myself some yougurt and checked my mail. All these people running about, doing the dirty work.� I felt like King Farouhk. The cable guy came up, and spoke to Darlene. "Is your son still around?"� he asked her. Darlene is a bit older of a woman.� Probably approaching her fifties, if not there, slight with blonde hair and glasses.� A very timid soul. She paused. "Is your son still around?"� he asked. She paused some more, then cracked under the strain. "I JUST WORK HERE." she said in a loud, tremulous voice. I came out of the back. "Oh, don't disown me now, mom,"� I said. He showed me what he did, and what still could be done.� Something about small coaxial cable wires fucking up the picture, which I hadn't noticed.� Someother time, someother day, badger-man. "If I had known you had a hired maid, I would've had her dust down in the crawlspace."� he said. This pissed me off. "That's just Darlene,"� I said lamely, disliking this discourse in its entirety. Perhaps it was referring to Darlene as a "hired maid" that bothered me.� She comes and cleans once every two weeks.� This doesn't qualify as a maid to me.� Cleaning lady, yes, maid, no.� The term maid smacks of servants and high society people.� People who don't know what a day's work is, and have a large sense of entitlement, not a family that started with little and earned every damn dime, which is what my parents did. I am grounded without pretense because of this. How money gets spent around here is not your concern, cheif.� Now here's my signature and fuck off. He made mention of his name.� I put it together with some kids I went to school with, but he didn't know. He gave me a weak handshake and left. I've got HBO now, but I don't think it was worth getting out of bed.
|
