At Thirteen

At the age of thirteen I went to work for the first time. I worked for my mother’s drug dealer Herman Shelby. That of course is not his real name nor did I fill out a W-2. I worked for cash: my first valuable lesson in the world of finances. I didn’t work selling drugs. He wasn’t that kind of a drug dealer. He was the kind of drug dealer who bought a pound of marijuana at a time and supplied himself and his friends for a profit of free weed and a grand or two a month. He was a good man.

Herman threw the best parties; parties that would go on for days and days; bodies and bottles and plates of bones sprawled about his property; the bedrooms and all around the pool, littered with extra sauce and puke and all night speeders making out in the lawn chair, fucking on the diving board, laughing hysterically in the pool…

One fourth of July I helped him with the pig. He took me to the slaughterhouse so that I could get the full effect. It was not my first slaughterhouse. The bolt ends the hog’s life; quiet fat flat on the floor.

He showed me how to build a small barbecue pit using cinderblocks stacked three feet high. It was my first barbecue pit building. The pit was huge. The hog we got was a hundred and fifty pounds of swine. We covered the pit with a tin paneling and just let that sucker cook. We removed the block on one corner and lit a small fire. Low and slow. We turned that pig every four hours basting it with some sort of orange juice/honey/whisky mixture Herman was famous for. We cooked that meat for twenty four hours and it was the best tasting pork that had ever passed between my tender lips.

That was the same year, when I was thirteen. I had quite the growing up that year. Anyway that’s how I learned how to drive the bobcat. Herman had one, and a backhoe. I was taught how to operate the giant earth moving equipment with the advice that it takes strong concentration, not strong muscles to operate these mechanical monsters. I was informed of some of the third grade dropouts who knew how to drive these beastly machines and of how I would not be able to work for him if I could not handle such a task. It was my second valuable lesson in the world of finances; you do what you get paid for.

Herman was in a motorcycle gang. I don’t think they had a name, like the devils or the wolverines or the red skulls but I don’t really remember. It was just Crazy Dave, Bald Harry, Wino and Skulls. They were nice as hell to me, when I was an innocent child. I often wonder how they would treat me now that I am a cynical adult. Anyhow Herman had a chop shop in his garage and used to disassemble and reassemble motorcycles that the gang had stolen, filing off the serial number along the way.

So for all the work he did for them, the gang stole a backhoe, and a bobcat. They just drove up with a flatbed truck and loaded up the merchandise and took off. I heard them laughing about it. I guess they assumed if I was old enough to know what they were talking about then I was old enough to understand the consequences of my blabbermouth. They were right. I spoke of their practices to no one. They hotwired the simple ignition switches. There was never a key to operate the machines, just a button that anyone could push.

It felt kind of badass to know my mother associated with these types of people. I felt apart of a sinful band, a brotherhood of outlaws. I totally expected to get fat, grow a beard and maybe become adept with a gun and a screwdriver.

Anyway I worked for Herman only one summer, over at a granite/marble quarry in East Knoxville. We put in the electric, and the plumbing. I dug a shallow fifty foot ditch for the drainage system. The owners wanted us to put in ten inch PCV pipes underground, until Herman wised them up. “Why would you want to burry your drainage ditch, just to dig it up and unclog it every six months? It’s cheaper, faster, and more efficient if we put in a concrete trough that flows down this giant hill right here and takes all the shit with it. You’ll never have to clean it!”

So that’s what we did. I dug a huge ditch with the back-hoe and later mixed cement in a wheel-barrow. Mixing cement in a wheel-barrow is the most hand blistering, back breaking work ever. I learned the sensation of breaking my back. I also learned the value of a dollar you earn for yourself. So I bought a knife and started working on my knife collection.

Herman Shelby had a daughter my age that was deaf. I learned a little bit of sign language. My mother was a sign language interpreter. I would often sleep over at their house. They had a pool, and a hot-tub, and parents who let me drink when I was thirteen. ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough for weed’, was their motto and consequently that turned into it was ok for boys to drink at age thirteen. I liked Yukon Jack the most; a syrupy whisky. I thought my mother was over reacting the first time she smelled it on my breath.

“Relax,” I told my mother, “Herman said I can hold my liquor remarkably well,” turned out not to be the smartest thing one can say. I had to confess to her that I had been drinking her wine-coolers since I was ten, and built up a pretty nice pre-pubescent tolerance for alcohol. I don’t remember ever trying to empathize with her emotional reaction to this information.

Should I have?