from hell to hell-arity!

When you're in a truly weird or shitty situation, corresponding emotions go from anxious to apathetic to pissing yourself with laughter. Perhaps standards for what is weird or strange may change throughout life, but you should still experience them. I hope I am never desensitized to where nothing catches me off guard and break out into laughter, because I'll feel blue about it.

I once went to Taco Bell for some delicious treats from south of the border. The wait was really long despite few customers, so apparently someone was screwing up in the back of the kitchen. Working at the food-construction zone was a deaf guy. He wasn't just your normal, run-of-the-mill quiet type. He was a show-off and wanted to entertain everyone in the busy restaurant. Problem was, he wasn't very good at it and simply made things even more uncomfortable. His jokes mainly consisted of wiping his brow with a "WHEW!" look on his face and then smiling and waiting for us to laugh. We didn't. Then he would pretend to yawn, and pretend to throw down his taco gloves in a fit of rebellion. Still no response from the audience. If he had stopped his scampish mimery, I might have had my double decker tacos a little sooner, and not had to stand near the counter with my reciept listening to "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner. Sweet Jesus is that song horrible.

So there we stood as the anxiety grew and grew and I just started laughing. The deaf guy thought I was enjoying his show so he stepped up the intensity even more. This made everybody else really mad that someone had encouraged him, so they all gave me really mean looks as my food was finally called. Fuck everyone.

Worse is when this kind of situation goes from fear to laughter, and you are then afraid that your laughter is going to get you killed. I worked as a City Maintenance Technician for my hometown in Tennessee, and is tied for the worst job I have ever had (see previous post "together, realizing potentials"). You know how dads drive along and say to their kids, "See that guy? If you don't go to college, that's what you'll be doing with your life,"? I was that guy. I had to weedeat in highway medians all day long during one summer, while my friends with much better jobs drove by saying, "Hey, whatcha doing?" I would then flip them off, because friends don't make fun of friends for making terrible decisions.

I worked with several people, some college students like me working for the summer, and some worked there year round. These two groups didn't mix very well. We stayed pretty polar the whole season, so sometimes we were forced together for the sake of simply getting more work done.

One man we had to spend considerable lengths of time with was Henry. He had an obvious anger problem, and was probably pretty lonely judging by all the talking he did. He was also a poorly maintained diabetic who loved cigarillos. Henry was a tractor driver, until the day he was relieved of that position for running over a mechanic who sat in his chair in the break room. This is true. After that, Henry was one of the underlings like us, so we had to get used to his constant, tense presence. His best story, though, was how he was "run off the road" by a Greyhound type bus. He pulled over and got his pistol out. Then a different (but same style) bus drove by and he started shooting at the back of it, trying to blow out the engine.

So since Henry was so possessive of his break room chair and all other work involved commodities, we decided to get a laugh by toying with this face. First, we put a salt shaker on the table right in front of his chair, and sprinkled a pinch of it on the table, too. An hour later, we found the salt shaker broken in half on the other side of the room. Then we took his vest and moved it from one part of the truck to another, and were going to see what happened next. This was a bad idea. Henry started screaming for his vest and did something that gashed his fragile skin open on the back of his hand. We laughed, oh god why did we laugh. "Where is it, godammit!"

"Oh, here it is. Oops.", we said as we pulled out of a pile of dirt and rocks. He didn't think it was too damn funny.

This same guy would sit with us in the truck, avoiding work, and talk about basically everything he could describe with words:

"Now my daddy's cousin, they don't know what killed him. Now I think it was the stab wounds. And my brother back in '84, he died in a wreck. He's just out drinkin'. Just like that fella that was in all them movies. Damn movies. I used to rent so many movies down there at that Short Stop Market. Buster's it used to be called. Every day I'd rent up about five or six of 'em, take 'em back the next day and get six more. I seen every movie they had down there. I used to be get them porno tapes. But I got so damn bored by it, it's the same damn thing every time. Then I used to rent up them horror movies. Hell my neighbor came over with his wife and she got so scared she started screamin' and what not to where he hit her and kicked her out and..."

You can see how this begins to reach critical levels pretty fast. I began to laugh and Henry got mad, and so the circle of life went, around and around.

In retrospect, these people may have been crying out for help, or something hidden and significant. If they did, though, I was probably trying not to make eye contact or wondering how I was going to empty my bladder without anyone noticing. Life is hard like that.