My boss is chubby and a red neck. Same chubby, same redneck as when I was his boss. Instead of puffing on the cigs these days he’s got this flasky-looking vessel he fills with oil or syrup that makes it impossible for him to take his mouth off of it. If that’s not enough, he’s got the bad diabetes, eats three hot dogs in a sitting. He’s a few years my junior.
As much as I flip him shit, I’m worried about him. He’s a good hick. Knew I was hurtin’. Put me to work without all the hassle of cover letters and resumes and interviews and, Why did you leave your last job again? It’s complicated, I tell him. I tell him the rest too. I got fired and . . .
He doesn’t give a shit. As long as I can keep a boat from hitting the rocks, he says, it’s all he cares about.
I piss in a cup and voila. It’s the marine industry for ya. Here I am now, moving rock from one spot to another for a future breakwater, a driveway. For a boss who keeps calling me vato.
“Mother fucker I still ain’t Mexican.”
He calls me vato no matter how many times I tell him I ain’t Mexican. He calls me “Hilary (Clinton) lover” too.
“I’m Ecuadorian, bitch.”
It’s like we’re picking up where we left off some 15-plus years ago, when we transported Navy sailors to and from their aircraft carrier on high speed catamarans.
I logged it as a very bloated, very overpaid government contract, one where I was one of three skippers, and he was my deckhand. He was chubby then too, talked just as much to get out of anything that resembled work and made people laugh. He had a story for every occasion. I envied that. I wish I had his quick wit. J.B. was a die hard MAGA fan way before there was even MAGA. Still is.
We’re in the galley and we’re bullshittin’ about Hilary (‘I didn’t like her either. I don’t know why you keep going on about it’) or Obama (‘he got Bin Laden, didn’t he?) or tariffs (don’t you think we ought to at least have our factories up and running first, Einstein?).
It’s good old-school ribbing. Something unsettling barges in, though. It’s about Michelle Obama. There’s a bilious undertow. Growing up around this shit, you just know. You know that there’s fifty shades of hick just like the color gray, and the bile’s not coming from JB. I knew that before I even got on a plane.
My liberal card that’s been expired since about the time MeToo fell off the rails renews, though. I’m sallying back to before the civil war broke out, when blues and reds got together and did things: barbecues and ‘won’t you look after the dogs while we horse into town’ and ‘pass us that cornbread recipe, would ya?’ Talking politics around the fire, too, like average adults. Civilly. Of course with some jabs and bantering until. Until when?
Until the country erupted and the blue got up from the table, or the red did and went and laced up with his political affiliation. That is more or less how it all went down, no? Friends and family one minute, fuck your cornbread recipe the next. Politics is thicker than blood. Saw it, felt it during the pandemic.
But so far I don’t have to get up from the table and pick up a rifle. The war appears civil; spirited, angry, but civil. I can flip shit back just as easily as I can take it. CNN is still allowed in the Oval Office. But yeah, I do wonder sometimes, as each side digs in and digs in, about the longevity of our civility. For now, the only eruption I really have to consider is Mount Spurr that’s not that many clicks from here in volcano miles. It’s all anyone’s really talking about around here at the present moment. And politics.
And some really good bear stories.
-tmc
Things Men Carry 