Halfway to Heaven
Well, Bippy the Chihuahua-Cornholing Clown who runs the show at Hydra Hydraulics has chased off every quality operator once employed here through an intense program of sixty-five-hour work weeks and aggressive ingratitude, leaving behind only a bumbling cadre of the desperately unskilled and/or the dumb Polacks. The Polish Hammer represented the and/or in this broke dick equation.
Bippy has the audacity to ask me of all people why my co-workers, many of whom I’ve worked beside for the better part of a decade and consider friends, are willing to drive an extra forty-five minutes just to work in an easy-going atmosphere for more pay over at Blue Origins.
“I don’t understand it myself, Bippy,” I admit. “You graciously allow them to work exorbitant amounts of overtime while treating every one of them like they owed you money. I can’t fathom why anyone would want to work less hours for more money at a company capable of providing their employees with the tools necessary to accomplish their work.”
“Right?” Bippy sighed. “I just can’t figure it out.”
What I couldn’t figure out… How did I end up on Jeff Bezos’ no hire list. I must have applied to Blue Origin six times. Crickets.
I imagined it could only get worse. Bippy believed himself to be infallible in the factory sense of the word. He’d yet to realize you couldn’t tell people it’s my way or the highway when the highway looked so fucking awesome. Around this time, Bippy hit upon an idea that would revolutionize the floor of Hydra Hydraulics.
Now, there’s two things the population of rural Alabama loves above all else. College football and crystal meth. Personally, I don’t care for either one. I’m from the Region, as I think I might have mentioned in a previous column. I’m all about the baseball and the cocaine.
Here in northern Alabama with meth addiction running rampant, there’s been a rash of newly established halfway houses willing to shepherd the poor folks constantly wavering between the hot and cold wars of addiction. These halfway houses offer, maybe not a safe harbor, but definitely a harbor that will financially incapacitate them far more than past addictions. It’s here, among the broken and struggling, that Bippy found his next generation work force. He cleared out the entirety of the Hope Free Ministry barracks situated on the edge of town, hiring those desperate souls to fill the holes left by the migrating competent machine operators yearning to be treated like human beings.
He hired eight halfway house habituates in the first wave. I know this because I counted the fucking Bibles piled up in the breakroom. I even got my own meth enthusiast for the chrome shop. It came with a promotion for me, which amounted to additional responsibilities for the wash and the grinder and the polisher to go along with the chrome shop, areas notorious for being overworked, undermanned, and hobbled with insufficiently efficient equipment. I’d essentially leveled up as the fall guy, a befuddled bump perfect for Bippy to back his bus over when everything inevitably went sideways.
This wasn’t the flex Bippy believed it to be. It’s well-documented how little I care for Hydra Hydraulics. I only await the completion of my car note to run screaming out the door and embrace a literary life rife with go-fund-me pleas.
My new chrome shop employee went by the superhero name Justin Jennings. His first words to me “Call me ‘Waylon.’ Everybody does.” Intuiting the fact I was a yankee and given to listening to the heavy metal, he quickly added “like the country singer.”
“Yeah, I’m not calling you that stupid shit. But you can call me the Polish Hammer.”
“Like the wrestler?”
“Like the small press writer who continually courts literary obscurity and financial bankruptcy.”
“You write?”
“Marginally.”
“You should write about my life…”
“I don’t know if the world is clamoring for another tell-all book about how you smoked a lot of crack then found Jesus. I’m not sure anybody wants to ready anything. If it’s got my name on it, anyway.”
Waylon seems like a good enough guy, really. He shows up for work, anyway, which, in this fucked-up, shitty world, passes for decency. Like most of the Hope Free Ministry cultists, he tends to walk the aisles with his arms splayed out as though he’d just finished bench pressing two hundred and sixty-eight pounds rather than hide out in the bathroom for the last twenty minutes doom-scrolling the social media. He’s the only hundred- and fifty-pound guy I know who forces himself to walk through doorways sideways.
And he has a tendency to ask jackassy questions like.
“Do you know God?”
“Ah, for fuck’s sakes.” It’s the eighth time I’ve been asked this since Hydra started entertaining these halfway house yahoos. “Do I know God? You talking about the deity passing out little dicks and male pattern baldness the day I was born? That God? Probably passing out cancer genes as well, who the fuck knows, I don’t believe in going to doctors, either.”
“Have you given your life over to Him? It’s the only way to be saved.”
“Saved from what? A life pissed away in the fucking factories? A more torturous lifestyle created to bedevil the main man of superior grooviness has yet to be devised, man. I ain’t gotta give my life over to God; I wasn’t the asshole that run out on my children so I could keep a needle in my arm. And what’s this ‘He’ bullshit? God’s supposed to be a dude?”
“Uh oh. You’re not one of those Kamala Harris types, are you?”
“Hell, no. I love guns almost as much as I love abortions. And as far as I’m concerned, there ain’t but two genders.”
“Amen, brother.”
“If there’s a tallywhacker swinging between your legs, you are a man. There ain’t no two ways about it.”
“You got that right, Polish Hammer.”
“And you know, since God’s a ‘He’ and we can agree on that. And definitely not a ‘She’ and we can agree on that.”
“Definitely, one hundred percent without a doubt.”
“How big you reckon his dick is?”
“What?”
I almost feel bad. I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this argument. I don’t even give a shit. I only care about being contrary.
“You think he’s packing a big dick? Or does his dick look like his balls are wearing a tiny, little acorn hat? We can at least hope that his dick is proportional to his body size, right? I think any man would be a bastard to demand anything more than a nice symmetrical proportion in terms to length and girth. So, how tall you reckon God is?”
“God is everywhere.”
“No doubt, brother. Which would mean his dick is everywhere. I could be looking at God’s dick right now and not even know it. Though I suspect it. Theologically speaking.”
The way children growing up in the backwoods of Hogjaw County were brought up believing the low-hanging clouds in the mountaintops were the campfires of rabbits roasting their carrot dinners, would the denizens of Hope Free Ministries come to suspect the constantly sporadic tornadoes harassing the neighboring trailer homes be the result of a very masculine God helicoptering his dick for laughs?
It was a religious discussion I decided to table for now. Waylon was getting squirrelly with images of God’s penis dominating his imagination. For now, it was enough to just dip metal into vats of chrome since Bippy was always lurking and I had a column to write.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
