Praise Jesus and Pass the Lasagna
“Polish Hammer! How’s it going? Ain’t seen you in forever.”
Ah, goddammit. This is the reason I try to stay out of the local Foodland. Being a carpet-bagging yankee since ’97, I know that if I’m called out in public, it’s by someone I currently or once worked with at Hydra Hydraulics. I’m invariably pressed to answer uncomfortable questions such as:
“You still working at Hydra?”
To still be employed by Hydra when every day presents a new opportunity to do anything else, anywhere else, is considered a character defect of the highest order by those who have managed to shirk the Hydra noose, whether by their own choice or the company’s discretion.
This meeting is especially odious. After a twelve-hour shift, I’m standing in the check out line with four boxes of Stoufers lasagna and a small phalanx of Marie Calendar’s chicken pot pies. I’m not in the mood for this shit. I’m trapped behind an old man counting out pocket change to cover his Little Debbie Donut Sticks bill. Behind me, an old lady encroaches with her cart piled high with Dr. Pepper twelve packs, likely for an unwashed grandson waiting at home, some half feral jackass who gnaws raw Ramen Noodle packs because he’s too fucking lazy to boil water. You couldn’t pass a debit card between the back of my ass and the front of her cart.
The man addressing me is the last person I’d chose to talk to today. And I know no small amount of idiots, assholes, and reprobates. Michael Harold Ryan. One of my ex chrome shop partners. He always claimed his middle name was Houston, but I never accepted this, even though he was inordinately proud of his jackassy middle name. He lived in rural Alabama the majority of his misbegotten life. Neither he nor his family harbored any affiliation with Texas. So, upon meeting this guy twenty years ago, he invited me to call him “Houston.” I would not. I decided “Harold” was a better fit, and, fortunately, every other co-worker at Hydra agreed with me.
“Michael Harold Ryan.”
“Houston.”
“Harold, I says.”
He stood there looking like a skeleton that’d been sheep-dipped in nicotine. He’d lost that chronic pinched look in his face that comes with prolonged exposure to Hydra employment.
I can’t help but recall the time Harold complained to Human Resources that the long hours in the chrome shop had caused his skin to turn a deep brown. Now, keep in mind, I worked right beside him but managed to keep my pasty white, Polack complexion. And it wasn’t lost on anybody that Harold spent every waking non-working moment floating his boat on Lake Guntersville doing everything in his power to con those large mouth bass into his livewell.
“Harold,” I said to him at the time. “Hear me out, now, you know I hate this goddam company just as much as you do, but you think you might have acquired that color from constantly trying to reduce the bass population in Lake Guntersville?”
Harold extended his deeply tanned twig arms. “You don’t get this dark from just the sun.”
I sighed, shook my head. I couldn’t rationalize this to a man who once asked me why men don’t bleed out of their dicks once a month. “Okay, Harold. But I wouldn’t leave that HR office until you get a promise that chrome won’t dye your skin anymore.”
And that’s the guy I worked besides, elbow to elbow, six days a week for eight years. To hear him tell it, he did all the work while I wrote novels. This is a ludicrous accusation. I never wrote a novel during the entirety of those eight years. Now, I did write the first twenty thousand words of about thirty-six would be novels. I suppose, in hindsight, I could have cobbled those disparate fragments together to form something similar to the structure of Cormac McCarthy’s last novel “The Passenger.” Without all the literary genius, of course.
I admit that I do indeed remain employed by Hydra. He offers his condolences but brightens considerably when he tells me he’s given his life over to Jesus Christ.
This is exactly why he detoured into Foodland when he spotted my turquoise Jeep wrangler gleaming in the parking lot. With the cashiers, baggers, and elderly shoppers looking on in dismay, Michael Harold Ryan begins testifying.
“Fifteen years of sucking hind teat at Hydra, and for what? They pushed me out the door like I was trash. That’s after five years without getting so much as a dime raise. I was making more money hanging drywall. Stilt work give me the varicose veins so I couldn’t go back to that. Just when I was at my lowest, and I thought I was going to lose my house I’d been paying on these last twenty years, my neighbor invited me to come out to his church. And just like that, my life improved.”
He talks loud enough for the entire front half of the store to hear. I’m mentally willing the clerk to hurry and ring up my fucking Stoufer’s lasagna, but she’s enraptured by this gaunt, zealous-eyed weirdo.
Now, Harold has no shame. Back in the day, he relayed a story his father once told him often at family get togethers. His father grew up on a farm with six older brothers, all of whom entertained themselves by fucking the livestock. One day, Harold’s father thought he might like to see what all the fun was about and cajoled a calf into nursing on his penis. The calf, seized with an unsatisfied milk lust, rooted Harold’s father against the barn wall and refused to let up until he hollered for help and Harold’s uncles had to come to the rescue and pull that calf off him. Now, I’m from up north, so I listened to the story with a mixture of trepidation and revulsion. When Harold finished the story and noticed I wasn’t laughing, he shrugged sheepishly and assured me the way his father told it was a whole lot funnier.
Crazy thing is, he told me this story many, many times. He was so proud of that story. Each time he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t laughing along.
Of course, I probably horrified my own son at work, telling stories about how, back in the nineties, I was fond of renting hotel rooms with water beds, so I could spend the night with a woman and a bottle of baby oil, stripping off the sheets and oil wrestling on the undulating vinyl. But, hell, that was with grown ass prostitutes. Not chickens.
Harold continued, “I got baptized that day, gave my spirit up onto the good Lord. They took up a collection and helped get me caught back up on my house payments until the good Lord saw fit to get my disability claim accepted and those checks rolling in. Praise Jesus.”
“Ah, fuck. So, you’re a Christian, now, is that it?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, are you still a racist, at least?”
The audience’s heads swivel back to Harold for a response. He shakes his head, chuckles. “You ain’t changed at all.”
And I’m not fucking going to. Truth is, I knew all about Harold’s sudden spiritual transitioning from mutual friends who’d had their patience tried when cornered at the grocery store or the co-opt or the titty flop out by the south end of town near the river.
When a co-worker from our early days at Hydra, Denis Pope, lay dying of prostate cancer, his last two days on earth, Harold sat by his bedside and testified how good the Lord was helping him get his bills paid up without having to resort to selling off any of his fishing equipment.
I told my wife, should I have to die at some point, do not let this motherfucker into the same room as me. She seemed to comply, but I could tell by her eyes, she wasn’t convinced. So help me, should I feel the first tendrils of mortality begin massaging my extremities, I am going to take to carrying a knife in my boot. Harold will be waiting for me at the gates of heaven with his fucking throat sliced, before I suffer one second of his mewling bullshit.
Anyway, I guess my whole point is: The concept of a loving God, of the possibility of an eternal salvation, of finding grace, and somehow constructing a vague scaffold from which to seek answers to the ineluctable mysteries… None of this shit is a viable comfort while you’re still employed by Hydra.
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.
