...cont'd...

Ok so here goes the inadvertant part 2 of employment etc.:
so I left off starting to describe Bigs, acorn-head with a vocabulary the size of a head of cattle at a conglomerated dude ranch, to abbreviate the man into a small set of clauses. Santa's only got one Claus but it's supplemented by all the carols and songs and secular hymns written for him, otherwise he'd probably demand his due set of multiple expository clauses. Yeah, this is kinda the way me and Bigs talk now, riffing off each other on the back of the juddering truck when we're not preoccupied with lateral gusts and overturned trash cans. He likes to say that we're 'probing the anus of language to see what kind of shit we can dislodge.' His eloquence is a motley thing.
But I guess you guys don't really need a play-by-play breakdown of all my first-day bumbles so I'll sum up, use apposite adjectives to lasso the past out of its dynamism. I met Bigs, we had a cigarette as he broke down the politics of the facility (or 'the malodorous hydra' as he calls it) - Gerry's a cantankerous hermit, Marvin and Sudsy are his pets (always getting dumpster duty, the cushiest run around since you don't even have to leave the stale-smoke rank cab to do your job, unless some random bum, of which we have few in Roanoke, or a family of cats, have made a cozy niche out of torn bags of garbage), Phoebe's a sweetheart when she's smoking, but otherwise curt as her sharp face, Ned's best to be stayed away from because he drags you into debates like a Norseman's wife on mushroom tea, Lugsy's better behind the wheel than behind the truck, etc. - and then we hopped on the back of Lugsy's rig. I got a look at the cab, an old pink-haired troll impaled with a barbie's leg hanging from the rearview, the smell of old french fries hiding out under the seats like Kosovar fugitives in Milosevic heydays. I fell once and bruised my dignity but Bigs chuckled, the only man to make the word a heaving reality in such a succinct burst of breath, and said 'even the Queen of Sheba got her period' and deftly pulled out a small flask from inside his vest, unscrewed it w/ his thumb and handed it to me after a judicious snort. After six curbside stops I got the hang of fitting the bulky plastic containers to the jerky jaws and the night passed uneventfully, me and Bigs trading anecdotes like bad cards in a tight game of stud, or at least on my side that's how I felt, his were fluid as June drizzles off a tent flap. This was a man who had campfire ash ground into his bones and knows how to make some mean beans that make forested squats all the easier to bear. He went to high school in Newport News, Denbigh I think, and did pretty well, starting tight end varsity, soccer star, men's choir, the whole achiever shebang, and 'matriculated like a deformed chock in a tight biscuit joint' at Missouri, where he 'went polymath on their constricted asses,' studying anything - carpentry, the sociolinguistics of modern honduras, salsa dancing, linear algebra, decadent poetry - and dropping out after three years b/c 'the enmity grew like a beanstalk on Mircale-Gro, and it was being poured from both horizons.' He didn't bring the flask out often, which I respect. How he ended up in Roanoke I still haven't divined; he's elusive as a wounded bobcat smelling cordite when it comes to certain subjects, that I've prodded but only enough to see his initial reaction; bobcats can be a bitch when riled.
Around midnight we'd finished our neighborhoods, mainly Glen Cove and Darnwood Forest, though w/ a bit of overlap into more central Roanoke, for some jurisdictional reason yet to be elucidated, and pulled snortingly into the 'hydra's' bay, Lugsy making an audible comical groan as he eased the air brakes down. I called Mom and she groggily said 'walk' b/c ultimately it's not that far from home, as I think I mentioned earlier, but after hanging precariously from a slippery metal bar and wreathed in the smells of a city that reveals itself through its refuse, trash and verb, it's hard to gather all the energy necessary to bear your own physical and olfactory weight. Lugsy ended up giving me a ride home, having heard my dejected 'fuck' slip out after I hung up my phone, and he me and Bigs, who lives four or five doors down from Lugsy near Electric, dawdled about smoking joints as Lugsy knitted a laconic route through the somnolent streets, the only lights sodium or orange, streetlights forever lit and our cherries blazing w/ the heavy inhales of tuberculosis pulling tight drafts from the inchoate world. they've been giving me rides every night now, which is sweet. I'm learning the parlance and honing my raconteurial skills, though it's really only by the whetstone of Bigs since Lugsy contributes his driving prowess and a few lunchbox moments or truncated insight. Bigs calls him 'the stoic Lothario of a lake district in drought.' I'm thinking of calling him 'Hephaestus's nudge.'
A toddler's body was found in the landfill near Avendale yesterday, a kid not even three years old; Phoebe's pretty distraught b/c he lived on the around and near Morningside that she did around the time he disappeared. The implications are colossal. We had a cigarette last night, before the hydra loosed its hulking vertebrae into the night dark w/ dread and possibility, and I referenced it, soft as a papercut from a w2, and she cringed and swooped in front of me and stared into me, not even my eyes but my whole self it felt like, not saying a thing, her eyes burning like a California brushfire not sure whether to flow into the city's arteries of trees and bushes or to hang back and lick at the fringe. I think she opted for the latter b/c I still have but one asshole, and when she backed down a bit she said 'there ain't nothing you know about kids thrown in garbage, specially if you wasn't the one that moved that can into the cherrypicker' and kinda meekly dropped her butt and her eyes w/ it, quickly squishing them both out w/ her boot and when I saw her later that night, and Vic who was on back w/ her and Harry who was driving, we noticed she was as if in a trance. Not the Vegas hypnotist kinda trance where you bark like a castrated whelp, but the profound self-inflicted kind where the eyes look like the skullcrusher on a trench knife b/c the blades been pointed to the back of the head, either to excise w/e metastatic transgression was born and germinated there or for some more grave, mental self-flagellation thing. Either way, when I see her next, I'm gonna be treading like Indy in a snake pit.
So yeah, it's 6am now and Mel's up rustling beauty from her makeup kit in the bathroom. Tonight was relatively late, got done around 3 b/c Marvin and Sudsy were cocking around on dumpster duty, holding us up since Gerry likes to have everyone back in before checking out because 'man is a horde animal led by a chief' and Gerry loves the idea of being a potbellied chief, eking ritual out of the smallest group rally. He may have been gruff in the 'interview' but he got more voluble when he saw I was now part of the team, not wanting to waste his words on an unvetted tyro. But yeah, so I'm off to pull a blanket of sun over myself and doze into noonish.
Welcome Matt out.