It seemed to be unseemly about my friend JBell, the apprentice electrician at work, the bright young man on the way up...ripping the middle aged guy who was showing him the ropes and just gliding on through until his retirement in a few years, but when it’s almost 2 in the morning, the words are flying free like birds in the blue blue sky having filed no flight plan with the FAA, with the swirly clouds swirling and whirling and twirling among the stars and the planets and the constellations and the galaxies and the milky ways way way above—and the liquor is talking in talking in hypnotic tones that grabs your attention and nobody is taking what’s being said too seriously or remembering or caring all that much...the music is playing thump boom thump thump boom thump over and over again, even the whores are leaving, figuring nobody left in the bar looks like they got any money left to spend on them...when we’re leaving, Mr. Apprentice invites a few of us over to continue the serious drinking session—the sess-she-on at his apartment—I go with my friend Mike in his big bad Mustang—but first we stop at a gas station because him and I are hungry and the car is thirsty...sticks of fine beef jerky for Mike, powdered sugar donuts for me, and 93 octane for the car...we hit the on ramp and the overpass and then around and round we go like a roulette wheel in a spin until we wind up facing the wrong direction and miraculously don’t hit anything or anybody...there ain't much traffic that time of night so we’re okay...should have paid attention to the ‘Bridge Freezes Before Road’ sign I guess, but we knew that already...when we get to Mr. Apprentice’s apartment, WTF???...we find him outside crawling on his hands and knees in the snow because Mr. Surehands who deals with thousands of volts at work dropped his little clear plastic bag of powdered sugar cocaine somewhere in the snow—between the parking lot and his front door—it’s dark and he’s drunk and white on white ain’t easy to see anytime, but especially now in these conditions and in his condition--but he ain’t gonna quit searching until he finds it...before somebody else does...it’s cold like right through your bones cold, stone cold, and your bones need a scarf, so after a token search, we’re like ‘See ya later’ and we leave...tomorrow we find out he fell asleep outside in the snow looking for his snow in a snowbank and another guy from the bar who came over found him and woke him up and got him inside and kept him from freezing to death...apparently the missing bag wasn’t found or at least nobody admitted to finding it...and years later, his good dear old friend who was Mr. Company Man--30 years or so riding cattle cars and eating from the roach coach and being the guy that everybody liked, and ran the lunchtime card game...well he got busted by a plant security guard for trying to smuggle some tools out...taped around his leg...well, he was a favorite of the management and he got off with 2 weeks suspension...kept his job, his retirement...it’s all who you know and who likes you...somebody else and he would have been fired in a heartbeat...when he came back to work, he was serenaded with the ‘Smuggler’s Blues’ song which I heard he didn’t find too amusing.
