My friend Henry is dead. I just heard. Looking back it’s been thirty years since we last spoke. Henry was not Polish, he was a “Fucking, black dirt, Polock.” He made that clear to anyone who was confused.

He had a bad temper, and he liked to fight. He may be the only guy I ever met who liked to fight more than me. We used to dust it up on hot summer afternoons, when it was too hot to breathe in the grimy and dark welding shop. Those were the days we’d cause a mild commotion in the back by the racks of flat iron, and we’d dance our way out the big overhead door and into the gravel and mud covered parking lot.

We’d hit each other a few times, someone would draw first blood, the boss would run out, all pissed off, separate us, hand me a couple of bucks and send me on a beer run. I’d find Henry out back in our spot on my return, sitting under a sprawling oak tree, out by the heavy I-beam ramps we’d built for working under heavy trucks and dozers and backhoes, and stuff like that.

Cracking a cold Genesee Cream Ale and splitting the six pack, not enough to get drunk, just enough to cool off. We agreed the beer tasted better when the boss paid for it. “Remember, you have to give the boss a little shit every now and then or he’ll think he owns you. When we fight, he gets scared. That’s good for us, plus, it was too hot to breathe in there today. This is better, and we are still getting paid!”

I learned a lot of the world view, according to Henry, under that tree. A devout Catholic, he could drink and fight all Saturday night, but on Sunday morning he’d be in church on a knee praying for forgiveness. I was puzzled often by the whole, seemingly endless sin-prayer-forgiveness-sin-prayer-forgiveness cycle. I guessed I’d never make it as a good Catholic. He possessed a deep fear of God, respect for women and right and wrong. I always admired the morality of a man who was as immoral as me, but still possessed a juxtaposing righteousness.

He was faithful to his wife of many years but had an eye for the ladies. On the rare day a pretty woman would find her way into the shop, lost or dropping off a part, Henry would remove his hat and leather gloves, and wipe the grime on his palms and fingers into his shirt, and offer the handshake of a true gentleman. He’d watch them drive off with a boyish gleam in his eye, “Ain’t no crime in looking!”

We found a bag of money once. About $50,000. A fortune in 1980. I instantly had a summer planned that did not involve Henry, the boss or that welding shop. Henry said we had to find the owner and return it. “What if it’s some old lady’s life savings?” The cops found the owner. Some NY City thug named ‘Lucky,’ no lie. I was pissed. Henry was convinced I’d feel better in time for doing the right thing. I never did.

He had a code, and believed a part of salvation came with a “Good Monday morning beer shit...”

We did a lot of work for the Hasidics when they began to move from Brooklyn to Orange County. We were more amused by the strange newcomers, many years before the community, Kirus Joel, Henry called it “Curious Joel,” became such a bitter controversy. One day a rabbi from the village was in the shop, talking to the boss about some work he needed done at the new boy’s school. Henry was welding on a backhoe bucket on a bench in the back of the shop. I heard his sparking arc stop.

Out of nowhere, off came Henry’s helmet, and hat, then gloves and he walked quickly to the front of the shop. I thought he was going to take a swing at the rabbi. Pointing a finger at the rabbi’s chest, Henry interrupted the conversation with the boss, “Is it true you people can only fuck with a sheet between you with a hole in it?” The rabbi laughed hard, the boss, about to piss his pants, laughed harder, and the rabbi replied—loudly, “Don’t you believe it!” Henry stood there, his hands on his hips and said, “Good, that’s good!” He turned and went back to welding on his bucket. Through conversations, over the years, I learned that proper married fucking was important to Henry. He had, like, a dozen kids. Other people’s religion didn’t confront Henry, as long as they didn’t fuck through a hole in a sheet.

The man was a master welder, a savant. I commented one time that if he’d gone to college, he would have been a great engineer. He laughed and said that the engineers often came to him for help, why should he waste his time in school. Possibly the most impressive thing I noticed about my friend Henry was how completely unimpressed he was. He never met a machine or mechanical drawing or mechanical device he couldn’t decipher and understand intimately.

One day we were working at the new sewer plant construction, outside Warwick. We both liked the gig; both of us far more accustomed to doing repairs on old, decayed, operating sewer plants, than new clean ones. You’d have to have worked on an operational sewer plant to appreciate the difference. An engineer called us into his trailer office and presented us with a table full of blueprints and plans. There were serious problems with the design. We were asked to look over the plans and design some repairs and workarounds. The engineer asked Henry how long it would take to fix. Henry took off his dirty, polka dot welding cap, scratched his head, looked deeply at the plans, lifted his head back up and asked the engineer, “How long did it take you to fuck it up?”

We were left alone after that, never another word, some days they brought us coffee in the morning or beer in the afternoon.

I need to go find an oak tree to sit under, and 1980 again, and pour a Genny Cream Ale on the ground and listen to some of The Maxie Schmulevich’s Polka hour.

It was a good time being your friend, Henry.

“She’s had a rich life...”

I heard that, again, today. “Your mom has had a full, rich life.”

The richness, the wealth, has dwindled to loose change now, maybe a dime, and a few pennies.

Every time a virus hits, even a cold, the fluid in and around her chest compresses her heart and lungs, it leads to heart failure. Her lack of movement, any real movement, then leads to pneumonia. There ain’t much oxygen flowing, this makes it worse, it starves a already dying brain.

Any drug to drain her chest hurts her kidneys, resulting in kidney failure.

The richness of life is forgotten, dulled to moments of abject boredom and sadness. She must feel, daily, the sensation of drowning, slowly...

Each bout with a simple cold results in a measurable loss. My phone rings at 3am, or noon, or 6pm, again...

More pennies taken away...

They always begin the report with, “Mr Lobb, no emergency...”

There is truly no emergency—ever. Not now, not here.

There are no emergencies in this slow, endless march. There are no battles or heroics. Only the slow, deliberate progression of days.

The end, the last day, the last breath is a teasing whore, offering glimpses, maybe a peek—then gone again. The whore never stays.

The robust wealth of life, squandered and spent and leaving only a handful of loose change. After each incident another coin or two is taken away. She never returns to a hundred percent—and last weeks hundred percent is barely a fraction of the life that was.

She gets pissed at me, and I’m happy to see it. It tells me there is still a little of the fire in that mind. The mind that would wake me, as a boy, at two in the morning and say, “get dressed, I’ve packed a bag, we are going to Florida...”

Florida was the promised land. A twenty-some hour drive, accessible even on a long weekend. Ninety miles per hour, top down, whisky bottle under the seat.

I learned to obey the law, whenever practicable, and carefully hide the evidence, from her. From her came some of my piracy.

I wish I’d left her to die in a home Florida, it seemed cruel, but it’s all cruel. The existence is cruel. At least she’d be dying in beloved Florida.

But, Florida or New York, the walls are all beige and antiseptic, and the same. Florida, is only another crumbled construct of a lost mind. Another memory that may or may not be real.

I try to get her to remember a better place. I tell her close her eyes and go there, and be there. I tell her this life is all an illusion anyway, but she gets confused and angry again.

There ain’t many pennies left in the jar, Ma. I wish you’d throw those that remain out the fucking window and let go...

“An unbroken string of days is all that brought us here. Eat some, sleep some, drink some, fuck some and fight some and here we are. An army of scoundrels, like me, like you, pulling’ and pushin’ and sellin’ each other to the highest bidder. Ain’t no allegiance.

There ain’t no plan, never was. No tremendous and awesome high-up power a savin’ ya from Hell’s fury and fire! Just all of ya in it, pushin’ fer what helps you and fuck everyone who ain’t like ya.”

“I learn’t this early on and I know’d they’s money in it. Preachin’ come easy to me boy. Ever man got his ass saddled down with guilt. A man stole some, er fucked somebody he want ‘spose to, or he finds his ass caught in a lie. Ain’t no feelin’ worst than when you know’d ya been caught in a lie, and the waitin’. The waitin’ is the worst.”

“Every man what ever put on a pair of pants got some guilt eatin’ at him. Ya just got ta dig a might ta find it, then offer a way to save his broke-down ass and he’ll foller ya like damn pup—and throw his last dime in the collection plate. Good money in salvation, boy. Damn good money. “

“That’s all we is, boy, just scoundrels fuckin’ and fightin’ and one day rolls inta the next and ya end up right smack here where ya have been all along.”

The summer always ended on his porch, the neighbor, Harry McCabe, down the dirt path dead-end by the water.

Feet up on the surrounding stone and cement wall, leaning back in the kitchen chairs we’d drug out after eating the evening meal. Carefully surveying the woods for the skunks. They liked appear as the sun sets, down by the garbage cans and the blackcap bushes.

The wind rushing under the wings of Canada Geese, landing on the small lake, more a pond, truly a swamp. To Harry it was a lake, his lake. The thick woods surrounding us betrayed the sun, the last rays of the day fall and we are borne into a new darkness.

Harry had been my dad’s friend, before my old man died. Together they worked on cars together in his driveway. My dad had a job, but he liked to work on cars too. I guessed that was the entirety of Harry’s career, cars and lawnmowers. He must have had a dozen or so old, broken down lawnmowers around the garage out back of his house.

Harry’s wife left him a few years back. I asked about it, but he said she just went to be with her sister and that was it. Word around the lake was Harry was a mean drunk, but he always seemed pretty kind to me. Some nights I helped him off to bed, when he got himself lost in the booze.

A Pall Mall cigarette burning in the enveloping night, he spoke, unintentionally of his insecurities and intentionally the need, come Saturday, to replace the starter in ‘The ‘53’ the Ford pickup, rusting behind his house. “I should teach you how to pop start that truck, when your legs are longer... it’s something you need to know.” He said with an urgent sincerity, a critical life skill he needed to impart to me...

He got me drinking whisky and sweet soda around the age of nine. Harry said, “What with your old man dead, now I suppose you ought to learn to drink and fight. I supposed nine is as good an age as any for both...” so we started to drink that sweet soda whisky on his porch as the summers ended.

A far off rumble slowly filled the night, every night, right on time, like a clock, then the wail of a train whistle, the rumble to a distant roar. “Diesel motor... when I was your age the steam engines were still rolling. I always had a feel for that trainsmoke in my blood, like a poison. Trainsmoke would make a man feel the need to be away. Not that life ain’t good here, at the summer’s end, drinking my whisky, but it’s that damn smoke that pulls at you. Somedays I walk out by the trestle and look at them boxcars rolling by...”

He stopped, I saw a man between two worlds. The man who loved his home and his porch and pickup Ford and his lawnmowers, and his mud hole lake, and the man who felt the pull of that whistle and rumble.

“Train smoke, boy... it’s in me stonger than this here whisky,” and we’d click glasses in some ritual I still don’t quite understand.

I went back to the lake in my later years and tried to find out what happened to Harry. The people who lived there now say he died, I like think he finally hopped that train.

I’m watching this guy struggle, mightily, with the vending machine. Peering deep inside at the collected offerings, kneeling down, then standing, then peering deep inside again. Hands on the glass, finally sliding in a couple of bucks into the slot and choosing a Baby Ruth. I made an idiotic comment about too many choices and he walked away. 

On the elevator the same guy. Again, he looks confused, can’t seem to find the buttons to push. The door closes and there we were, just him and me—alone. 

“My mom is dying, this week, all week she’s been trying to die...”

I listen in silence, he continues, “I can’t tell nobody, but I hope she dies. I hope she dies tonight. That makes me a bad person, right?”

I couldn’t tell if he wanted validation or a fight. 

I said, finally, “My mom has been here since 2016. Every day I want her to die. Every goddamn day...”

He looks at me and says, “Thank you, man. This ain’t no life.”

He comes up to me and and puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “I can’t find the tears. I know I should be crying, I can’t find the tears...”

I said, “This is a world without curiosity, or joy, or music. You ever hear music here, man? It would confound them. The memories of the music would torture and haunt. When I do hear music here it’s sad music, a caricature, almost mocking... 

When you reach this space and time, there is no place for tears.”

Another son of someone who has outlived life itself...

He looked me square in the eye, across a sweaty beer—turning piss warm on this hot July morning—Inhaling the filterless Camel I watched it burn down damn-near an inch on one drag. The conversation is lost for a moment as I watched, preoccupied, with the ash about to fall and land on his dirty dungarees. 

“It’s harder now to answer as a man, but it was hard to answer as a boy, too, I reckon.“ He took the unfiltered butt from his mouth and licked his lips, dry and burned from the unrelenting sun. “As a boy all I feared was snakes and hay and my old man’s belt. Ain’t so simple now is it?”

I stare across the shaky, old table and say, “Hayin’, ain’t nothing harder than hayin’”

“War is harder than hayin’ boy. Ain’t nothin’ harder on a man’s soul than killin’ another man. Other than that I’d agree with you, hayin’ is hard as fuck.”

He pours back the piss warm beer and says, “Trouble is today too few men know the reality of war or hayin’. Everybody is either sellin’ or buyin’, Ain’t nobody breaking a sweat, or smellin’ the blood of another man, or that burning pain from a copperhead bite when them son’s-of-bitches hide in the wet hay.”

My Mustang is lowered three inches and for four summers I’ve been trying to get the exhaust right.

If it hangs down even 3/8” of an inch it scrapes in driveways and speedbumps. If I get it up too tight it rattles.

Saturday morning I took to fabricating. By Saturday afternoon I had a good solid fix in place, finally. Some combination of thick tire rubber, exhaust clamps and 1/8” perforated sheet metal.

My only bitch of the entire day was that can be no reason whatsoever for 1/2” bolt heads and 13mm bolt heads to exist on the same car, or in the same universe for that matter.

It was a good day spent with dirty hands and a minimal amount of knuckle blood.

It was a good day away from my phone and news, spent under my car and in my shed at the vice.

Then about 4pm, I came inside to wash up. I heard about El Paso and I worried about my daughter and her girls, not because they are in El Paso, but because I love them and it makes me sick this is the world they got.

I went to bed Saturday night annoyed at myself for being so shallow. Nineteen people we dead in Texas, yet I was happy about my exhaust fix. I figured you need to find peace and happiness where you can, in America 2019...

Then I woke up Sunday morning.

Staring at my grandfather, holding my tongue; I need to drink in this hot July. I need to stop and taste each drop of sweat. I need to feel my skin burn crisp in the hot-high sun. I need the July-burning wind, raging maple’s leaves upturned betraying the coming storm. It’s ninety-six degrees at sunrise, it’ll be hundred and four by noon.

Now immersed in the day I walk with the old man out to the edge of the parched and cracking fields of wild berry bushes.

From our vantage point, huddled amongst a massive white stone outcropping, passing a bottle of his blueberry tinged moonshine, we watched the young girls working, picking and talking softly, bending over in their light cotton dresses, a field of pastels against the cloudless blue sky and green of the knee-high bushes.

Looking close, I see the salty-sweet droplets of sweat running rivulets of mud on their skin, and the wet red and blue and yellow bandanas, a feeble, but well meaning defense against the fire in the azure above their heads.

Jimmy B. turned to me, taking the bottle and a long drink he spoke softly—uncharacteristicly softly—saying, “it’s been a hagridden life boy. The whores, the wives, the good church ladies, your grandma; ain’t no cure, boy. Just a hagridden life. All of it, all you heard and read, all the stories and the lies, the bigger the story, the more I lied to make it a bigger lie. It was all fer that and nothin’ else but that and nothin’ more.” He raised his arm and pointed away across the field with the now near empty bottle and the pretty young girls.

“That dead man, down outside town, the one who got runned over by that train. I know’d you heard about it from yer grandma. Me and one of them town boys, we found him there, all cut in two, a bloody goddamn mess. I think he fell out the train drunk and get his ass tangled up in the wheels. He had over a hundred dollars in his purse. Me and the boy, we had a hell of time gettin’ that purse, and he had a gold watch too, and a couple rings. It wasn’t easy work, he was pretty goddamn gruesome, all mangled and bloody and bone stickin’ out. You ever try to pry a ring of a dead man fingers? It’s goddamn gruesome work.”

“Jesus, anyone think they was easy work? I reckoned he was never using the hundred dollars again and his time for usein’ that watch had sure as Hell long passed. It was hard work and he’d started to smell a might, What with all the heat coming off that gravel they use to lay down the railroad ties.”

“I come home and I’m feelin’ like a rich man, with my fifty dollars, my cut of the work, and the gold watch. The town boy couldn’t tell time good, so’s it wasn’t much good to him. He kept the rings. So I come home and I’m happy and proud and I shows yer grandma and she starts hollering and screaming and saying shit like I desecrated the dead, and I’m yelling back I didn’t desecrate no-damn-body, I just stole his money and stuff.”

“But she went runnin on down off the mountain and said she was going to report me for desecratin’ and I had to go hide my half the loot.”

“Pussy-whipped and hagridden. Story my whole goddamn life.”

“I’m not sayin’ it ain’t been fun, some, the preachin’ and the healin’ and the all the money. But now it’s all seems to be catchin’ up and they askin’ a lot of goddamn questions, not about that dead guy. That’s old news, no they’s asking about my preachin’ business and taxes and such, and I stand here, with a good drunk on before noon, and I look out across this field, and I think I could’a figured out a better way.”

It was October ’65 and it was cold night with no moon. My father had died the previous April and I was still pretty pissed off about that, and all that went along with fathers dying. I didn’t like people feeling sorry for me, and I started to like fighting a lot.

I’d stopped talking to anyone but Kippy, he was twelve and I was eight, and twelve seemed pretty old and worldly. He was bigger than me, by a good foot, and I decided I’d not try to fight him, what with his long arms. Besides his dad had been in the Navy and mine was dead, so that somehow gave him authority.

Then the lights went out. Everything was black, darker than I’d ever seen, before or since. My sister was eighteen and she came home and said the whole town was pitch-black dark. She took me out the front porch and we smoked cigarettes and she told me she was sure it was UFOs. I didn’t say nothin’, just trying to inhale those Camels and not choke.

A fireman came to our house down by the lake and yelled at my sister for giving me the smokes. Then Ma’ came out front with us all and the fireman said the lights was out all the way up into Canada. I didn’t know if I should believe him because them fireman had been coming to our house a lot since my old man died and I wasn’t sure I was ok with it. I wasn’t so sure he was even a real fireman, either, and that it wasn’t just some made up shit. I’d never seen him put out no fire. My money was on he was up to something no good. Besides, how could he know about the lights way the Hell up in Canada.

Kippy and his sister showed up at our back door at the same time and came around front and met all of us: Ma’ the fireman, my sister and me. They said we should go to up to their house. Donna, Kippy’s sister, said it was the Soviet’s and we was all gonna die. Ma’ didn’t want to go but I was really agitated.

That summer past I decided to not speak to no one but Kippy, and seeing how his dad had been in the Navy I figured he’d know what to do when the Soviets attacked.

I was a bit confused and Kippy couldn’t explain, but as the dark night wore on I got more agitated because I’d never done a goddamn thing to no Soviets, and now they were attacking my lake and my dad had just died.

The lights eventually did come back on and there was not a Soviet nor a UFO to be found, but from that day on I decided I’d never trust nobody. Not even Kippy.

That was 1965 to the best of my recollection.

My dad had a deep and abiding respect for shade and ’51 Ford Shoebox convertible vent windows. I’m quite sure he never slept a night of his life in air conditioning.

While I never did come across bad shade, I accompanied him many days on the quest for good shade. Expansive oak trees seemed to be the best place to find ’the good shade,’ the cool shade.

My father worked hard, and every day, but he was less busy than me. He found time to seek the good shade. If the day was too hot we’d drop the top on that Shoebox—by hand of course, the motor burned out about the same year I Love Lucy debuted— and, top down with those vent windows open wide, so as to shoot the hot sticky air back into your face, we’d take a ride to ‘cool off.’

We never really cooled off, I’m sure, until September, or we jumped in a pond. His favorite was up on my uncles farm, a deadly summer pool alive with snakes that I was certain would end me long before my eighth birthday.

Summer nights sitting and sweating on the front porch, of a house, on a dead end dirt road, by a swamp—he insisted was a lake—trying to decide if the mosquitoes were worse than the heat inside.

The songs of the Bush Crickets, and Dad’s Pall Mall cigarette glowing in the dark, smack dab in the middle of the 20th Century.

Unplugged and alive.