Thursday, September 8, 2011

LOOK WHERE I'M POINTING ONE EYE!

All eight "Spanish Guys," on the Latino house painting crew were slightly annoyed. They were well aware that the American white guy-- the ex-High School football player with the thick neck and missing tooth, had been drinking the night before.

The Spanish Guys knew this because the white painter sometimes (when he had been drinking the night before) came to work sullen and miserable, and uncommunicative, without even so much as a "Good Morning" in response to any sort of a greeting from the Spanish Guys.

As the painting crew would gather together in the parking lot of the Condominium Development, and chit-chat in friendly, early morning tones, the white painter guy would sit by himself in his beat up old clunker car, and sip his coffee, with a scowl on his face, and a cigarette in his left hand hanging partly out the window, so as not to fill his sagging jalopy with smoke.

The ex-football player white guy would have a look of latent fury,  as a feeble tide of dim and untutored ideas washed and passed through his mind, back and forth and back and forth,  like waving kelp in a low tide current:  insignifigant, erratic and irregular, in a muddy and forgotten, urban marsh--a polluted current of ideas,  without which, stagnation would set in, and abcesses would form on the surface of his brain, and ultimate eventual cerebral decay would quickly take hold, and eat its way into the cortex.

Such was the conceptual and reasoning and spiritual effluence, which passed for the phenomena of thought in the case of the white painter guy with the thick neck and missing tooth who used to play American football in high school, and who had evidently been drinking the night before, and who was now wroking on a house painting crew at age 32, hung over, and miserable, waiting for his workday to start at 7AM.



Gotta go paint. But anyway, this little bit goes with this story here:


As with a lot of my stories, they are works in progress, and now I see that I have to somewhat fictionalize Jose's story for a number of reasons.