Inspirational Note

At the head of each entry, this pulp biographer, thought it weird, cool and proper, to include a chapter heading and quote from the book that propelled Electric Dan and his keystone companion, Heavy-Gravity Dave, into barbaric action. All quotes are from Dan’s childhood paperback treasure, Conan the Liberator, by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter, Bantam, 1978.

“This castled capitol crouched upon its hill like some fantastic monster out of ages past, glaring at the Outer City walls, whose great stones held it captive.”

-1, When Madness Wears a Crown, page 9

…

I met him working at Brown’s Chicken when I was sixteen. He was the day breader and I think he was like twenty-three. So like that whole place was more than just a place you worked out. Everybody hung out and went to parties outside of work. It was an instant friends group. Dave was the guy who I used to have call in sick for me at school and pretend he was my dad. I worked up front doing the register and packing up the orders when I first started. The reason I worked there was that a friend of our family ended up owning a couple of those stores. Between him and my dad they had it worked out that I would starts right when I turned sixteen.

Right after I graduated high school is when Dave started his concrete business. He worked for another company and then he went out on his own. Doing residential flat work, mainly patios and sidewalks. So I worked for him that whole summer. So, Dave was this Polish guy who was probably five seven and maybe two-sixty, he had really thick joints, and you saw the picture, he definitely has a bucket head. He could work nonstop all day. I would get out of breath and get tired and take a break from shoveling or breaking up concrete, whether it was with a shovel or a jack hammer. He would tell me to pace myself and work at a steady rate. He would go at a steady pace and just work like a machine.

He didn’t like to stop for lunch. We would just work until we got whatever the goal for the day was achieved and the we would go to one of the many neighborhood bars that he knew of and we would eat lunch and drink beer when the day was over. I never got carded even though I was only 17 because he knew everybody and I was hangin’ out with him. I worked with him every day. He had a couple of friends that would come help us out from time to time on certain projects. I worked with him five or six days a week.

One time we were working all day and it was really hot out and I was sweating buckets and we went to this Mexican place he liked and they both poured a beer out of the pitcher and it was Old Style beer. When we sat down at the table there was jalapeno peppers on the table and we started eating them. So when the beer came out they poured a beer each and I down the pitcher, and when the next beer comes out I down the pitcher, because I was thirsty as hell and my mouth was on fire, and I’m in the bathroom pissing and I’m thinking where the hell am I, I was like wasted in ten minutes.

At that same time his concrete company sponsored a softball league that was all guys his age or my age. After we played softball in our uniforms we’d go to the bars in a group. A couple other guys, like Joe and Wally, were my age and nobody would card us because they knew the whole team would leave and we’d drink and not get carded. Going to these bars at day for lunch with Dave and with the team, I could go in and get served. I thought I was pretty cool at age 17 to go into these bars and get served. I didn’t look 21. People just assumed I was because of my associations. It was just that summer, working for Dave.

We were at a party at this guy Jim’s apartment and my friend Joe was dating this girl who he ended up marrying. Not to far from the thing there was a street with the same name as his fiance, so Joe wanted to steal the street sign and put it up in her room. So Jim, who helped us with concrete and was also on our softball team, he had lost his prescription glasses and was wearing his sun glasses. You could take alleys from Jim’s apartment and the street and back and not go on a major road. In the process the whole concrete base came out and someone picked up the base and threw it in the back of the truck and the sign part was sticking out of the pickup truck. Someone must have called the cops that we were taking this sign. I’m in the back with Joe and this other kid Dave, and Jim and Dave—high gravity planet Dave—is in the passenger seat and a squad car shows up right behind us and pulls us over. He tells us to take the sign back, which was cool, and we’re driving back and Jim takes the corner kind of fast and the sign slides across the bed and slams into the side of this parked van.

When Jim pulls over again the cop comes up and says, “You hit that van.” Fortunately the van is a busted up, rusted out, piece of shit, and Jim is slurring his words, telling the cop, “You show me, where I hit the van.” The other guy Dave that was in the back with us, when the cop turns his lights on he had jumped out and ran off and the cop didn’t ask about him.

Joe, me and Dave are in the back of a squad car listening to drunken ass Jim argue with this cop. We thought we were in big trouble. Basically the cop just said, “Someone else drive and you idiots just go home.”

Jim had moved back home to live with his parents from Flordia. Jim was literally a rocket scientist who worked for NASA. He was married and while he was down their working his wife was going to college and soon after she graduated she told him that she had been fucking all kinds of other dudes and she wanted a divorce. He had paid for her college in full. So Jim started drinking to the point where he lost his job at NASA. So what do you do for a career when your degrees are in space travel and effects of satellites on geo-synchronous orbits and shit like that?

I don’t now how long he continued it. I think he ended up going to work for someone else. I worked security for Cub Foods and I was going to junior college and worked security at night from like 3 to 11 and on the weekends I’d work a day or two.

Dave to be continued in, ‘Shootouts with Negroes’: From a Heavy Gravity Planet 2.C