“… an alchemist seeking to transmute iron into gold or to concoct a universal panacea.”

-page 11

Sausage Fingers

The origin story for Dave as the heavy gravity planet guy was when we were working construction and I said something about his hand, like a catcher’s mitt of a hand, okay and I said something about his sausage fingers. That’s when he said someone had described him as looking like he was born on a high gravity planet. When I was in junior college I think he just worked for another concrete company.

Jobs I had during Junior College

The security job, one time we had a guy—there was two of us on the weekends—I think I had come in in the afternoon and the guy before me had just gotten this dude for shoplifting and had him in the office. He was in the back where we had a little thing set up to take his picture. We were blocking the door and he made a break for it and we get in this scuffle at the door. The cops had told him that if someone resists we are free to fight back. So the guy was trying to wrestle with us so we were pounding on him, smaller and older then us, disshevelled looking. We beat the crap out of this guy and handcuffed him to the chair. Later on, after the cops got there, we were laughing because we looked at the linoleum floor and it was crazy with scuff marks.

Another time, with that same gut, I don’t remember his name, but he was the main guy, not a manager or anything. We were working on the weekend during the day and the girl from seafood department calls us and says there were two suspicious guys looked like homeless dudes that were ordering hundreds of dollars of seafood. I went o the entrance, because a lot of times they would sneak out the entrance. The store was set up like a rightward maze. He [the main guy] went to the exit. We had radios, got in position. The manger went to the exit with him. The two guys tried coming out the entrance and I grab the cart and one guy by the wrist and the other guy takes off the other way and I radio. The guy goes running out the exit and the other security guy clotheslines him and his feet went up and his head hit the floor and busted and he was bleeding everywhere, because he split his head open. We had to call an ambulance—the cops and everybody show up. It was either really exciting or really boring, working security.

Junior College

My first year was general shit because I had no idea what I wanted to do and I didn’t like it. I ended up getting chronic tonsilitus. So I didn’t finish that semester. The only classes I liked in high school was my electrical class. I had done some work with my dad on side jobs and hooking up lights for people. Mike was the same age as Dave and he was taking the electronic program and he told me not to waste my time, but to take automated systems technology, about motors and programmable controls. So I did that the next two years and finished the program. My teacher wrote the textbook, not just for the class, but later on when I got into the IBEW apprenticeship, the textbook we used was written by him. That teacher, we had a final that was pass or fail, and he would give us a conveyor built and we had to design it and put all the components together for a practical test and it was pass or fail because it either worked or it didn’t work. He had night classes for guys that worked at the Caterpillar factory. We’d go back into class after taking the test and he asked me how I thought I did and he said, “What if I told you that only one person in all of my classes got it correct.”

And I said, “It must have been me.” The he started laughing and he gave me my paper and I was the only one that got the problem right.

I did good in those classes. It was something I enjoyed. After that it was you either become a plant maintenance guy or you go on to engineering school. I didn’t want to be a plant maintenance guy, so I went to a chemical plant and worked on their line with the idea of becoming their electrician or maintenance guy—I really didn’t want to, but didn’t know what else to do. I worked there for six or seven months.

In between there for a while I got a job working as a summer helper at a beer distributor near my parents house. All the beer guys were drinking back then, even the drivers. We used to go into this biker bar that was a full on Nazi biker bar and they had pictures on the wall of black guys as targets! They had this big Hungarian dog, the dogs name was Huzar. The dog came up to me while we were wheeling beer around and he put his nose right up to my crouch and started growling. I was like holy shit how do I get out of this situation? Then the person came around the corner and called the dog.

You would go with drivers who had certain amount of volume for a helper, I was a summer helper. I went with this one driver I didn’t know to a bar, I think it was named Joey’s Place, the owner, Joyy, behind the bar and the driver and I and they were joking around and it seemed friendly and Joey motions for me to come over to him like he’s going to tell me a secret, and he reaches up and he kisses me on the cheek and I recoil, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck,”

And he’s like, “Oh, you don’t like me,” and he pulls out a gun, looks like a .45 APC, and he’s pointing the fucking gun at me and I’m ten feet away of so, and the surrealness of the situation got to me and I look at the driver and the other guy and they’re not doing or saying anything. I said, “I don’t know if this is a prank or what so I’ll wait for you in the truck,” and I walked out and got in the truck.”

I thought about going back there with a bat and breaking Joey’s legs for a while! Then I heard from other people that he was a big coke head and a lot of drugs were dealt out of that bar. The driver acted like nothing happened! It was so weird.

Drinking with Dave

We had mutual friends still. A lot of times we went to a bar named Garnseys. One time we were drunk and outside in the back of the bar one of my friends is smoking, so it was probably weed, because at that time you could still smoke in a bar. We were rough housing and Dave pushed me and I went through the fence, a six-foot wood panel fence between the posts. Then I pushed him and he went through another fence, and we figured we better stop, we had a good four sections of the fence knocked down. This was a neighborhood bar where the fence was separating it from houses.

Jim’s Farmhouse

So Jim was running a big farm house and he use to have these awesome parties because we would have bonfires and we could crank music and be as loud as we wanted to and didn’t have to worry about neighbors or cops. Jim met a local girl and got married and had a couple kids and he works as some kind of engineer at a chemical factory and his wife is a pharmacist.