I Can Remember Sitting There

I can remember sitting there. I was sitting there in heavy workboots the soles smooth under the balls of my feet from walking up and down and up and down the ramps all morning, all week, all month, all year. My jeans – loose, sweaty, distended, -- were dark blue and heavy and faded and stretched at the knees only. My hands, greasy with chicken fat, filthy and huge, sprouting like two Tinker Toy spools from thin, sinewy forearms. My hands, in the sun, the muscles in their palms actually casting shadows across my fingers and wrists. Huge, capable, powerful; fingers spatulate and splayed, shiny and studded with scabs and scars. My hands looked like leftover monster parts: screwed on, alien.

I can remember sitting there with the two fried chickens sitting there in my lap. And the grease soaking into my jeans. And the parkinglot curb digging in thin and hard in under me. And my gallon of ice tea sweating there in the shade and the sunshine. And the other guys and the driver talking about the women driving by and whether they’d look good out of their cars and about the customer and whether we’d get a handout tip and how much more we had to haul out and about that big,red gunsafe in the basement and how that was gonna be a total hassle to get it up those narrow stairs and into the truck.

I can remember sitting there on that curb with my college degree in English sitting somewhere in my parents’ house. I was sitting there and I was thinking. I was thinking about how I could do this. I could sit here, every day, in the parking lot of a grocery store with two fried chickens picked greasily apart and wrecked on my lap and I could just listen to the other guys talk and pick apart the rest of the afternoon’s work. I could sit here every afternoon just this way. I could sit here, everyday and just keep to myself and listen.

And every afternoon after lunch I could be the guy who got the bottom and carried the gunsafe up the stairs and into the truck while the customer always in the way talked about how “it took four guys to get that down there when we moved in” and while the other guys’d talk about how I had a college degree but I still moved furniture and was just a helper.

I was sitting there and thinking all that and then the driver got up. He was finished with his lunch. So, we were finished with our lunch. Those were the rules. And we got into the truck, three across and me in the middle over the hot transmission hump because I was new.

We drove back with me with two fried chickens in my belly to a house with that big, red gunsafe in the basement at the bottom of those long, narrow stairs.