By Drew McQuade
They called him J.C. for obvious reasons.
Long stringy hair over a gaunt face. Sandals in the summer. A toga might attract attention, so it was wrinkled shirts with long sleeves and long tails over solid-colored T-shirts. A quiet, near-mute serenity. Expressionless. Open-mouth, squinty-eyed, silent zombie.
He walked on cement like he was sinking in and out of foam rubber.
How else would he float through life? He spent the better part of most days with his face two feet from a paint trough inspecting bomb shells as they trudged along a conveyor.
Inhaling paint fumes up his nostrils to his brain cells.
The abuse toward him was constant, yet it rolled down the steep, skinny excuse he had for a back. He never reacted to the taunts. Did he hear them? Nobody knew.
I caught a glimpse of his eyes once on a rare occasion they weren’t staring at his own toes. There was a kindness, not a dark abyss as most suspected.
They were green and sparkling. Maybe it was the drugs. Or the fumes.
He would absolutely stump those slick, cocky carnival age-guessers. He could visit them and rack up the giant stuffed Pandas. Was he in his 30s or 50s? J.C. was barely alive in whatever decade he was trudging through.
He would mumble a song incessantly. Had to be made up. A blues song, of course. Caught some of the words but they were faint moans:
“I used to be ruggedly handsome but now I’m just ruggedly…”
The words leaned more toward country western but J.C.’s execution was more Muddy Waters on crack:
“I used to go nakedly swimming but now I just go nakedly…”
On and on and on he sang. Day after day after day. It stopped only at lunchtime when he disappeared.
I ate lunch at lunchtime. Silly me. The convicts on work release boxed during the break. Bare-fisted, bloody brawls on a cement canvas. No ref. Heavy betting. Scary men with fresh red on their tattoos. Three rounds or less. The bosses weren’t always stupid. They looked the other way. The fights cut the tension. Less bombshells made it onto the skids after lunch, but the ambience shifted to mellow.
The bouts were draining. I hung on the fringes and watched with my friend, Bud, who kept putting his hands over his eyes. He could still see through the split fingers. You had to watch. Had to.
With the blood on the ground and lunch coming back up toward your mouth, it was back to lifting bombshells onto skids before easing the prongs of the flat hand truck under the medal platform and pulling the load toward the back of the plant where the trucks sat idling.
Never once thought about how some of these bombshells would eventually kill Vietnamese people in a couple weeks. Never once. Just a summer job in suburban Philly for knucklehead high school kids more interested in hippie girls than revolutionary causes.
The best part of the job was pay day when we snuck into the dive across the street after work and pretended we were 21 while the bartender pretended he was blind to the so-called adults with peach fuzz faces and adolescence demeanors.
Mostly we eavesdropped while sipping on watered-down drinks. The conversations were more fantasy than fiction with the recurring themes of sex, alcohol and sports. In that order.
We mostly laughed like goofs till our guts hurt and yearned to witness just one of these stories in person. You know, out of the way observers behind a tree or in a dark corner where we could enjoy in nervous silence without commitment.
One night we actually stumbled upon an eerie set of circumstances which no one ever believes. So Bud and I rarely bring it up. Makes us both shiver some so maybe it’s for the best.
We rolled out of the dive toward the dingier dive known as Jack’s. The owner and bartender was named Bob. If you asked him why the bar was called Jack’s, he spit out the same refrain with disdain. “I don’t know Jack.”
The heavy rain outside melded through the cracks on the window sills and slid down the walls near the dark corridor. Fresh legs nearly wipe out on the first trek to the bathroom, using the term loosely. You pissed on the wall and checked for roaches on the ledge of yellow and brown water below. They can’t jump but they can crawl upstream like insect salmon.
At the bar, fiberglass surface on rotting wood base, the two Jims were monopolizing the conversation if you consider grunts and guffaws conversation.
They had the verbiage and makeup of Neanderthals. The worst kind of cavemen. They never aspired to stand upright and favored bringing back the wielding of fat clubs and hair-pulling as the perfect date. They had plenty of nicknames but my favorite was Jim the Lesser and Jim the Even More Lesser. It had just the right touch.
Anyway, on this night they were harassing a behemoth of a man. The two Jims were not afraid of anyone. They would be in the tag team wing of the Alley Fighters Hall of Fame if one existed.
The massive human they were bugging was larger than both Jims with hair growing out of nostrils to form an impromptu mustache. He could make Paul Bunyan flinch. Blind to the monster’s physique, the Jims kept nibbling at him until they were taking it outside, a nightly adventure for the Jims.
The fight was stunningly short. The Monstrosity leveled Jim the Lesser with one mighty blow which made me shiver and recoil in the shadows. Bud was watching through his fingers as usual. Then, the huge dude pulled out a knife and cut a red line below Jim the Even Lesser’s chin and he plopped with a thud which would have registered on the Richter scale if Jim the Lesser’s motionless body hadn’t softened the landing.
Believe it or not, here’s where it got truly eerie.
A gaunt form slithered past and laid his hand on Jim the Even Lesser’s throat. Three seconds tops and then the guy shuffles down the alley, cutting a path through broken glass and cigarette butts, fading into the darkness.
Just like that. He seemed familiar.
Jim the Even Lesser got up like a zombie with a smile.
The scratch on his neck was barely visible. The other Jim was moaning now. He got up with help from his foggy companion and they trudged away in the opposite direction of their savior.
We stopped telling the story months later, weary of the eyes rolling up on the disinterested faces of the reluctant audience. But it resurfaced to carve out a niche, a permanent fragment in the brain, when the news buzzed through the plant one cloudy morning in the spring.
J.C. had been murdered. His bloody body was found near the veteran trash behind the Old Roman fencing company. He had sustained injuries to his head, hands, feet and torso. What was left of his forehead was entangled with barbed wire.
The report numbed me.
J.C. was 33.
