Hot and Hotter

I'm still working at the yard next door -- the "junkyard." It doesn't get any better, only worse, now with Summer weather upon us. Temperatures often in the 90s. For about a couple of weeks I was working in the engine rooms, where it's very hot even on cooler days, because the ship while in drydock, without the AC functioning, is a big steel oven. The only relief is the ventilation blower we carry around with us. It's about the size of a small beer keg laid on it's side. These are very powerful -- they make a lot of wind, but the blow all the dirt and grit around, too. We lock it up at the end of our shift with a chain and padlock, but sometimes people cut these and take the blowers anyway (which happened to us last weekend).

Other than that, it's pretty much S.O.S., same old shit. I've been bounced around on about six different jobs, without having finished any of them. Well, the other day we (who the "we" is at this moment, I'll get to in a bit) did finish one, four foundations for lube oil pump controller boxes, but today Tim Babbitt, my current supervisor, told Denny Dennison, my partner, we had to take part of it down again, so the cry baby welders could weld part of the back side before we put it up again. I told Denny I wasn't going to do it. "Fuck the welders," was how I expressed it.

Okay, about Denny, who as a matter of fact they sent to another job down river today, so we're no longer working together. He's an odd one, but then everybody in the shipyard is odd, it seems. Denny is 45 years old, was born and raised 5 minutes from the shipyard, and talks like a redneck. He's big -- 6'1" and 260 pounds, with curly dyed black hair and a cherubic face with a smudge of mustache. He's a good fitter when he decides to get off his butt and get moving, which normally takes a while. He plays golf -- usually with his older brother -- and plays the stock market. Because he lives so close, he went home every day for lunch, and when he came back he'd report to me on how the market was doing that day. He told me he's in a garage band (that stays in the garage), plays guitar I think and also sings falsetto! When he first said this I thought he was joking, but apparently not. In addition, he says he's got every song Frank Sinatra ever recorded as well as the Billboard top 100 songs for every year since 1944. It also came out that he likes The Village People. He's not married, evidently never has been, and doesn't seem to have a girlfriend -- or boyfriend.

I've already mentioned Dean, who's in charge of the shipfitters on this job. Many years ago we were friends, but have drifted apart. So I was very surprised a couple of weeks ago when he stopped me to ask about my daughters, the second of whom had just graduated college. He told me he still had a photo of my first daughter when she was two. I don't remember how he turned the subject to himself, but he said his father had died a year or two ago and now he was all alone except for his brother. I said, "But you're married, you have a family." He said his wife wanted a divorce. I asked if it was because he was married to his job, working all the time. No, he said, he had "fucked up." "You mean you were messing around with somebody else?" "No, not really," he said. "That doesn't exactly sound like a categorical denial," I said, but he wouldn't elucidate any further. Thinking about it, and knowing Dean, I'm betting she caught him with pornography on the internet. A few days later I asked him if she was really getting a divorce. "Yes," he said. "Does she have a lawyer?" "Yes," he replied, and added that he was now living in a motel.