Of Monkeys And Men

Trouble Lord, trouble, trouble is all I see
Trouble, I said, "Trouble, trouble is all I see"
Yes, you know, I ain't got nobody there work and care for me

--“Bad Luck And Trouble,” Lightnin’ Hopkins (1959)

“How do you feel about a little overtime this weekend?”

The question caught me by surprise, and I guess I must have sounded pretty retarded with my response.

“Huh?”

“Overtime. This Saturday. Joe’s out of town for the day,” explained Ken, “and we need somebody to cover for him.”

That’s when it began to dawn on me that I was finally coming of age—I was a real man. The boss needed somebody to do something extra, and he had thought of me. “So what do you think?”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, affecting my most manly recline in the chair in Ken’s office. His office was really just an extra room attached to the break room. It had a map of Gainesville on the wall, and a couple of file cabinets to go with the second-hand desk and two chairs.

Ken wasn’t an office kind of guy, anyway. His reddish-blond hair was thick but close-cropped, and his full beard was an exact outline of his tall, rectangular face. His perpetually stern expression made him seem somehow more solemn and older than his actual age, which was around the mid-thirties at that time. He had a sort of constant nervousness about him, personality-wise, as if he were still a bit shocked that someone had made him the boss—and he was worried he might screw it up. I don’t remember ever laughing at a joke with him, now that I think about it. And he was dead-serious about work, for sure.

Ken was easily the most serious guy I knew. He was serious about the Parks Department of the City of Gainesville. He was serious about making me stop goofing off and cutting up during morning meetings. He was serious about making sure I drove five miles per hour through the park when I was in a City truck. He was serious about those animals in the zoo. He was serious about not having a repeat, on his own watch, of that other incident—that Dump Truck Thing in the cemetery from a few years before. He was serious about life, serious about work, serious about his beard—just seriously serious, man. I couldn’t hardly handle it.

“Well, I’ll send you with Joe tomorrow and he’ll train you. And you’ll get time and a half for Saturday.”

“Time and a half. Great.”

And that’s how The Great Monkey Incident of 1989 got started.....with the promise of time and a half from a really serious guy.

*             *             *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

I guess I only got the job in the first place because good old Papa had talked his friend Orville down at City Hall into giving me another chance to work for the city. I had slunk home in disgrace from Waxahachie—exiled for my sin, forever in humiliation—and needed a job to pay for my apartment. Even the apartment had come with some serious help from Papa—he had talked to a guy he knew, who agreed to give me a chance to be responsible, and all that hoo-haw—and it was a little one-bedroom duplex over on “the wrong side of the tracks,” as everybody in Gainesville called it. I was the only white guy within seven blocks, and definitely had the trashiest apartment on Commerce Street. I barely earned enough working for the City of Gainesville Parks Department to keep the lights on. I had no television, but did have a loud stereo. I owned maybe three or four dishes, and couldn’t cook to save my life. My most important possession was an old typewriter that Papa had given me.

Papa had always liked my writing. He always wanted to read whatever it was I was working on, and always made a point of telling me how I might be a famous writer someday. Looking back, with all I know about Papa now, I suppose the fantasy  of having an important writer grandson would have been kind of a big deal to him. He had dropped out of school in the ninth grade and joined the Navy, and never had a formal education beyond that—but was a voracious reader with a sizable intellect. When he gave me that typewriter, the importance of that gesture was not lost on me. I wanted what he wanted—for me to be Somebody. And we both understood that writing might be the ticket to me being Somebody.

And so I had set up the typewriter in my living room, where everybody could see it and understand that I was a Writer. If I was a little weird or goofy or drunk or lacked etiquette, it was because I was working on something Important. I don’t think I actually did any real writing, beyond a couple of long-forgotten short stories. But it was the way I impressed the girls. I could invite them over, and they would ask about my typewriter and I could tell them that I was a Writer, and was working on something Important, and would probably be published within the year and would have to move to New York City because my agent needs me to be close by. Believe it or not, it actually worked a few times. Somewhere out there are two or three grown women lecturing their daughters or granddaughters about men who make up laughable crap about themselves in order to impress girls—and wherever they are, there is certain to be two or three daughters or granddaughters who are rolling their own eyes and ignoring the old crones—and the Cycle of Idiots continues on, unabated.

But it was a bona fide miracle that Papa had talked old Orville into giving me another shot at working for the City—the most coveted of all unskilled positions in Gainesville, Texas. There wasn’t a chance in hell that Orville had forgotten about You Know What at the cemetery—but he must have been real good friends with Papa because he pulled some strings and got me that job. And so I put all my mowing and weedeating skills to work again for the bustling metropolis of Gainesville, and found myself once again growing into a trusted employee. This job was a little different; I did travel to the three parks in Gainesville and keep the grounds trimmed and clean, but I was headquartered in the Frank Buck Zoo, where I helped to keep the cages hosed down and clean. You know all about the Frank Buck Zoo.

The Frank Buck Zoo had been founded by Frank Buck, some Indiana Jones-type guy who brought back exotic animals to be used in traveling circuses and zoos. His motto, memorialized for all time in a big important-looking plaque in front of the zoo bearing his name in Gainesville, was “Bring ‘Em Back Alive!” Guess there was no chance HE was going to be a writer.

But the zoo got famous back in 1981, when the big flood hit Gainesville. I was in sixth grade when it happened, and I only remember it because my friend’s dad got killed riding in the front of a backhoe while trying to help clear the streets for the good citizens of Gainesville. That was a terrible moment for him, and my heart still hurts for him to this day. But of course everybody else remembers the Great Flood of 1981 because of Gerry.

Gerry the Elephant was just a stupid elephant, until that flood. But after that, she was a Cooke County treasure. It turns out that some idiot built the zoo right on the banks of Elm Creek, and after it had rained for a solid twelve days in 1981, the creek flooded and threatened old Frank Buck’s hallowed motto. Many animals lost their lives in that flood, but one plucky female elephant got washed into a big tree, and kept her trunk above the water to stay alive until the flood abated. Gerry became a front-page story, and a miniature cottage industry. People began making t-shirts that had pictures of Gerry on the front, trunk held aloft in a tree, with the saying “Gerry and I survived the flood of 1981.” I doubt very much if my friend’s family owned any of those. I wouldn’t own one to this day, out of respect for him.

But I got to see Gerry the Overrated Elephant every day of my life during my second stint as employee of the City of Gainesville. When I wasn’t weedeating and mowing, I made rounds with a giant water hose to all of the cages in the Frank Buck Zoo. I stood outside the cages, on the sidewalk with the regular people, and sprayed water up into the cages to wash the animal feces down into the gutters. Gerry’s product, of course, wasn’t as easily disposed of. I had to actually enter her cage with a giant snow shovel and a wheelbarrow and remove great mountains of elephant dung twice a week. Believe me when I tell you that I wasn’t all that impressed with Gerry’s survival of the Great Flood of 1981 at that point in my life. In fact, not entirely without coincidence, it was during the execution of these duties that I actually decided that it would be advisable for me to return to college forthwith.

No, my job description in the Parks Department was not going to inspire much in the way of inter-departmental political maneuvering so someone else could snag my job. I was pretty safe in my position—as long as I could keep from screwing it up, a possibility for which Ken gave about even odds.  And despite Ken’s rather obvious distaste for my constant joking around, it looked like I might even be earning my way up the professional ladder. Joe the Zookeeper existed on an entirely different strata than I; he was skilled labor, and had actually trained to do his job. He made very good money, and worked a lot less than the rest of us. On this particular Saturday, he had something he had to attend out of town, and I had been the employee Ken trusted to do Joe’s job in his stead.

I was feeling pretty grown up as I made Joe’s rounds with him. Joe treated me pretty well, too—he took me to each cage, showed me how to get in, how to feed the animals, and how to lock up. He showed me the giraffes, the monkeys, the two lions, the mountain goats, the hyenas—I was in the cage right up close to every one of them. We went into the forbidden zones, the places where the regular people would watch enviously from the safety of the outer sidewalk. We went right into the cages and mingled with the animals. The kids who came to the zoo were eating their hearts out with envy, watching the zookeeper and his helper. My day of training was the apex of my time in the City’s employ, and I could feel my stock rising as an important member of the team. Before we left for the day, Joe handed the keys to the zoo over to me.

“Zoo opens at nine, but you can open the gates at 8:30 if you want,” he explained. “Folks don’t usually start coming in till later anyhow, and there’s no point in doubling back toward the gate once you’ve passed it.”

The keys. I had the keys to the zoo.

“Make sure you close and latch the gates behind you when you go in.” Joe was giving me last minute reminders as he climbed into his truck. He didn’t ask me testing questions, or look at me concernedly, or anything else like that. He gave me important professional instructions, man-to-man, and then was done with it. He assumed I understood, because I was a full-grown City employee, not a perpetual screw-up prankster.

“No problem. Will do.” I was earnest and capable, and could tell that Joe had faith in me. “I’ll handle it for you.”

“Have a good weekend. See you Monday.” He closed his door, started his truck, and drove out of my life forever.

*             *             *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

Saturday started off unlike any Saturday before it—I was in charge. I had the keys and I was in charge. I woke up early, got dressed, put those keys in my pocket and drove to work. I was a half-hour early. That’s what men do sometimes.

I opened the break room and made myself some coffee. I drank a cup and decided to get to work. Making my way to the zookeeper’s barn, I looked over at Frank Buck’s plaque, his heroic bust gazing at some far-off exotic creature to be captured, a safari hat on his head. I’ll keep ‘em all alive for ya, Frank, I thought to myself. I could feel his nod of approval. I started on the west side of the zoo, and carefully made my way through all of the animals leading back east toward the front gate. When I reached the gate, I unlocked it. There were no people yet, but when they arrived they would see the motivated young zookeeper hard at work, all by himself with his animals. I made my way to the hyena cage. The hyenas were clearly the ugliest animals I had ever laid eyes on, other than That One Girl in 10^th grade, but they deserved my professional treatment. I fed them, watered their cages, and spoke authoritatively to them. I moved on to the monkeys.

I carefully opened the gate in the back of the patas monkey cage. Hooking the open padlock on the fence adjacent to the gate, I closed the gate and latched it shut. Picking up the coiled hose in the top of the cages, I turned on the water and began to hose down the concrete roaming area. People were beginning to enter the zoo now, and some of them had stopped in front of the patas monkey cage. I pretended as if I didn’t notice them, manfully going about my business being the zookeeper for the day. I hosed down the cage on the right side, then I moved professionally over the left side and repeated this action. As I finished up the left side of the cage, I ventured a glance at the curious onlookers, and noticed that quite a crowd had gathered. They were pointing and looking up at me, and I realized that they were actually looking behind me. I looked backward to where they were pointing, and saw the monkeys.

Outside the cage.

The gate had been unlatched and opened, and the monkeys had escaped from their cage. They clambered over the fence and up into the nearby trees. I immediately dropped the hose and ran after them, trying hard not to look like I was panicking. I bolted out of the cage and turned toward the nearest two monkeys, who were sitting on the ground directly behind the cage. They turned and darted to a nearby elm tree, and I gave full pursuit.

Did you know that a patas monkey can run at speeds up to thirty-five miles per hour? Yeah, me neither, at that time. I do now, though.

I never so much as laid a finger on the monkeys. They ran up that tree and—I swear it—looked down and laughed at me. I saw a flurry of activity to my left, and noticed three more running toward I-35, which runs adjacent to the zoo. I must have looked quite hilarious to the people, flailing about and trying to capture these super-fast animals. I could hear the folks laughing. They were having quite a Saturday entertainment, alright. I gathered up what was left of my tattered pride and made my way back to the office. Picking up the phone, I dialed Ken’s emergency number. I don’t remember the particulars of the conversation; I just know that the man was dumbfounded, and in a serious way. I could hear it over the phone. By the time he got there, somebody had called the police and the fire department, and I guess he had already mobilized some other employees to come out and help round up the monkeys. Everybody was there except Joe, who I was sure would just shake his head sadly at my incompetence when he returned from his one day off.

It took us all morning long to get them all back, and it was quite an adventure. We had to lure them down from trees, away from the lion pens, out of the bird cages, and away from the highway. Two of the monkeys didn’t make it back; they had been struck and killed by cars while trying to cross I-35. I remember looking down at their bodies in the back of the city truck after they had been retrieved, and quietly gloating to myself. Their mangled corpses were the most glorious sight I could imagine at that moment. The monkeys had declared war on me, and I had lost. But at least there were two casualties on their side. In that moment, I hated them with what must have been something akin to how American soldiers felt toward the Japanese.

Still do.

One lucky patas monkey made his way across the highway and over to the McDonald’s where the dumbstruck customers called the police and the Gainesville Daily Register. A newspaper reporter came out and took a picture of the little monkey, trapped up in a tree at McDonald’s. I’m sure you can still see this Peabody-worthy photograph in the Daily Register archives, if you ask them. It made front page, above the fold, the next day.

That wasn’t all that happened the next day. I gingerly made my way to work the next morning, and tiptoed into Ken’s office sheepishly. I assumed I was in trouble, and wondered whether or not I’d be fired for what had to be considered an honest mistake. Who knew that would happen? I latched the gate. I didn’t lock it but I latched it. Who knew that patas monkeys would know the difference? Chalk it up to more information that I learned about the patas monkey later. They’re fairly smart.

As I turned the corner in the break room and walked into Ken’s office, I could see him sitting behind his desk. The air was heavy with seriousness, even more than normal. He looked up and saw me, and he was already shaking his head. There were no words spoken; I fully understood the communication. He stopped and stared at me, and pointed out the door. He resumed shaking his head as he looked back down at his work on the desk. I knew better than to still be standing there when he looked up again. That’s my last picture of him—shaking his head, refusing to even look at me.

I guess that was the first moment in which I came to grips with two unavoidable truths about my existence: first, it was starting to look like I would need to get used to living my life in more or less constant shame. It was just destined to be the narrative arc of my life, and I was now aware of it. No matter what goal I undertook, or what noble cause I stood up to be counted for, or what destiny I reached for—there would always be some sort of humiliating embarrassment that would mark my presence in it. I was a walking Three Stooges episode.

 Second, I would have to become a real working man without a City of Gainesville pension to shoot for. I’m not sure how Papa and Orville got along after that, but somewhere in the bowels of City Hall is a Human Resources folder on employees. And despite the blacklisting laws on the books in the state of Texas, it is quite certain that there is one employee who folder has been red-tagged against future hiring in any department for the City of Gainesville. Those monkeys’ tenure may have outlasted mine in the Frank Buck Zoo, but the really good news is that the patas monkey only lives 25 years in captivity.

We’re just about coming up on that figure now.

Cemetery Blues

I'm going down to the cemetery 'cause the world is all wrong
I'm going down to the cemetery 'cause the world is all wrong
Down there with the spooks, to hear 'em sing my sorrow song
Got a date to see a ghost by the name of Jones
Got a date to see a ghost by the name of Jones
Makes me feel happy to hear him rattle his bones

--“Cemetery Blues,” Bessie Smith (1923)

I guess I learned how NOT to drive a standard before I learned how to drive a standard. It was back when I was about fifteen, and I was working with The Goon Patrol. I can still smell the stale coffee in the break room one morning right after we clocked in and were still trying to talk ourselves into actually going to work.

“Ken, you take da kid and go twim the whole sout’ lot today,” said Glenn, the foreman. He was a middle-aged chubby man, balding, with false teeth and a terrific speech impediment that made him sound a lot like Elmer Fudd. “Me and Ron will take da Tubota and dig two graves in the front for tomorrow.” Glenn couldn’t say “Kubota”, and it made me and Ken laugh pretty regularly every time the word got used.

Ken Clevenger shook his head mildly. “You don’t really think me and the kid can do the whole south lot in one morning, do you?”

“You’re gonna have to. We got two fun’rals tomorrow, and the gwass is too high already.”

“Ok, but we gotta change the fuel line on the kid’s trimmer first.”

I kind of liked being called “the kid.” I felt a part of the crew; one of the guys. When one of them referred to “the kid,” it was kind of like a term of affection, as far as I was concerned.  Of course, looking back now, I realize I was just some dumb part-time high school kid to them—someone who was always underfoot and in the way, and likely couldn’t be counted upon to get the job done. But back then, I felt like I was one of them, and I really wanted to impress them—especially Ken.

Ken Clevenger was the closest thing I had to a real friend. He was thirty-five years old at the time, and had a shock of sandy-brown hair and perpetual beard stubble. He was usually paired with me for the day’s work, which typically consisted of “trimming” the grass around gravestones with our weedeaters, or mowing the larger swaths of grass with our self-propelled lawnmowers. Prior to funerals, we would dig the graves with a Kubota backhoe, finish the hole out with shovels, then set up the Army green funeral tent and chairs over the nondescript hole. Ken would give me fatherly advice on how to talk to girls, how to get along with my parents, and how to avoid becoming a card-carrying member of The Goon Patrol.

The Goon Patrol was Ken’s name for the other crew—Glenn and his two inbred helpers. These guys were their own piece of work, believe me. Glenn—Elmer Fudd—was the talkative one, and Ron and Jeffrey were silent and grim in their confederacy as Glenn’s helpers. Glenn had been working at the cemetery for close to twenty years, and his authority over both crews was unquestioned—but Ken never missed a chance to poke fun at The Goon Patrol every time we set out in the white Chevy stepside pickup trucks to begin the day’s work. I was always happy to be paired with him, and as we rode through the winding cemetery roads toward our labor, it hardly seemed like work.

I suppose, looking back, I can see that the men I’ve most admired or been drawn toward as influences have all had one thing in common: a really outstanding sense of humor. They were all really funny guys. My Uncle Mickey, Uncle Harry, my best friend Brad Llano—these guys were hilarious, and their jokes, one-liners, and imitations made my childhood bearable. Ken was easily in their number, and his morning rants against The Goon Patrol in the pickup truck were the stuff of comedy legend. No topic was sacred from his humor, and no amount of work to be completed would stand in the way of cracking his helper up. Once, Ken advised me that I needed to lose my virginity to a fat girl.

“Yeah, boy, lemme tell you,” he would say. “What you need is a big, 300-pound Bertha to bring you up to speed. Once you go there, you’ll calm right down and live life normal.” I wouldn’t even know how to respond to such a suggestion, other than uncontrollable laughter.

Ken would let me drive the pickup truck, occasionally, too. It was an automatic, and I was always grateful for his trust in me. I liked driving, which I was just learning to do, and I liked the responsibility. He trusted me to keep from killing him in that truck, and I appreciated that. In the height of summer, when the heat was most brutal, the tarantulas would come out in force and almost cover the tiny cemetery roads. Ken and I would take turns driving to see how many tarantulas we could run over with one tire. We were reckless, and probably should have both been fired for the way we drove that thing. One day, for no reason at all, Ken was driving down the small stretch of Fair Avenue that bounded the cemetery on the west side. This was a real street with actual Gainesville traffic, not a cemetery road, so when Ken didn’t stay in his lane, I became concerned.

“Hey man,” I said. “Pick a lane already.”

“Nope.”

“What? Come on, man, we’re going to end up in this stupid cemetery with Glenn digging our graves with the ‘Tubota’. Pick a lane, man.”

“Nope...I’ve got one half of the road, and I’m taking mine right down the middle.” How do you not laugh at stuff like that?

So one morning, Ken and I went to the maintenance shop on the back property of the cemetery in order to change the fuel line on my weedeater. I liked working on the small two-stroke engine with Ken, from whom I learned a lot about that sort of thing. Of course, we always found time to play with the air compressor and have air hose fights and all sorts of forbidden pleasures like that. But this particular morning took a fairly serious turn when I asked Ken a fateful question.

“So whose funeral is it later on?

“Some kid,” said Ken. “Killed in a wreck, Glenn said.”

“Really?” I figured there might be a greater chance of my knowing the person if they were young. “Who is it?”

“Name I saw is Patrick Kazda.”

My heart fell like a big lead fishing weight into my stomach, and I stared at Ken with my mouth slightly open.

“Pat Kazda?”

“Yeah...you know him?”

“Know him?” I asked blankly.

Pat Kazda and I had played on the same soccer team together in elementary school. We weren’t especially close friends, but I knew him. We were on the same team. This wasn’t some old person whose time had come. This was a kid around my age, and he was dead.  And I knew him.

I KNEW him.

It was so strange, and had such an instant effect on me—and Ken noticed it. Trying to be sensitive to me, I could tell he was trying to keep the humor down and not be flippant. We finished the fuel line in relative silence, and loaded up the truck with our weedeaters and gas cans. Ken drove wordlessly to the south lot, and we got out of the truck and began to strap on our weedeaters. “Alright, pace yourself, kid,” he said. “Don’t try to do the whole cemetery; I’ll come get you at lunch.”

I nodded and fired up my weedeater. Beginning near a fence, I began to trim away the grass from the edges of the gravestones, one at a time, all the way around. After the first ten, I was on autopilot, trimming away while my mind wandered to the very real dread that I would be helping to dig the grave of a guy I had played with just a few years before. I was always a little pensive and moody on the subject of death anyway, what with my mother and all, but this Pat Kazda thing was really throwing me for a loop. By the time the lunch hour rolled around, I had worked myself up into a real philosophical lather about death and dying and the afterlife and the weirdness of knowing Pat Kazda, now Pat the Dead. Ken and I ate our sandwiches, and he sensed my mood.

“It’s a little bizarre, I know,” he offered. “But it’s very natural. It’s just one of those things.”

“mmhummm,” I muttered in response.

“We all get one chance at this thing, and he blew it.” The words hit me like a thunderbolt.

“Yeah, I guess he did,” I answered.

“Yep.” I still think Ken Clevenger was the most articulate man I knew in the first twenty years of my life.

That afternoon, we set up the funeral tent for Pat’s family. Ken and I smoothed out the hole with our shovels, and I said a little prayer for Pat. We waited a respectful distance away from the funeral proceedings, so as not to appear like vultures waiting to throw the dirt on the deceased. It was our normal proceedings, but this time there was no joking around. Ken knew I was a little freaked out, and he tried to be respectful regarding my “loss.” I was still feeling a little philosophical a couple of days later when Ken and I were assigned the north plot to trim. This was where, of course, my mother is buried, so of course I had the opportunity to wax moody again.

The truth was, the Pat Kazda thing wasn’t much of a loss for me. I wasn’t particularly close the guy—I was just a little freaked out that Old Man Death had come so close to me—again. It was weird. And exhilarating. And fleeting. Nobody else in my high school had ever actually buried someone before; no one had been this closely associated with death to the extent that I had. I was unique. This made me special, somehow. I had a good story to tell.

I guess it was a few weeks after the Pat Kazda thing that we had a real Goon Patrol moment. Both crews had been working together digging a grave in the south plot, and had some down time while we waited for Glenn’s helpers to come back with the tent and chairs. Now you might think a grave is six feet deep, but you’d be wrong. Most graves are actually four feet deep, and when it rains into an open hole the workers have to put on rubber waders and get down there and pump the water out of the hole. They wear rubber because a lot of the water has traveled underground through other graves and corpses, carrying diseases and embalming fluids and blood and who knows what else. It’s really a freaky job, let me tell you. Caskets are usually lowered into pine boxes or concrete vaults that fit into the hole. On this particular fine summer day, as I said, we stood around waiting for the rest of the funeral set-up to arrive. Somebody got the grand idea to dare the kid to lie down in the pine box that had already been lowered into the freshly dug hole. Of course, the kid was all too happy to oblige.

As I clambered down into the box, I heard Ken say, “now you’ve got one foot in the grave, kid.” I could hear Glenn’s maniacal Fudd-esque laughter as I lay down in the box.

“Put the lid on!” said Glenn.

I lay there while they put the lid on.

Now don’t get me wrong....I was never one of those goofy Goth kids that wants to weird everyone out around them by being obsessed with death and all, but this was an opportunity too good to pass up. How many of YOU have ever laid down in an actual grave, and experienced what it would feel like to be buried?

That’s what I thought. It seemed like some laughs at the time.

But I can tell you that it didn’t take long for me to bolt upright and climb my spooked self up out of that hole once that lid came down. None of the other guys had volunteered to do that, so none of them made fun of me for being a little quick on the ascent. But that incident was the inspiration behind one of my first short stories. I titled it “The Heretofore Untold Doings Of The Goon Patrol,” and wrote it for Mrs. Lillard’s 11^th grade English class. I typed it on one of those old electric typewriters that seemed so state-of-the-art in 1984, but can only be found in a museum now. Because the only way of “saving” a document back then was to actually save it—put it in a box or something—I no longer have that story. But it was a doozy, I promise you. It had a touch of Edgar Allen Poe in it, what with a kid lying in a pine box on a dare, trapped with a mean tarantula, the coldly dispassionate narrator detailing every macabre thought in the youngster’s mind. I was working on a “Telltale Heart” kind of thing—building suspense and what-not.

Those were some fine adventures I had in the Fairview Cemetery, to be sure, but all of them were just lead-up to the moment which would live in Gainesvillean infamy for years to come.

It was in the waning days of summer—school was around the corner, and my hours would eventually be cut back to accommodate my return to the classroom. Glenn, Ken and I were in the cemetery’s chapel—which was actually just a big storage facility, since no services were being held there—going through some of the junk we had stored there. We had worked for most of the morning in that musty old building when Glenn realized that we had brought the wrong truck. He turned to me and asked a fateful question:

“Can you dwive a stick?”

“Huh?” I asked, stunned by the question and just wanting to buy a couple of seconds of time.

“Do you know how to drive a standard?”

“Oh, sure,” I lied. How hard can this be, I thought to myself. I’d seen it done a million times.

“You sure?” Ken asked, doubtful.

“It’s not hard,” I said. “Just use the clutch when I want to shift gears.”

“That’s it,” said Glenn. “Go dwive the Chevy back to the barn and bwing the dump twuck back here.”

I could feel the pride and nervousness welling up simultaneously. The dump truck. Now they were trusting me to drive the dump truck. I was only sixteen, and I was going to drive a dump truck. And because the truck barn was located adjacent to the cemetery on the south side, I would have to drive that dump truck on a real street—Fair Avenue—not just cemetery roads. I was feeling mighty grown-up at that moment, I’ll tell you that.

I hopped into the Chevy and fired it up. Carefully, I drove it through the winding road of the cemetery. I was much too mature to run over any tarantulas on this trip, of course; there was work to be done, and men were counting on me to do it. I slowly made my way to the cemetery entrance and came to a complete halt, even though there was no one coming for days. I carefully took a left onto Fair Avenue and accelerated to thirty miles per hour, the posted speed limit. As I neared my left turn into the parking lot of the shop and truck barn, I slowed down and used my turn signal. From here on out, I would no longer be the kid. I would be the one they counted on to move the dump truck. I would probably be trusted to dig with the Kubota shortly after this, and maybe would even be a supervisor in a couple of years. I need you guys to head down to the south plot and trim all those graves, I pictured myself giving orders. Me and Ken have to get six graves dug in the east plot by sundown. Let’s keep it moving, boys. I carefully parked the Chevy in its parking stall. If my driver’s ed instructor or my dad had been there, I would have been given high praise for my parking job. Life was good as I got out of the Chevy and climbed up into the very manly dump truck.

The keys were in the ignition. Before I started the dump truck, I studied the gear shift to make sure I knew which was which. Let’s see....It’s parked in first, which is up, then second is down, then third is the H—over and up. Probably won’t need fourth. Reverse is all the way to the right and down. Got it. I reached for the key, stealing a glance at myself in the rearview mirror. Guess I’m a man now. I smiled and turned the key.

As I did so, my left foot was nowhere near the clutch. That only happens with people who know how to drive a standard.

Looking back now, I realize that no one had ever used the phrase “popped the clutch” in my presence before. I certainly heard it a lot in the next forty-eight hours. Immediately upon turning the key, the dump truck lurched forward, as if possessed by a demon. It plowed through the back of the metal barn, and as I saw the metal header beam rushing toward me I stood on the brakes, my dump truck drive over in the blink of an eye. I sat there, blinking in the unwelcome sunlight that was streaming through the hole in the barn into the cab of the dump truck. I cursed softly to myself and turned the key off. The truck lurched again, but only a couple of feet this time. The damage was already done. I climbed down from the dump truck and slunk over to the Chevy, already working on my story. Something happened with the clutch...I was lucky I didn’t have my head cut off by that beam.  I drove slowly back up Fair Avenue to the cemetery, took a right onto the cemetery road and pulled up to the chapel. Glenn and Ken were waiting on me, and both had looks of confusion on their faces.

“Where’s the dump truck?” Ken asked.

“I had a little situation.”

“Situation?” said Glenn. He waddled over the Chevy. “Move over.” He slid into the driver’s seat, and Ken got in on the passenger side. I was sandwiched in the middle—the most un-manly end to what had been my great manly fantasy just thirty minutes earlier. Glenn drove the Chevy—much more carelessly than I had, I might note—back to the shop, and only when he turned into the parking lot did I first grasp the enormity of my error. Both men gasped audibly as they noticed the giant hole in the back of the truck barn, the nose of the dump truck jutting outward from underneath the twisted metal.

“Oh my God,” whispered Ken. “You must have popped the clutch.”

Glenn whistled through his false teeth. “I thought you knew how to dwive a standard.” I tried stammering through my impromptu story, but it was clear to the two actual men there what had really happened. My gut filled with the anvil-heavy dread that I would be fired. I had grown up in a family of hardscrabble workaholic types, and getting fired from your job was the ultimate disgrace, like Chuck Connors having his sword broken in half in the that old series Branded. I could feel the back of my neck burning with shame as the terrible fact dawned on me that I would have to report all of this—my incompetence, my firing—to my dad. My Papa’s friend would be forever disgraced as the guy who had vouched for the Loser Who Couldn’t Drive A Standard. I could feel the ruin setting in.

I did get fired, of course, but they were in no hurry. They took a couple of days to talk it over with the City Supervisor, and those were the longest two days I could remember enduring up until that moment. They called me in, sat me down, and informed me in a somber voice that I was being let go, which wasn’t quite the same thing as being fired. I took solace in that and slunk away in disgrace. I never saw Ken Clevenger again, or the Goon Patrol, but I do know it took the City of Gainesville several months to fix that barn. Every time we would drive past it, my dad would look over at the dump truck-shaped hole in the barn and just shake his head. I have often wondered how long it took Ken to find some humor in the situation.

I was barely sixteen, and I was already leaving my mark on the world.