I’m 22, always hot to get Jeanne alone, and having a blast in North Carolina being her carpenter’s assistant. She had a swagger I loved, and real chops when it came to building stuff. God, I was so into her.
The town where we lived, Burgaw, was full of good old boy rednecks and poor country folks but most everyone treated us like family.
It was because Jeanne loved honky tonks and roadhouses and she could hang with the boys, plus we made no pretenses of being straight so they were intrigued. Until they found out we weren’t into doing them. By then it was too late and they liked us anyway.
But there were dark clouds on the horizon on the job site. George, our foreman, got furious when Captain Jack dragged a broken down trailer onto the lot and told us to use it or else.
To get back at Jack, George ordered a crane and put the trailer up on top of the first floor of this mansion Jack had half built, then he walled it in with cinderblocks so there was no un-doing. I think the trailer came from a prison chain gang; it smelled like puke and man-pee, and it was caving in here and there. But Jack got what he wanted.
George had already been wooing the Widow Bowen, a German lady from town who idolized him and had a bunch of money, so he proposed and quit the same day. It was an elegant and well-timed “fuck you” to a guy who deserved it, but it left Jeanne and me to take on the fall out.
And the fall out came the very next weekend. We lived up a dirt road from Jack and from time to time his bulldog would get loose and trot down to fight with our pit bull, Halo.
That Saturday at five in the morning we heard the dogs fighting outside. Jeanne grabbed Jack’s dog and brought it inside. She called Jack who mumbled something and hung up.
Five minutes later he was pounding on the door, yelling, “Give me my Goddamned dog!”
Jeanne foolishly opened the door with her hands full of bull dog and this fat bald prick punched her! Wham---knocked her right off her feet while I stood on the stairs in shock. Then he grabbed the dog and slammed the door behind him as he left.
That was the beginning of the end of my experience in Burgaw. Shortly after that, I packed it in and came back home. My girlfriend followed in a few months.
But five years later I dropped a dime on old Jack as payback. I heard he got Alzheimers in the federal pen and ended his days a drooling idiot. When they arrested him on the deck of his yacht he said, “I bet it was those fucking dykes.”
No, just one, Jackie.
Moral of the story: Don’t mess with me and mine.
(See also: Rude security guards, Republican pages, lawyers who live on my street and the deaf/half blind.)
