THE HAMMER PARTY
A Tale from The Martin
A few weeks after I became the super, I got my first late-night call. There was noise coming from the end of the north hall. I said I’d check it out. When I got there, I smelled chemicals. Suddenly, a hammer flew out of No. 18 and got stuck in the wall. I backed up and watched from behind the corner.
A guy, covered in green and yellow paint, bleeding from his head, ran into the hall. He yanked the hammer from the plaster and darted back inside. Shouts and screams followed. I retreated a few steps, then four maniacs, dripping paint and blood, bolted out of the apartment, and ran past me like I wasn’t even there. They left the building, and it was over.
I cautiously peeked into No. 18. The door was off its hinges, propped against the wall. I stepped inside, flipping on the light. The place was a mess—open cans of house paint, spray paint, Raid, Lysol, and other aerosols were everywhere. A dozen hammers littered the floor. I opened a window to clear the fumes.
I went back to my apartment and lay awake in bed, wondering if what just happened was weird or if my sense of normal was completely off.
The next day, I put the door back on and cleaned the place up. Nothing like that ever happened again. I stopped telling the story because no one believed me. Even I started to doubt it. Seven years passed, and The Martin became a more civilized place. I almost forgot about it.
Then one night, Chris H______ came to my poker game for the first time. He looked okay, but said the last time he saw me, he was a mess. He told this story, just like I remembered it. Everyone lost it. Not just because they thought I had made the whole thing up, but because Chris looked so clean-cut and healthy now. You’d never guess.
Why take the door off the hinges?
Why the Raid and Lysol?
Why throw paint at each other?
Why throw hammers?
Chris answered all our questions with the same answer:
“Drugs make you do strange things.”
DRIP DROP
There’s a new concept bar in my neighborhood. They keep it simple: two drinks—no-name beer in unbreakable plastic pints and no-name liquor in unbreakable plastic shots. Both drinks are a dollar. The place is packed every night, and the bartenders can barely keep up.
With drinks this cheap, everyone’s wasted, so there’s a lot of spilling. But that’s fine—the floor is heavy-duty grating over a deep pit. After closing, they just hose the place down. The stools are bolted to the floor, and everything’s steel, the counter, the walls, even the ceiling. It’s like being inside a giant dishwasher.
Downstairs, there’s a second bar that serves only one drink: everything spilled from above. They’re planning a third bar in the basement. Seems to me like they’ll just keep going, digging out endless levels, reducing the prices, serving what spills from above to the crowd below.
TRUE STORY
My father was a classic rock musician, ranked between forty and fifty on various charts. Until the end, he faithfully performed the hits of his youth to a greying audience. Despite the praise, he thought his own music was mediocre and believed his fans were simple—not out of condescension, but because he thought more talented musicians deserved the recognition he received. Critics disagreed, claiming he should have ranked in the top twenty. But what do critics know? On his deathbed, he told me, "Son, rock and roll was just a way to put food on the table. My true love—by a factor of a hundred—was sex and drugs. Without those, I wouldn’t have stuck with rock and roll."
OUR BEST SHOW
The best group improv work done by The Olympia Radio Company has to be the satirical Pink Floyd podcast. It’s also the show with the highest play count. At over three thousand, it’s a thousand downloads ahead of second place. One theory is it got picked up by a member of the band. Emily, Ben M, Ben K, and Jane are hilarious in this, but it’s Ariel Birks who drives this clown car, which allowed me to play the straight.
THE DRUG MULE
Organized Crime in Olympia
Movers have a slang for everything. Heavy stuff for the bottom? Bam. Small items for gaps? Chowder. The guys loading the trucks are Lumpers; packing up stuff inside the house, they’re Rappers. Tilting a dresser? Let’s forty-five it. And, you never say dolly—it’s either a two-wheeler or four-wheeler. Although, for big jobs, it is called a Reefer Dolly.
Our foreman, Don Rickles, looks just like his famous namesake. He says he’s 69, or he’s a pervert, or both. He has even more words. He gives everyone a nickname based on his perception of their background.
He won’t tell me how he knows I’m Jewish. He just says, “I can always SMELL a Kike,” which is the nickname he’s given me.
Having felt ethnically invisible since I moved to this this small mostly-white Christian NW town, this is oddly uplifting. It’s nice to be seen as anything other than just another plain nothing.
There are a dozen guys on the crew. All of them are ex-cons. Don’s names include: Big Bean, a large Mexican, Charlie Don’t Surf, who is Vietnamese, Poor McSwirly is Irish (with numerous drunk driving mishaps, the court garnishes his paychecks, why he’s poor). The black guys are Nicey-Nice and Killer, names cleaned up after Johnny Bachman, our towering, track-suited boss, made Don stop using the N-word. However, Logan, an Eminem wannabe, is called Lil Wigger.
There are others, even more derogatory, and most come with a recurring joke.
Don’s joke for me? “Aw, shit, we forgot a calculator. Oh wait, we’ve got The Kike. Hey Kike, what’s 635×444?” I toss out a number. He says I’m right. That’s our routine.
It could really be a lot worse. I’m lucky that Don’s sense of a Jewish stereotype is that we are good at math. Pretty soon, everyone is calling me The Kike.
After I get my CDL, Johnny offers me a run to Las Vegas. Five days, $1,900 plus expenses, and a bonus day in Vegas. I love driving, so I say yes. The desert drive is a rolling meditation. When I get back, there’s a $500 bonus. I’ve never made this much in five days.
I start doing the Vegas run regularly. Ten times in total. It’s perfect—good money, time with my kid, and freedom for most of the month. But after the last run, I notice the cargo is the same going and coming back. It doesn’t add up.
It still hasn’t crossed my mind that they’re up to something. On my way to talk to Johnny about it, I see Logan (AKA Lil Wigger) poorly driving a fork lift in the yard, crushing a plywood crate. He’s honking. Over the noise, I shout, “It was the same stuff on both runs.”
“Kike, it’s always the same stuff on the Vegas runs,” he says, grinning.
He stops the fork lift, climbs down and says sarcastically, “You’re so smart.”
I know I’m missing something important. What? Logan’s faux patience is patronizing, and it doesn’t help me figure it out when he adds, “Smart, clean-cut-college-white, collared shit, no criminal record, no jail, no speeding tickets, no DUIs…”
Then I get it. Uh-oh.
“It’s drugs, isn’t it?”
Logan just smiles. I say the obvious out loud. Logan laughs like it’s a great joke because to him, me being a drug mule is hilarious. He leans over and says softly, “Keep doing it or Johnny’ll get weird.” I know what he means, Johnny’s not like a normal boss, or even a normal mob boss. He’s the kind of villain you’d see in a David Lynch movie.
Lil Wigger goes back to breaking pallets. I hang around, watching, worrying about what I should do.
Then the secretary calls me over the loudspeaker. On the walk over to the office, I assemble a story about another job. It has some truth. I have an interview coming up at a TV station.
I go in to see Johnny. He makes a slow lazy dragon hissing noise when he stands up. He never shakes hands. Instead he holds out his pinky. I hook my pinky to his pinky. It’s a thing he does. Now it seems menacing.
We sit down. I tell him my new job story. He doesn’t say anything.
He stands up, walks around behind me and puts both of his hot heavy hands on my shoulders. It feels awful. I’m pretty sure I’m dead already. Johnny says, “We really like having you here. You should stay here. I want you to think.”
It’s an abrupt end to the sentence. THINK. Right now, I can’t think. I can’t think of anything to say. Johnny squats down like a catcher and opens the door on the unlocked safe on the floor. He counts thirty old hundred-dollar bills onto the carpet, picks them up, stands, and hands me the money.
I look at the money, “Johnny, I really appreciate this,” then with shaky hands, I return it and say, “but I really need to take that job so I can get back to doing what I was doing before. It’s what I studied in college.” I’m lying.
Johnny doesn’t take the money back. He goes back to his desk, hisses again, sits down, and says “Keep that money. It’s your big bonus.”
Johnny’s making a strange face, almost apologetic, like I’m a fish he might throw back. Speaking artificially slow and quiet, he says, “If anyone ever disparages this company, or disparages me, don’t call, just come here and we’ll work it out. I want you to come to me if there’s a problem, okay?”
All I want to do is get as far away from here as possible, and live. My legs are jelly, but they stand me up and I walk out promising to come back soon, but swearing to myself to never return.
I don’t see Johnny or the others again, but one day, I run into Don Rickles at a Costco parking lot. Strangely, he calls me by my real name. As he walks away, I shout, “Hey Don, what was in the truck on those Vegas runs?”
“Hundreds of pounds of marijuana,” he yells back, casually.
It’s still a few years before pot would be legalized.
