Anyways, my dad was pulling a two year tour in Korea and I was staying with my grandparents while my mother worked in the canneries. When Johnny Jones came to visit his granny on the weekends, I had a playmate while our grandmothers shared the latest neighborhood gossip.
His name was Johnny Jones, never just John or Johnny, but Johnny Jones. Everybody called him by that name, saying it like it was one word. His Granny Edna called him Johnny Jones and when I met his mother after we returned to Modesto a couple years later, she called him Johnny Jones too. Even Bean, his wife, called him Johnny Jones. It rolls off your tongue so smoothly you can't help but say it.
It was funny as hell to hear Granny Edna standing on her front porch hollering, "Johnny Jo-OOO-ones, time for supper! Git yourself home, O Johnny Jones!" It sounded like she was calling in the hogs.
Because my grandma was friends with his granny and they lived within a couple blocks of each other until the day they died, we ran into each other quite a bit as we grew up, but we weren't tight, and the further into adulthood we got, the less we saw of each other. We just went our separate ways like most childhood friends do.
Oh, if we ran into each other in town, we'd pop into a bar for a beer or grab a taco if there was a truck handy and shoot the bull, but that was about it.
Then he moved to Riverbank City of Action when he found work there, so I started seeing more of him around town, then he started showing up at my shack with his wife Bean for a few drinks or beers.
*
Bean got her name because everybody called her Stringbean when she was growing up on account of how thin she was and as she got older, it was shortened to Bean.
Even as an adult she had a slight build and in her usual attire of jeans and an oversized man's button down, you had to look really hard to see any kind of a figure. I remember one time a bunch of us were passing around a joint and right out of nowhere Allen popped off with "I sure wish Bean would get pregnant so we could see what she looked like with tits."
Bean was a delightful person. Other than the tit thing, I can't think of one bad thing to say about her.
Johnny Jones worked wherever he could find work and on his days off from his regular job, he did day labor, mostly farm work, the same kind of shit I did when I needed a few extra bucks, the difference being I did day labor when I needed extra money while he did it to survive. He didn't want Bean to have to work, so she stayed home and took care of the house while he busted his ass 6 or 7 days a week when he could so she could do that. They never had a lot of money, but they were happiest couple I've ever known, before and since.
I ran into him at the store one day and he told me he'd just gotten laid off at the truss shop and would I happen to know if anybody was hiring? Well, it just so happens I had heard earlier that week that we'd gotten a new contract and would be putting on a new crew at the ammo plant. I told him I'd talk to my boss and see what's up.
I went in the next morning and talked to Rod who confirmed that yes indeed they were going to hire 30 people within the next couple weeks. The ammo plant had an unofficial policy of hiring from within, friends and family of employees, so I was able to get an application for him. Both me and my dad who worked in the machine shop provided written references.
Anyways, he got on. He was making a whopping $7.35 an hour starting pay with a 65 cent an hour raise after he finished his 30 day probation, guaranteed 40 hours, occasional overtime, weekends off and 100% medical and dental insurance for him and Bean to boot. He was ecstatic, telling me when he called to let me know he got hired, "Man, I ain't never made more than 5 and a half bucks an hour before!" I think the California minimum wage back then was $3.35 an hour.
Welcome to the Big Time, son.
*
Even though they'd been over to my place a few times, they'd never been over on a Friday night when my friends from work came over for some R&R, but once Johnny Jones started work, he started making my place a regular Friday night stop.
The first couple times he showed up, he was alone. "Where's your wife at, man? Doesn't she want to come and visit?" I still didn't know her all that well myself.
He just grinned and said, "Give her time, she's a little bashful, especially around crowds."
She finally did come and he was right, she was bashful - for about 2.5 minutes until a couple of the other girls came over and introduced themselves and invited her over to help them polish off a pitcher of Margaritas. By the time they left that evening, she was friends with everybody there. Hell, there were a bunch of times later on when Johnny Jones couldn't or wouldn't come for one reason or another, but Bean would show up to visit with her new girlfriends. I remember one time I called him up and told him, "Hey bro, come get your old lady. She's too fucked up to drive," and when he came we put her butt in a lawn chair and carried her to the truck, and she was waving and smiling to all her drunken friends like a pageant queen. We were laughing so hard we almost dropped her.
*
Johnny Jones had a beat-to-shit guitar and would bring it with him occasionally, and Bean would do the vocals. Notice that I didn't say that he could actually play that guitar or that Bean could sing. Let's just say they were enthusiastic.
The first time I saw it, I had left to go buy some more ice and while I was gone, the Jones' had come over. I pulled in and now all my friends, must've been two dozen of them, are gathered around in a big circle with the two of them in the middle, Johnny Jones furiously strumming the guitar in a vain attempt to make music and Bean waving her arms around with a piece of barbed wire in her hand and acting like a 3rd grade music teacher, directing the music. "Everybody now! This land is my land, this land is your land, from California to the New York island....." and everybody laughing hysterically.
*
Johnny Jones took to wearing a fucking sombrero somewhere along the line and the funniest part about the whole deal was it looked so natural on him that nobody really noticed. Okay, most of my friends wore beater cowboy hats after work at my place, and his wasn't a big novelty hat, just a small sugarloaf sombrero, maybe a 4-5 inch brim, but a beaner hat none the less. One day there's a crowd at my place and somebody asked, "How long has Johnny Jones been sporting that lid?" and nobody could pin it down. We didn't even realize he was wearing it until somebody pointed it out. We asked him and he laughed and said he'd been wearing it for months.
One late fall Friday evening, he showed up at my property wearing a serape too. That I noticed. I told him, "That's it, Cabrone. You ever show up here with a burro or a chihuahua in tow, I'm having your ass deported."
*
Bean kept a clean house and she was proud of it. Johnny Jones told me once that she cleaned at least one room a day from top to bottom, I'm talking walls, dusting, floor, the works. She even cleaned the globe for the ceiling lights, something I never even thought about until the layer of dead flies in the bottom started blocking out the light.
Half the time, if me and Johnny Jones took off somewhere, we'd be apt to come back and find her painting trim or baseboards.
One Thursday afternoon I was straightening up my house and scrubbing the bathroom in case folks came by the next afternoon. While most of the activities were outside, there was a fair amount of traffic in the house between ladies having to pee or a couple of people having a private conversation or kids getting ice cream their parents brought from home and put in the icebox for them.
After I had finished and had drank a few beers I walked into the bathroom to take a piss and saw that I had done a shitty job on the mirror. What the fuck..... Oh well, I'm drinking beer right now, I'll knock it out after I get off tomorrow afternoon before anybody shows up. Then I promptly forgot all about it.
The next night the alcohol was hitting just a little too hard so I went into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face and as I was reaching for a towel, I looked in the mirror and saw it had been cleaned. There wasn't a spot or streak of haze on the entire thing. I instantly knew who the culprit was. "BEEEEAN.....goddammit, do I have to start locking up my cleaning supplies?"
Johnny Jones hollered from outside, "Let me guess, she mopped your floor."
"No, she cleaned my fucking bathroom mirror," I hollered back.
"Welcome to my life. Check your floor on the way out."
I was in the kitchen doing something one afternoon and I heard my dog barking and Johnny Jones holler, "Yo! You home?"
I would think that was pretty fucking obvious seeing as my truck was in front of the house and my front door was standing wide open so I could let the old flies out and new ones in, but I yelled back, "Come on in, I'm back here." I rounded the corner and saw him kicking off his boots before entering, drunkenly confusing my house with his.
He didn't get three steps in when he went, "OW!" and lifted his foot. He brushed something away, then picked it up to study it. "Fucking spent primer," he says.
"Shit. I thought you found that scorpion I saw skittering across the floor last night."
Johnny Jones looked at my completely straight face for a second, then put his boots back on, but not before shaking them out first.
*
George, one of the set-up men I worked for, slid his truck to a stop in front of my shack late one Friday afternoon. "Don't you ever answer your fucking phone, hippie? We've been trying to call you from the plant."
"It ain't plugged in," I answered.
"Why isn't your phone plugged in?"
"To keep people from the plant from calling me. Beer's in the trough, help yourself."
He grabbed a beer from the trough, shared a laugh with the drunks standing around it, came back and asked if I had any plans tomorrow. "No, but I'm not going to help anybody fucking move, if that's where this is going."
"Relax, I'm seating a new die on one of the presses tomorrow. If I have to do it by myself, it'll take me 6 or 7 hours to get the press back on line. If I have help, I can knock it out in under four. How about it? Start at 6, home by 10:15."
"All right, man. I'll be there." I liked George. Even if I'd had something planned, I'd have put it off to give him a hand.
"Plug in your phone. If anything changes, I'll give you a call."
Bean, who was walking by, overheard that and started giggling. "George, you have to walk him into the house right now and watch him plug in his phone or it won't get done."
George shrugs. "Or he can get his hungover ass out of bed and go to work just to get turned away at the gate because the die wasn't ready yet. I don't give a damn one way or another."
About 7 or 8, a bunch of guys decided to go catfishing and by 10, everybody else was gone. Fucking A, I went in and checked Ol' Cap for ticks, read for an hour or so and went to bed.
I hadn't been asleep a half hour when that damned phone rang. Thinking it was George or the plant, I answered it and heard, "Thank God you answered. There's somebody outside my bedroom window."
"Bean?" I shook my head to clear it. "Where's Johnny Jones?"
"Fishing, remember? Some guy's in my yard. I can hear him mumbling to himself." She was whispering.
I'm out of bed and getting dressed and trying to keep from getting tangled up in the phone cord. "Have you called the cops yet?"
"Yes. They're sending a deputy but she said it might take a while."
Fuck. They lived in a Riverbank housing tract, just not within city limits, so it was the sheriff's jurisdiction. They wouldn't wake up a Riverbank cop unless it was a life or death emergency. Stanislaus County's pretty good sized, about 1500 square miles, so it could be hours before somebody showed up. "I'm on my way, Sis. Stay away from the windows and don't open the door for anybody but me, not even if they say they're the law."
"Hurry Kenny, I'm scared." I could hear it in her whisper and I'll be straight-up honest with you, I was starting to feel a little anxious myself. That shit's contagious.
"Four minutes, sweetheart. I'm leaving now."
I flew over there and as I turned the corner, my headlights lit up some skinny redheaded dude with no shirt staggering around in the side yard. Fuck, just some drunk. Maybe I can just talk him out of there. I parked nosed in to the curb and got out. "Hey! What are you doing in my yard? Can I help you with something?"
He turned and squinted in the glare of my lights. "Who the fuck are you?" he demanded.
So much for him leaving without a hassle. "I live here. You don't. Beat it," I growled.
This dude's so fucked up he's doing that DUI dance where he's trying to stand on one leg and using the other for balance, staggering around in circles. "Fuck you," he says and finally gets some momentum going in my general direction, taking 45 steps to advance 15 feet - one step forward, a step to the side, another forward, one back, lather rinse repeat. I was getting tired just watching him. When he's about 3 feet from me he starts trying to stop. His feet quit moving but his torso kept on coming, causing him to have to put his hand on my shoulder to steady himself.
I was amused. He reminded me of me. Then he backs up a step and started winding up to throw a punch. Okay, you remember when you were a kid watching cartoons and when one of the characters wound up to throw a punch, his arm would start going around in circles? Red does this for a good 5 seconds.
I was laughing. I couldn't help it. I came over expecting some serious trouble, but instead I'm dealing with this clown. And then I see his cheeks puff out and his eyes cross and I knew he was going to throw that punch next time it came around and when he did, I sidestepped to the right and smacked him upside the head, catching him right above the ear with the palm of my open hand and dropping him. It was more of a heavy push than a blow, but he was so drunk he'd have gone down had I used my fingertips. He wasn't knocked out, but he was calling it an evening if for no other reason than he was too fucked up to regain his feet.
It was right before I smacked him that Bean ignored my advice and decided to peek through the curtain. That's what she saw. That's all she saw. She came out after she was sure he was down for the count and I asked if she knew the guy or had ever seen him around before, and she hadn't. She was apologizing and thanking me profusely the whole time. "I'm so sorry, I know you have to work but you live closer than anybody except Rex and Amber and he's fishing too. I was so, so scared! Thank you thank you thank you!!!"
"Anything for you, Sis. Okay, I'm going to check all around your house to make sure he was alone, then I'm going home and to bed. I'll keep my phone plugged in and I'll be home until 5:30. Call me if you need to."
"Um, Kenny? You're not leaving him here..... are you?" nudging the now peacefully snoring drunk with her foot.
Good point. "Let me flip my truck around and you can help me load him in the bed."
I took him over to Sanchez's Cantina and dropped him in the alley behind it. There's a pretty good shot he'll wind up with company before the night's out on a Friday night behind Sanchez's. That's where Tony and Lumpy piled their drunks when they passed out in the cantina.
I went to work the next morning and told George the story who immediately claimed credit for half of it because he was the one who told me to plug in my phone. We laughed over that, then went to work.
By 10:30 I was home, out of the shower and reaching for a drink when I heard Johnny Jones' truck pull into the yard. He jumped out and strode with a fucking purpose to the open door. He walks a couple steps into the house and stops without a word, just looking at me. I'm standing there with a bottle in my hand with my mouth hanging open wondering just what the fuck is going on, and he holds out his arms like he wants to give me a hug. Okay, hugs are good. We're both dressed, I'll give him a hug if that's what he wants.
We hug, do the manly three pats on the back and separate. He's got both hands on my shoulders and he finally speaks with a tear in his eye. "Brother, thank you so much for saving Bean last night. She's my world and if someth....."
"Whoa whoa whoa, back the fuck up, I did what last night?" I sniffed and pushed him away. "Godammit, you're still in your fishing clothes! I just got out of the shower and here you are rubbing all over me! Now what did I do last night? I saved Bean, you say?"
"Man, you cowboyed the fuck up, that's what you did! My wife called you for help and you dropped everything and rushed over. Bean said it wasn't five minutes and she heard a ruckus out front and when she looked out the window she saw y'all fighting and then you knocked him the fuck out! Then you even disposed of the body when you left!"
Oh, Jesus. I poured a couple shots into a mason jar. "Amigo. Here. Take this drink. Sit down and quit talking. Let me explain what really happened. It was no big deal. First of all, it was just a drunk looking for a quiet place to sleep, we've both been there," and I ran it all down blow by blow and we got a good laugh. He told me the law didn't get there until after 4 that morning, so she hadn't slept a wink all night which explains her version - she just kept replaying it in her head over and over and the more tired she got the more way-out-there it got.
"Wait a minute... have you told anybody else about this yet? I'll be dispelling rumors for years."
"Nope, I ain't said nothing to nobody. I just got home a couple hours ago, been cleaning fish and waiting for you to get off."
"Cleaning fish and then you decided to to come give me hugs. Right on."
Johnny Jones went back home about an hour later after a couple drinks and and finally showered, then him and Bean grabbed a much needed nap. When they arose in the afternoon and were rested, Johnny Jones gave her the whole expanded, unedited view of what she thought happened, then he asked her if she had called and told anybody yet and she said no, well, except for Kim and Tammy and Cindy and Stony Joanie and Megs and Sherry and Sue and Amber and maybe Lori, all calls made while I was telling Johnny Jones the real story, and all to women that I worked with or were married to guys I worked with. Damned near our entire circle of friends. Fuck.
I got to work Monday and the word was out. I was getting slaps on the back and handshakes from the moment I walked in, even from people that didn't even know Bean. Guys were wanting to know what happened, but I was running just a bit late, so I blew them off for the time being.
I probably should've taken the time. About an hour later George showed up at my work station and wanted to know if I heard all the bullshit that was going around. Remember, George and Johnny Jones were the only two people I talked to about it and the only ones that had heard the real story, but George told me one of the versions going around had me beating on the guy with a fucking billy club, another had me pistol whipping him while yet another version had me showing up just as the guy was kicking in the door, saving Bean from getting raped.
"Man, these motherfuckers are worse than a bunch of women with their gossiping," I said, forgetting that the women all heard it from Bean and the men from their wives, so I wasn't all that far off.
At breaktime, I got up on a chair in the cafeteria and whistled for everybody's attention, then I explained what happened. Everybody looked a little disappointed, then Real Pancho piped up and said, "You should've kept your mouth shut, homie. We were going to take you to Reno next weekend and get you all fucked up and laid at the Mustang Ranch."
"Well, you can still do that if you want," I said. "I did do good, ya know."
"Fuck that, anybody can bitch slap a scrawny little redheaded drunk. You didn't even fuck him up enough to get arrested," he said, returning to his card game.
*
Johnny Jones worked at the plant until it closed and we all got laid off. The last 5-6 years we worked out there, I was doing 80+ hours a week as a set-up man on the grenade line and Johnny Jones stayed on the 60mm line doing a 40-50 hour week. With the hours I was working, the Friday night parties scaled waaaay back and I didn't have time for much of anything, but me and the Jones' still made it a point to have dinner together every two or three weeks, and that eventually ended up being about the only times we had a visit lasting more than an hour.
Then after we got laid off, I went to work at the Safeway warehouse in Tracy and Johnny Jones got hired on at a glass plant working a rotating shift. The fact that I was working anywhere from a 10 to 14 hour workday with Tuesdays and Saturdays off when I first started at Safeway and Johnny Jones was working that horrible rotating shift pretty much killed our friendship. We just never could seem to have any time to get together. The last time I saw him and Bean was maybe 2009 when I ran into them at the Bass Pro in Manteca, the first time I'd seen them in 4 or 5 years. They bought me a nice meal and we spent a couple hours playing catch-up and then went our separate ways.
