George (and a shout out to Lyin' Larry)

Both George and Lyin' Larry were set-up men on the 81mm mortar line. I had worked for the two of them over the years and got to be good friends with them. Both of them were older in their mid 50s, best friends, and the complete opposite of each other. George was kinda somber and cross all the time whereas Lyin' Larry saw everything as a joke and was very boisterous. Once they started drinking, George would lighten up and Larry would use him as his straight man, and the bar was in for a show. Hell, there was one dive bar they frequented that had a small stage, so Larry and George would move their table up there on the stage to talk shit to each other and keep the crowd laughing their asses off. Once they got started, they didn't have to buy a beer for the rest of the night.

Lyin' Larry..... Dude looked like a life sized garden gnome with his bushy hair and beard and acted like a leprechaun, always hopping up and down and tugging at your sleeve while laughing like a maniac. Motherfucker was ugly, so ugly that the word around the plant was that when he was a kid he could do his trick or treating over the phone. 

He had a knack for telling stories and could sucker you right on in to believing him before delivering a punch line. He was one of those guys that could tell you a lie to your face and you'd know he was lying, and he knew you knew, but he'd still keep talking and you'd still believe him anyway. Hence the name Lyin' Larry. You couldn't believe a goddamned thing the man said but when you left him, your cheeks ached from laughing so hard.

George was half Mexican although you couldn't tell if you didn't know. The only reason I did was because George had invited me over for dinner one night with his family and Mama was there. He had an Anglo surname, married to a white woman, he spoke English with an Okie accent and about the only time he spoke Mexican was when he was pissed. Even that, he spoke with an Okie accent according to the border brothers.

It never occurred to me until years later that maybe he wasn't half Mexican at all, but an Okie kid that was adopted by a Mexican family.

In spite of George being a sourpuss, he really was a great guy, both at work and after. We ran into each other quite a bit around town and we'd almost always stop to grab a beer or something to eat.

Back before I knew him and before he got old he was a serious prospector, and was forever giving me tips about locations and methods. Dude was a wealth of information not only on the gravels but also the locations of a shitload of small obscure mining camps from the days of '49 which I was researching at the time.

He never got upset with his operators when they fucked something up and he never bitched if the engineers piled extra work on him for their projects. He just did what needed to be done. 

George took no shit off the bosses though. I had gotten the last cup of coffee from the urn and while I was putting on another pot, one of the bosses walked up and told George to tell Mark, one of the other operators, to go to a different job.

George hated Fernando as much as the rest of us but it still surprised me when George growled, "Fuck you. I'm the set-up man. I adjust tooling and do maintenance. Telling people what to do isn't in my job description, but it is in yours."

Fernando fired back, "Your job description is whatever I say it is, fucker. Consider yourself a lead worker now. I've got a meeting to go to and when I come back you'd better have done what I fucking told you to. Got it?"

Fernando came back an hour later to find every single one of George's six lathes shut down and in various stages of being torn apart, and not an operator in sight.

George told me the next day he flat out exploded. "Where in the fuck is everybody and why aren't you running production???"

George said he played it off when he told Fernando, "I ran into a problem and couldn't pin it down to a particular machine, so I shut them down and did lead worker shit - Mark's where you wanted him to go, and I sent everybody else home for the rest of the day rather than have them standing around playing with themselves."

So the next morning when I was returning to work, they told me to go straight to Personnel. I get there and waiting for me was Diana the headhunter, Rod the line boss, and Fernando.

I was straight up with them and told them exactly what happened, how Fernando had put George in charge and then left the area. Fernando jumps in before I was finished and says he was just joking.

"Don't interrupt me when I'm talking. You don't get up in a man's face and cuss him like that when you're joking. There was no doubt in my mind you were serious and George evidently thought so too," I said. 

Rod wanted to know why George shut the machines down. "Damned if I know or care. The bass spawn is on right now and all I gave a shit about was getting out of there and out to the lake." Rod nodded his head. He was a bass fisherman too.

We never heard a word about it after that.

I always worked real well with George and occasionally if he needed a hand while he worked on a machine on a Saturday, he'd ask me which was cool - not only was I learning something but I was picking up a little overtime.

When I got my first lathe set-up job on the 81mm line, I was replacing George who had bumped up over to the press room to do set-up over there, and he was kind enough to loan me the job specific tools that I needed, including precision instruments, until I had a chance to buy my own. And there were a few times when I ran into problems on my new job and if George had some slack time, he'd come over and show me how to deal with it.

*

Because the plant's operations were spread out all over the damned place, the engineers, bosses, mechanics, and some of the set-up men had company supplied bikes and trikes to get around on. While the bosses and engineers rode regular bikes with pneumatic tires and everything, the bikes out on the production line were industrial bikes - they looked like a girl's Opie Taylor except the frames were much heavier. These fuckers were designed for durability and to haul loads, not for comfort.  There was a big-ass book basket in front of the handlebars and a basket on either side of the rear wheel, saddlebag style, for hauling tools or tooling or whatever. One gear only - low, or so it seemed. You could get a good head of steam up eventually, but you worked for it.

The trikes were ridden by the mechanics. They were the type that old folks like to ride, but again beefed up and they had a large basket between the rear wheels for their tools as well as having a trailer hitch if they needed to haul more shit like a welder or something.

The line bikes and trikes also had solid rubber tires because of all the metal chips on the floor and after the hard rubber tires got a healthy build up of metal chips embedded in them, if you were on a two wheeler and did manage to get some speed up and tried to round a corner on that concrete floor, the wheels were more likely than not to go out from under you, giving all your friends something to laugh at for the rest of the day.

In spite of all my whining, sniveling and cajoling, they wouldn't let me have a bike. George had one, though. So I stole his. Repeatedly. Every chance I got. Actually, I'd steal any damned bike that was handy if I needed one, I didn't give a fuck if it was a boss's bike or what, but George was my favorite target. I'd go out of my way to steal his shit just to fuck with him.

I'm serious. I'd have to make a run to the tool crib which was 250 yards thataway, so I'd walk the 500 yards to George's work area on the other side of of the crib, steal his bike and ride it 250 yards back to the crib where I would abandon it when I was done there.

Shit, if I was short on time, I'd steal a bike to ride over to steal George's bike.

All of my friends, knowing full well I was going to get blamed, started stealing George's bike too. I didn't mind the extra help except when I'd hiked all the way over there a couple times only to find out it was pre-stolen. But it all worked out in my favor - after it was proven a few times that I wasn't the one that stole his shit, it made my future denials much more plausible. 

The only bikes I didn't fuck with were the mechanic's trikes for a couple reasons. Number one, they had their personal tools in them and you just don't fuck with a man's tools, and number two, it was hard enough getting a mechanic to get off his ass to work without them being pissed at me.

Check this out: I'd fire up my machine right after break and have something mechanical go wrong. My boss, seeing that I wasn't running production, would call to find out what I needed, and I'd have him call Maintenance.

Fat Boy, the maintenance boss, would take the call and after 20 minutes or so, the runty Yosemite Sam lookin' motherfucker would clamber down out of his chair and assign the job out. The chosen mechanic would take his sweet-ass time finishing his coffee, then he'd gather up his newspapers before heading to an isolated bathroom where he'd sit for the next hour out of sight and mind of Fat Boy. He'd leave there and head my direction, visiting with all his buddies along the way, then he'd realize it's only 20 minutes until lunch so there's no sense in getting anything started now, so he'd turn around and head back to the shop until after lunch when the whole process would start again.

I'd be steaming. Sure, those fuckers got paid by the hour, but this was lost time I'd have to make up. I'm already working an 87 hour work week that just got turned into at least a 90 hour week, along with the rest of my crew, all for a problem that could've been fixed within an hour.

As bad as all that was, there was no fucking way in hell I was going to make it even worse by fucking with their bikes. I'm not real stupid, ya know.

Side note: Fat Boy really did look like Yosemite Sam with his walrus mustache, his little pointy toed boots and cowboy hat and the fact he couldn't have stood more than 5' 4" give or take.

All in all he was a good maintenance boss even if he was spread a little thin given the area the plant covered and the fact that trying to keep track of a dozen or more mechanics was like herding cats.

He was a bullshit artist too, always joking and clowning around. When him and Lyin' Larry got together, it was fucking epic.

He was a cattleman as well as the maintenance boss. Dude had an Australian Shepherd that came to work every day with him who during the cooler months would wait patiently for his bud in the cab of the truck for 8 hours. During the summer he'd hop out of the bed of the truck and go behind the ammo plant to the pasture that Fat Boy leased from them and amuse himself by herding cattle all day.

I noticed in his obit that he started raising miniature horses after he retired and moved back to Oklahoma. Makes me wonder if it was just a hobby or if he was raising saddle stock for his squatty body. Hell, maybe he planned on raising miniature goats and needed something more his size to round them up with, who knows.

FAT BOY'S OBITUARY

The bikes were technically assigned to the operation, but every set-up man that had one considered them to be theirs and would personalize them to some extent - more comfortable handlebars, fancy paint jobs, mirrors, bigger seats, shit like that.

It made no difference how cool they looked or how comfortable they were after they customized them, the bikes were all dogs if for no other reason than they were older than I was, so you can imagine George's delight when his was destroyed when a vendor backed over it. George may have planted it there. But macht nichts, George was getting a new bike.

I made it a point to be there the day they delivered it to him at lunchtime. He was like a kid on Christmas morning opening the box and lovingly inspecting and caressing each piece as he unpacked it.

"Make sure you buy a real comfortable seat on payday, George. My hemorrhoids have been bothering me lately," I told him.

"You keep your motherfucking bloody ass off my new bike, Kenny. I'm not kidding. If I ever see you on it, I'll gut shoot you." 

I stole that bike the next day. I waited until he was doing a tooling change, then I jumped on it and even said "Hey George," as I rode past him to make sure he knew exactly who stole his bike, then picked up speed as a wrench went whizzing past my head.

About a week later I went over to his area to give him some 357 magnum I'd loaded for him and saw that not only was his bike tethered wheel and frame with lock and chain, but he had stenciled 'Kenny Keep Off' on a couple pieces of painted plywood and had them wired to the baskets, front and back. Looked real purty.

The next day I waited until he went into the breakroom for lunch, then I snatched those signs, signed out of the plant for lunch, hauled ass home and dumped a magazine of 45 By God ACP into them, then made it back in time to wire them back on before he came back to work.

To discredit those who say George had no sense of humor, those signs were still on his bike when I got laid off years later.

But don't think George didn't get his revenge. He trapped a possum one time and stuffed it in my trashcan, then when I lifted the lid I've got this motherfucker hissing at me and baring its teeth, causing me to scream like a little bitch in front of my crew because possums creep me out. You know the shower scene in the movie Psycho? Yeah. In front of my entire crew. For months afterward I couldn't walk past a group of people without somebody doing a little scream and then everybody falling out laughing. Fuck you, George.

I'd come back from lunch only to find my work area completely encased in bins full of scrap grenades, 5,000 of those fuckers per bin, causing me to have to climb on a lift and unstack that shit just so I could get to my machines and toolboxes.

I've gotten both light-my-ass-up chili pepper juice and a thin coat of 90 weight gear oil in my coffee mug too many times to count. I bet I was buying 2-3 replacement coffee cups a week there for a while and for years afterward I'd still catch myself touching the rim of my coffee cup and then tasting my finger for pepper juice, and after I filled my cup I'd bring it up high and tilt it back and forth towards a light to detect any oil sheen on the surface.

*

George lived just a couple blocks south of me there on the corner after I moved into town. By that time I was working as a set-up man on the grenade line, putting in an 80+ hour week, so I didn't see too much of him anymore.

One Saturday I'm driving home from work and I see George in his driveway working on his brakes. I honk and wave and continue on my way. Next Saturday, same deal - truck's up on jack stands, wheels are off, George is looking puzzled, so I circled the block and got out to see what was wrong with his truck for 2 weeks running. "Orale, Jorge!" I greeted him as I walked past and into his garage to get a beer from the icebox. "You're looking all distressed and shit. What's up?"

"Aw, this motherfucking truck. You want to buy it? Five grand and it'll be your headache." He was pissed.

"Yeah, I'll give you five for it. Monday when the bank opens okay?" I didn't have 5,000 bucks but I knew he wasn't serious. "What's wrong with it?"

"These goddamned motherfucking brakes," and then he started machine gunning Mexican at me. I was picking up the cuss words but not much else. If it's not a menu item or a cuss word, I don't understand Mexican very well.

"English, George. You know I don't speak your gutter language. What's wrong with your brakes?"

"I'm getting a hard pedal every once in a while and the truck won't even try to slow down. I bought new wheel cylinders, I've replaced the fucking master cylinder, I've flushed the lines. I've even replaced the shoes and checked the drums even though I know that don't have shit to do with it but what the fuck as long as I have the wheels off,  I checked and double checked the linkage for binding, and it's STILL fucking doing it. GODDAMN IT!!!"

I knew exactly what the problem was. I had a 1968 Fury that did the same thing, and I went through the same shit George did until Cousin Kenny snapped me to it. I tapped the power booster unit behind the master cylinder and told him, "Here's your problem, George. It operates with a vacuum and there's a diaphragm in there. If it gets a pinhole leak in it, you'll get a hard pedal occasionally. Same thing caused me to run a red light and get a DUI 7-8 years ago. Costs about 50 bucks new."

George was giving me a 'are you fucking kidding me' look. "All the money and time I put into this and you're telling me it's a 50 dollar part and maybe an hour to replace it?"

"Yup, uh-huh, about an hour and that includes the parts store run if there ain't no line there. Plus you can stand up while you do it. I'll be by after work Monday with your money."

He just looked at me, then turned around and slammed into the house. I can take a hint. I helped myself to another beer and left.

*

I ran into George and Lyin' Larry one night at The Cattlemen's Club just outside of Riverbank City of Action and started drinking with them. George had disappeared about 11 or so, but me and Larry ended up drinking and clowning each other until last call. We split up at the door, him parked over by the hitching rail and me in the dirt lot around the corner. As I was walking to my truck, I noticed George passed out behind the wheel of his truck, snoozing away, his uppers falling out of his mouth. I reached in through the open window and shook his arm. "George. George! Wake the fuck up, man. You're going to be late for work."

"Huh? Wha...? Oh. Oh shit! Thanks, Kenny," he says as he fires up his truck and heads to the plant a mile or so down the road where he's promptly stopped by Stan the Man the gate guard, who informs George it's 2 AM Saturday morning and the plant's closed for the weekend but he's perfectly welcome to come back and try again Monday morning, say around 6ish?