Zee, my neighbor’s cat, came with me again this morning on a job to a gravel yard, or? A gravel pit? A gravel—what would you call it? White-collar-warning alarms are going off in some gravel worker’s lunch pail right now, while his father, a gravel worker for sixty years, is turning over in his grave, is maybe even just turning the whole fucking coffin upside down underground, actually, that’s the extent of his heartache that I don’t know what the fuck a gravel place is called. And add to that the fact that I was about go back to my DVD pile to see if the second season of The Wire ever involved gravel workers working on or near the Baltimore docks, so that I might get my answer that way—that fact alone might make an entire cemetery in Montana turn upside down.
But what the hell is this for, what I’m doing, this chronicling of my adventures, if not for me to be honest? If not for me to bare myself, to confess my sins?
It’s for nothing, if not that. That’s your answer. It’s for nothing.
Anyway, a gravel yard, I’ll call it. Zee came with me. I had to bring some sort of blueprints to the, er, gravelers there, that was why I was hired.
“Hello, good morning,” I said as I walked into the office.
I was still a little perplexed as to what would require blueprints to make a gravel pit.
“Those must be my blueprints!” said a tall man standing in the middle of the room.
“Yeah, that’s right, the blueprints,” I said. “Say, instead of this blueprints process, couldn’t someone just send over a little note that says, ‘Make it 200 feet deep’?”
(Have you seen the forearms on these guys? No joke. I don’t know why I’m saying things that very likely should offend them. My shoulder’s still weak from getting stabbed a few days back, so I’d have no chance to preserve my face if this guy turned on me.)
Instead, the man laughed and said, “Goddamn, pal, wouldn’t life be easier if that was the case.” He turned to another guy a few feet away and told him what I said, and they laughed and laughed.
Okay so gravelers apparently have great senses of humor. Like this guy understands the actual detail required of this work, but he also realizes why some freelance bicyclist would make fun of the should-be simplicity of it. I loved him immediately.
“Do you have a lot of friends?” I asked him.
“Fair share,” he said.
“Good. You should,” I said.
“What’s in the basket?” he asked.
“Oh, that’s Zee. Zee the cat. My neighbor’s cat.”
“You ride to a gravel pit with a cat?”
“Well not like specifically, not like I looked at my schedule, said ‘Oh shit, there’s a gravel pit on the schedule today, better get Zee.’ But yes.”
“Your neighbor must be crazy.”
“She is. But you can imagine it’s good for Zee to get out and see the world.”
“It’s a cat,” he said.
“Hey, bud, look”—I pointed to the pit—“it’s a gravel pit. But you have blueprints, don’t you. So.”
“That’s a fair point.”
The man handed me $70 for the delivery of the blueprints and he also gave me a little tip, a gift card to the Jamba Juice in town. He said there was about $14 left on it, and he didn’t need it. He thanked me for the prompt service and told me I was welcome to swim in the gravel pit whenever I wanted to. He looked over his shoulder and hollered out, “Charlie, hey! Charlie, this guy”—he pointed at me—“he’s okay to swim in the pit, okay, put him down on the list.”
That’s a graveler inside joke. You don’t ever swim in a gravel pit. Even I know that.
We all laughed, Charlie the hardest, and Zee swiped at my hand, drawing blood.
Resist the urge.
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