Tar
Walking about on this otherwise beautiful, mild morning, I can smell tar everywhere in the neighborhood around. It's a hateful smell: acrid, insidious, unmistakable.
During one of my many endless summers schlepping boxes in a chain drugstore, the strip mall in which my workplace was located decided to re-tar the roof. The tar machine (tar melter? liquifier? infernal poison-smoke demon?) was placed just outside of the back door of our stockroom, and belched a foul white smoke all day, as we hauled deliveries out of trucks and took trash to the dumpster. The southern sun and the tar machine collaborated to produce a Venusian kind of heat, humid and deathly. I cannot begin to imagine the conditions on the roof itself. The re-tarring process took a long time, more than a month: my assumption at the time was that each day's crew had to knock off at noon to bury their dead.
The machine pumped a continual feed of tar through a pipe to the roof; when the level of tar got low, a crew member minding the machine would dump in a roll of solidified tar from a nearby stack. I and the other hourly-wage monkeys from the drugstore got to know him.
His crew colleagues called him Petey. He looked like an emaciated David Crosby, with a long dark moustache that gave him a unique air of mournful dignity; he could have been thirty or he could have been sixty. I never saw him wear anything other than a pair of thin dark pants and beat up tennis shoes. His bare chest and back were the color of a Christmas ham, and he had a long crease of a scar, as if he'd been improperly folded at some point, running diagonally across his torso. He toiled alone with the machine, except at lunchtime, when the crew would call his name and he would climb up to the roof to join them for lunch. They acted toward him with a mix of derision and protectiveness that reinforced the idea that he was in some way disabled or injured.
Petey was extraordinarily friendly: when idle, he would rush to help us unload a truck, shrugging off all protests and grabbing heavy cases with aplomb. Due to his thick speech impediment, it was hard to understand Petey, but Andrew, one of my co-workers, liked to chat with him. The only thing I remember Petey saying was this: "People look at me and think I must be a drunk, but I never liked to drink beer or nothing." Long pause, followed by a sunny smile. "Smoked a lotta dope, though!"
Posted by B T at January 10, 2002 09:19 AM