Heavy Duty

Most people don’t know a damn thing about heavy equipment. If your in this lucky group of folks, try and stay there…Now, when building a 25,000 square foot, illegal, tree house, you will need some heavy equipment, sooner or later. If in doubt, find an empty lot with a forty foot long steel ‘I’ beam laying in the dirt, and try and move it ONE INCH. Hope you brought your lunch…Just a couple of months ago, I wonder if a pal, Hawk Stone, can move some boulders for me. Its what he does. Moves heavy stuff. I’m told I should maybe roll by his yard and check out his almost new fifty foot equipment trailer. Hmm. I take a ride to downtown Acton ( Acton means, ‘town of backstabbing assholes’, in Comanche ) I spot the trailer instantly. Its the one with the MELTED TIRES AND RIMS. Not one or two of the 18. ALL OF THEM. An eight buck an hour flagman has him dump in a new spot. Right under some 100,000 volt high power lines. Driver jumped in time.

Gengis Townsend

His nickname was the Falcon. I worked at the phone company with him for thirty years. He rode a Harley too, so, I was always teamed with him as a repair/Installation team…He lived in the Falcons Nest ( Viking house ) at PHONEHENGE for 18 years. This is the story of the night he arrived, then, stayed awhile….I come home from work late. I’m on my cycle. I see lights on in my guest house. Huh? The people I had just rented it to said next Friday to move in. I roll down the drive, spot Townsends bike. He comes out on the 2nd floor balcony, says, “Hey dude, I just moved in”!….Over some brews at the local Mexican joint, I find out why….His story, “Well, I’ve been sharing a house in Pasadena with Sheri. We’ve been fighting alot. I called her at work today, told her I was working late. That I’d see her after midnight. She comes home sick, pass’s me with a Vago chick on the back seat of my bike!” Sheri’s driving this old station wagon from the sixties. A great big job. She whips a ‘U’ turn on Rosemead Blvd., then starts splitting traffic, trying to run me down. I finally get away. I sneak home around three a.m. No lights are on inside the house. ( He had a long down driveway leading to his house. I once moved a fridge for him ) I coast quietly into the garage. Her car is gone. As I head for the front door, lights come on and a car is speeding down the driveway. Its the bitch! She slams my Harley in the carport, right into the side of the house. Then, engine screaming, she tries to back off the cycle, stuck under her rig. I go for my sawed off shotgun, hidden in the garage, start smashing her windows with the butt. Her car dies. I go inside for some crank and a beer. I lock the door behind me. The bitch comes in through a side bedroom window. She attacks me in the hallway. I give her a hard shot to the jaw, then, choke her against the wall. I hear a crack, and let her go. I think I broke her neck”!…Now, I have my helmet off. I have to hear the rest of this Jerry Springer moment…Townsend continues…”I leave her wheezing on the floor, head for the fridge for another brewski. As I open the fridge, all the power in the area goes out from a lightning strike somewhere down the street. As I grope around the dark fridge in the now totally black kitchen, I hear this sound. The sound of something crawling towards me. I flick my lighter and jump back hitting the sink and losing my lighter on the floor. I had seen enough anyhow”! …Now I’m staring at him, waiting for him to finish. He lights a smoke and finishes his tale…”It was her. Sheri. The bitch was crawling towards me with her head bent at an odd angle. She had a butcher knife in one of her hands. Dude, after driving around all day, your the only place I could think of to crash. I’ll pay the rent on time, no problem”! ….One story on this guy from an easy thousand…

Received a late subpoena to be a witness for an upcoming trial. I already gave testimony, so, what the hell do they want from me now? …The case? Some psycho tries to kill his girlfriend is all. In my driveway. Its about eight in the evening. I’m in the barn at Acton, helping Leo fail some class. We have a pounding at our bridge door. Now, no one uses that door. Well, the N.A.T. Team does, but no friends. I grab a flashlight since no porch light there. A wild eyed woman’s face is illuminated in my lamp’s beam. I say, “Yes”? She informs me her old man just tried to kill her. I nod my head, then ask her in. As she blurts out her story to Pat, I wonder where Mr. Wonderful is right now. I didn’t have to ask her. I hear an SUV roaring under the bridge, heading towards the Danny Devito stairs. Opening the upstairs door, I hit the stair lights, just in time to see the vehicle crash into my custom chicken coop…Since it had just rained, the dirt road was not the road to speed on. This man is now wedged into the vehicle by the deck railings. He ends up climbing out of a rear side window. A big skin head with lots of tattoos. He starts jumping up and down on the roof, then, switches to some Karate kicks to the doors and windows once he fell off. He then starts to come up the steel stairs with a gun in his hand. I have my .12 gauge behind my back. I say, “Hey Bub, hand over that gun and we’ll talk”! He stops, stares at me, then hands it over. SO far, so good. I notice he’s dripping blood from his left hand. From beating on the car most likely. While I take care of his wound, I’m talking to this obviously drugged out guy to calm him down. I look past him through the barns big picture window. Cop car after cop car are coming up the road from the highway. Guess where. By the time the cops take this guy away, they Tazzered him TWICE! Oh man, this guy on the first go around, just didn’t get the message. When the Sheriff hit him the second time on wet ground, this guy danced like an out of control meat puppet, then, did a Curley of the Three Stooges break dance on the dirt drive…Note: When tazzered it seems you lose control of all bowel functions…

The worst thing about this entire fiasco is losing all the giant beams and seventy five foot Utility poles. I could tell you stories ALL DAY on wild stuff that happened getting those materials from where they were given to me, to getting them past all the cops. Usually in the middle of the night. Like my ninety foot long glue lams. Dude, here’s how that goes down. First, getting said beams into position to hoist with a crane onto a sixty foot long low boy Dozer trailer is something in itself. Not just one pal. Thirty six. Some of these babies were only sixty foot, but, way fatter and thicker. The three sisters that made up the supports for the second floor were just unbelievable. Weighed six tons each. At my Uncle Curlys old Pier in San Pedro, they had 150 ton cranes. WOW! Power city!!! My Uncles ran the dry docks for forty five years for the U.S. Navy. Battleships, Heavy Cruisers, Destroyers. All the big swinging dicks came to be refitted at my Uncle Curly and Wimpys docks. My other Uncle, Melvin Koontz, owned and trained all the M.G.M. lions, but, another story for some other time…Back to these beams….We had them all ready to go for six days before we could pull off the move. This load was BEYOND ILLEGAL. When I put a tiny red bandana on the end of the load, all the guys in the shipyard started laughing. Any cop that spotted us would feed big time on our ass’s. Starting with impounding a $200,000 Eighteen wheeler and D10 Dozer trailer. I get a call at two a.m. from Frank the Navaho in Coahilla. A thick fog has rolled in, plus, a huge wreck near the Roy Rodgers museum wlll have all the Highway Patrol tied up. I get my big rig pal, George up and on the road with me in about a half hour. We’re off around four am. We’re on the 138 coming off the San Berdo desert. All had been going well. Coming off a steep downhill, a cop goes past, I see brake lights. I tell George, “Could of been braking for the curve”! George looks at me like I’m some slack jawed simp fresh off a funny farm. He finds a wide dirt road and hangs a power right onto it. We, head down it for a couple of turns and kill the lights. Keep the motor running though. We can’t see Jack shit through the fog. We wait about twenty minutes. Felt like hours. George does 18 wheel stunt driving, so, he can drive like a maniac, no problem ( Go to his site, ‘THE JACK KNIFE KING’ ) We get back on the road. Bumping off the road made the load shift. One beam is laying on two of the rear tires of the Dozer trailer. Hmm, weighs six tons and we have a five ton jack. George pulls in close to a cement underpass just off the 138. He puts truck in reverse, then, does this dipsy doodle with the trailer at about ten miles an hour. He nudges the beam back in place with the wall. UNBELIEVABLE!!! We make it to PHONEHENGE around seven am…Oh, almost forgot….Just before leaving, the crane guys lifted my flat bed one ton like a Tonka and set it on the four ninety footers that stuck out of the other beams like giant battering rams. Those beams held that truck like a rope sitting on Sonny Listons shoulders. They didn’t bend one inch…

The Rose Man of Sing-Sing

Just finished my book by the warden of Sing-Sing prison, ‘Thirty thousand years in Sing-Sing’. He started it out with, “I’ve put to death 150 men and one woman. None were a deterrent to crime in my opinion!”..Anyhow, there’s one chapter called, ‘The Rose Man of Sing-Sing’. He was over sixty when he went in for life for killing his wife. A former big shot on a New York paper, he killed his wife for cheating. Turns out, she wasn’t, but, since she was still dead, off to prison he went. He ends up getting a shot a planting this fantastic garden inside the prisons two acres. People from all over the country sent him cuttings and books for his growing library on gardening. Fountains, trees, the works. Just as he finishes it, the prison has to be re-plumbed. Over a hundred years old. His garden is destroyed. Wiped out by the construction crew. I can honestly say I know how he felt…

Yesterday was a great day! Kevin and Bill, along with Rick the tent boy, helped me move some of my heavy equipment to the new ranch with Kevin’s low boy. Man, you can tell Kevin’s worked his equipment for awhile. He did stuff connectiong and backing I could NEVER do. On the way to Tehachapi, went by the tiny market off Rosamond and 90th street. Its where Corky Carson and I had our last lunch before he died. We sat in the cab of his water truck, talking about his court date the next day. The County had ruined his health, his life, and his business by their usual tactics. Pressure, intimidation, stress. Corky had a heart attack the next day. Was dead by Sunday. When we unloaded my backhoe, I popped open the storage compartment to check for gloves. Inside was my guest book for the tree house. Was looking all over for it. The first person to sign it? Corky Carson…It can break your heart, these little things…

This, ‘Desert Rat’, moniker. Not me pal. Rats crap and piss in their nests. How about the, ‘Desert Tortoises’! That would be much more apropo. Since we’re being slowly moved off our land, have to carry what we own at a moments notice, plus, able to cross over most terrain with zero water at times, a much closer symbol of what we actually are. Or, the ‘Desert Stink Bugs’! Once, while at a town council meeting in Acton, my pal Sack, wondered why they named the new high school, Vasquez High. Questioning gazes spun his way. Sack filled them in. “Vasquez was a convicted murderer and highway bandit, hung in Sacramento!” I thought it was a Gym dandy moniker. Mainly since the million dollar gym (Notice the clever pun) has never had one kid play in it since it wasn’t built to code. Hmm. Someone got a permit though. I think I know of a similar case. What was that guys name?

So, while sitting in jail for my tree house, I listen to all the conversations going on around me. Here’s the gist of them. First, If they give you a year for your third drunk driving, they play hard ball. You’ll have to do at least two weeks. Unless their really, really overcrowded. Then, your booked and released. Ankle monitor? Nope. Too much money and not enough people to run it any more. Didn’t pay that child support? Booked and released. Slapped the better half around? Booked and released. No one in my holding tank was worried at all about what the judge had just told them. I’m so naive. The more I listened, the madder I became. At myself. My kids are right. I’m stuck in Andy of Mayberry land…

The War Against the Ants

Holy shit, all true. My pal, Dave Sequera, brings some huge old growth cedar logs down from Northern California. Wants to store them at my Acton place. Big bastards. four foot high, twelve foot lengths. Carved looking bark. Smelled wonderful. It was also winter. In the spring, I’m looking at my new barn and something catches my eye. A black line going up one side of it. On closer inspection, I see that its a conga line of large, ebony black ants. Big ones I’d never seen on my property before. I hit the plywood siding with the butt of my steel framing hammer to shake them up. About twenty resonated off the siding, right onto me. Every bite and sting was worse then the last. I slap at myself and run for the mules trough. Welts the size of quarters welled up. The war had begun…Later, I track some or their scouts back to one of the huge log rounds. I pop off some of the thick bark to get a better look underneath. Out of hundreds of perfectly round apertures pop hundreds of warrior ants. Not panicky. Ready to kick some ass. They stood stock still in little units, waving their antennae and making their mandibles open and close in a sort of cadence. I was transfixed at how brash and brazen they were. Didn’t these pricks know the giant could crush them at any moment? Some blow torch stings on my ankles brings me back to reality. Their pals had come out of the hay covered corral and come inside my pants while I was busy inspecting the other guys. Once again, I run. Right for the hardware store and some ant poison. I sprayed those logs with one of those pump spray deals from one end to the other. Adios little ass holes. I then moved the logs down below, away from the barn…War has just been won…Saturday morning. The night before, my freshly installed power on and off switch mounted by my water bed by Pixley, straighten out a little problem I had been having with Townsend, King of all Morons. He lived in the Viking house for 18 years. He rode a loud Harley and did lots of drugs. At night, on speed, he would start doing his vacuuming at four am. With the new shut off to his house next to my pillow, I just rolled over, hit the switch. Instant quiet. Well, for a minute, then, the crying and begging started. “I’ll be quiet dude. Come on, give me some power man, I can’t on line gamble!” Life was sweet. To put in that switch, a conduit had been put through my wall. I hadn’t put putty into the extra hole space yet. As I go to roll out of my water bed, I’m looking eye to eye with five big, black ants on my bed railing. Huh? I raise my hand to smack them, they open their big jagged mandibles and brace themselves…Scary. Not afraid…I Windex the patrol of ants then paper towel them into oblivion. I shower, then head for the wood rounds. My sons Noah and Ty tag along. We use steel bars and my Power Wagon to roll the logs to inspect them. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of pissed off ants are boiling out of the very first log we rolled. We actually ran for our lives. Army ants have nothing on these guys. The poison seemed to do zero to the colony. We head for Barnes and Noble for ant books. The library? Don’t even go there. Not with my kids banned for life. I try all kinds of things. Nothing works. I end up telling Dave to get the logs out off my property. I was to get one log for storing them. I gave up that idea. Just get ’em gone. After the logs were down the road, we finally high-fived each other. Game over…They had queens popping out new colonies all over my entire property. They didn’t need those logs any more. I ended up paying a pro, eleven hundred bucks to exterminate their sorry ant asses. Even with that, we found one more colony the next spring. I made sure my weed and brush pile for burning was right over their heads, then, nuked ’em. They are very worthy opponents…

We have too many toys. Leo and I drove a giant box of toys to the people who have the ranch next to us. They are designated people very delicately. But their kids? Hey, give ’em a break. The little girl is about six. Her brother, maybe four and a half. They don’t drink then fight. Leo helped me drag the box to the porch. They weren’t home. Their pitbull no longer scares Leo since the home invasion fiasco, but, once again, another story. No one home. We escape. Inside the box? An electronic Enterprise Aircraft carrier with nine jets, two old G.I. Joes with some weapons, five Breyer horses, bunch of steel Tonkas, old electric train with no transformer, box of soldiers, etc. Old stuff, but still cool…The father just left. He was so thankful, he started crying. Seems he works an oil rig in Bakersfield and his hours have been cut. They’re having a tough time. Guess I won’t blow his truck up…