So, here I am at Stevie Wonder’s house again. Nope, in the half dozen times I did repair there, never met him. I knew his gigantic Harlequin Great Danes real well though, from the first visit after they had tossed an all nighter party. People were still crashed all over the place. Sofas, chairs, the floor. Two maids were busy cleaning up all the wreckage. A ten button wall phone had been torn off the kitchen wall. No big deal. As I set my tool case down, these big dogs scared the crap out of me, bounding into the kitchen through the garage. I froze like a rusted tin man. One maid said, “Feed ’em this bone here, they’ll love ‘ya for evah!” I took the bone. Both dogs would have jumped off the Empire State building for that bone. I chuck it far into the vast living room. People are yelling and cursing the dogs. I knew a good thing when I saw it. I reached into the sink, grabbed about five big rib bones, tossed them through the doorway. Pandemonium. I snap the cover back on the wall phone base, now reset with new anchor bolts, slide out the back door. I escape…
Here I am, an Idiot/Savant, being asked my opinion on what in the hell is going on around L.A. I’d say I lean more towards the Idiot part of that equation, but, I do gossip with a lot of old timers, and once in awhile, younger bulls. Here’s the lowdown. It’s positioning. Hey, you can do it too. Figure out future growth, buy up land in the surrounding areas. What’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is the difference between BUYING, and TAKING. Now, my tower is gone. Sob, wail. BIG DEAL. I’m just pissed my material was destroyed. That too is now a dead horse, well whipped, so, let’s move on…I need more beams and utility poles. Good ones still viable…Hey! A MATERIAL LIST!…A good utility pole has to be free of these defects. Especially if over seventy foot long…No major splits. No rotted spots. No bends or twists past six inches from top to bottom. No knots that affect integrity. No creosote. No insect infestation…On slow days for Pacific Telephone, the Foremen would give guys five pound stepping hammers, hand them an area off of Mulholland or Benedict Canyon, tell them to go inspect poles. Now, lots of guys blew it off and sucked down brews at Barneys Beanery. At the end of the day, who was the wiser? Well, for one, that Foreman. If that pole fell into a kitchen and killed someone, or, went down across Laurel canyon, well, guess who’s name popped up on the inspection report. Now, a rogue pole is nothing to sneeze at…If a ninety foot pole goes down, get ready for some real problems, FAST. What will also go is the strand wire. That’s the continuous wrapped wire that holds the actual cable onto all the poles, for MILES. If that baby snaps, say, from the two thousand pound pole going down into a canyon full of expensive homes, OH MAN! That bastard can go like a 5,000 pound Anaconda right through a house, taking the roof right off. And its not close to stopping. Then it will whip back and really show some carnage. We saw films of tests done by Bell Labs and Western Electric about what some poles had done, all over the world. AWESOME! As long as your family wasn’t the star of said film. Oh, I almost forgot. Those big high power transformers are usually come down too. The fun just never stops…
Dreadlocks on skinny white hippies in Boulder…Everyone’s dog has a neckerchief…No one would even think of tossing trash on the ground…Bicycles hold up traffic everywhere…Prairie dogs even have colonies in the meridians in town…Chicks that don’t shave, shave their dogs instead…motels are EMPTY…The drive through the Eisenhower tunnel is AWESOME! You cross the continental divide while inside the mountain…Rafters look like hockey players with all the vests, helmets and such…No helmet law, so, no helmets…Tons of old clunker trucks, still used daily…Books? Hit a used book store near my daughter Tegan’s. Nine hardbound books from ‘Letters from Remington’, to a 1932 first edition of, ‘Twenty thousand years in Sing-Sing’, for under forty bucks…Everyone pulls over to fish…Bears in my kids trash at night…
The animals in Colorado need glasses. You drive for three or four hours, not one car around you. Maybe an 18 wheeler on the other side of the highway. That’s it. So, how are these animals getting nailed? Must of counted ten deer, forty coyotes, a zillion squirrels and prairie dogs, skunks, opossum, raccoons, quail, dogs, cats, all sorts of animals. All DEAD. Sprawled on the side of the road or in the meridian. “Maybe they’re suicidal?”, popped into my head. Maybe their throwing themselves into the headlights like lemmings off a cliff. Ditto for the burned pavement from torched vehicles. Utah must have some kind of record for cars spontaneously bursting into flames. As far as huge, giant skid marks, then, smashed road barriers, Nevada is King. Especially coming into or leaving Vegas…
What a suck ass town. I helped a pal build a deck there once. They charged my buddy more for the engineering fees, the permits, the soil tests, water flow studies and such, he spent over a hundred grand on it after they busted him for adding taller railings and made him redo the plans. Later, when I was loaned to that area to work on the mayor’s office phones for Pac Bell, I even charged them nine cents each for individual screws that held the jacks on the wall…
Well, leaving for Boulder, Colorado in five minutes to pick up my lowboy trailer. Need it to move all my equipment. Especially the 1949 UNIT Crane. Only one of its kind left in the world…Oh brother, this trailer. It’s fifty foot long, originally used to move D-8 Bulldozers. Everyone borrows it. Then, for some reason, can’t get it back. Last time I had to pick it up from Naselle, Washington. Pal died after he got there. Sad. Anyhow, I arrive at night, hook up the trailer, sleep in my truck, start out at five am for home. After the sun comes up, people are waving and honking at me. I wave back. The highway patrol doesn’t wave, he red lights me. I pull the Freightliner over, look in my mirror for the cop. He’s still in his car. I figure he wants me out. I step down and hit the ground. I fly right back into the cab. A giant swarm of pissed off bees are trying for payback. A hive had set up inside an empty tool box while sitting for a year…
Have a new insect report…This new guy is some sort of wasp. It’s wings are shaped like a stegasaurus’s back when not in flight. Its about half and inch long. I spotted it trying to bring down a fly a bit too large for it to drag down. What caught my eye? IT HAS ARMS IN FRONT LIKE A PREYING MANTIS! Never seen anything like it before. Its quick too. Real quick…My plane arrived early from Chicago. My taxi driver asks me if I want to party with a hot babe and do some drinking. I say, “Hey, why not?” He takes me to my house…
My wife says to me, “How do you know what to write?” I say, “Its not what to write, its what not to write!” If I wrote every story that I remembered I’d be tossed off this deal in five seconds. Huh? You say. Lets see now, what just popped into my head. Hmm. A song on the radio can set me off down memory lane. Gee, ‘Money, money’, made a memory lane come to pass. It made me think of, ‘THE GLORY HOLE’. In phone man terms, a DBA. That means, the job your being dispatched to, is so DISGUSTING, they give it a fake name under, Doing Business As, to fake you out into taking said repair ticket. Hence, a DBA. If you knew you were going to a gay bar that specialized in old fags getting T-bagged, why, you just might find a way not to go to said business. Plus, the telephone equipment is mounted in the mens room ceiling accessed by a pull down ladder. Since its a gay bar, BOTH restrooms are for men. Naturally, the one that was for women is used by the cross dressers. Both have glory holes, so, be ready. These type places are where I would use my secret weapon to avoid contact with crazed inhabitants. No matter what drug these nuts were on, I was protected. My big container of fake boogers, given to me by the master mask maker at Hollywood Toy. Just pop on of the fake rubber sticky snots into your mustache, and PRESTO! Your an instant pariah. I always stuck one on the back of my hand to give me the, ‘Hick just wiped his nose on is hand’, look. I’ve found over the years its the little things that make life more interesting…
I’m doing a repair for Andrew Lloyd Webber at a leased house in Beverly Hills off Linden Drive. No, he wasn’t there thank goodness. Just his staff. I have to go to the basement of the house to find the main telephone protector box. One of his flunkies shows me the basement door, then ignores me. I hit the light switch, go down some fairly large stairs into a BIG basement. As I hit more light switches (the really old types made of porcelain), I see it. Sitting on a twenty-foot long work table is a model of a battleship. Almost completed. I step closer. On another bench beside it, some of the eighteen inch guns, still waiting to be installed. It looked like someone had just put down their tools, then, never came back for ten years. Dust covered everything. I already knew from the bow and the superstructure that it was a model of the, YAMATO. It was the finest rendition I’ve ever seen. All wood. WOW! Hit the phone box, rolled for my next job.
Another, MONSTER rock load. Its dump truck load number seven and it set a new record. The truck was half loaded when my neighbor, Steve White, rolls by with his big Ford loader. I was attacking a four ton, totally bitchin rock out front with the Kubota and going NO WHERE, fast. I wasn’t even getting a yawn out of the big yellow stripped bastard. Since I drove him around for a year decades ago when he lost his license for awhile, I always bring it up when I need a favor. He stops his real loader, smirks at my feeble attempts, then picks it up in his bucket, takes it to my dump truck, sets it in. The truck settles down. I point out an even bigger boulder, the size of a Mini Cooper. He gets in place, skids the bucket under, up into the truck it goes. This time, my truck looked like a Great Dane taking a crap on a lawn. Oh man, that was it. Just drove home doing 55 all the way…
