Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Draft #25
This is a story about my days at the gas station, and a customer I got to know over the years. The customer's name was Ed, and every day Ed would come into the station to get his coffee and Chicago Tribune. Ed and I would spend anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes a visit discussing his beloved Cubs, the Packers, life, and whatever happened to be burning his britches that day. I was in college during my years with the gas station so my hours there were limited, and we only saw each other no more than once or twice a week (in case you were wondering why I had that much time to burn, each day he came in). Ed always played the on-line lottery games, as we in the business liked to call them. His game of choice was Supercash and he would dabble in the other games if the pot got really huge, but whatever game he played, he played with little to no success. In the four or five years I worked there, I didn't pay out anything higher than twenty five dollars to the guy. Anyway, outside of Ed's trip to the gas station and his semi-daily trip to George Webb for a fried egg, there wasn't much going on. The gas station was his only form of a social life.
I knew Ed from when he was 66 years old to about the time he was 70. He's a no nonsense guy who stands about 5'8'', slim in figure, thanks to the pack of Camel straights he smokes each and every day. The only family he has is in Ohio (a brother and nephew), and he's been living in an apartment his whole life by himself. He fought in one of the wars, Vietnam or Korea, my sense of history is absolutely terrible and I could research the dates right now, but I'm lazy and I don't feel like doing that. Ed never married, but I was told he dated two different married women for the majority of his adulthood, a decision he now regrets due to the fact that he has no offspring to look after him. He tended bar for a living, and I'm not sure what else he did besides that. He spends his lonely days at home no doubt, listening to sports talk radio until the afternoon when it's time to run errands, and then it's back home to catch the next ballgame on TV.
Ed has an ingrained hatred for the dental industry. He has false teeth thanks to an oral surgery that went terribly wrong at one point in his life, at the fault of the dentist I'm told. "It's ruined my life." Every year I knew Ed, I think his physical condition worsened. The guy is usually hacking up a lung for the majority of his conversations. He buys a twenty piece Chicken nugget on Monday from McDonalds when it's on special, and that will usually last him the week. And to top it off, he sleeps about four hours a day, in two different two hour increments, and sometimes only going with one two hour secession. He's as skinny as a pole, has no ass, a nice head of white hair, and a three outfit wardrobe. If necessary, a nine year old could pick Ed up over their head and slam him onto their bent knee, breaking Ed in half, that's if he's not done in by a swift breeze and a patch of ice, first.
Ed's had a couple of visits to the hospital during the time I knew him and each time he escaped the clutch of it's healing grip, only to have been diagnosed with pneumonia or something unfatal. We at the station, weren't disappointed, but we all kind of thought that something has to be seriously wrong with this guy. But alive he remains to this day, at least to the best of my knowledge, cheating death every step of the way. The crux of this entry lies in the meeting we had in my final year at the station. Ed stopped in like he always does, and the story he had was a little hard to believe. Apparently Ed's apartment manager was stealing his mail, and Ed was completely convinced of this. The motive? Not exactly sure. But according to Ed, the manager somehow knew that Ed received his meds in the mail, and this was the manager's way of sticking it to Ed, "There, try to survive without your precious medicine, old man!" So Ed's like, "Andy, I gotta get out of there, I don't think I'll last too long in there." He said he's been wanting to move for years now, and this was the straw that broke the crippled camel's back. I told him if he found a new place to move into, that I would help him out when the time came to haul all of his crap around town.
So Ed actually found a new apartment and I followed through on my promise to help him move. I learned a couple of things through this process, A) Ed looks like Skeletor without his teeth in and B) This guy had boxes apon boxes of useless crap he's saved throughout the years. For an example, he had two shoe boxes with the original shoes still inside, never worn, purchased in the 1960's. What the hell are you waiting for? Might as well give'em a test spin before the grim ripper takes you away old man. Most of his crap was piled high in the storage cube he has in the basement of his apartment. I remembered the map he made of that cube, he knew what was in each box and who was going to get that box when he finally croked, very meticulous that Ed. He was trying to show that map to me once, but I really wasn't looking at it with much thought. That would be like listening to a bumb talk about his covetted garbage collection.
So a week after the move was completed, Ed walks up to me and says, "Andy, I don't think I'm gunna make it through the winter, that place is too big to heat, and I'm freezing. I gotta get out of there." And now that I think of it, perhaps that also explains the pneumonia episode, ah well. If I was the type of person that was into assaulting the elderly, I may have slugged him one in the breadbasket at that exact moment, but I didn't. I just played the "Oh that's too bad" card and tried to avoid that topic of conversation. No way in hell, I'm helping him move his mound of crap again. During the move I also became aware that his condition is worse than I first thought. We were sitting there watching TV when all of a sudden he decides it's time for his nebulizer treatments. It looked like an electronical bong that he sucked on to receive medical vapors that helped clear his lungs. And when it's time for the nebulizer treatment, it's time for the nebulizer treatment, no screwing around. He had me fetching all the component parts, and fetching this and fetching that. In my head, I was thinking, "Get your own crap you lazy bastard, I'm trying to watch the game." And at that moment, I realized that Ed wasn't as much in need of a friend, as he was a nurse's aid. So from that point on, I decided to distance myself from Ed, try and get back to a customer/cashier relationship. Well actually, the pneumonia episode put him in the hospital for awhile and after that he stopped coming into the gas station, opting for the grocery store that was closer to his apartment.
This move happened just before Thanksgiving of 2004. We probably stopped seeing each other sometime after winterbreak, my class hours were later than normal, and I never saw him much. Somehow through the moving process, I ended up with three boxes of books that were his, and a Frank Sinatra four cd box set. The cd's, I know I was just supposed to borrow for awhile, but I never saw the guy, and the books, I think I was supposed to glance through and see if there were any books I wanted and then return the rest.
I have yet to even look into any of the boxes, or even listen to the cd's. Neither of us want to be the first to say anything about the situation. He thinks I'm mad at him, and after four months or so, I've been fearing the visit of shame where I return his stuff with my tail tucked between my legs, looking like a monumental jackass knowing I've had his possessions for way longer than the courtesy week or two. Each passing month just adds to the awkwardness of the eventual get together the two of us might someday have.
I'm going to hell for this, aren't I? Stealing from the elderly....... I'm surprised I haven't burst into flames already.
Also, Andy, I don't think you have anything to worry about as far as bursting into flames goes. Afterall, this guy is old, as you said, so he probably doesn't remember the incident or you anyway. Don't all old people forget everything that happened to them ever in their life when they in fact become a complete drain on society at age 72?
Plus, do you really want to go to his apartment to find out that he either died, is in a nursing home, or has a nurse who comes by every day to feed and bathe him and you just happen to walk in while she is scooping strained peas into his mouth while trying to keep the drool from getting on his shirt and changing his soiled diaper?
Oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that, I feel very warm right now. Uh-oh
Seriously, doesn't the mention of Pick bring a smile to everyone's face? Even if for nothing other than the fact that we can all think, "yup, I'll never end up like that!"
Vin- Ed and Pick met once, to the best of my knowledge and I don't believe it was love at first sight.
Ed and I were deep in conversation, while Pick kept interrupting with comments like,
-Do you know they allow women to drive?
-They should increase the speed limit to 80, everybody drives like animals anyhow.
-Hey Andy, where's the ladies underwear section?
-When I was in high school, West Bend had 70 people in town, now it's like half a million.
-There were no pretty girls when I was in high school, all ugly.
Ed was not pleased with the interruptions, he was trying to explain to me what two bits was.
Apparently it's 25 cents, who knew?
One time at the station he asked to borrow some scissors. I gave him the scissors and he proceeded to use them to cut his fingernails, right on the counter, infront of other customers.
Needless to say, I never borrowed him the scissors again.
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