PROSECUTORS WILL BE VIOLATED!

Blog number forty and seven                                                        Oct. 06, 2006

A dream: I'm walking with Teresa at the downtown mall in Sacramento when I suddenly realize I am naked.  I get very uncomfortable and tell Teresa that I don't have any clothes on.  She asks why I didn't put on clothes.  I tell her I just suddenly realized that I was naked.  I tell her that it is just like I sometimes dream that all of a sudden I am naked.  It does not occur to me that being naked is one of my signals that I am dreaming so that I can wake up in the dream -- have a lucid dream.

She asks me what bothers me about it -- are people looking at me?  I look around, and nobody seems to notice, but I still feel very revealed.

It seems very strange to me that THAT really was me, but THAT me had no knowledge whatsoever about ME that was sleeping in a bed.  THAT me never knows about me, but I know about "him."  Why is that?  Is there right now a "Me" that knows about me, but I don't know anything about "him?"
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When I was nineteen years old and married, I worked for a family wholesale fruit and vegetable business.  We would sometimes go to Texas to pick up watermelon, sometimes to Joplin Missouri to get cantaloupes and radishes at a farmer's market -- a real one, not these "Buy a few crates of peaches and sell them to the locals" type of farmer's market.  This stuff came direct from the farmers who grew them.

One day my boss -- a guy of about forty who I liked a lot, asked me if I would like to take the pickup to Marshalltown Iowa to pick up a load of bananas.  He said to look the bananas over really carefully because the lady who ran the warehouse was a slick character and for me not to let her give me crap.  I jumped at the responsibility.

At the warehouse, watching the crates of bananas come by me for loading into my pickup, I realized I couldn't tell a good cratefrom a bad one.  What does a nineteen year old look for in a crate of banana's?  I suspicioned that I saw several crates come at me again that I originally rejected, but this time around, accepted.  Anyway, I got loaded and I no longer felt content with what I was doing.

I was to go to stores on our route on the way back to see if I could sell any crates.  So I'm tooling along and it starts to rain so I stop and cover the bananas with a tarp.  Why I thought rain would hurt them, I cannot now imagine.

I get back in the truck and I'm cruising along and I hear this "flap flap flap" sound.  It keeps going and I cannot imagine what it must be.  I look around and I happened to glance in the rear view mirror and here's the tarp, wrapped up like a towel being used to slap someone's ass in the shower, whapping at the top layer of bananas.  I quickly stop, get out, take a look, and every crate is banana soup.  Shit!

Not only that, but in order to hide some of my error, I dropped off a crate of the worst looking bananas I could find at one of our most valued customers.  The lady that owned the store trusted us so much that she never even looked at what I gave her.

I never heard anything from my boss about the whole thing, but I never delivered anything to that store again.  My boss always went.

Another day, the top of my truck tears out a metal awning over the front of a grocery store.  I go to the restaurant where I'm supposed to meet my boss.  I sit next to him and the first thing I say is, "Do you have insurance?"  He looks straight ahead, and replies, "No, why?"
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I worked in a fancy Des Moines cafeteria as a bus boy once.  One Sunday they served prime rib and as the customers came down the line, some would ask the prime rib guy to cut them a slice of the rib.  One lady asked if she could have a slice that was a little more done.  The guy flipped the rib over in the au jus it was sitting in, and sliced her off the top of that.  A few minutes late I hear, "Could I have a slice a little more well done?"  "Sure, lady," and he flips the rib again so the rare part winds up in the brown juice while the rare part that had been standing in the brown juice was now on top, looking like it was well done.
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One Sunday in Denver I was to pick up a friend of Teresa's and bring her to our home.  I was a little early so I stopped at a bar to have a beer.  (Taverns open on Sunday in Denver?  That's the way I remember it.)  I'm sitting at the bar and I overhear two men and a woman talking about the previous night in the same bar.  They talk about a man rolling around on the floor, screaming and carrying on something fierce and then one of the men says, "He held out his arm and said that he bet I couldn't straighten out his arm."  A few beats, then "Hell, I didn't know he was crippled."