Excerpt from ‘Mr. Man Candy’ by Bobby Horecka

Now before you start calling me a straight up asshole, you’ve got to understand how we two first met, ol’ Bubba and me. Not that what you might call me matters much. I been called worse. A lot worse. Today, even, and I ain’t even finished my first cup o’ Joe yet. If the boot fits, I always like to say, wear that sumbitch proudly. But how we met says an awful lot to how we’ve put up with each other for so long. It says a lot about what makes us tick, how we view the big wide world around us.
    I didn’t know Bubba at all back then. Seen him around the jobsite a few times, but that was it. We worked different crews in different trades. He was a framer, or carpenter to folks outside the business. Me, I’m an electrician. Were it not for landing on the same floor that one afternoon—and that dumbass kid—I doubt we ever would’ve said word one to each other. It’s kind of an unwritten rule on a construction site: You don’t fuck with other crews and they won’t fuck with you back. Makes everything a hellova lot easier, most days.
    But every crew has its dumbass. This kid was theirs.
    I’d seen hands like him a thousand times. This fresh-out-of-the-box, know-it-all little prick who couldn’t keep his yap shut if you paid him. He may know every obscure fact about how the Martians built the pyramids and how his piss-ant wages were single-handedly funding the welfare system—I know this because he told us all about it, all morning long—he somehow had not yet mastered the fine art of working a tape measure.
    Every stud he touched somehow came up a few inches shy of the wall he needed built, much his bewildered confoundment all morning long. Let me tell you, such a thing can get downright irritating. Enough to make you plumb lose your mind. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty who did.
    But not Bubba. No sir. He drew that kid in close, tucked him right under those big ol’ dragon wings of his. “Gawwwlee,” I heard Bubba say, not long after we came back from lunch. “This one’s coming up short, too.”
    You’d have sworn he was just as perplexed as that kid was, standing there biting his lip, peering up at Bubba on the ladder. There wasn’t an ounce of meanness in his tone, just a kindly observation offered in the sweetest granddad baritone. Ol’ Bubba played it up, too, doffing his hat, scrunching his brow, and scratching his big shaggy head like he trying to work out astrophysics up there.
    “Boss is gonna be awful mad if we keep going through lumber like this,” he added in that same sticky sweet drawl. Even from across the building, you could see those words take all the wind out that poor kid. His shoulders slumped. Feet shifted. I almost felt sorry for the little bastard.
    Bubba had him right where he wanted.
    “I know,” he said, stroking his beard like it dripped answers. “Yeah... That’ll fix it.” He darted his eyes across the room. “Why don’t grab me that ratchet with the big, orange handle out of my box over there?”
    The kid lit right up, flitted across the room, and spent the next several minutes rummaging through the heaps of crap Bubba kept in his big green chest. Meanwhile, Bubba climbed down and measured out the correct dimensions for his walls.
    “Orange handle, you say?” the kid said after a few minutes of rummaging, ass in the air, his whiny vice echoing inside the box.
    “Dadgumit! That’s right. I loaned it to one of the electricians earlier this week. Why don’t you go grab it from them? Tell them I sent you to get my board stretcher back.”
    That kid sprang up on a mission and trotted right for me. “Don’t suppose you might know who borrowed Bubba’s board stretcher, do you?” he asked.
    I ain’t gonna lie. I had hard time keeping a straight face. Bubba’s doubled over laughing in the back of my line of sight wasn’t helping, either.
    “Let me see,” I said, imagining endless checkout lanes, crippled puppies, webcam hemorrhoid surgery footage—anything at all, really—to keep that shit-eating grin off my face.
    “I think Larry Carver did, just after the safety meeting earlier this week. You ought to check with him. I think he’s working on the sixth floor today. Yeah, you should probably go ask him.”
    Now, let’s ignore the fact we were standing in the basement and I just sent this kid up seven flights of stairs. Let’s ignore the fact, too, that Larry remembered Chuck using the board stretcher last and sent him back down another six flights of stairs to find him. Or that Chuck, upon hearing why he needed such a fool thing in the first place, decided another fellow probably had an even better tool for the job.
    “Go find Jamal,” Chuck told him, just as serious as if he’d witnessed Jesus hisself descend from the heavens on the fleet wings of archangels. “He was working on the roof yesterday, but he’s the only one I know who has what you need. Tell him Chuck said to let you use his 14-inch pantalón snake.”
    Before all that settled in, Chuck grabbed him by his shoulder, looked him dead in eye, and added: “Now this part is critical. It’s gotta be the fourteen-incher. Anything smaller just won’t do.”
    Head bobbing up and down to show he understood, he was off again. That kid must’ve spent the better part of the afternoon on this snipe hunt before the big boss finally sent him home. Either way, I sure didn’t lose any sleep over it, nor did the rest of us. Still, the super gave us all a stern talkin’ to at the next safety meeting. The dangers of pranking somebody on a jobsite or some such.
    I sure as hell couldn’t tell you. We were still drunk from the night before, Bubba and me both, and well on our way to becoming fast friends.

Share: