Waiting for the drop

When’s that other shoe going to drop?

We’re just waiting for it to come around, is what we’re doing, as Arlo once said. And when it does, if we want to end war and stuff we’d best be ready to sing loud, with four-part harmony and feelin’.

It always comes around. But sometimes it takes a while.

When I was a young dope fiend and freshly minted college dropout, a Selective Service lottery winner with hair down to my whatsis and that sardonic gleam in my eye, I was for some reason having trouble finding gainful employment in the libertarian paradise of what then was not yet called Bibleburg.

So I signed on with one of those temp outfits that promises to keep a fella busy and the first job they sent me on involved the interior cleaning and restoration of a narc’s house that had been set on fire.

My first thought was that I didn’t feel too good about it. My second was that maybe I should come back in the dead of night and finish the firebug’s half-assed job.

Thing was, I had already dodged two bullets in my after-school sideline as a low-level weed retailer, and through nothing more than sheer good fortune, too.

The first: when I got pulled over for speeding at oh-dark-thirty in Walsenburg by two bored cops playing with their new radar gun. They didn’t even bother to look in the back seat of my Chevy, where the 10 pounds of weed were sitting right fucking there in a sack, and after accepting a small cash gratuity they allowed me to proceed along my merry way.

The second: When a friend overheard a gaggle of John Laws in an Alamosa breakfast spot chattering about some major dope op’ they were fixin’ to fire up at the college. This led to the acquisition of a footlocker, much aluminum foil, a shovel, and a hole in the ground far from our dorm room, which underwent a much swifter and more thorough cleaning than the narc’s house would get some months later, in my new life as a retired mota peddler.

So I decided that the third time would not be the charm, for me, anyway. And what the hell, I needed the bread. So I rolled up my sleeves, got busy, and after that filthy job was in the rear view found myself a regular gig as a janitor. Honest work. And no button-down types give a shit if a janitor has hair down to his whatsis and a sardonic gleam in his eye, because his workday starts after theirs has ended.

You know the rest. After seeing my reflection in toilets grew tiresome I landed that first newspaper job, and that’s where I was when Tricky Dick scuttled out of the White House like a rat fleeing a landfill fire.

“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Jerry Ford. Uh, not so much. A month later he pardoned the crooked sonofabitch. Shortly thereafter I bought my first gun.

And a half century later, here we are again, trying to wake the fuck up from our latest national nightmare.

It feels as though we’re facing the same choices I did as a temp, when my hair was still down to my whatsis instead of crowding my ears and nostrils: Clean it up, burn it down, or go elsewhere.

The other shoe is still out there, dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, and once again it may belong to a vice president. I had high hopes for ol’ Jerry back in 1974, but not this faux hillbilly. Every time he cracks his hairy piehole I hear banjo music.