Winter in South Texas is a breed of its own. The island contracted down to its residents and stayed there for quite a while. There was the “Winter Texan”- the nice term for “snowbird”. These were retired folks from Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma who would come to the island to winter in a warmer climate.
Friday night trips to the Gaff, a favorite bar of ours would be met by the same faces week after week. It was always the same, Dad would walk up to the jukebox and play BB King’s The Thrill is Gone and then I would play Betty-Lou’s getting out tonight. A game of darts would begin and it was home.
The Sunday Morning Gentleman’s Club was going strong. We started this Sunday 10:00 AM event because drinking on the beach before noon on Sunday was illegal. The club was a 3-hour series of dart games played at our house. The core members were Dad, Steve, Glenn, and I. These Sunday mornings go down in the history book of my life as some of the best days I have ever lived. If you were to grant me a place in the past to spend a day in (other than with my kids being little again) I would ask to be deposited into Avenue J, 1985 the Sunday Morning Gentlemen’s’ Club without question.
We were getting ready for the visit of Brooke and my Grandmother the next month, so we were trying to make our house a little less like a 1950s mobile home that two guys lived in. This meant trying to do a better job sweeping and keeping up with the dishes. The dishes were an important thing to keep up with too because if Jeri and his family ever stopped in, and Jeri’s stepson Robert was grounded, Jeri would very casually say, “Robert, do Joe’s dishes.” Dad would protest, but Jeri always won, so we tried to not have a sink full of dishes if they popped in. It was 1985, and no one really ever knew if anyone was coming. Suddenly, there would be people in the front yard walking toward the front door.
Very, and I mean VERY few of us on the island had telephones. They were just not seen as necessary, despite phones being invented 107 years earlier. We found ways to communicate and overall, life was very spontaneous. So, our preparation for the visit was moving along nicely and in the end, we pretty much had achieved the look and feel of a 1950s mobile home that two guys lived in.
Dad and I had done a great deal of relationship-building over the months of 1984 and we were in a good place. I needed to fill him in on one more important thing. I have no right to discuss that in type here, but let me say, it was a big deal to sit him down and to make him aware of everything that he had missed since moving to Texas 5 years ago.
There are some words you can say to someone, that change their entire life. When he heard his words that night, I can only say that he did it with such eloquence. All of the emotion that made him so unique and the power that broke every barrier imaginable suddenly had to be doused with concern for others. This was one of the most painful things I have ever witnessed in my life. I hated myself for not informing him back in June of this news. I hated myself for telling him tonight. I hated myself for showing him why he could not act on his emotional response. I loved him enough to do what had to be done, to respect him enough to honor him with truth. I think he saw it that way too.
Five days a week, my faithful 72 Dodge and I would ride out 18-mile road (Park Road 53) down to South Padre Island, across the causeway into Flour Bluff, Jeri would hop into the car and out SPID (South Padre Island Drive) across the great seaside city of Corpus Christi. As we were driving out of town heading northwest on I-37, the flames shot up into the sky from the gas crackers that expelled waste gases from the refining process. That great city of steel and explosives that we worked at every day like ants with thousands of others. A benign but acidic mist descended over us all as we worked to turn this oily machine into an oily monster.
Working as an instrument fitter helper was really not bad, but when you are 19 and this is your first construction job it can feel that way. Anyone who has worked any sort of construction job knows what that initiation is like. I fell into the mid-range level of the knowledge hazing graph. I spent my days hanging with people twice my age so I had the benefit of osmotic wisdom and knowledge I suppose. Informational tampering was rampant. For example, when Benny, another fitter, took measurements for a long vertical run of tubing tray that we would need to fabricate up a concrete column, he ordered his helper, Beto to run to the tool trailer to get us some concrete welding rods so we could fasten the steel tray to the concrete. I suspected that much of the morning foot traffic was these poor laborers trekking across the refinery asking for things that did not exist and even worse, being given random items from the tool trailer guy that made no sense, except to amuse the fitter who sent the helper in the first place.
Working with Jeri was an initiation in itself. He challenged me. He did not make things easy on me, he just wanted me to master whatever it was I was doing. I think at 19 I expected him to give me a pass on some things because of his long friendship with my Dad that went all the way back to high school, but that was not Jeri. I did not really understand it back then, and I always found myself either on the defensive side or just saying things to shock him into realizing that I was not your run-of-the-mill 19-year-old. If I could draw disappointment from him, I somehow felt that I was getting even with him for his rigidity.
His technique was working on me though. At first, it did not seem to be. Like a hang glider dropping off a platform and plummeting into a valley, things did not look good. My history was a teenager sitting in my room, listening to music, and working part-time jobs. Real life and construction work needed determination, and that took effort. At first, I did not know how to achieve it, yet at the same time, I knew that the physical world around me was not made simply by showing up and being comfortable. I knew that pain was involved, and when the pain increased anger was needed. The effort required channeling all the frustrations of not knowing how to do something into anger that had a constructive goal. When I did that remarkable things began to take place. That hang glider took lift and I noticed that I could do anything I wanted, and even more importantly, needed to do. The rides across Corpus Christi every day with Jeri talking with me, his refusal to give me preferential treatment was more valuable to me than I would know for a long time.
I still thought about going to Connecticut, but I was not saving for it. Right now, I just wanted to level off. Soon. Soon I would figure out how to put something aside for that and it would fall into place. I was told about the turn-arounds. These were periods of the last weeks of the construction of a refinery before everything went live, all instruments pipes, and tubing were tested, remediated, and re-tested. 12 hours on 12 hours off, often 13 days in a row. I knew that is when I would be able to put something aside.
Driving out to the refinery every day, I began to notice a slight vibration, a little extra clunk in the driveline of the Dodge. I had put a rear universal joint in last summer and now, it appeared the front one was worn. I was going to buy one when another fitter at the refinery said he had a whole driveshaft with a new joint in it and he would sell it to me for fifteen dollars. I bought the driveshaft and placed it in the trunk. I told myself that I would take care of this soon.