Buddies Read Online Free PDF Page B

biceps, forearm, and thigh. Colored ones, no less—snakes and eagles and murder and paranoia. Socially, Gene had one topic, “layfuck.” For the first three beers and two joints, he would expound on the attracting of “my woman.” Four beers and another joint along, he would outline the various methods of layfucking them. By the eighteenth beer, he’d get into how to dispose of them. Then he’d pass out wherever he happened to be.
    Plenty of ironworkers are happily familied, jovial, and intelligent. I even knew one who was—on the quiet—a Dickens buff. But it is not a settled life: the work wanders, the schedule is erratic, the weather can freeze you, boil you. It’s not for anyone who has the chance to do something better. So ironworkers tend to be roughnecks—and in this Gene was the essential ironworker. He was a fabulously uninhibited slob. He was also one of the largest men I’ve known. The flow of beer bloated him a bit, but he had something like six shoulders and a chest that could cross the street. A good man to have on your side, if you’ve got to be in the war.
    He was hard company, the sort who expresses his joie de vivre by putting headlocks on you. He also laced his endearments with threats of sexual attack, a typical ironworker anarchism. When I asked him to stop mauling me, or do it more gently, he said, “I could screw your butt. Would that be gentle enough for you?” Of course, one doesn’t take any of this literally. They like to shake up the taboos. Jim would say, “I don’t know why I’m so exhausted,” and Gene would reply, “Because I was fucking you all night and now your fucking asshole’s all sore.” Imperturbable Jim would observe, “Yeah, that might be it,” and they’d proceed to other matters. After a number of these outbursts, I began to wonder if something genuine might be pouring out of Gene.
    He was often at Jim’s when I was, elaborating his theory of layfucking, and, out of loyalty to Jim, would attempt to draw me into his philosophy. Or perhaps it was just because I was there; perhaps he would have polled Eleanor Roosevelt for the dos and don’ts of layfuck had she had been in the room. He would be deep in depiction of a pickup, acting out the parts, even filling in for passersby who, he once said, were “huffy and out of date.” Then, he told us, tensing, showing us how it felt, “My woman spots this briefcase dude and she is traveling. She is traveling away.” Now he showed us Rodin’s The Thinker. “But what she don’t know is, see, those guys in suits don’t spend money on my woman like an ironworker does! Am I wrong or what?”
    “You’re right, my man Gene,” says Jim; and I’m trying to figure out where all this lingo comes from.
    “What about you?” says Gene, to me.
    “What about what me?” I respond, trying to look about six foot eight.
    “What do you think of my woman dodging me like so?”
    I took up my beer can, swirled the liquor thoughtfully, and offered, “I read that as an uncanny act on the part of my woman.” Had I made it, passed? Jim was nodding, but Gene was just looking at me. I looked back.
    His face a puzzle, Gene asked me, “So like tell us why you didn’t join the union like Jimbo here.”
    “Jim already knows,” I said, backpedaling.
    “So me.”
    “The punk’s a writer,” Jim put in.
    “What kind?” asked Gene, his brow clouding. “Novels, fiction, stories?”
    “All of the above,” I answered, for they already were all of the above.
    Gene looked dire.
    “Fuck me and fuck my college,” I said. “Right?”
    “How come you could have joined the union and instead you’re being a writer?”
    “Well,” I said, “every family has its black sheep.”
    Gene looked over at Jim, digesting this comic flattery, and I believed I had scored the point. But there was one more test.
    “So tell us,” said Gene, “some of your unique procedures in the enticing of my woman.”
    Jim smiled. I hadn’t told him I