The above is a DORMER. A dormer is a roofed structure, often containing a window, that projects vertically beyond the plane of a pitched roof. It’s a rich person’s house thing.
Well, I have returned from my insane week up in Ottawa where I built a big lead-coated copper dormer ( above ) at a private residence for a surgeon and his wife. They had a huge house in the forest and were very nice people fussing about the place and picking up each little piece of copper that dropped from the roof into the garden.
The dormer took me six days. The whole time Jim and Bruce worked on something over the other side of the house. Twice a day they took off to town in the truck to “get things”.
I later discovered that it was all a ruse.
A FUCKIN RUSE!!
It was actually their job to do the dormer together and my job to fix up the broken guttering at the back of the house.
They put me on the dormer to do by myself and then pissed about for a week on the other side between visits to the strip club bars.
Jim the retired stripper, Bruce the Dodgy Deevo, and I shared a room in a hotel. On the first night we arrived we played a game of pool to see who would have to sleep on the little fold out bed on the floor.
I was winning and I was on the black ball. I was playing Bruce and he was supposed to be a big-shot pool player, he was even wearing his Las Vegas 2002 pool player’s tournament qualifier T-shirt. He had only one ball on the table and he was getting angrier and angrier as I calmly sunk ball after ball. I had been playing quite a bit of pool out at the Goth clubs and fancied myself as a bit of a COMPLETE POOL PLAYING LEGEND…
So I was in top form …but then I kind of realized that if I beat Bruce and forced him to sleep on the little bed he would be so demoralized he may not recover and I would have to work with his sad sulking ass the rest of the week, and surely he would plot to get me back somehow, as was his evil penchant.
So in the interests of a calm peaceful stress-free week, I flunked the last very easy shot, and grinning and happy Bruce took me down.
The little fold-out bed was a million times more comfortable than my bench anyway.
So work went sanely enough as I was by myself 90 % of the time.
The nights consisted of me quickly having a shower and bolting down to hide in the restaurant while they stayed in the room, watched hokey, and sunk beer after beer.
Jim smoked fat joints of potent weed which he would whiz up in a coffee grinder.
Another reason it was good I got the little bed, there was no ventilation or operable windows in the room and I could sleep with my head practically out in the hallway away from the stench of manky socks, stale farts, ciggies put out in beer bottles, festering buckets of KFC and continual reeking dope pong.
Then I would meet them in the Bar, watch them play pool, and engage in heartily faked camaraderie to establish myself as one of the team.
In the world of dangerous remote workplaces, you are either one of the team or, one of the enemies, and you do not want to be an enemy of guys as loony as men who find enjoyment in shooting the nail gun at each other and throwing ice filled snowballs at you when you are hanging precariously on to the top of a 44-foot ladder.
I would then sit by the fire until I reached my limit of trying to be friendly and cool, then take off up to the room to recover.
An hour later they would stumble into the room, two incoherent Canadians clutching beers and dead set on tainting me by forcing me to go along to the strip club with them. I declined, faking exhaustion.
The strippers always made me sad.
I would sadly stare at them and wonder about what led them to do it.
I would spend their entire show, totally soft, fantasizing about how I could save them and get them cleaned up.
These were not modern, upbeat “Empowerd” stripclubs…where healthy feminists make 1000$ a night… these were outskirts of Ottawa near truck stops ones…
After they had fueled up on dope and beers they would be rambling back into the corridor by themselves and off to the strip club leaving me in peace….
There was another crazy factor to this trip.
The mad French Canadian guys. My first run-in with such.
Their crew consisted of two supposedly “in charge” 50 or so-year-old weathered-looking beaten-down roofers who wore denim, gold chains, rings, and cowboy boots when heading out on the town.
And three young severely derelict-looking weasels, 18 or 19 years old, going on 30 they seemed and wore mostly ragged hoodies, ragged shoes, and ragged jeans, they all had bad teeth and ragged beards as well. The only thing about them that didn’t seem ragged was any new case of beer as they carried it up the stairs to their room. But that too would be ragged as they ripped it to pieces to get to the liquid treasure within.
The Mad French Canadian guys were working on the shingle roof of the house in the forest we were working on.
I came to know the Mad French Canadian derelict work ethic.
The first day we were there they said it was “too wet” (It sprinkled in the morning, lightly for an hour) so they took off back to the hotel for some serious drinking and T.V watching.
The next day it was “too windy” (a gentle breeze and no more)…So more drinking, bar hopping, and strip club going too was in order for them.
The last day we were there they had no excuses left so they managed about four hours of stripping the roof of shingles with pitchforks before deciding that it was Good Friday and a holiday and the boss was gone and they needed him to tell them what to do next so off they went.
What was really going on was that they were “Too hungover”. The lady of the house had told me that they told her they all had food poisoning from some bad hotdogs, and that was the reason they hadn’t had as much done as they wanted to.
I resisted the urge to say ” Well they seemed healthy enough at three a.m. when they were scream singing some sort of garbled French songs up and down the hotel hallway.”
I made the mistake of going into their room to say Hi! Just for the whole young French Canadian derelict traveling roofer experience.
I realized that over the last few years, I had changed personally through the diligent application of trying to do the right thing instead of things the fucked me up, and I had abandoned much of my past twistedness.
Thus their mad behavior came as a bit of a shock to me!
The first thing I see is two of the young guys with their arms around each other and bottles in hand singing a garbled Metallica song in heavily accented French.
The other beardy ragamuffin was standing on the bed wobbling back and forth and reading the bible out loud to the other two.
Then I was accosted by a whisky bottle-holding old timer who proceeded to tell me how one of the blond girls at the strip bar could put her legs behind her head “Jesuschristfuckingchristallmaightjesus!!” he said as a way of emphasis…
He also went on (complete with hand motions and air drawings) to describe various parts of her private anatomy that were on display while she did this.
I will spare you the details …and luckily I was also spared most of them as in his excitement he lapsed into French without knowing it and I kept him at bay by nodding and smiling as I backed out the door and ran down the hall to the sanctuary of my room.
On the second night, Jim and Bruce brought a harried-looking skinny and drained, mid-30-something red-neck gal up to our room for drinks.
Her story was that she was hiding from a psycho ex.
She went on a lot about how all her past boyfriends had treated her really badly and she drew pictures of some ex’s deformed penis to show us.
I paraphrase her words here…but what I gathered from everything she said was:
She was a useless idiot whose dad owned a towing company and thus she was brought up rough and was as rough as the rest of them and she could drink like anyone and had had a hard life and all the ex’s thought I was fat and ugly and I think I’m fat and ugly and I have a reputation for being a slut but I’m really not and I don’t know what I’m really doing with my life I’m in a rut and I can’t get out and can I have another smoke Im so sorry, and I forget my bag everywhere where is it I think I left it in the bar oh no there it is, What’s this strange music your listening to? Wow, where are you from? Oh, and I’ve had a hard life and all the guys say Im fat and I’m not a slut no matter what anyone says.
Jim the retired stripper was a charmer and laid on the compliments and the advice which of course were answered with “Do you really think so? … Really?
Bruce sat on the bed and chain-smoked with a stupid grin on his face.
I smiled and nodded filing it all away as material for the latest chapter of “The Adventures of the Cowboy Coppersmith”.
They later gave her a lift home and she sat between them in the truck and with her hands out to the sides gave them both a hand job for being so nice to her.
Because that is what good Tow truck Drivers Daughters from small towns on the outskirts of Ottawa who aren’t sluts, do.
Jim had to wake me up to tell me all about it for some reason, and now I’m telling you so this occurrence on planet earth will be recorded in your memory.
Friday afternoon we packed up all the gear into the truck, long ladders, 27 feet of guttering, all the tools, all of our stuff … and ROARED off back to Toronto.
Roared back, while they listened to Shania Twain at full volume, sank beers, smoked joints, and Jim played the guitar in the middle between us.
Sometimes they would pause the CD, imitate Shania Twain, and then laugh so hard and long bending themselves over and shutting their eyes, that I was sure that we were going to veer across the motorway into other cars and die.
For a terrifying half an hour, Bruce tried to keep pace with a flash new Pontiac at 150 ks. I was so scared I even said, “What are you doing bro?!”
And he said, “We’re gonna make good time if I can pass this guy!”
I was so sure we were going to crash with the ladders and tools wobbling about in such a furious fashion, that I put my seat belt on…
Usually, I go for the “thrown clear of the burning wreckage while everyone else struggles with their flaming seat belts, theory”.
But this time terror overrode all my silly theories.
I survived. They took the truck down Queen Street Toronto with the ladders and guttering threatening to decapitate unwary pedestrians at every corner.
I got out near the movie theater and fled … into the night…
The shakes stopped a few hours later.
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HOOK UP A POST GRUNGE DRIFTER with a Kombucha
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the tow truck driver's daughter sounds nightmarish. I was getting such a stark, tedious image from that paraphrase.
Good stuff dude.
Omg