Electric Dan

Electric Dan’s story is perhaps three-quarters told in the material that is complete. Like many of the readers I meet, he turned out to be a strong man. The last time we sparred it went great. Then the next morning he was up to do it again. I demurred, feeling like I had just been hit by a car. Dan is a patriarch working in the trades, still gathering on Saturday nights with his children and grand children to play family games, an example that Gen-X seemed to do okay in small town settings where they were almost erased in big cities.

Dan is a kind, barrel-chested man. Associating with him and other Midwestern Men, I have noted a type, a natural football player physique common to the region. I think, that of college and professional football teams had to be staffed by men native to that state, than the game would be truly worth watching, with distinct styles of play based on regional types, with men like Dan crushing skinnies on the gridiron. Some of his family lore is tucked into a journal written in 2020, during the year the world bent the knee. He was a devote Christian, even a Sunday school teacher, until the corruption and hypocrisy and anti-family politics placed him in the Camp of the Hammer.

Bob Johnson

Bob was the first reader to invite me to come and have a stay in his corner of the USA, back in 2015. He noted that I read sign in gutters and on sidewalks like he did in canyons and on game trails. I had never taken to a man so easily before. Bob was the first of many men who I met through writing that seemed like a long-lost brother despite a lack of shared experiences. Bob is just over six feet with shoulders twice as wide as mine. There is a picture of us together that looks like a viking hugging a pet Irish scamp who is quick to fill the ale horn. I have spent an entire year, over 10, living with Bob and his Wife, Deb, who is the toughest broad I have ever met. She is the only woman to ever outwork me; and sweet to boot.

Bob and Deb were married on my birthday and have done 50 years together. They are so family oriented they he calls her Grandma. She calls him Berto, usually with a slight comic smile. He’s as wide as a bear, and shambles, which bothers him. He used to be a light-footed big man who could outrun most and outswim all, like a Tarzan of the Alps. Working three jobs at a time for most of 40 years, earned him.

Bob has had more different kinds of jobs than any person I know: bailing hay, installing fences, pouring concrete, docking sheep, skinning mink, hunting guide, hard rock mining, machinist, feed store operator, water operator are on the redneck resume. Crafts like sighting guns, custom loading, reloading and fly making fir fly fishing are among the knowledge trapped in his battered body, stocked with metals hips, knees, and a lumbar cage so that the once graceful athlete has been reduced to shambling like an ox in his old age. Most of the damage seems to have been from the water operator job at high altitude, working with heavy materials in cold wet conditions.

Cousin Mike

A Gen-X fellow five years behind me, grandson to my favorite and smartest uncle, Mike has had more interest in our shared half of family than I have. I fell from touch and he found me and made contact. The material in this book is the bones I should help him hang a family album on. I intend to keep sitting with him at dinning room table for coffee and discussing his search. Just as the young fellows appear in this mind’s eye driving, Mike and the other elders appear seated, exchanging words, sharing a drink and a thought.

Mike is tall, middle-aged, with dark-shocked big head making his wide shoulders look narrow. His face is a considerate cavern housing friendly eyes that wishes they did not peek out upon such a wicked world, but grimly accept that they do. He likes print books, big books held in the hand and picture windows on a calm day.

Kelly Baker

Kelly’s biography is near complete in this volume. He was a big big man who took to this little tramp kindly as a long lost brother and would always pull me to him when we clasped hands, his one hand stronger than my whole body. His hair was still thick, and white, cut short, his beard trimmed around his square chin, his teeth flat, blunt and white, through which he had a habit of laughing in a sardonic way as his big face pinked and spread a smile that admitted that we just had this little while together at the ends of our crooked ways. The things he liked the most were fishing, swimming, Alaska, a good dog, a good friend and a woman that didn’t bitch “too much,” with a few shots of moonshine washed down with a light beer.

He called me brother and meant it, looking forward to hearing about me “getting your ass beat by fellas so young you should know better.” I hope I preserved Kelly’s sense of humor, as, even on his worst days, with his heart failing and his wife—who since passed—griping he was never more than a moment away from a smile, able to see the light even in the depths of our fumbled plights.