Musgrave lost a few customers after that crackdown, but most of the people I delivered to were the real thing, guys who just wanted to go back again and put on their safety glasses and their steel-toed boots and find another good spot on the concrete floor beneath the fluorescent lighting. For most of them, the ones who couldn’t return, it wasn’t about money. The LTD payments were big enough and they could go on forever, but without the job, the days spread out too far and there was nothing to look at. Lots of those guys pulled all the way back and faded out of the normal world. They changed their internal clocks and went on completely different shifts so they could stay up all night and not have to wake up again until one or two the next afternoon. Then they’d start it up right away with the gin and tonics as soon as they got out of bed, and by the time I came by with their packages some of them would already be half in the bag and they’d have to stagger out or kind of half-crawl to the door. The guys who lived alone were separated from their wives and could only see their kids every other weekend. They made their minimum support payments and dumped the rest into the cable bill and the big-screen TVs that took up half the wall in those little war-time houses on Rankin or Josephine. Some of those guys looked like they came straight out of the Hells Angels or the Desperados. They were way up over two hundred and fifty pounds and they had mean-looking goatees and shaved heads, but sometimes when I came by to drop off their medications, they’d be completely wrapped up in some mid-afternoon episode of General Hospital or pretending not to cry over the latest crisis on One Life to Live.
Most of my trips started with Barney. He was this horrible, fat, nearly naked guy and he had everything wrong with him. Diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney problems, a liver thing and some kind of circulation issue that made his feet swell up so badly that he couldn’t wear shoes and could barely walk. Barney had been laid up like that for years and there was no chance he could ever go back to work. He even had one of those Medic Alert buttons that he was supposed to wear around his neck all the time and never take off. It had a flashing red light that told you the battery was okay and I guess if Barney ever felt himself slipping away, or if he felt his heart giving out or whatever it was, he was supposed to push that button and some kind of help would come screaming down the street to save him.
He was Musgrave’s most regular customer and he was there with me from beginning to end, getting three or four deliveries every week. Barney had a standing account at the store and he paid for everything with a credit card over the phone so I never saw one cent from that guy, but that didn’t stop him from piling on his extra stuff. He ordered from the pharmacy like it was a grocery store and every time I went to his house I’d have to haul a half-dozen heavy cans of Chef Boyardee. Musgrave kept it in stock just for Barney. Sometimes I’d catch him gobbling it down cold, straight out of the can.
In the summers, Barney used to sit outside on this one sagging lawn chair he kept on his front porch and in the winters you’d find him sprawled out on the couch in his front room by the TV. Those were his only two places. He wore almost no clothes, never any shoes, and usually just a pair of nylon track shorts that almost disappeared when they got sucked between the folds of his rolling gut and his wide, hairy thighs. Once in a while he might pull on a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt that he would never button closed and when the real humidity started up in July, Barney’s whole body would get this greasy sheen. A puddle of salt water would drip out of him and pool under the lawn chair until it almost seemed like he was one of those stinky, exotic plants from the rainforest that need a heavy, regular watering every day.
He was famous mostly for his hernia. It was this red pulsating growth about the size of a misshapen grapefruit and it bulged way out of the lower left hand side of his stomach. It seemed like something impossible, like one of those gross, special effects from an alien movie that was supposed to make you think there was a smaller creature in there. Just the shape of it, and the way it stuck out of him, and how it seemed to come right at you, could make a person squirm if they weren’t used to it. But he refused to get it fixed and he was always making a big deal about how tough he was and how it didn’t bother him at all. He thought it was funny to pull back his shirt and scare the little kids as they walked by.
“It ain’t hurting me,” he used to say. And then he’d poke at his own stomach just to prove it was true. The finger would go deep down into the grapefruit and when he pulled it out, the creature inside would kind of tremble.
“What do I care?” Barney used to say. “I’m not going to lift another goddamn thing as long as I live and I’m not letting nobody cut me open.”
The cops used to come around Barney’s place every once in a while to give him tickets for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace, but there was no way to really get rid of him. All kinds of bad rumours circulated around his house and people used to say that Barney had a thing for kids and couldn’t keep his hands off little boys.
During the last week of every month, or whenever the new issues came out, Barney would make sure Musgrave sent along the most recent copies of Penthouse or Easy Rider or Swank. He’d call it in early and by the time I finally made it to his house, he’d have been sitting there for hours, sweating it out in his slick, excited state, just waiting for me to show up. He’d pull the magazines out right away and start flipping through the pages and he always wanted to stretch out the spines and unroll the centerfolds to show me.
“Look at that one,” he’d say and he’d hold up some crazed picture of an orgy that was supposed to be taking place in a working garage with five or six people, men and women, all tangled up around each other and bent over the hoods of the cars.
“You wouldn’t have the first idea how to treat one of these ladies,” he used to tell me. “You wouldn’t have a goddamn clue what to do.”
I made my own rules for Barney. He was always the first stop on my shift so I could get past him as quick as possible and outside of the most basic stuff, we never talked. When he tried to get at me with his pictures and his attitude, I never gave him anything to work with. To this day I bet he wouldn’t know my name. I had to draw borders around him, safety zones, and when I brought over his stuff in the summer months, I only went as far as the top step of his porch and I stayed out in the open where everybody could see me. In the winter, I put down a hard line right at the threshold of his door. Even if it was driving snow or minus twenty or if the rain was coming down in heavy sheets — and even if he kept calling out from his couch, telling me to come in — I just stayed on my side and waited until he finally got angry enough to work up the guts and wince his way over to the door.
“You’re a goddamned-lazy-ass-motherfucker, you know that?” he’d say as he grabbed the bag out of my hand and slammed the door in my face.
“You’d make a cripple walk before taking one step.”