When I get there at 7 a.m. he and Ricky are racking spikes. He collects one-handed and takes a drag on his cigarette with the other. He's not using gloves, but I put on a pair and then I take the spot across from him. I look again at his scar. It's a red-and-white kid-scrawl V, starting above his right ear and dribbling to a point an inch below his hairline.
"I've been cutting down though." Zach is 20 years old. "This weekend my buddy got a 30-pack, I only drank 6, he drank 24. I haven't gotten loaded in 3 weeks."
We're talking about music. We did that a lot today. "Last concert I went to, Kenny Chesney, aw man, it was so bad. Gayer than AIDS."
"...yeah, he's pretty terrible."
"It sucked, he was a total douchebag. And everyone there was drunk. Lawn seats, it fucking sucked. Everyone was just totally trashed."
Ricky knows about everyone in the factory whether he wants to or not. So he knows about Zach's scar and why one of his legs is shorter than the other. He's giving him shit about it, with his big burly Florida boondocks drawl. Zach's trying to sound less guilty. "And those guys in the ambulance, they were trying to take off my pants, and I was like, what the fuck, don't fuckin touch me!"
"D'ja think they were tryin to get at your pants 'cause you were bleedin all over the floor?"
"I woke up later, in the hospital, find out I was handcuffed to the bed!"
"Well, maybe you should stop being such a fuckhead."
They both grin like they want to laugh but neither one does.
I don't know how we got on this subject. "Like heroin. I don't fucking get it. Some of my friends from high school, they're on heroin, and I see them and I'm like 'what's up?' and they're like 'uhhhh go get eightball.' Or they don't even fucking recognize me, like, we've been friends for ten years. And I gotta see, you know, their mom, 'hey, how are you, have you talked to Jason lately?' Oh yeah, he's shooting dope into his ass. 'Have you talked to Frankie?' Yeah, he married a hooker. He's like 'oh, she works at Denny's.' One morning we wanna go fishing, says we gotta wait til 5 a.m. for his wife to get back, what do you do when you get back at 5 a.m.? 'Oh yeah, it was costume night.' Yeah, costume night in a fishnet full-body suit. And my buddy Jason, he went to rehab for 2 months, got clean for 2 months, then he went right back on the drugs."
"Crazy."
"It's fucking sad." The machine has stopped working again by this point and Ricky comes in to try and fix it.
He sings a lot (and terribly) (although his Rob Zombie impression is pretty accurate). I don't know any of the songs he's singing except when he sings along to the radio. "Hot Blooded" comes on and he sings along for a little while, then transitions to something else. Another familiar one comes on and, excited, he steps away from the table to hit his knees twice and then clap his hands. "WE WILL, WE WILL ROCK YOU!" I rack the spikes with two hands to make up for his absence. Ricky's heavy Southern accent ranges across the machine. "You know who sings this song?" Zach pauses and cocks his head. "Uh... King?" I keep racking but my smile gets bigger.
The machine isn't playing fair today, as Ricky puts it. Zach gets really angry whenever it starts spitting out broken spikes, chucks them in the barrel with a grunt and goes, "These spikes are shitty!" Maybe he gets so angry because he hates doing nothing.
I watch him dump the broken spikes into the barrel. Hey man. Maybe you should find your brain. Wring the alcohol out of it. Build a life or something.
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