In Ginosko Literary Journal Issue 27
Jägermeister Don
Daylight. Barely. I kneel on the roof where I have to install steel the next few hours. Waiting for the frost up there to dissipate, I use the roof shears to cut steel roof panels. I shiver in the east wind’s mountain-dump cold and feel the fear.
On wine, I’d car-sales-pitched how easy standing-seam steel roofing is to install. Sold everybody I talked to on it. Sold my wife on it. Even sold myself on it. We drove clear to the valley and bought it. Hired the mountain of roof panels delivered. On the house, the panels went up pretty fast, pretty good, pretty neat.
But today, on my own, I’m roofing an after-thought firewood storage. The Y where the long horizontal ridge is supposed to junction with the two ascending hips and all the roof sections have to plane together? I tell myself I’ll “finger it out”.
Jägermeister Don did, though. Seven years ago. On the house. On the garage. An easy dozen Y-junctions all dead-nuts perfect work.
Alone, I’d climbed up on Don’s garage roof. I’d studied his precise, hand-sheared cuts – clean as factory finish. But Don’s mystic “how” was cloaked under his exact steel folds and bends. Made me shiver. Fear. The fear particular to builders – the fear of not being able to float the illusion that they know what they’re doing.
Back last night at 1:57AM, I woke up sweating again – realizing I started the long ridge toward the Y–junction with the two hips completely wrong. Desperate, I wanted to take a headlight and straight-edges, and go up there in the sleepy dark and risk a header off the roof. Instead I turned on the TV news and reminded myself since I wasn’t being shot at and didn’t have cancer, I didn’t have any real problems and fell asleep to psycho-babble.
First time Jägermeister Don showed up on our house site, I smelled it on him. My crew tooled and bagged-up with screws and nails, they all knew it was dangle-big-beams-over-perdition day. They all knew that day was all sky-work, placing support for the huge roof trusses arriving from the valley in a couple of days.
Smiling, Don asked that first time, “You said cash? ” I just breathed the octane of his breath and showed him the spot-cash pay-off 20s I always had on me in those days. Baffled how I was going to get my crew to do it, I explained the twenty-foot-up destination of the four-by-twelve beams laying on the ground. But while I talked, I saw only one mind switch on – Jägermeister Don’s.
So, feeling the fear, I walked away to the Porta-Potti and hid for about five minutes behind the plastic slap of its door. But when I came back out, my beams were aloft and so was Jägermeister Don, balancing free-hand under one of my four-by-twelves with my seventy-eight-inch level – fifteen feet up on the east deck’s railing framing. Like it was candy, he tossed a wise-crack to his grinning Team.
But today. Short version is, by the afternoon sunshine, I finally stand up like The Creator I think I am and say my Y-junction is good. With spit, I wipe my dried blood off the painted steel. A thermally-operated pneumatic system, my ego bulges. So I do. Tell myself I’m a craftsman. In a sort of awe, I tell myself out loud that even though there’s a shallow buckle in my Y- junction and my final fold-lap’s out nearly
three quarters of an inch, my finished roof looks awesome...
...from twenty feet away.
Problem is, though, from here I can see Don’s garage roof, too, and suddenly, I see clearly Jägermeister Don’s ghost up there in his “Will Work for Peppermint Schnapps” t-shirt, bent over the roofing shears. Suddenly, I remember the cosmic fog of truth in which Don skilled each of his unassailable perfections. Only reason long-hair Don worked for us at all was I paid him that spot cash – whenever he felt like showing up – so he could go back over to the Flounder Inn and drink.
I just sag and swallow the big, wild-blue-yonder fact of Jägermeister Don: the Y-junction I just faked, Don origamied – no, Jägermeistered it.