I had lots of ‘adventures’ while I lived in Chicago, and I met a lot of interesting people. Many of the people I met you wouldn’t want to meet, if you met them, if you take my meaning. They were a rough lot, but most of them also had a good heart; they’d give you the shirt off their back, but you had to be cautious, they might also be picking your pocket at the same time. But it was all good natured.
a drunken taste of Chicago
One of the finest folks I met was a fellow named John Sullivan. As you can probably tell by the name, he was a native american. Ok, so the name didn’t give it away. Should his name have been John “Broken Arrow” Sullivan, would that make you happy, you insensitive racist bastard? Well, that wasn’t his name. It was just John.
He was the chief mechanic at our work site (don’t read anything into chief either, I’m warning you!) and knew his way around a tool kit. He could fix pretty much anything, and did. Well, let me amend that, if they would let him, he could fix it. Sometimes when you work at salvage/scrap/demolition jobs, the main focus is can a piece of equipment run, not how well does it run. These companies operate under the radar as much as possible, and are prime targets for OSHA if the get spotted.
We had one grapple crane that leaked about 55 gallons of hydraulic fluid per day, but if you took a few days to fix it, the job would be at a standstill, so they absorbed the cost of the fluid and kept running it. They actually kept a couple drums on the crane to act as extra counterweight, so they served a double function – allowing the crane to work over capacity, plus handy when the fluids got low.
John could have fixed that. He drove a beat up old pickup truck with a utility bed on it. It was totally not street legal, so it stayed within the confines of the work site, which was a huge steel mill locatted on Chicago’s south side near Indiana. (don’t think for a second that John the Indian was from Indiana, he wasn’t)
He’d drive up whenever I had a mechanical issue and he’d stop the truck, pop a Budweiser, and throw a chaw of tobacco in his mouth and spit long drooling disgusting puddles of juice on the ground. He’d also have a stump of a stogie in his mouth at the same time, just to ensure he had enough nicotine, I guess.
I had to act as the assistant mechanic when he worked on my crane. He’d yell “hand me that festerous” and I’d have to guess what tool he meant. He could never remember names of tools, so he called most of them a festerous. That was a catch-all name that he had made up.
John looked more like an Irishman than an indian, but he told me stories of his mother who was full blood Cherokee or Choctaw or whatever she was. What a combination of blood to have. When I left Chicago, he, my brother and our buddy Rabbit all signed a ‘good luck’ card for me, and he signed me, John the drunk. Nice self image there. Accurate though. He started drinking early AM and never stopped through the day. the only other half Irish half Indian I knew was my first fiance so maybe that combination of cultures has a tendency toward addiction. Certainly is the stereotype, and those two examples held true
