Scumbag Eric

Scumbag Eric

By Ezekiel Tyrus

Late 1980s, Melbourne, Florida, I'm 16 years old spending the summer working as a laborer &/or "carpenter's assistant" for $4.50 an hour at a construction company that changed its name every 6 months.

By mid-August, I had put on a solid 20 pounds of muscle and captured a suntan that lasted the rest of my teenage years.

Muscles and a suntan may be the only positive things that came out of that summer.

Truthfully, I was the most incompetent construction worker that ever lived.

Though I was ox-strong, even before that summer, I barely knew the correct way to hold a hammer or read a level and worst, this native Floridian hated the heat and hated the humidity and made the mistake of bitching about it, and for some dumb reason, I mentioned my stepfather was the accountant who did the books for said-construction company, and that my main hobby was not sports but rather ‘acting,’ telling them I had already spent a good deal of my childhood doing community theater, was active in my high school thespian club, and my ambition was to move to L.A. or New York and become a professional actor.

Everybody on the crew was older than me; 20s, 30s, 40s, and if anybody was told to cut me some slack due to my youth, I never felt a minute of it.

Those fuckers were mean. Exceptionally mean.

They treated me with amused contempt and all day long, there was somebody calling me FAGGOT, HEY, FAGGOT, FAGGOT-BOY, CHICKENSHIT, PUSSY, PUSS-CAKE—all the usual names manly men use for those who aren’t manly enough.

I never proved them wrong, by the way. Never defended myself once. Not once.

I had no girlfriend and I was still a virgin. Two questions these guys asked every day, like it was any of their business.

Outside of lifting heavy-shit off a truck and putting heavy shit back onto a truck, you couldn’t rely on me to do anything right.

“As useless as tits on a bull,” is what they use to say about me.

Of everybody, none was meaner (or uglier) than Eric.

He was tall, 6'3" or more, and his skin was darker than tanned, meaning he looked like he could've been Native American but his last name was common and sounded German. I never inquired if he were part American Indian on his mother's side because in my heart, I refused to believe he had a mother at all but rather came to life-form when some human waste and fungus out-grew the rock it was living under.

Construction work requires muscles. Construction work will develop muscles. Eric had none. Though he was already a seasoned carpenter in his early 30s when I met him, Eric was skinny as fuck, a muscle-free beanpole whose shoulder blades jutted out of his back like fleshy bat wings.

While the rest of us wore comfortable baggy shorts that went to our knees, Eric wore tight gym short shorts with no pockets, the kind teenage girls wear when they play volleyball. Eric must've been hung like a thimble because I remember thinking even at 16, I couldn't wear those shorts without looking like a porn star.

Oddly enough, Eric almost never wore a carpenter's belt. Instead, he'd leave his tool belt on the ground to the side and put bundles of nails in his mouth and walk around carrying a hammer, simply pulling nails from his mouth whenever he needed to hammer something.

As incompetent as I was even I invested in a great pair of work-boots with thick soles that cradled my ankles and provided military-like balance. Everybody wore boots like that or something better. Everybody that is but Eric, who wore a pair of cheap threadbare Payless sneakers with thin soles nearly worn-thru and falling apart, with dingy off-white socks that came to the mid-shins of his skinny legs.

Eric's nose was long and noticeably strait and his nostrils were always inflamed with a reddish-tint, which I thought meant he was angry all-the-time, ready to ponce on anybody at any given moment, but now I know, he was just a tweaker, high on speed, as most of those fuckers were.

The man had high cheekbones, dark-eyes and check-marks that sat on his eyebrow ridge in twitchy anger.

His teeth were rotten, only a handful left, like sharp rat teeth stained black from the chewing tobacco Eric sucked between his cheek and gums, spitting the nasty black tobacco juice every few seconds through the nails he put in his mouth, muttering things like, “I'm a mean son-of-a-bitch. I know it. I mean son-of-a-bitch.”

Interestingly enough, the one thing he had going for himself was his hair. Besides speed, this is where all his money went.

Believe it or not, Eric was in a local Heavy Metal band and in Florida in the 1980s, all a guy needed to do to get laid was grow his hair long and pick-up a microphone.

Eric's hair was thick and full, dark-brown and went all the way past his shoulders. At work, he typically wore it in a ponytail or even in a hairnet, and yet, nobody made fun of him. His hair wasn't coarse. It wasn't dry. It was obviously professionally done and styled, using the best products available.

By all accounts, Eric was a ladies' man. I remember people talking about the ‘really hot blonde’ Eric brought to the Christmas party the year before. Every other day, Eric would bring handwritten notes his girlfriend would leave him on his dresser or on his welcome mat under a stone.

Though he insisted she was in her 20s, the notes were the intricately-folded notes of an immature adolescent complete with hearts for dotted i's, smiley faces by her signature and petty hopes, fairy-tale dreams and the occasional promise of a blow-job.

Eric would pass the notes around during lunch laughing his ass off, assuring us she wasn't ‘the only bitch’ he was fucking and describing himself as a 4-F-er; 1. Find them. 2. Feel them, (both physically and emotionally.) 3. Fuck them. 4. Forget them.

I wish I could remember the name of his band but what I do remember is when he wasn't muttering about what a mean son-of-a-bitch he was or calling me by one-of-my nicknames, the motherfucker was always singing Heavy Metal songs at the top of his lungs, all high-pitch nasals and no-talent.

Eric had no redeemable qualities sans his hair.

Why did he intimidate me so much? Even at 16 I had a better body.

In my early 20s working as a bouncer at Tampa punk clubs, I use to fantasize about confronting Eric and beating the shit out of him but it never happened.

Of course, when lifting weights in my late teens and early 20s, I use to fantasize about fighting all those fuckers.

Even at this writitng, I'd eagerly step into an alley on a rainy night to brawl with every single one of those assholes but this, too, will probably never happen.

When Eric was a younger man, he went to prison for armed robbery, or so he said, and as far as I knew, he was the first real criminal I ever met, or the very first ex-con, and that scared me, the fact that he had been to prison before.

My stepfather continued to do the books for that company for decades and when I was in my mid-30s, I asked him whatever became of that scumbag Eric?

He told me that Eric worked for the same company for years on relatively good terms but he was often in trouble with the law; possession, domestic violence, DUI, misdemeanor assault, etc, though nothing too serious but one day, he and a buddy decided to hold up a liquor store while they were on a camping trip in Georgia and it didn't go well.

Partner was shot and killed and Eric sentenced to a lengthy prison term due to his frequent offender status.

As far as my stepfather knew, that bastard was still in prison and was going to be for the rest of his life.

I wonder if he still takes good care of his hair.

San Francisco. August 9, 2013.
Ezekiel Tyrus