Marsh Township Sanitary District

Here comes Joe, ready for his break, which according to the Union he will damn-well enjoy for exactly fifteen minutes twice every day plus a full lunch hour allocated down to the very last second, no matter what dire emergency is going on at the plant. Born in 1923 as Giuseppe Agostino Sanfilippo, Joe was the only one of the guys who initially socialized with the college students, the only one who gave us the time of day, who could joke around, ask about our lives and loves. Sanfilippo quickly put us at ease and lessened our nervousness about working around these viciously racist old boys, some of whom harbored dark and volatile personality disorders, likely without provocation to fly off in unpredictably explosive rants. In the big garage, all it would take is one reminder (his neighbor, the Harley Davidson aficionado) and Larry the foreman might start hurling monkey wrenches or flashlights around and whatever other dangerous projectiles that happened to be within reach, so that if you weren’t hyper alert, one might catch you upside the head. If there were a rare Homo sapiens however, who had incompletely diverged from the great apes, retaining more of the primate than most others, Joe was living evidence. His knuckles nearly scraped the ground when he walked. At first glimpse, you couldn’t tell if Sanfilippo with his massive, heavy head (perpetually frozen into a surprised smile), his gigantic honker, his knitted, balding hair and gorilla-like torso swung around like King Louie, was African, Caucasian, Middle Eastern, all of the above or none at all, or perhaps entirely of a lost, uncharacterized hominid line. The son of Sicilian immigrants who settled in Ohio, Joe evaded the draft during the Second World War he said because he was working as a bouncer for a mob-owned bar in Dayton. That apparently saw him through the duration of the conflict. Joe quickly won our admiration by pulling Bobby and I aside one afternoon and offering his guest room at any time of day or night for whatever unlimited intimate rendezvous we might want to plan with any of our girlfriends. Quite generous I thought, indeed. Thank you Joe! We were too mortified to admit to the randy old frog that neither of us had a girlfriend at the moment. More honestly, Bobby and I probably couldn’t have gotten a date inside a women’s prison at that time. Working on that though Joe, we’ll let you know! Maybe he had a peep-hole to watch this kind of activity? And he constantly urged us to take Laura to lunch in one of Cook County’s nearby Forest Preserves. Joe liked to brag about his low-calorie, carnal lunches with her in the backseat of his Chevy Bel Air, savored in a parking lot famous as a hook-up hotspot for those seeking passion of all persuasions. I never believed him. Laurie was perk, cute, smart and dignified enough, why was she letting him have sex with her, this Yeti, this Sicilian Cryptid, the savagely shithandled pseudoprimate? Joe urged me on to her. I knew this was a setup for a face slap at best, so I never took him up on it. One noontime in the lunchroom, I mentioned to the guys that my dad was a decorated “Great-War” veteran, hoping to score some political capital with them, trying to get them to accept us. “You want to know what I was doing during da war?” “What was that Joe?” “I was fucking da wives! I was fucking all da wives!” It was entirely likely that Joe, through the help of the Dayton mob, was able to sit out the conflict in the homeland working as a bouncer in a nightclub. Maybe he was fucking all ‘da wives.’ But I took that as a gross exaggeration. Here was an audaciously obnoxious miscreant, half-ape, half what have you, presenting his staggering lack of patriotism, shaky moral foundation, and disrespect for our veteran Fathers and the sanctity of marriage right in our faces, chuckling about it. Now I had it with him. “My pop and his selfless comrades had come resolutely to the inevitable conclusion that Hitler had to be stopped, even if it meant accepting one’s premature and untimely end, even if it meant breaking away from their hysteric al and sobbing Italian mothers who urged them to the contrary Mr. Sanfilippo!” I responded, trying not too hard to conceal my cold anger. “They never wavered, and God bless those brave souls that never came back, or came back profoundly changed, depressed and broken as my old man had been. What in the hell was your excuse? How did you evade the draft” “Somebody had to do it!” “Do what?” “Keep all da wives happy,” he roared, his laughter trailing into a cigarette-smoker's chronic cough. A tableau of lonely bobby-soxers with chauffeured hair waited in line to get inside the Dayton nightclub that I imagined to be dimly-lit but tasteful, festooned with antique lamps, bow-tied bartenders and Blue Eyes in his salad days, another AWOL, crooning a corny melody. I could imagine Joe preying on them with that contagious smile and ice-melting charm. He might have been good looking once. I tried imagining him as a better-kempt young man in black suit and tie, tossing some poor drunk to the curb. “What did you do at work today honey?” my mother would frequently ask, behind the ironing board as I came tiredly plodding through the front door of our home, the starch and steam a welcome antidote to the methane atmosphere of planet BTSD. Same old shit, day after day, I painfully reminded her. My sweet old momma always had cold beers waiting for me. If there were ever a prizewinning family of enablers, mine took the blue-ribbon. This was one of her compensations for the ludicrous, meaningless and cruel labor to which my father forced me. There was no sense arguing with him. He cut his teeth in the Good War, and by God, I was going to have to go through something similar to it if I were to reach adulthood, even if it meant the BTSD. For my poor older brother, it was Midwest Forge, a stamping plant where he was almost incinerated in molten steel, so I guess I got a break. I glanced at her suspiciously though, thinking, what in the hell were you doing anyway during the war? Joe’s boast had made me cynical of humanity in general, even my dear own momma. I tried imagining Sanfilippo trying to press his thick tongue through my mother’s reluctantly clenched teeth. I knew well what she was doing during the war however. Unable to afford college, Leah became a talented typist and became so good at it she landed a job with U.S. Representative Edward Thomas Taylor and made the bold move as a single woman in the late 1930’s from Glenwood Springs, Colorado to Washington D.C. She went upward from Representative Taylor’s office to the State Department, who sent her to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. She lived a chaste life under the close supervision of a conservative Latin American family during the war and, hating Hitler just as much as my old man did, performed whatever duty and more she thought necessary to add her small contribution to the larger, noble effort. Who were all these people, fornicating their way through the war?