There was the time they set me up as a sideshow strongman, but I never got sent out on my own.
I had the skills. I had mad skills, as the kids say. I guaran-goddamn-tee that I had Barney fuckin' lapped in all those classes.
Running, jumping, shooting, fighting: all of them.
They tested us all the time. Got so as I could fill in those circles with a Number 2 pencil in my sleep.
"Newspaper is to scissors as duck is to...." I hate those questions.
And they never tell you what the right answer is. Everything you do is always "interesting."'
I was so god damned "interesting" that I spent my career fetching wrenches and pretending to be interested in whatever it was that we were supposed to be doing.
Can't go near a hardware store without breaking out in a cold sweat. Something about the smell of the place and I can feel my pulse drumming in my ears and feel the beads of sweat start to form.
Feel the same way about any kind of truck, which is unfortunate given that for anyone who is not French, most cars and passenger vehicles are too small.
Spent too much time in the things. Way too much.
And it was always my job to make sure it was packed with anything we might possibly need while in-country. And I do mean ANYTHING.
A lot of the jobs I was on went to plan, many more than we had any reasonable right to expect, but there was the odd one that required us to improv our way out and then, if I didn't have whatever they needed I would get the brush for months afterwards.
I probably shouldn't tell this story, but once when we were doing a simulator job--trying to convince some dumb sonofabitch that he was in the cargo hold of a Russian freighter I got tagged for not having the right kind of gum wrapper.
Fucking guy quit smoking the week before--the fucking week before, mind you--and he had swapped out one habit for another. Guy went through more gum than that bitch Cinnamon went through stockings.
"Where's the gum, Willy?"
"How come you don't have the right kind of gum?"
"Are you stupid, or something?"
How I was I supposed to know that he was mainlining gum like some sort of speed freak? There was nothing in the file. Nothing.
I checked.
Rollin ended up stalling him with some bullshit and we cobbled together "the last package on the boat." I free handed the label and we filled it with some scraps of latex from Rollin's make-up kit. And, at the very last minute, as the guy was going to put a piece in his mouth, one of the Hartford Rep guys knocks it from his hand and the package goes flying into the "bilge".
Worked out great. Didn't save me from getting the shoulder on the trip out, but it was a great moment.
That kind of stuff happened all the time.
"Willy, pack the truck."
"Willy, make sure the props are checked."
"What do you mean we don't have a period-correct 16th Century Persian drinking cup, Willy?"
Whatever the job was, it would have been so much simpler to shoot one or two of them and we could have gone home. I sometimes wonder if they didn't come up with the most complicated way possible to do the simplest things.
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