goodbye timbo
 I saw these goth kids while pumping gas the other day. The one kid had taken his goth look to the Marilyn Manson extreme and beyond. What a strange thing to go about your daily life activities in a halloween costume--stranger still to do it in a sleepy beach community where everyone else is golfing and fishing and wearing pleated khaki shorts and loafers.
Anyway, I was so taken with the appearance of the goth kids that I drove away from the gas station without paying. I realized my mistake when I was a couple blocks up the road and did a quick U-ie. The gas station lady was so busy she hardly seemed to notice.
One of our workers by the name of "Timbo" kind of fucked up at a gas station too that day. Timbo pumped $65 dollars worth of regular gasoline into our tree truck and took off down the road. That would have been fine, except that our truck has a diesel engine. After a quarter mile or so our tree truck sputtered and died. Chris had to spend $450 bucks to have the engine flushed out. Then Chris fired Timbo.
I was pretty happy about that. I really hated Timbo. It seems like every time I drove by the job site, Timbo would flag me down and jog up to my truck.
"I gotta take a shit really bad," he would say. "Can you take me to a bathroom?" Then Timbo would jump in my truck with his clothes all covered in saw dust and oil. While Timbo was taking his shit I would dust the seat off where he had been and try to decide if he had left any permanent stains.
But I didn't hate Timbo because he had to take shits all the time. I hated him because he had a shitty attitude all the time. He hated his job and he hated the people he worked with and he was always seething and ready to explode. I can imagine some of the things that would make Timbo want to explode. Like that fact that Bob and Chris were getting rich off his work while he got the same flat pay rate year after year. Or the fact that his dream was to be a rock star drummer, but at forty-eight he was pretty much stuck being a guy that drove a truck for a tree trimming company.
One day Timbo got it in his head that we were going to go home early on a Friday. But then we didn't go home early and I asked Timbo to keep doing his job until five o'clock. Timbo blew-up and freaked out on me. You fucking, mother-fucker, fucking this, fucking that, fuck, fuck, fuck, Timbo screamed. I was standing with our customer who was this nice old man who came from a time before the word fuck was even invented.
I would have fired Timbo right then if it was up to me, but he was still too valuable to Chris and Bob. But ever since that day I was just waiting for Timbo to try and flag me down and ask me to take him to the toilet. I guess he knew I was waiting for him to do that, because he never asked again after that day. In fact, we never spoke or even made eye contact.
Then finally he filled our diesel engine with regular gasoline and got fired. I watched Timbo as he got into his Camaro and left our job site for the last time. I pulled my Durango way to the side of the road as we passed in case he had any mind to ram me in a head on collision.
6:44:48 PM 
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