You've Gotta Meet Bobby

Hey all. I know the first tease for Crossed Wires is there, but there's more that I can share, without giving the storyline away.



Meet Bobby

Once born as Robert Joseph Mitterando, the man now known as Bobby "Mitts" Mitterando was extraordinarily unhappy with his fifty six years on planet Earth and everything else that had to do with it. In a word, Bobby felt f*****. He felt so f*****, in fact, that he told his company's boss to stick it up his wazoo and that the next phone call he would get would be from his invisible lawyer.
Bobby was on a roll. Even in his hospital bed, Bobby felt his sanity so clearly that he wanted very badly to beat it flat with a ball peen hammer. Stroke by stroke. millimeter by millimeter.
Mitts knew all about working metal. He knew a lot about a lot. Fifty six years on planet Earth could do that to a human being like Bobby. But right now, laying in his hospital inflicted pajamas in a VA hospital bed, he felt rightly and properly f***** like Chuck. F***** like Chuck, Bobby thought. And who the f***-all is Chuck anyway? Over and over again. Damn Chuck and his little dog straight to hell!
No, dumb ass! A big old dog! His name is Nixon!He wondered where that thought came from, vaguely. But now he was too busy trying to remember.
Bobby had been working in a boat yard in an obscure part of Newport News, near Virginia’s famed Chesapeake Bay. Though primarily a journeyman ship fitter, Bobby was anything but a one trick pony. He'd been involved in all phases of ship work for the better part of twenty years and had gained a reputation as the go-to guy for pretty much anything going in whatever yard he might be employed. He was a skilled welder, all around superior craftsman and a qualified maritime engineer. Most recently, he was the supervising Q.A. expert at a small but prestigious boat building and refitting company where he had spun his hat for the better part of the last five years.
With the exception of the company's owner, Bobby was held in very high regard by all of his employees and co-workers alike. The Big Boss, however, did not care for Bobby in spite of all of his talents or popularity. For whatever reason, the Big Boss hated Bobby's guts. For whatever reason, he hated them entirely.
The final solution came by accident, or an accident to be precise. Bobby was supervising the overhaul of two bow thrusters on a nearly brand new commercial fishing boat in the company's dry dock, down on the James River satellite facility to the company. He had tasked two crews to remove what appeared to be defective original equipment and was awaiting the new units with increasing anxiety. While the port crew had successfully removed their unit, the starboard crew found themselves wondering what to do to remove very stuck pieces of broken metal from a relatively small h*** without having to take a torch or some other equally invasive tool to the issue. It was late in the second day of the project and cutting the pieces out would mean more time in the dock; this would cost money to both the company and the owner of the boat and thus was potentially a Very Big Problem. Bobby was in no mood for Very Big Problems.
Consistently, Bobby had an almost supernatural knack for solving engineering problems. He could see the infrastructure of machines like an X-ray could see the infrastructure of human bodies. He could generally come to the right solution to any problem in very short order. He had a weights and measures system in his head that was honed down to the microgram, the millimeter, a vast memory of parts and part numbers and a thorough command of just about every technique invented by man to fix mechanical things. Bobby was a machine savant.
"Hey, Mitts," came a gruff voice over Bobby's walkie-talkie.
"Go ahead, Earl. What's the problem?"
"Two of the splines jerked out last time she rolled and are embedded in the tube. There ain't no way to do this clean, buddy."
Bobby understood his good friend's verbal short-hand perfectly. F***** like Chuck, he thought.
"Best case scenario, Early?" Bobby said, wishing for an answer he knew wouldn’t come.
"Best you come take a look, Mitts. This ain't gonna be my call."
"Roger that. I'll be down there in a few. Knock your guys off. It's already past four."
"Roger. See ya in a few. Out."
Bobby was up in the main yard, about two hundred yards from the dry dock. There was no sign of the anticipated parts truck and, again, it was getting late in the day. It was obvious to Bobby that this problem would take a little longer than the average to unscrew.
Bobby walked over to one of the supervisors at the yard's main tool shack and asked him to keep an eye out for a truck coming to the front gate. The super shrugged a no problem and said that he'd keep an eye open for anything that might come in. He said he was working a double anyway and that he would probably be around for another few hours. Bobby thanked him and began to trudge toward the dry dock and the stupid-ass nearly-new fishing boat that was ultimately going to cost him his job.
F***** like Chuck, Bobby thought. This had become his mantra with this project: f***** like Chuck. It seemed like nothing was right with this son-of-a-b****-of-a-boat to begin with. Wrong parts for the wrong systems, wrong this, wrong that. He sincerely hoped that in the long run the owner would finally make enough money to pay the damned thing off and then scuttle the f***** somewhere. He also sincerely doubted it. So it goes with the rich and the unintelligent, he often thought.
On the day of the accident, Bobby's chronic arthritis was starting to flare up in his left knee and by the time he reached the dock and his co-worker Earl Sandling, the pain was getting more than annoying. He reached into his shirt pocket for an Advil and found the bottle there, empty. F***** like Chuck, he said to himself.
"What's the rub, Early?" he asked, trying not to wince with the growing fire under his left knee cap.
Earl Sandling was in his mid fifties, like Bobby, but he was taller: he was about six feet tall and as lanky as a man could be. He looked almost skeletal, with drawn features and graying hair peeking out from under his safety hat. His normally blue-on-gray eyes were tired and red around the irises. He looked as tired as he probably felt, Bobby thought.
"This ain't good for the home team, Mitts," he said in his gruff, cigarette sand-paper voice.
Bobby looked up at the h*** where the problem lay. A solid-structure, four-footed access ladder was snuggled up against the hull of the boat, its top most step being just about two feet under the aperture under consideration.
"That bad?"
"Probably worse," said Earl. He threw a cigarette butt down and lit another one.
"Best you take a look."
"Roger that. What'd the boys from the company have to say?"
"F***** from the get go, they said. Wrong installation with the wrong bow thruster for the class of boat. Screwola." Earl reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out yet another cigarette from a partially crumpled soft pack and lit it with the ember of the one he had just lit. He realized what he had just done and with an almost nervous twitch flicked both of the cigarettes to the ground.
"Screwed the-f***-ola," he said, taking a deep breath, craning his head up toward the h*** in the bow of the boat. "Two more days, my guess."
"Wonderful," Bobby said. "Just wonderful." Even before he looked at the problem he had that sinking feeling that this would get really ugly with the powers that be. They had another contract due into the dry dock the following night. This was now becoming a Big Money Problem.
And big money problems always meant big headaches for Bobby and his crew.
"All right then. Let's have a look-see."
Bobby mounted the steel ladder and began the twenty step trip up to the sixteen inch diameter h*** in the boat's starboard hull. His left knee felt like someone had put a blow torch to it and he was getting progressively more annoyed with reality. The vagaries of age were one thing: this boat was really starting to piss him off.
When he got to where he could see inside the bow thruster shaft he realized that his friend wasn't off the mark. The main parts of the unit had been removed but he could see that the damage left was pretty dramatic from all practical points of view. The what- should-be-smooth was now dinged and dented and there were two small pieces of the thruster spline embedded about midway, deeply wound into the steel. To the untrained eye, this might amount to not much but to Bobby this was a f*** of a lot more than a money problem. If they wanted to fix it and fix it right, this problem would take days of very expensive time.
"S*** on stick!" Bobby shouted down to his friend.
"See what I mean?!"
“Oh, yeah!” Bobby reached for his cell phone, tucked in his left shirt pocket. "It’s time to call the f*** heads!”
He flipped the phone open and with his right thumb began to press the button that speed-dialed a very dreaded number. That’s when his left knee, in one painful strike, gave out completely. Phone flying off to points south; he began a slow, almost comical decent down twenty steel ladder steps, holding on as hard as he could to each one as he slid and tumbled.
F***** like Chuck, he thought before he hit the dry dock floor with a sickening, vaguely audible smack. That was the last thing he heard before he lost consciousness.
That was it, except for that faint barking of a dog. The name is Nixon," the old pup seemed to say. Name is Nixon, dammit.
Long days just sucked.
When the crash came, Bobby didn't care.