Submitted to: Contest #253

Of Lights and Women.

Written in response to: "Set your story over the course of a few minutes; no flashbacks, no flashforwards."

Drama Creative Nonfiction

The customer was skeptical of my competence, I could sense as much, and I suspected it was because she was shrewd and observant. This was the kind of sign job that I had little prior experience with, but I was determined to prove her fears unfounded, and assured her I would have her sign illuminated before the end of the day. I went back outside, a touch annoyed by her acumen, and proceeded to move the bucket truck into a position to access the sign panel.

By my standards, it was a large and expensive sign, double-faced, with two, 3-foot by 8-foot pan-faced Lexan panels in an internally illuminated steel and aluminum cabinet, twelve to fifteen feet above the ground and welded to a one-quarter-inch-thick steel pole that was 8 inches in diameter. The pole was cemented into the ground with about two-thousand pounds of concrete (or more) embedded in a concrete pylon that protected the pole from careless drivers. All in all, it represented a substantial bit of advertising hardware. The Lexan sign-panels were worth about 800 dollars each and probably weighed about 45 pounds, but I didn’t have to remove them. I merely had to unscrew a bracket and side-panel on the cabinet, and then slide one of the sign panels out a foot or two so I could access the ballast, an electronic junction-box that routes electricity to various fluorescent lights. I already confirmed that the bulbs were not blown, so it was a foregone conclusion that the sign required a new ballast.

I planned to open the sign’s cabinet, get the part number on the bad ballast, return with a replacement later that day, and switch the two parts out. Due to the novelty of operating a newly purchased, but very old, used bucket truck, I approached the job with a false sense of confidence, telling my assistant, Bridgette, “I’ll just back the truck up parallel to the faces so I can remove the retaining strip and pull the face out without having to move the bucket all over the place.”

She had a skeptical look on her face too. As if she knew there was a way I could fuck this up. “You want me to come up there with you?”

“No.” I shook my head, and told her it’d be better that she stayed on the ground in case I dropped something. She looked disappointed.

‘It’s not a carnival ride,’ I thought, but I didn’t say that. I understood her feelings. She would have nothing to do while I was up in the bucket fiddling around. ‘So she has to chill’ I thought. ‘So what?’

I climbed into the bucket through its one open side, checked my surroundings, and began my slow ascent to the sign, a process that defied gravity and afforded me a unique perspective on the parking lot, my assistant and the bucket truck itself.

The truck was about thirty-years old and I paid less than 700 dollars for the crazy thing in a silent auction; a sky-blue, rust-o-rama, Franken-truck, that weighed more than 5-tons. The boom lift itself telescoped out, rather than scissoring like some bucket lifts, and the mechanism was hydraulic, and that meant that the engine had to be running for the boom to work. Without power, nothing moves, in, out, up, or down. The three-levered controls for the boom were right next to the bucket. Swing left or right, go in or out, and up or down: One for each. What could be simpler?

Since the truck was so heavy, I didn’t need to deploy outriggers, extendable feet that give the rig stability. Good thing too, because it didn’t come with any.

These are the kinds of things you think about when sitting in a bucket, waiting for it to extend. It bounces up and down as you go, jerking you back and forth, so it is a bit like a carnival ride. I swung it in low towards the bottom of the sign, thinking I would remove the lower screws first, and then, ‘well, I guess I will have to raise the boom at least twice, to remove and replace the upper screws in the panel retainer.’

I should have been paying more attention to the boom and the sign because, while I was thinking of all this other stuff, the control lever to extend the boom got caught in the outward position underneath the sign cabinet. Simultaneously, the lever to lower the boom was rendered useless as well because it bumped into the sign face before it could engage its proper function. It would only come toward me, an action that would raise the boom, not lower it.

This was a dangerous situation and my first concern was keeping my hands from getting crushed, the last lever I could use was the rotator, but as I watched and did nothing, it too became encumbered as the boom continued to extend until it came up against the pole. As I said, an eight-inch circular pole of hardened steel.

The old truck wheezed once, then continued chugging, the boom creaked, and then to my horror, it began to bend the pole.

I screamed at my assistant Bridgette, to kill the engine in the truck.

“What?” She yelled.

“Turn the key off!” I screamed. “Turn the key off!” Luckily, the driver’s side door was already open and she was standing right next to it. She hopped into the cab and turned the key, killing the engine in a matter of seconds.

And there I stood, fifteen feet up, twelve feet out from the truck, inches from the sign, and—suddenly possessed with the clear understanding, that this old truck’s hydraulics would bend or snap that eight-inch steel pipe like a plastic straw in another 15 or 20 seconds. Jesus, what a sound that would make. That’d be something for the six o’clock news.

Naturally, Bridgette immediately wanted to know what we should do. I shook my head. I could barely think.

“You want me to restart the truck?”

“No, no, no, no, no. Don’t do that,” I said. The panic in my voice scared me worse than it did her.

I surveyed the controls. The levers were connected to rods, the rods ran down the boom, and went where? To a set of valves. I’d inspected the truck superficially, to check for fluid leaks, and as far as I was concerned, I never wanted to disconnect anything from anywhere. The boom was lodged between the sign cabinet and the pole, jammed up against a steel collar that welded the sign to the pole. No damage had been done to anything, yet. Bridgette hollered up at me. “Why don’t we let some air out of the tires?”

It was a great idea, I had to admit, and I hadn’t even thought of it, but this truck had dual rear tires, they were huge, and dangerous, and though I may have wanted to kill Bridgette a few times in the coming months, I didn’t know it yet, and was inclined to keep her alive for the time being, and in one piece. Another way to put it is this: I wouldn’t fuck with those tires under any circumstances, and I didn’t really think it would work anyway, so I told her no. Too dangerous.

The control levers were six inches long. I didn’t need a crash course in algebra to know that I needed at least seven inches of clearance to free that lever from under the sign.

I thought about climbing down to the ground, to inspect the situation from a different angle, but I hadn’t brought a ladder, I didn’t need a ladder, I had a bucket truck, and even in my nimble condition, it was a dangerous leap down to an asphalt parking lot, and the controls were near the bucket. So eventually I’d have to figure out how to get back up into the bucket from the ground.

I knew that as soon as the engine was started, the boom would resume extending, stressing a pole that was already, and quite incredibly, beginning to bend. And, for some reason I recalled an oft-quoted phrase, perhaps incorrectly but… ‘Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough, and I could move the world.’

I was never good at math, so I don’t know who said it or why, but I knew what it meant, and I knew I was at the end of the lever, as far from the fulcrum as could be. ‘If I could move the world just a few inches,’ I thought, ‘the other end of the lever would travel quite a distance. Wouldn’t it?’

I looked around the parking lot from my perch in the bucket, but found my salvation in the bed of the truck. Two short pieces of 2 by 4 boards. I directed Bridgette to grab those two boards.

She snatched them from the truck, and, misreading my intention, she hollered up at me. “One under each tire?”

“No.” I said, very patiently now, because she was going to be crucial to the operation. I asked her which way the trucks front tires were turned, if at all. With that information, I told her to stack both boards on top of each other and to shove them in front of the right front wheel, the furthest tire from me, in the bucket. She did as instructed and returned to a spot where I could see her.

“It’s only gonna go up three inches, you know.”  

“Yeah, I know,” I said. Two by fours are only one-and-a-half inches thick.

It may be difficult to appreciate the danger I was in, the forces involved, the extent of my dilemma without being in the bucket with me. Eight-inch steel pipes do not bend very much, or far, or for long. A sign like the one I was about to break would cost about ten-thousand dollars. I might as well close my business after this fiasco.

My assistant roused me from my doom-laden thoughts with a simple question. “Okay. What now?”

Again, I want to give credit where credit is due, because this girl, my assistant, could drive—anything, and often drove like a maniac. And she was fearless. I said, “Hop in the truck and leave the parking brake on, but put the truck in first gear.”

“Uh-huh. And then?”

I suggested that she do that first, and she did. She returned to her previous location. “Now what?” She said, with a positive gleam in her eye.

“Okay. You’ll have to push in the clutch, turn the key, start the engine and let the clutch out, all in rapid succession.”

She stared up at me. “Yeah? What about the parking brake?”

Christ, it was a good thing she was thinking. She had to release the brake, turn the key, fully release the clutch, and stomp on the brake and the clutch as soon as everything moved.

“That’s right,” I said. “I almost forgot. Then stomp on the brake. I don’t want to go more than a foot, but you gotta go at least six inches. Think you can do it?”

She said, “You wanna get the front tire up on the boards?”

I nodded. She understood my intent, if not my reasoning. “Okay. Sure.” She hollered up at me. “If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want,” I said.

“I don’t see how that’s gonna help but… you ready?”

“No.” I hollered down at her. Perfectly petrified. “No. Wait a minute.” I looked around. It was amazing how anonymous we were. Two dopes, in broad daylight, farting around with a bucket truck and a sign. Trucks and buses passing by on the street. People pulling up in their cars, parking, getting out and going into a nearby store, hardly giving us a glance. All oblivious to our little drama, my career, my business, my truck, and my reputation circling the drain. Even the customer was unaware of our predicament. But I believed in my theory. The truck had a four-speed stick, on the floor, a top end of 53 miles an hour, a low speed, high compression engine and it would buck itself down the road rather than stall. I really believed it would work and changed my mind. It had to work. “Okay,” I said. “You’ve got to be fast, Bridgette. Release the brake. Turn the key, when the engine catches, dump the clutch, when she lurches forward, step on the brake and the clutch at the same time. You got all that?”

“Yes, sir.” She said, and saluted me. I think she was prepared to see me go down with the ship, come what may. I did not return the salute. I was not in a humorous mood.

She was in the cab of the truck so fast, it almost caught me off-guard, but she paused and got out again, standing on the running board. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do,” she said, “so I just wanna make sure you’re really ready.”

I surveyed the controls, the curve in the pole, the end of the boom jammed against the pipe’s collar. “Okay,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Um, yeah, alright,” I said, staring at the control levers without touching them. “I’m ready.”

She darted back into the cab and I heard her say, “Here goes nothing.”

I heard the engine start, and the boom strain as it pushed against the pole and the truck lurched forward with me in the bucket. The end of the boom and the bucket instantly dropped about twelve inches as the right front tire went up three inches onto the wood. It jumped forward too, by about a foot and then stopped, and I was able to flip that handle up and out from under the sign and I could rotate away from the sign as well because she didn’t even stall the engine.

That’s it. That’s how Bridgette and Archimedes saved my ass. Archimedes may have been a genius, but few people on earth can drive like Bridgette. 

Posted Jun 06, 2024
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14 likes 14 comments

Hazel Ide
00:16 Jun 13, 2024

Bridgette sounds great. This seems different from your usual tone in writing but I really enjoyed it. I was intrigued to the end waiting to see how the MC would get out of that mess!

Reply

Ken Cartisano
15:36 Jun 13, 2024

Hi Hazel,
Thank you. It's funny how time and distance can change your perspective on things, if not the nature of the events themselves. After I read it, I thought the story would be more intriguing if I started in the middle, flashed back to the beginning, laid out the details of the predicament and then delivered the conclusion--like a lot of good stories. But it would have run afoul of the prompt, which specified no flashbacks, no flash forwards. No flashing at all!

What's hard to believe about this story is that I'm as smart as Archimedes.

That's because I'm no. The truth is, I already had the experience of being in a mobile bucket lift years earlier, while moving it from one wall to another, we had to traverse a sidewalk with an 8 inch curb. (My boss and I.) While we were in the retracted 25 foot boom, as low as it would go, as soon as the furthest wheel went up the curb opposite us in the bucket, I swear that bucket fell out from under us by at least 24 inches. That past experience informed my MC of what would happen and why. But again, I was afraid it would have introduced another flashback and disqualified the story. So, I wasn't really acting upon some poorly understood theory from ancient Greece, I was acting on experience. But all the other variables were different: the length of the boom, the position of the fulcrum point, how well Bridgette could drive, etc. I didn't really know if it would work in that particular situation. I hope, and suppose that I presented the uncertainty I felt at the time pretty well. (I was just about scared shitless.)

The great thing about Bridgette is that very few people, male or female, could have pulled off the driving part of this story, and she did it very much as I wrote it. No worries. No doubts. No second thoughts.

Thanks for reading it and giving me some feedback, Hazel. Much appreciated.

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15:24 Jun 10, 2024

Utterly enthralled and fascinated by this tale!
Really had me on the edge of my seat, I'm not even joking!
I think because you told it so well and even though there was a lot of technical detail in there, the voice used delivered it entertaingly, I didnt find any of it boring at all!
Great Stuff! I'd read more of these adventures! :)

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Ken Cartisano
03:38 Aug 27, 2024

Thanks Derrick. I appreciate your comments, and don't know how yours slipped past me until now.

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Darvico Ulmeli
09:29 Jun 08, 2024

I enjoyed the story.
Great thinking to save the day.

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Ken Cartisano
08:35 Jun 10, 2024

Thanks Darvico.

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Kristi Gott
04:32 Jun 08, 2024

The emotional truth of what the main character experiences comes through clearly and we readers feel the suspense and tension of the dangerous situation. I see from the comments this is a true story and I thought it must be while I was reading it. This story is a reminder of how strong and immersive a true story can be. Excellent writing with those details making me hold my breath knowing how close this was to disaster.

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Trudy Jas
02:56 Jun 07, 2024

Bless the old Greek. :-)

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Mary Bendickson
21:14 Jun 06, 2024

That woman is brilliant!

Reply

Ken Cartisano
01:26 Jun 08, 2024

Thanks for giving it a read. I don't think it's that good, but it's true.

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Mary Bendickson
02:24 Jun 08, 2024

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction but maybe not as exciting.
Thanks for liking Flooded... It was true, too.

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Ken Cartisano
04:10 Jun 08, 2024

I thought so. It was quite matter-of-fact. Which is what hunkering down is all about. Facing the facts. 'That thing is headed right for us, and we ain't goin' anywhere.'

What is also accurate in your story is that no one seems to panic. Sure, people clear the shelves, buy water and batteries and canned food. But no one is really frightened of hurricanes... until they've been through a really bad one. I've lived in Florida for decades and experienced many storms, and many close calls. One year we had four major hurricanes hit us in one year. But it was either the same year as Katrina or the year after, so nobody cared. In any case, we did not suffer the awful destruction experienced in New Orleans. (Or Galveston, for that matter.)

We had one storm named Charlie that the National Weather Service informed everyone was heading up the west coast, so not a current threat. But a local weatherman, Tom Sorrells broke with the NWS and warned us, (everyone in central Florida) that that thing was going to turn, and shoot across the state--like NOW! He said, get your stuff inside, tie down what can't come in, 'cause this baby is gonna turn in a matter of hours, and it will race across the state in record time.'

And that's exactly what it did. He made the forecast at about 4 or 5 pm. The storm turned as he predicted at six or so, made landfall in Punta Gorda before sunset. The eye passed within 11 miles of our house in Edgewater around midnight, and was over the Atlantic by 1 am. (Give or take.) The guy probably saved a lot of lives and probably ought to get a medal for his actions.

I experienced an eye once, when I was a teen, in Miami. It was sooo strange. The wind stopped so abruptly, it was impossible to resist the temptation to go outside. (For about two minutes, no more.) Everything was gray, black, or silver. No colors at all. Stars shown through a hole in the clouds. We went back inside. Five minutes later, bam, the winds went from zero to 110 in about 90 seconds. Incredible.

The funny thing, as pointed out in your story, is how many people go to sleep. I don't sleep during hurricanes. I can't. Shit is flying around, things are thumping against the roof and the walls, and every now and then, the wind will be so severe, it affects your hearing, you can feel it on your whole body, even safely indoors. It feels and sounds like the walls are flexing out, then in, then out, then it passes, and everything is still intact. And you really, I mean really, feel lucky. It was just a gust.

But your story conveyed that matter-of-fact confidence expressed by so many people that they'll just ride it out.

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Mary Bendickson
13:26 Jun 08, 2024

Really heady stuff you went through! That old lady we rode the storm out in was so solidly built we were sure there would be no problems. Naive. Next time we will leave.
My youngest son moved to Punta Gorda last summer. Buildings around there are still cleaning up after one two years or so ago. Ida, I think.
We have tornados around here. Devastating, but at least it is a path so others can come to your aide. Whereas a hurricane is more universal to the whole area. Stay safe.

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Ken Cartisano
22:06 Jun 09, 2024

Mary,

It didn't seem that heady, honestly.

I believe that a lot of South Florida's housing was/is made of concrete block. Even old and tiny 'row' houses for soldier's families, or railroad workers, which later became lower middle class homes and neighborhoods. Everything was made of block, no matter where you lived. I suppose it's because wooden structures didn't hold up to repeated tropical storms.

I recall living in four different homes as a kid, in South Florida, and they were all made of concrete, and we never worried excessively about the storms. As you said, we boarded up and hunkered down.

Occasionally, we would read about someone who would lose their roof, (no one that we knew) but that was usually due to poor construction. That was the case until Hurricane Andrew, which caused the entire state to revamp their construction codes. And I am sure, I wouldn't want to try and survive a storm with 165 mph winds. Even in a concrete house. Even though, again, most fatalities are due to rising tides, fallen trees or downed power-lines.
Or idiots that choose to go surfing. (Yes, really. Can you believe it?)

We have a home in central Florida now, lots of wooden homes up here. Which is one great reason for us to get the hell out of town on the rare occasions when a storm comes our way. No hurricanes hit this area for 40 years until 2004, I think it was, then we got four in a row, in one year.
The aftermath is worse than the storm. No power, no services, nothing to do, and it's always sweltering with 100 percent humidity. And post tropical thunderstorms would suddenly erupt in mid-afternoon with no warning, the rain would fall in torrents and then stop as suddenly as they started, the sun would come back out and steam would come up off the streets, hardly a welcome sight for people without power.

I have a board I use to cover the back door and one of the windows and on those two boards, I wrote the name of every storm I boarded up for, starting with the four from that year, with 'Charley' right at the top and there's like 17 names on the list.

Despite this fact, (I have a picture somewhere.) I came across this reference in Wikipedia. From 2016:
September 1 – Hurricane Hermine made landfall along the Big Bend of Florida with winds of 80 mph (130 km/h), making it the first hurricane landfall to the state since Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

So it seems Florida didn't even take a direct hit from a Hurricane for eight years. I live there and didn't know that. But I still had to board up for approaching storms, many of which turned at the last minute. (Thank God.)

A few years back a very large Hurricane Mathew was headed right for our town and turned at the last minute and just grazed the state, but it tore up every dock, piling and navigational aid on the intracoastal from Cocoa to St. Augustine.

That part about the whole area being devastated. I believe you touched on that aspect in your story, the fact that, if you don't evacuate soon enough, you're in even worse danger, because the roads become clogged with traffic, and then, impassable.

Two years ago we had two major storms, but minor hurricanes, and somehow, half the streets in our neighborhood were flooded. We never saw so much water in our lives. We had water lapping at our back door, (for the first and only time in 20 years) despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, not much rain fell. So--it was a troubling sign of things to come perhaps.

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