Here it is at last, the final reblog of the final chapter of my hilarious series about my days as a delivery driver…

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We come at last to the end of this really rather dull part of my life, when I was newly married, expecting a child, settling down, and giving up the wild impetuousness of my youth. I do not mean to say that my personal life was boring, but my job certainly was. So I did a few things to try to add some zest to the dreary days at work as a delivery driver. And I guess I still had… (and in fact still do have)… a certain strange ability to be in the right place when something interesting happens. Some people have the opposite problem. They go through life and never see anything interesting happen. I would like to give this a try… for a week or two.

And perhaps, now that I look back on it, that lithograph company wasn’t really all that boring. There were only about fifteen people working there, but it was an intriguing mix of personalities. Let me finish this series by telling you a little about some of the people I worked with. I will not use any names. These are all real people, and some of them might still work there, 22 years later, which is sort of a scary thought to my way of thinking.

There was one guy who moved his lips when he was reading. He couldn’t read unless he mouthed along with the words. I used to tease him a little. I said I wanted to put duct tape over his mouth, and then follow him in his car to see if he could stop at stop signs.

There was a girl who got married to a guy she was dating. She had never met any of his family because they were from somewhere in the middle of the country. They flew back to meet his family for their honeymoon. When she returned to work a week later, she told us that her entire week had been spent hanging around his family home with his mother, while the new husband went deer hunting with his brothers and father. She even brought us back some venison. I ruined mine when I tried to barbecue it.

My favorite characters were a father and son that worked there. They were hillbillies. I do not know where they were from, or how they ended up in San Diego, but I worked on a tobacco farm in Cynthiana, Bourbon County, Kentucky on one of my adventures, and I know hillbillies when I meet them… (I would have known even if the father wasn’t missing most of his front teeth)…

Here are some stories about them. These are true stories, just so you know. And they might just help you figure out if any of your friends are hillbillies.

The semi-toothed father had a whole heap o’ youngins… (that’s hillbilly for a lot of children)…

One of them was  U.S. Marine… for a while. Then he got a medical discharge. Why? Because during training he managed to get run over by an APC… (that’s Marine for an Armored Personnel Carrier, sort of like a tank and almost as heavy)… It ran right over the guy’s chest. Fortunately he was standing on a soft dirt incline when it happened, and he survived… barely. They make hillbillies tough.

Then there was the other son, the one that worked at the lithograph place with us. He was tall. I am 6 feet 4 inches tall, and he towered over me.

He came to work one Monday, and he was walking sort of funny. He called me and… the guy who moves his lips when he reads… over, and sitting on a tall sorting table, asked us to pull his snake-skin boots off his feet for him. We didn’t even ask any questions. We knew he was going to tell us. And we knew it was going to be good.

As we began to tug at the snake-skin boots… (evidentially the first thing hillbillies buy when they get to the big city and earn any money)… he began to tell us about how he had gone camping in the mountains over the weekend. He had met some guys at the campground, and they had shared a bottle of some kind of fancy, store-bought moonshine around his campfire.

We got his boots off. The first thing we noticed was the smell of cooked meat. Oh yeah, this story was going to be a good one. We also couldn’t help noticing that his socks were wet and pink on the bottoms of the soles.

He went on to tell us that when his new acquaintances decided to call it a night, one of them decided to stomp through his campfire. You know, like guys do. Well our friend leaped up and proclaimed, “Ain’t nobody gonna stomp through my fire lessen it’s me,”… (Translation; “If anyone is going to step on my fire, I think I ought to be the one to do it.”)…

The thing is… (You knew there was going to be a ‘thing’, didn’t you?)… our coworker wasn’t wearing hiking boots like his new drinking buddy. He was barefooted… (I said hillbillies were tough, I didn’t say they were all rocket scientists)…

I think that when he woke up the next morning, he had figured his best option was just to pull on a pair of already dirty socks, and then pull his boots on over them. And I don’t think he had taken them off since it had happened. I assume he just slept in them. His socks were firmly glued to his feet by the seepage from the huge blisters. Some of the blisters were as wide as his huge feet. Some of the blisters had blisters on top of them. It was not a pretty sight. Or a good smell. We suggested he see a doctor. He just laughed. Then he put the socks and boots back on and went back to work.

Now that I think about it, I sort of wish the Marines would recruit only hillbillies. Because any country that wanted to take on a large combat formation of hillbillies with tanks and machine guns would be wise to think twice. Just saying.

Now this same guy with the cooked feet, he had his own passel o’ small fry… (That is another way of saying that he had children of his own)… I met these kids. They were a testament to the hillbilly traditions. Lots of kids bite other kids in a fit of anger. One of his kids bit another kid at school. He bit him on the cheek. And he swallowed the chunk he bit off.

(I hope you did not take my advice to bring a snack to eat while you read this, because I am beginning to realize that these stories are not really going to go well with Brie cheese and a lovely Cabernet).

Now do not take this the wrong way. I might sound as if I am making fun of these people. But I am not. I used to hang around with them after work. On purpose. I liked these people. That being said, here is one last tale of the hillbilly clan. When they moved to San Diego from… wherever they were from… they brought a cat with them. A hillbilly cat. Even their cats are tough. Now I did not see this for myself, and so far I have only told tales that I had proof of… (like crispy feet)… And I met the brother who was run over by the APC, and I saw the surgery scars crisscrossing his chest. But this one was told to me by the guy who cooked his own feet, an why on earth would he lie about this? Besides, his father and brother both vouched for the truth of this story.

When he and the cat were both much younger, right after they had moved to San Diego, he had made the mistake of making the cat angry. (Here is some advice from me to you, never ever ever make a hillbilly angry, and this goes double for hillbilly cats. You have been warned)…  The cat displayed its anger by turning around and sinking its claws into his arm, you know, like cats, even non-hillbilly cats, will do. It is more in the ferocity of the display that hillbilly cats differ from other cats. The cat didn’t just take a swipe at him and let it go at that. The cat launched itself at my friend and sunk all four sets of claws into his arm. He sunk his front claws in so deeply that they got wedged into the elbow joints and tendons of the arm. (I am sure my friend deserved this. Even hillbilly cats do not get this angry for no reason)… They couldn’t get the cat off his arm. Not even with pliers… (which are in all hillbilly medical first aid kits)… So they had to wrap the cat and the arm in a towel and take human and feline to the doctor.

Once again, I am not making fun of these people. I liked them There is a certain bluff honesty in the hillbilly character. Even a bit of nobility, if you ask me. They are straightforward, and will always lend you a hand if you need it. And they are fearless. In a weird way they remind me of the Hells Angels I used to know. They have a code. They understand the code, even if the rest of us do not. If eight Hells Angels hear you insult the Angels, they will all jump on you and kick your ass. But if one Hells Angel hears eight guys insult the Angels, he will jump into that fight just as quickly, and damn the outcome. Hillbillies are sort of the same way. I do not judge this way of thinking, I merely point it out to you.

Alrighty then. I have bored you enough with my little tales. I could go on… and on… The time a pigeon flew into the front windshield of the van, right in front of my face, while I was on the freeway doing 80 miles per hour. If you think a big bug can make a mess on your windshield, you might be able to imagine this. His beak took a big chip out of the glass, and it scared the snot out of me. I had to turn on the wipers just to see out.

I hope you have enjoyed this.

We will now resume our regularly scheduled broadcast of silly pictures and random stories and observations.