Doug Blough

When I last left you, Beemer and I were fresh off an attempted dump truck heist he had wanted no part of and he was already questioning his decision to drive 2,000 miles to spend three months at my parent's house in Pennsylvania.

Over weeks and gas-guzzling effort, we had secured jobs in Somerset at a hose nozzle manufacturing plant called Gilmore's Mfg. We worked mostly on a nozzle assembly line and as if we weren't seeing enough of each other ... sleeping in the same room and me without a driver's license, we were now usually side-by-side at this assembly table. We worked 3:30 p.m till 1:30 a.m, Monday thru Thursday pulling in $65 a week. When that stint ended each week, we were heading straight to underage-friendly dump of a bar, Tops Tavern.

Tops himself was so old and blind, he often cut his fingers on the snap-tops and traces of blood were on most of the dingy little beer glasses. The bar was frequented predominantly by two groups — a handful of retired, constantly fighting coal miners with an obese woman named Cookie, and a long-haired bunch of underage stoners obscured by a cloud of marijuana smoke, led by mammoth Frank McVicker. Frank was a fighting/partying legend who would coincidentally become my brother-in-law a couple years later.

Dave and I adopted the underage potheads as our Tops family and although we didn't partake in the smoke-fest, often continued the party at closing time at Frank’s trailer back of the dirt road and behind my parent's house. Big Frank shared the trailer with his pregnant wife Debbie. It was like Frank was the king and all the stoned others his worshiping subjects.

Tops sat at the crest of a half-mile hill, and that place became so crucial to our days off-survival, I can remember slipping and flailing behind Beemer's old Ford pushing it all the way up that icy hill during raging blizzards. Of course, we sometimes found alternative opportunities to drink, like at weddings we'd sneak into like the original Wedding Crashers. One wedding we were invited to was my old high school buddy Lester and that drunken affair stands out because at some point we got separated [I had probably run off again to call Diane, who I was pining over to beg for another chance] and Dave found himself at some house party in Westmont, the ritzy section of Johnstown.

He's in a bathroom throwing up while hearing female voices outside the door shrieking, “Who is he and who the hell brought him here?!!” I had found some ride home and eventually Dave tired of puking in a stranger's bathroom and found his way home too. His regrets were growing and he'd been there less than a month.

Another time he had to remind himself where he was living was when we and my buddy Sam Rullo were car-drinking at a strip-cut mine during a driving rain. Dave was being a wisenheimer pushing my buttons when he told Rullo, “Doug doesn't know it, but when he falls asleep, I sneak over to his little sister’s bedroom.” “THAT does it!” I bellowed, and tore into him with what little pugilistic skills I possessed against a trained boxer, and Rullo reached up and opened my passenger door to allow the flailing combatants to roll out into the rain-soaked anthracite.

At some point I desperately grabbed a big handful of Beemer’s big Afro and he said he'd had enough, so we shook hands and went back to drinking warm beer. I like to claim I won the fight, but I think it was the fact HE was living at MY house that fueled his submission. From there we made our way to the local Burger King hangout always guarded by several cops. For some reason they seemed to be glaring at us excessively, and in the bathroom, we figured out why. Our faces were black with coal dust and it had to look like an Al Jolson routine.

Sadly, I'd estimate that over half the times we arrived home late at night, one of us had to help the other into the house. These are just a few accounts that won't be covered in Beemer's upcoming book. Next column I'll wrap up the whole ugly affair ...