So I called Kevin

So I called Kevin up today at work. I talk to him every month or two, just to catch up and usually make fun of Sam a little more. I told him that I gave them fake names to protect their identities. He told me I should have used Hector and Carlos for their names, but I told him that sounds kind of racist. He called me a bad name.

Kevin is about 25 years old. He's short, like I already said, and if you watch Entourage, he is very much like Turtle, only not so much in the white-boy rapper vein. He's got a baby face that the girls think is cute, and he pretty much always wears white t-shirts and jeans.

Sam is probably 38 or so by now. He definitely doesn't look this old. I always thought he was about 28 when we worked together. He liked to wear white t-shirts too, but with disastrous results. See, unloading trucks all day tends to get one dirty. Kevin knew how to keep the dirty boxes from rubbing up against his clothing, but Sam lacked dexterity and coordination, so after a long day his shirt would be turning gray, his hair would be disheveled and he's be pretty much a mess.

Doing trucks there was fun and painful. We unloaded boxes from the delivery truck, and formed a fire-line to the elevator. One guy would unload a box, pass it to the middleman, who would then pass it to the third guy, the elevator loader. Loading the elevator required some skill in organization, so it was always Kevin or myself that did this part of the job. Sam would often ask if he could load the elevator, but I would only let him do it if we had a very small truck that day.

In any case, whoever had to be the guy behind Sam always had it bad, because he had a bad habit of touching your balls nearly every time he handed you a box. Again, lack of coordination, and not gayness, is what caused this. You know how when you're folding sheets with someone and you don't know which way they're going to fold it, and you go back and forth in a little sheet-turning dance? This is what working with Sam was like. If you reached for a box one way, he was sure to hand it to you the other way. And for some reason the way he gave it to you was likely to have his hand touching up against your testicles.

We would usually finish doing the truck about 2 pm, and then it was lunchtime. Kevin and I would usually scrape a couple bucks together and buy a pizza, then we'd make Sam go pick it up a couple blocks away. As a reward for going to get it, he could have some of the pizza. This went on for about a year before he started to tire of it. I remember the day when we asked if he wanted to go pick up the pie, and he said, "Why do I always have to go get the pizza?". And Kevin told him, "Because we always pay for it". "Oh yeah", Sam said, and off he went.

The funny thing is, he probably had more money that we ever did. Because Sam was a gambling savant. I don't know how he did it, but he was always going to the casino or buying scratch tickets and winning big. This pissed Kevin off more than anything, because he always lost. Always. He showed me a big stack of losing scratch tickets he kept in his glove box. I asked why he kept them, and he said once a month in Boston they have a drawing where they pick one of these losers to win. You just had to fill out your information on the backside and turn it in and you were entered. He probably spent $300.00 a month on scratch tickets each month, and invariably Sam would walk in on a Monday morning and show us his scratch ticket that won him $500.00. Boy was Kevin steamed.