Neanderpundit

that there were moron olympics. (annoyingly loud music, so watch your speakers)

But I do know a lot of people that are serious contenders.

When I worked at the mill, everyone talked about getting out. The situation was such that people wanted the hell out, but nobody had a plan. The first guy I saw who pulled it off was a short black guy who loved to cook.

he had changed his furnace from oil to natural gas, and ended up with a 275 gallon oil tank. He intended to use his old boat trailer to take it to the dump, and it ocurred to him.

A bunch of stove bolts attached the tank to the trailer, and a friend with a sawzall cut the top, and a couple of big barn strap hinges made the “lid” work fine. he added a rope and a brick and an eye, so he could lift the lid easily. The whole assembly he towed behind his old Buick deuce and a quarter.

He’d get twenty or thirty racks of ribs and boil or simmer them overnight so they were already mostly cooked, and then he’d put them in a box lined with foil to keep them warm. He would be garbage picking skids and scrap lumber in the wee hours, and he’d show up at the Inland factory gate around the time the day shift was going in. They all took note.

In the parking lot, he’d fire up that big oil drum till the sides smoked, and on a grate made mostly of rebar, he’d lay out the ribs. He had an old fashioned milk can filled with his homemade sauce, and plunger handles with mop cotton tied onto them for mopping. He was, as I’ve said, a small guy, and he would sit on a lawn chair in the trunk of the deuce and a quarter and mop sauce onto the ribs. If I remember correctly he sold a whole rack for $10 (this being the mid 80’s) and a whole rack was enough for two if not three or four people. Around about ten the smell of that pork would start to waft out over Three Cold Strip, and by noon, the guys were lined up against the fence. They’d hand their tenspots through the chain link and he’d toss a foil wrapped rack of ribs over the fence. Sometimes he would have cool whip containers of collard greens too. he easily sold the twenty or thirty racks every day, and in an era where $300 a week take home pay was a decent wage, he was bringing almost that home every day, and I don’t imagine the IRS saw much if any of that.

By one PM he was done and would drive the Buick and trailer down to the shore, and sit and fish off the riprap where Inland had used a hundred years of slag and detritus to reclaim Lake Michigan rather than buy more land. I don’t know what he caught if anything, but he wasn’t working.

He had been at Inland long enough to collect a pension, and he did, once he became eligible; I think he lived on that, mostly, and his social security, until he died. If I recall correctly his food income paid his son’s college education.

he’s long gone, now, and nobody will ever take his place, but I can still remember the smell of those ribs, and the way they tasted, mixed with the grit and grease and grime of the steel mill, like a little piece of southern heaven.

Is as good or better a book than movie, and its an insanely good movie.

Edited to add, now that I’m not posting from the car:

The contrast between Ed Tom Bell, a decent husband and sherrif,doing his best to simply do his job, and Anton Chigurh, a singleminded and efficient killer, is so intense that you nearly get whiplash switching between one and another, as the scenes change.

Toss in Moss, a tougher than your average bear househusband and welder, who decides to do, as he says, “Somethin dumbern’ hell”. Decides that he can outfox the people whose money he wanders off with, and almost pulls it off. And all the other redshirts in the movie, victims of drug dealers or Chigurh or their own stupid, are even better in the book.

I’m back to reading about a book a day, to keep free of the rest of the BS I got going on. It’s nice to stumble on one this well done. If you’ve seen the movie, the viewing experience will be enhanced by reading the book.