So I showed up at nine in the morning to learn the mechanics of waterbed setup, dream mechanics, and the delicacies of entering the inner sanctums of people’s lives – where they spent anywhere from six to eight hours playing tiddly-winks with the puzzle pieces of daytime. I wasn’t quite prepared for Abdul, the boss’s son-in-law, or his tallywacker.

We weren’t gone more than a couple minutes before he turned into a Burger King a few blocks from the store. I caught a reflection of the delivery van as we pulled in. It was everything that I wasn’t and hadn’t planned to be at that point in my life. Gaudy. Flashy. Accessorized. In addition to the bright orange lettering on light blue paint, the van had the most up-to-date lighting paraphernalia: fog lights, red reflectors, and a spotlight on the driver’s side like the ones police cars have to aim into the dead of night. It even had white mud flaps with chrome trim and more reflectors covering the back tires. Maybe, it too had a tallywacker.

“Break time,” he said.

Five minutes on the job, and I was already fucking off, while the friends I had as an undergraduate were sweating it out in graduate school. Inside I ordered a double hamburger with double cheese. That’s when the trouble started. That’s when Abdul exposed himself, so to speak.

“You Americans, so much meat,” he said in a high-pitched, nasal voice.

“That’s all I’ve had today. I didn’t eat any breakfast this morning.”

He smacked his lips like I had stepped into some forbidden territory or crossed an invisible border. He made it a point to order a single. I refused to comment on it or his disapproval of my eating habits. I could be like Bartleby the Scrivener, the passive-aggressive anti-hero of Melville’s tale if I wanted to. Inwardly, I felt like lining his superior attitude up for a knock-out punch.

“So much meat, not so good,” he said, before turning away when something caught his eye, or rather, the point of this digression, his tallywacker.

He pointed to a woman standing in line, being ogled by every male in the place. Less is more was her fashion. A white crescent of buttocks reflected the hopes and desires of all the assembled handymen in stained T-shirts and dungarees.

“Hey mister, there’s a nice one.”

“Yeah, not bad,” I said.

“Come on, mister, wouldn’t you like to take her out? Huh, mister?” he challenged me like I was some kind of a Harvey Milquetoast.

“Yeah, sure. But I’m eating my number one with double cheese right now,” I said, dropping the Bartleby persona.

“There she goes, mister. I’m going to take her out, mister. She can ride in the back of the van with me, huh, mister, and we can do IT all over the back. I got a big one, mister.”

I’m trying to eat my double hamburger and he’s talking about his pickle. I couldn’t imagine him doing IT all over the back of the van with the plywood and junk we had loaded. I don’t think she would have appreciated the splinters either. And I don’t know why, but he kept calling me ‘mister’ even though he knew my name: Wilbur Dobbs.

“I’m glad you do, just don’t pull it out here. Not so much meat, okay?”

Two could play whatever game he was playing, I figured, even though I had no idea what he was up to or why.

“Let’s go to work, mister, you can’t sit around bragging all day about doing IT. You have to learn how to set up my father-in-law’s waterbeds. Shame on you.”

I almost walked after listening to his noise and the mister crap, but, I had a National Defense Student Loan to pay back so I went along with this fuck-off.

Our destination was a house in the country twenty-five miles away. We drove through a nearby town noted for its old-fashioned quaintness and Strawberry Queens where Abdul spied a woman walking in front of some shops. She balanced packages in both arms. He motioned for me to roll down the window so he could taunt her.

“Ask her if she wants a ride to the strawberry fields, mister.”

He craned his neck in front of me to get a better view. Of course, she had no interest in two yahoos in a delivery van. The van careened into the curb. The tires bounced off like a bumper car at the Strawberry Festival.

“My father-in-law should have windows all around the van. I can’t see her anymore. Why didn’t you ask her to come sit on your lap, mister?”

“She’s carrying all those packages.”

He kept his eyes on the rearview mirror for a couple more bumps against the curb. When she finally walked into another store he looked at the invoice on the dashboard, trying to decipher the instructions. He smacked his lips like he’d done with my double hamburger and double cheese.

“These directions no good,” he said.

“We’re lost?”

“People in this country don’t know how to give directions.”

He slowed the van and maneuvered into the parking lot of a feed store. He jumped out and walked towards a middle-aged man wearing a Stetson cowboy hat.

“Point your nose in that direction,” the man said, “for ’bout a mile or two, you’re gonna find the road you’re looking for.”

Oh, did I mention Abdul’s nose? It was the most prominent feature on his face and, perhaps, a microcosm of his personality. It was long and thin, ‘chiseled’ is a word that Dr. Cavanaugh, my freshman English teacher, would approve, and parabolic like a Chiquita banana. From the size of it, I guessed it must have been hyper-sensitive like a douser’s water wand and a selling point for his new career as a beginning geologist searching for oil deposits in the American West and sniffing out puntang wherever he could.

Abdul aimed his prolific proboscis in the correct direction. A brown gob of chewing tobacco spiraled from the side of the man’s mouth and splashed onto the pavement. Abdul raised one of his caterpillar eyebrows but was silent.

At our destination a woman and her teenage daughters waited anxiously for the smell of new plastic and virgin Ponderosa pine. When they spied the van, jeweled with colored lights, in their driveway it was like a big cheese ball of Christmas, Easter, the Strawberry Festival, the Fourth of July, the birth of a child, and a college graduation rolled into one cataclysmic milestone. The new waterbed, an Econo King, was a major event to elevate them above the humdrum and glitter of daily camouflage.

“It’s here! It’s here!” one of the girls called out from the front porch.

She raced to the van. That everything on her body bulged in just right proportion and certain parts jiggled was not wasted on Abdul or myself, but it was Abdul who feasted his eyes on her, her sister, and then their mother like they were roasted double goat smothered in double herbs and spices.

We were led into the house. Abdul winked and pointed to their hips shifting in front of us. Abdul, the wannabe redneck, who drove a yellow, jacked-up Camarro, and had a pack of Winstons rolled in his T-shirt sleeve, began singing like one too, a country song with a Farsi accent.

“It’s a hard one… nothing but a hard one,” he hummed along to a popular song on their radio.

We carried in two long sidepieces. Abdul in the front and I was in the back. He began to rock the sidepieces, pulling me forward, then pushing me back, back and forth like he was working his tallywacker. He continued with the melody while they showed us where the waterbed was to go. In the living room, we went past a large aquarium with tropical fish darting in and out of green plants and white structures. Guppies. Black Mollies. Goldfish. Abdul rubbed the wood like it was his John Holmes and hummed the song through his nose turned kazoo. It took several choruses of the song to bring in the dismantled waterbed and there it lay in pieces of tiddlywink.

Abdul hopped around, crouching at times, part gremlin, troll, yogi, and genie, compressing his body into curves of pretzel, his kneecaps level with his shoulders as he squatted and worked on the floor. He constructed the bottom pedestal out of particleboard and joined them on the ends with metal.

Particleboard made no sense. Balancing one thousand pounds of water on water soluble supports. So that was the game of dream mechanics he was playing? Nighttime dripping like the Sword of Damocles into daytime. His lips curled into a smile. I could smell formaldehyde and resin.

He wrapped his arms around his kneecaps and worked for a few minutes until he halted.

“Jiminy! We have problem, mister!”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“My father-in-law gave me wrong plywood. This is for a queen-size waterbed, and we need king size. Jiminy, mister!”

The girls’ mother heard the conversation and leaned into the room.

“Aren’t I getting my waterbed today? I missed a day of work,” she said.

“We have problem,” Abdul said.

“I better get it today,” she said, the sides of her mouth turned down.

Abdul rigged three different colored extension cords through the shrubs in the front yard. He put the piece of plywood on two sawhorses that we found while emptying the contents of their garage onto the front yard. One of the neighbors looked elated. He would be the first one at their yard sale.

I held one corner of the plywood. Abdul ripped the plywood down the middle with an electric saw from the van. Halfway through the cut he stopped and took a step back.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “I have two pieces. Both the wrong size. Why didn’t you stop me, mister? Shame on you.”

“You’re the expert. I’m taking your place, remember?”

On the way back to the store to get the right plywood, my first day as a dream mechanic double-backed to the beginning.

“Break time,” I said.