Jackjaw, what a name............
Like the story.
JoeyA
Like the story.
JoeyA
I have told this story a handful of times but it belongs in this thread. May be, but a search didn't turn it up. I was running a dirt track late model and a usually friendly competitor was Bobby S, Jackjaw. We were both out of work and he called me to help him on a few day job he had been offered, swapping transmissions on some ten wheel over the road tractors in a gravel parking lot. He figured we could do it with a standard floor jack I had and a piece of half inch plywood he had. I shudder now just thinking about probably a thousand pounds of transmission on that little six inch or less jack plate. With one of us laying in the gravel either side of the jack a transmission would have crushed one of us like a grape had it fell off the jack!
We had dropped two transmissions on the ground that day working from early to about five. Couldn't see much but our eyeballs after working under those old trucks with the whole undercarriage covered with dirt and grease and every muscle was so sore I felt like I had been beaten with an ugly elephant. Bobby didn't have any wheels and lived 25-30 miles away. On the way to his house we passed the three-way lounge. Had a few pool tables there and a pit in the woods out back where most arguments were settled. Often half the bar emptied out to watch a fight and they had everything but chairs and waitresses back there, did have a couple chairs come to think of it. Most importantly they had cold beer, very cold!
I'm racking the balls on a seven foot Valley for the first game when two guys came up wanting to play partners for a beer each. "Sure." They won the coin toss and one broke dry. Bobby, stone cold and after pulling wrenches and wrassling eighteen wheeler transmissions all day which was guaranteed to tie your arms in knots, ran out that rack from their break and then ran seven more racks before I got up. Before an hour was up I had shot twice and had thirteen beers in front of me.
We were supposed to be making seventy-five each for every transmission swap, brutal work. As we went out the door I said "Bobby, we gotta talk". Took a day to round up a little pocket change, got stiffed on the transmission work on top of everything else, and then me and Bobby went for a ride.
Made a double handful of short few day trips over the next six months or so but Bobby had a hard time remembering he was married on the road and his wife was a pretty good shot with a pistol or his old Winchester 30-30 western style carbine. I used to cut the engine and coast by his house and drop him in front of the woods just past it. I was partying just as hard but I was single. After a couple close calls I decided I didn't want to get shot over Bobby's partying and I shut things down. A 30-30 can leave a nasty hole!
We hooked up partners off and on for years until Bobby got into a lot of hot water, they thought he was either the knife man or a witness to a killing that happened at the three-way. A man Bobby and several others had been playing pool with earlier was killed and robbed for less than a thousand dollars. Bobby had to pull a fade and went to Texas, the classic GTT.
Years later we met a few times again but never hooked up for a little rambling again. Oddly enough since it was a low dive miles from either of our homes, the story started and ended at the three-way, perhaps the most dangerous bar within fifty miles but a hopping place on the weekends when they had a country band and the piney woods emptied out to come there.
Since every cowboy knows he is a lover, fighter, and pool playing son of a gun, the pickings were easy on the challenge tables as long as you didn't get greedy and try for a big bite. On the quieter nights whoever you were playing usually wanted to double up and catch up at the end of the night and might try that a few times. Played fifty a game eight ball on a Valley a bunch of times and a hundred a game a few times. Pretty sporty in the early seventies when minimum wage was a buck and a quarter and most of the guys on the table were working for that.
Jackjaw was loud and talked a lot, to people, tables, and pool balls. He drew action to him like a magnet. Had a sister who played pretty strong for a lady in those days too.
I miss the days when I could jump in the truck with a little scotchbrite or small piece of sandpaper and a brad tip tool in the watch pocket of my jeans, twenty bucks seed money, and plan on being gone a week or more. Gas at fifty cents a gallon or less and knowing the tricks of living cheap on the road made a lot of things possible.
Hu