Otis was an American original. An original what, I just don't know. The man was somewhere between sixty and death. He was a large man, well over six feet, and weighed in around five hundred and fifty pounds. He smoked cigars that smelled as though they were skunk cabbage leaves hand-rolled in goat vomit and pig shit. He had about five teeth in his head, seldom shaved, and NEVER bathed. Otis did indeed work at the local sewage treatment plant. With his prodigious intellect (fifty-four on a good day), I'm sure he wasn't management.
Otis always wore bib overalls. The same pair of bib overalls. He said he didn't wash them -- they lasted longer that way. So did the smell. Imagine a several-day accumulation of spattered shit, spit, sweat, cigar smoke, halitosis, and bad karma -- that's what Otis smelled like.
The night Dad showed up with Otis, my brother and I were outside playing. Behind Dad's car came this huge prehistoric beast of a truck. It was a 1947 Ford shitwagon -- a massive, blackish-brown cylindrical tank entwined with nasty greeninsh brown hoses that graced the back. The fenders were laced with rust, as were the doors, the bottom of the cab, the hood, and the roof. The truck itself was a nondescript grayish hulk held together by wire and baling twine. It had no muffler. It stank. It was very much the perfect vehicle for Otis. It was so worn out that the treatment plant had sold it to him for twenty-five dollars. Otis was as proud of that truck as some people are of their kids.
Otis levered his considerable bulk out the passenger door of his truck. "Driver door busted," he explained. He lurched and wobbled to the front door.
"Ma's gonna just shit," my brother observed solemnly.
Mom's initial reaction did seem to indicate that her tenuous grip on sanity was about to be severed. But with a valiant (or grim) smile, she welcomed Otis inside.
For the next five hours, Otis enjoyed my parents' hospitality. I don't recall what was for supper, but I recall most of the conversation. Otis regaled us with tales of what he had personally hauled out of septic tanks with his "own bare hands."
He recounted "gittin' right down there to see whut wuz stuck" in a pipe at the plant, and how the dead cat looked after he dislodged it.
He enlightened us as to how thick the crust on the surface of a "good workin' tank" should be.
He told us about the time he fell face-first into a septic tank "an' gotta mouthfulla it."
He punctuated every other story with "like goddam shit on the ceiling" -- whatever that meant, I shudder to think.
After dinner, he thanked Mom and pumped her hand vigorously. She looked as though she wanted it amputated after he let go. He and Dad talked for a while before we heard the Otismobile wheeze and roar down the driveway.
Ah, the memories of youth. That was right around the time Mom developed that funny little facial twitch and we first heard the word "divorce."