MLK/Inauguration Day

Originally Posted Tuesday, January 23, 2013

Here is one of the 8x10 Impossible images.  Competition high school swimmer with a scholarship to college next year.  Trains twice a day, once at five in the morning and again in the afternoon.  Crazy, right?  Nice kid.  I had shot with her sister to whom I'd mentioned my new "Small Trades" project of people in uniforms.  This is a uniform, right?  A competition swim suit.  It's a start. 

I had many plans for the day, but as usual. . . .   The woman who rents my garage apartment called to tell me that the air conditioner was not working.  I went over to look just to see if the breaker was off.  I opened the box and fiddled around for a minute before I saw a big, pale frog flattening itself in a horror as great as mine quickly became.  If it had jumped on me, I would have been dancing the marimba.  It was an alien for sure.

"How'd he get in the breaker box?" my tenant asked me. 

"Holy shit, I don't care, holy shit, holy shit."  I had the involuntary quivers.  "Jesus Christ, mother fucker." 

"It's just a frog." 

"I'm calling the repair guys."  I'm not cut out for this shit, I thought. 

I love the a.c. repairmen.  They are happy crackers who work slow and sing and whistle and smoke cigarettes and fix things cheaply.  I get a kick out of talking to them.  One is big and thick and as sweet as he can be.  The other has lost most of his teeth so that his mouth caves in and wrinkles.  But man, they are honest.  When they finished, I asked them what was wrong. 

"There's a circuit board in the heater and the switch was stuck.  We banged it around a bit and it seems to be working." 

"Great.  That's what I would have done." 

"We'll try to order a new one, but that's an old unit and it might be difficult to find."

"Well, as long as this one is working again. . . ." 

"You want to just pay us when we come back?"

"I can do that.  O.K." 

Other companies would have replaced the whole unit.  There is something not all bad about a cracker. 

Otherwise, I was working on photos all day.  I didn't mind.  I don't miss people.  It was relaxing.  But in the morning, it is back to the factory. 

I should have learned to repair air conditioners.