We worked together back in the ’70s and ’80s and had a ton of fun doing our respective jobs – his specialty was air attack, mine was in aerial delivery. In the mid-’80s we went our respective ways but we always stayed in touch, either by phone, or in person when I went on one of my gypsy motorcycle treks across North America.
When we got together we always had plenty of stories to tell one another and the peals of laughter would cause his wife to wonder what in hell it was that we could be so carefree about. It was that devil-may-care attitude we both had that comes with each of us being competent and proficient at our jobs – to the exclusion of all else – when it was required. That, and an ability to see through the pretentious phoniness of those who attempted to interlope and ride to glory on our backs, so to speak. Eventually his wife would catch on, but she had to be re-trained a time or two before it became permanent.
Ted has two daughters, and the last time I saw them they both looked like trouble — in a good way, of course. One is now 16 and driving. Now there’s justice for him. I can’t wait to remind him about the beer in the back seat and the girls in the trunk – just in case he doesn’t have enough on his mind right now.
He’ll be thrilled when I hit him with that one just after he comes out of surgery.
I know, I know, it goes against every single precept that I have been preaching to myself for the past seven years – or longer – but it’s for a position that I just can’t ignore. At least, that’s my story, and so far, I’m sticking to it.
It’s actually a management position, overseeing and directing an existing operation while developing, funding and implementing additional technology to complement the existing. I’ve done this before, so it’s not new to me by any stretch of the imagination; however, I’ve not done it on such a small scale as will be required. It should be interesting, to say the least.
Consequently, my operational background and experience shoehorn me into the somewhat enviable position of being capable of competing for the job – which, per se, isn’t really a job to me. It sounds as though it might be “fun” – which is how I characterize every job I’ve ever had.
For the most part, I have tended to look at employment this way: If I can’t wait to get to work in the morning, and, subsequently, can’t wait to lock the door and go home in the evening, then what’s the point of being there? And, in fact, that’s the reasoning behind why I abandoned my last period of well-financed career employment seven years ago.
I’m not counting chickens, though. I’ve been a vagabond for so long now that my work-related experience seems to me to be only a figment of an overactive imagination. Has it really been seven years since I was last gainfully employed in the profession that I chose as a teenager? It seems to me to be only a heartbeat. That seven year layoff may end up costing me, but then, that’s all right too.
If I’m fortunate, I’ll still get a bike ride to a job interview that’s over a hundred miles away, plus expenses.
Update April 2015: I just logged in to my old Anything Goes site where many of you are and discovered that way back in November 2014, Confuzer (thanks very much) posted a link to some of the chats that went on in 2000. Take a look. Some of the posts had me rolling at the memories. The usual suspects You know who the guilty parties are: RussianGirl, confuzer, verdeii, loz-who-changed-her-name-from-lollipop for obvious reasons, ROSES, Draven et al.
Unfortunately, in 2018, Forumco dropped all of its free forums.
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For Alicja, wherever you are.
I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places… –Irving Kahal
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Update May 2011: Michele White has written a book titled “The Body and the Screen – Theories of Internet Spectatorship”. It runs some 200 pages, not including notes and end credits. By the sound of it, she was being paid to sit and chat. The book is copyrighted in 2006.
Club Gabbay gets an honorable mention at the bottom of page 29. I wonder how much time she spent in the rooms, and what character names she used. She has more publications to her credit, so it’s obviously not a thesis. Michele, if you’re out there, come by and say hello.
I found the link to a record of some very old ClubGabbay chats that Confuzer (Rutger) mentioned in his comment, below. There’s quite a few of them. Read and enjoy. Don’t neglect **ArRoW**’s Chat Center guest book below, either.
Update October 2009: With the closing of GeoCities domain and web sites at the end of October 2009, all the old familiar places will be gone for good. Here’s a link to **ArRoW**’s Chat Center guest book. Take a look at some of the old entries for some memorable names.
Update April 2007: It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Alf on April 24, 2007, known to us all as Fozzie. While Fozzie was working in his woodlot, harvesting trees to turn them into lumber for a building he wanted to construct, the little Furpot was called to the great kitchen in the sky, where beautiful cooks and lovely waitresses prepare and serve the finest foods and sweetest desserts known to exist, just for him. Fozzie will be sadly missed by all of his good and kind friends from Australia to North America and places in between.
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The Lobby chat room background from ClubGabbay. I did a little color enhancing to make the background more recognizable.
Back in the ’90s there was a chat site known as ClubGabbay, or Anything Goes. It consisted of a number of rooms, most notably the wildly popular “Anything Goes” chamber, but also a more tame room known as “The Lobby”. The crazies–of which I was one, I sheepishly admit–populated Anything Goes, while more sane individuals among us were known to frequent the Lobby.
(How many of us discovered ClubGabbay from the Healthy Choice Chat Center? I know I was one that initially found the Healthy Choice room, but soon thereafter migrated to ClubGabbay and Anything Goes.)
In the search engines, the site was listed as being one for music appreciation, but from what I saw, no one who came in talked much about music. Eventually, in the late ’90s, the owner of the site attempted to sell his somewhat mediocre audio recordings to fund the operation, but that bombed big-time. Eventually the entire place collapsed into the one remaining room known as The Lobby.
The chat room eventually ended up being given or sold–I’m not sure which–to a couple of people. Then the trolls arrived, during which time a couple of the regulars using multiple handles actually ended up destroying the place. Finally, the Lobby imploded and was closed. The domain remains still, but it comes up as a commercial search site, listing mostly inane plastic cookware and travel sites–such a fall for a once-popular and widely-known series of chat rooms.
During the course of the site’s operation, I went on the road to meet many of the chat site regulars, who were physically located far and wide across North America and the world. Most of those I met were located in North America, but some from offshore ended up visiting, and I eventually rode to meet them also.
When the chat room closed, we were limited to the various messenger services and their limitations. The crazy days were long gone by then, and the silliness that had pervaded the old site no longer ruled in the one-on-one world of the IM chat clients. If you couldn’t post a link to a silly picture, what was the point? Stay in touch without that? No, thanks. Consequently, we all went our various ways, and most ended up falling off the map.
I think it would be mildly interesting to find out what all the crazies are doing now. From personal contact, I know that a few have completed their Masters or PhDs, some have gotten married, others are having babies, and still more are doing what they always did, working away and killing time in other chat rooms or forums. Some have passed on from this life and are now in a kinder, gentler place but will continue to live on in our chat room memories.
It was a fun time in the early days of the wide-open chat room environment, but eventually most of us lost contact while moving on to live our lives.
Jean-Marc and I lost touch once more after our escapades in East Africa. Occasionally I would end up in the places he had been, and I would be approached by someone or another as to his whereabouts. I didn’t know, of course. By then, we were both traveling hither and yon to the far-flung outposts of the helicopter world, involved in fire fighting or exploration or construction and sent wherever the company saw fit to dispatch us.
It was during one of those assignments that I learned Jean-Marc had been killed while flying in the mountains. I didn’t get all of the details right away, of course, but eventually they trickled down to me via phone calls to the company and to various people I knew in the business. He didn’t stand a chance, and ended up smacking the ground with a substantial thud. I did learn one thing though, and that was that young Bill had been his swamper on that job.
Years later I decided that I needed something different to maintain my sanity, and so I retired from flying and got myself tied to a desk, still involved in aviation, but finished with active flying. Occasionally I’d see one or two of the old crew who came to town to do a job, or someone who was passing though and wanted to touch base and talk about old times. And then, to my complete surprise, a half-dozen of them showed up on a charter headed west. The charter flight had stopped for fuel, so they all wandered across the field to my office to kill some time.
Bill was one of them, standing in the background. Finally he walked up and we shook hands. To my complete surprise and discomfort I noticed that he was wearing Jean-Marc’s ring. Without blinking an eye, I now sized him up for the man that he was: a thief; a liar; and finally, a grave-robber.
I wondered. Did he take the ring off of a dead man’s hand? Or had he merely put it in his pocket when he collected Jean-Marc’s personal effects?
The former would be no surprise to me, and the latter is unlikely, since I later learned that Bill was the first man to get to the accident site.
The overseas project I was in charge of needed another aircraft and flight crew to cover the increased work load, so the company had one boxed and flown into Djibouti via an Air France 747.
When Jean-Marc stepped off the plane I was as surprised as he was, but we had no time to reminisce. I was relegated to getting the import paperwork completed. This was a nightmare until I discovered the appropriate French officials to over-rule the locals and allow the aircraft out of customs bond in order that our maintenance people could assemble the rotorcraft.
Jean-Marc had been with the company for almost as long as I had, but before we ended up on the same job in north Africa we had never spent time in the same foreign locale. He was assigned to Ethiopia, and on his R&Rs went into Addis (Addis Ababa) to scour the markets there for interesting and unusual bits and pieces of gold and silver for his many women around the globe.
I, on the other hand, preferred the more isolated regions on my rotations out, and consequently ended up in Mog (Mogadishu), or Djibouti, or Galcaia, to name only a few. I preferred those places to getting to know the white enclaves in the larger centers such as Nairobi or Jo’burg (Johannesburg), where one could become enmeshed in the local white perceptions of the continent’s native life.
For the most part, I always figured there was no point to going to Africa only to see and experience a white world. Africa is black, obviously. It’s former name on the old maps was the Dark Continent, for the unknown and mysterious visage it presented to the European explorer of the 19th century. I didn’t want to miss out on any of that, even if it was late in the next century.
While our ground crew was busied with assembly, and until the aircraft was ready for test flying, Jean-Marc and I retired to the local watering holes, frequented by Djibouti regulars, la légion Étrangère and various and sundry other miscreants as could be found. At one point we discovered a troupe of misguided Air Lufthansa flight attendants trapped with their flight crew during a strike. We managed to rescue them from their boredom and bring them into the fold.
We spent ten days trolling the depths of Djibouti depravity with our new-found friends, but when our aircraft was readied for departure, we said our goodbyes to the stewardesses and flew off into the sunrise. The oil exploration contract progressed from there, and was subsequently fulfilled and terminated some months later.
Jean-Marc wore a particularly noticeable ring that he had picked up in his travels. It was extremely detailed, in gold and silver, that of a tall ship, fully rigged and under full sail, on what appeared to be black onyx. I asked him about it, and he said he had found it during one of his market forays into Addis. The person he bought it from couldn’t tell him a thing about it. I had never seen anything like it, and told him so. Jean-Marc said that he had looked for more of them, but had only seen the one. When I asked him to take it off so that I could look at it more closely, he refused. Obviously, it had some meaning to him, and I understood, to some extent why, given the intricacy of the design.
Digging the hole
When we ended up back at the head office hangar we all liked to get out on the floor and mingle with the maintenance people responsible for the well-being of the helicopters with which we entrusted our lives and the lives of our passengers. If the right crowd was around, we’d end up hitting the hotel just down the road for an evening well-spent until closing time, or the wee hours of the morning when the owner would keep the place open for us.
One of the guys that usually came along for the beer was young Bill, a lowly apprentice, who wasn’t known as the brightest bulb in the hangar, so to speak. He was a slow-moving, slow-talking man with a drawl that managed to irritate you if you spent too much time listening to him. Bill was married to a girl who didn’t take kindly to his nights out with the boys, and, after a night of debauchery, he would drag his sorry ass back into the shop on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Friday morning with a hang-dog look on his face and a ready story about what his wife had done to him this time upon his late and drunken arrival home.
Eventually, we all got fed up with Bill’s constant whining, and after one particularly long and winding nighttime trail of destruction spent at the various strip joints in the area, some of us pulled Bill outside and gave him a pep-talk before sending him on his way to be chastised by his bride one more time for being tardy in getting home to her waiting arms and sharp tongue.
Bill hadn’t show up at work for two days, so Larry, the owner of the company – in his own right not to be outdone as a drinking machine – called Bill’s wife to ask if he was sick. After hanging up the phone, Larry came out to tell us that Bill was in jail. A quick call to the precinct confirmed this, and after one of us went down to bail out Bill, he was back on the shop floor once again, with a story to tell about how he had ended up in the crowbar hotel.
It seems that our pep-talk a few nights previous had really cheered Bill up and put him in the proper frame of mind to hurry home and confront his bride. On arriving, he found his belongings out on the front porch and the door locked. Bill, not being the smartest fly over the cesspool, pounded on the door for a couple of minutes, and, just as his wife was unlocking it, he managed to kick the door down and both door and Bill landed on top of his bride. She didn’t take too kindly to this turn of events and consequently, when the police arrived, Bill was hauled off to jail.
Now you know how young Bill’s mind works – or doesn’t – as the case may be. Be that as it may, we all were somewhat chastened by the results of our advice-giving.
I always stop in to visit with old friends when I pass through, although it was difficult when I first started doing so. This time it’s been at least half a lifetime since I saw them last. We had great times together. One even saved my life on a bright sunny day years ago, so I have much to thank him for. That was my best friend. Others I was not so close to, but they were very good friends too.
We partied hard and fast and furious when we were growing up, to the dismay of some in our crowd of friends, and to the chagrin of some of the hometown girls we dated. We never listened, mostly going our own way and finally getting out of town and away from the madness of it all. It was hard keeping track after that, scattered as we were.
They’re not hard to find now, since I know the exact spot to ride to to see each one of them one more time. All of them came finally to rest in a quiet, green, treed cemetery just west of town. It overlooks a pretty green valley and the small factory town where we all grew up – although I must admit I was the newcomer, not having been born there.
Bob, Stan, Vern, Dale. One by aircraft, one by car, one by motorcycle, one by ill health. All taken over a short time span, some within a couple of days of each other.
I remember them as though it were yesterday, and I trust that I am not the only one to visit with old friends and reminisce. I’ll be returning this way later in the summer, but I’ll only ride by and wave for I fear that too much remembering is not good for one’s soul.
