Expiration Date - Softcover

Wallace, R. E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1450220487 ISBN 13: 9781450220484

Verlag: iUniverse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

At thirty-nine, Bobby Thomshaft is working sixteen-hour days, six days a week delivering milk on the eastern plains of Colorado while yearning to live the lusty life that has always been out of his reach. When his twenty-twoyear marriage to a newly-transformed yuppie princess turns sour, Bobby's partner and friend, Rudy Tvorsky, takes him out for a night on the town and introduces him to his eclectic group of friends who are into more than just cocktails. After Bobby tastes methamphetamine for the first time, he bids farewell to his former life. Bobby 's meth use increases and his normally positive nature warps into a delusional mix of Pollyanna optimism and meth-fueled arrogance. As his marriage disintegrates into nothingness, Bobby hooks up with Allegra, a twenty-something divorcee and recent Colorado transplant who loves cocaine and a good time. Meanwhile, Bobby is starting to believe the rosy illusions of what he wishes to be true and creates an elaborate plan of self-deception that keeps him from acknowledging the slew of meth complications piling up around him. As Rudy attempts to wake Bobby from his illusions, he suddenly discovers that people, just like milk, are not exempt from nearing their expiration dates.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R.E. "Bob" Wallace has published more than 3,000 articles in newspapers, magazines, and on web sites. In researching his first novel, he spent thirty months delivering milk and drinking too much, and about fourteen months taking methamphetamine. He has lived in Colorado and Texas and currently resides in rural Montana.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Expiration Date

By R.E. Wallace

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 R.E. Wallace
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-2048-4

Chapter One

Bobby Thomshaft is driving home from an evening movie with his wife when word that his marriage has fallen beyond repair reaches him via the FM radio.

He had just flipped on the local classic rock station. The DJ is saying, "And would you like to dedicate that song to anyone?"

A woman's voice says, "I'd like to dedicate it to Bobby, the sexiest milkman in the world."

There were probably several milkmen named Bobby along the Colorado Front Range. Thomshaft doesn't recognize the voice. Nevertheless ...

"Hear that?" Thomshaft says. "I wonder which girl on the route that is."

"Robert, she wasn't talking to you. You can't be the only milkman named Bobby in Colorado Springs."

"No, but I'm the milkman. Genny, you have no idea how I am at work all day. How I get along with my customers. I've known some of them thirteen years. I've watched their kids grow up. I'm like family. There's not one customer I've got who, if I needed a place to stay, wouldn't let me move into their house. These people love me, and I love them. It's not a sexual thing, either."

"Who would want you?" Genny asks. "You're just a milkman."

"Just a milkman? See, that comment there proves my point. You don't know the first thing about how important my business is. It's because of milk, and all those years I worked seventy hours a week with just Sundays off, that you can live like you do. Our kids have never wanted for nothing. You don't have to work, and you can have all the nice things that your yuppie wife friends have."

Genny sighs, tired of laboring the point. "You're just a milkman."

Chapter Two

Dididit-dididit-dididit-dididit-dididit-dididit-dididit-dididit-dididit. Rudy Tvorsky didn't want to open his eyes. It couldn't be 3:30 again already. But no, he peeks and there, burning in the blackness, is the red devil time. The mock chirp of the alarm shoots a familiar dread through him, breaking his spirit a little more-before the day's even begun.

Snake an arm out from under the covers, flip on the light, flip off the alarm. Rudy sits up, lights a smoke, tries to remember what day it is. Friday, long Friday. After training on the milk route for six weeks, he is still no closer to thinking he might ever feel good about rising at this unnatural hour. But rising at this hour is the first requirement for this gig.

On second drag, a violent coughing attack-Kahooluh-kahah-kaak aakkaaaaak-gorp-grawwgh-haaaawwwwkk-gorp. Then spit-Pthooh-a large, brownish gray, half-tar, half-catarrh loogie onto a pile of old sports sections next to the bed.

First thing in the morning, nothing wants to move. The last time Rudy could remember waking up this sore and tired every day for this long was during double sessions playing high school football. He was sixteen, almost half a lifetime ago. The coughing spasms get the circulation going again. Everything aches, from wind-burned face to feet, swollen from pounding hard ground. Rudy swings his legs over the side of the bed. Wet sandbags for thighs laced with bungee cord hamstrings on the verge of cramping remind him of how many times he'll have to climb in and out of the head and belly and ass of the twenty-ton iron milk cow today, jerking, swinging, and sliding forty-pound milk crates around at all the worst ergonomically conceivable angles. Maybe that's why that hard pain, a peach pit between the shoulder blades, makes him slouch like a gorilla.

Dragging ass to the bathroom to get regular, he looks back with something akin to nostalgia at the warm, wrinkled indentation in the sheets. Just sixteen more hours and he can be back in bed asleep. That is how Rudy measures time every day on the milk route-backward. From the moment of that last wistful glance at the bed, a countdown starts in his head to the fortunate, distant, future moment when he will again be free of the milk route for a few hours.

Between coughing attacks on the toilet, Rudy begins his daily chastisement to start the day with dark thoughts. Until a few months ago, he thought he'd paid his dues, thought his days of hard physical labor were over. He was supposed to be reaching his intellectual prime, not hefting crates like a primate. Now was a time to stop dreaming and take the old man's advice to heart, "You can't have a job you love, so get that outta your head, kid!"

Back in the bedroom, teeth brushed and weary coat of fatalism applied, Rudy picks dirty work clothes from the day before off a heap of dirty clothes next to the bed. He slips on filthy, gray Carhartt painter pants, encrusted around the ankles with various dried dairy products, and a blue golf shirt that smells of must, sweat, and sour milk. On the front breast pocket in embroidered letters reads Thomshaft Dairy Inc. Embroidered on the back is the Thomshaft Dairy logo-three cows' rear ends, with a message below saying, "We dairy like no other." Indeed.

The dairy was only two miles from Rudy's rented bungalow on the west side of Colorado Springs. Thomshaft lived way up north of the Air Force Academy in the hamlet of Pikes Glen on the Palmer Divide, but he was already at the dairy when Rudy pulled his shit brown '78 Celica into the lot at 4:20 am.

They called it "the dairy," but it wasn't really a dairy-more of a concrete block truck depot with cold storage. The milk and other dairy products were made at the plant up in Denver and then trucked down to Colorado Springs for further distribution.

They never talked much at the dairy, still too drunk with sleep. They just nod slack faces, expressionless.

"I'm whupped," Rudy says.

"Just one more long day," Thomshaft says. "Then an easy Saturday. Just deal with it."

It came out, "Jus dill wid it," blurred from repetition. It was Thomshaft's coverall phrase for coping with all the misery the milk route could throw at you, which was considerable.

A milkman's relationship to his product is one-sided. Dairy had to be respected, lest it kick your ass. Milk, meanwhile, respected nothing, save the laws of perishablility and gravity, which it obeyed without fail. As defined by Thomshaft, milk has four states of relativity to the milkman:

1. Kicking milk's ass

2. Milk kicking your ass

3. Laughing at milk

4. Milk laughing at you

When milk laughed at you or kicked your ass, all you could do was deal with it.

First thing in the morning, the trick is to keep busy. Keep moving to keep awake in the rheumatic blue fluorescent mist of the cooler. The milk order for the day is stacked on pallets, six crates high, by the loading dock. Thomshaft backs the truck to the door and then starts pulling seven tons of hard, gray plastic crates of dairy products stacked six crates high, stack by stack, up a small ramp into the back of the milk truck with a long, thin metal hook. Rudy, using his thighs and feet, wiggles the stacks into a tight cube, a practice that had left his thighs bruised like a serious S-M freak.

By 6:05, as the mountains blush red to meet the dawn, they are rolling out east on Woodmen Road toward a thin melon strip coming over the horizon. They ride past dimmed, identical box houses laid around pointless cul-de-sacs, new car dealerships, strip malls, and supermarkets, chancres of Colorado Springs' prosperity boom in the 1990s. For most of its history, Colorado Springs consisted of a downtown once known as "Little London" for its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1450220487
• ISBN 13: 9781450220484
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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