Installations

By Michael Fontana


There’s a right way and a wrong way to hang an awning, and I’ve seen both. With the bad kind, the first good rainstorm that hits will make the awning droop toward earth. You can practically hear the cry of the aluminum as it bends. The good kind stays anchored to the client’s house, bolted in nice and tight, aerodynamic even. That’s my forte, the last one, the good one. The other can go suck eggs.

The problem was that my boss, this tenuous little creep named Rodney, didn’t always want the awning hung right. He personally made all the sales. You should have heard what he spun. Hunkering up to an elderly couple like he was their own son, assuring them that paperwork was just a formality. “Your signature means nothing more than you want an awning.”

Liar. It meant that they locked themselves into a massive interest rate to pay for a piece of aluminum that, if they’d had the wherewithal, they could have bought at the local hardware store and hung themselves for a fourth of what they would fork over to Rodney.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when Rodney’s latest customer was a couple that included a reasonably attractive married woman. The couple made the purchase, locked themselves into the inflated interest rate, the whole nine yards. Then Rodney upped the ante even further. “The awning for the Stieglitz’s is going to hang crooked,” he told me in the shop. “Got that?”

“Not on my watch.”

“Yes, on your watch. You’ll hang it from your forehead if I order you, got it?”

I rolled my tongue just to keep from talking back to him. Rodney was a man of middling build who wore cheap suits and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. Plus he had this head of firecracker-red hair. What did women see in him? He was a smarmy mollusk of a man, and maybe that gunned some ladies’ motors.

What I did know was that I needed that job. My wife worked at a deli where she sliced lunchmeat razor thin all day and earned sub-minimum wage. I had a baby boy going on two years old whose sitter was my creepy brother-in-law. I wanted to fix that last problem as quick as I could. Plus our cars were always limping into repair shops with some cork or another popped beyond my expertise.

“Got it,” I said to Rodney.

“Good.” By good, he meant that hanging it crooked gave him an excuse to return to the buyer’s house and act concerned that they were pleased with the job. When they obviously weren’t, then he had cause to act indignant about it, chalking it up to a lazy underling, namely me. He then ordered me back to the house with an apology and to set the thing right, which was how I would have done it in the first place had he let me.

In the meantime his concern and indignation built until the wife softened her defenses and maybe shared a glass of wine with him at lunch one day. Then they fumbled into a kiss. Pretty soon they would wind up soiling the sheets, finishing with just enough time to send Rodney out the door before hubby made it home and saw the doings firsthand.

Not every woman went for Rodney, but enough did that he smiled like a geezer on an Ensure binge most days. His ex-wife was a woman who never went for him, even when they were married. He knocked her up, pretended he had a moral bone in his body, and married her. From there she sat at home all day with the baby while he came into work. That was when the conquests of other men’s wives began. If he was going to be married, by God, it would be to all the women he could find. Like marriage was a big cosmic pool and you could exchange spouses just by bedding them.

Rodney’s ex didn’t see it that way, once she found out. I think it was the nude photos that some cross and double-crossed other man’s wife decided to mail to Rodney’s house. The photos weren’t of the woman in question. They were of Rodney’s treacherous penis in various states of excitement, ranging from Leaning Tower of Pisa to rotten banana. Rodney’s ex had seen all those looks in her day. Not only were they familiar but they were exquisitely ugly in such renderings.

So Rodney had alimony and child support to pay. This made him hype himself each morning on Bayer aspirin and espresso. That combination spruced him to go out and make cold calls to homeowners who were awning-free. Thus the cycle of sales and infidelity began over and over again.

On the day I was ordered to hang the crooked awning at the Stieglitz home, I smoked a joint to calm my nerves. This was in the company truck, which was a definite no-no, but I figured if the boss could transgress, I should be able to as well. I didn’t particularly want to bed any other women, since my wife was still pretty even after having her belly stretched like a Slinky to give birth. Plus we enjoyed each other’s company, watched some tube, played with the kid, and ordered a pizza on Saturday night.

Once I was finished with the joint in the company truck, I knocked on the door of the house. An attractive woman, who was probably in her mid thirties, greeted me. She had blonde hair with black roots growing at the center of her head. Her body was thin and she showed it off in a robe with likely nothing beneath it. To avoid figuring out whether or not she was indeed naked underneath, I stared at her bare feet, which were pleasant-looking and smooth.

“I’m here to hang the awning, ma’am,” I said.

Her toes were polished pink. “Is there anything else I might find hung?” she tittered.

I ignored this. “Where would you like the awning?”

“Why don’t you relax first? How about some Irish cream and coffee?”

“I can’t drink while I’m on duty, ma’am”

“But you can smell like a bong?”

“I don’t know what you mean, ma’am. I think you’re mistaking the chemicals I use in my work for an illegal substance. I don’t go near such substances.”

It was a standoff at her door. She said nothing. I said nothing. Her feet said nothing. Finally, I returned to the truck and grabbed my tools. I made an assumption about the placement of the awning and went at it. Drilled the appropriate holes. Checked the anchors. Screwed the thing into place. And made sure that it tilted ever so slightly north, just to make Rodney happy.



Published July 2007