September 21, 2004

• Terrible Terry, the evil twin:
  Another tale from Felony Flats
  

  
  

  As you may know, Felony Flats is the local name for the flea market strip where I live and work, and the place has earned the nick.  In the last year–according to a local guy who used to sell guns and furniture there but quit when it got to be too much of a hassle–there have been like four meth labs and a crack house busted there in the last year.  Many of the folks there are on some sort of welfare, disability or whatever.  A woman who I call Gimli springs to mind–she is built like a fireplug, lives on welfare, and once prompted me to call the cops when she was screaming her head off in the parking lot at four in the morning following a first of the month, hooray, the checks are in party.  Her dog bit me once, I called animal control, they gave her a warning, she got another dog–and lets IT run loose.  Hasn’t bit me yet, just tasted me a few times.  But I digress.
  
  The strip itself is maybe half a mile long, unpaved, consists of a (surprise!) strip of trailers, storage units (at least one of which is occupied), and cabins.  I have one of the nicer units, a 10×12 foot affair near one end of the strip, with no door.  Really.  It has this sliding glass patio window for a door–before the landlord thought to put numbers on the units, mine was known as “the glass cabin.”  I recently tweaked my shoulder trying to force the thing open one morning, and the roof leaks, drips down the window and onto the floor every time it rains.  No running water otherwise–I fill up jugs from the local spring when I come home, and Kathy usually brings a jug or so with her when she comes into town–but there is a Porta-john nearby, and there is electricity, thank God.  I cook with a primitive old Singer microwave, and eat a lot of sandwiches.  The microwave and a coffee maker are all I have in the way of food prep thingies, and I use the top of the little fridge as a food preparation surface.   It works for me, although I warrant that many soft city folks would deem it unfit for human habitation.
  
  My stand is roughly in the middle of the strip, next to a used-vehicle lot run by the titular hero of this tale, terrible Terry.  His name really is Terry (would I lie to you?  darn tootin’, but not right now), and he has the worst reputation of any dealer along the strip.  He has no business license, but that isn’t unusual.  I am the only one who does, besides the landlord, a veritable land baron who owns cabins and plots of land all over the valley.  In the sixties, he ran the Iditarod, by the way, which probably explains all the dog sleds parked on the roofs of some of the cabins (including mine).  The landlord hates Terry, would love to see him leave, but Alaska law favors tenants heavily, and as long as Terry pays the rent, there is nothing the landlord can do.  He hates the way Terry tends to spread out his stuff–four-wheelers, motorcycles, snowmachines, plus seasonal stuff–right now, he has a bunch of heaters for sale–on the frontage of other dealers. ( I once had some words with Terry myself, when his stuff kept intruding on my own frontage–his  profane and racial epithet-laden response was to threaten to kill my cat. I suspect he was drunk–the red eyes and slurred speech would have clued me in if nothing else had.  Anyway,  I don’t talk to him any more, and started to carry a lead-filled sap in addition to my gun.) The landlord  is also convinced that Terry has stolen stuff from him.  Other dealers at the strip have told me that Terry is a thief, and a customer once told me that he had seen Terry load a four-wheeler that wasn’t his onto his truck and sell it.
  
  Another day, as I was setting up, a guy stopped.  He looked familiar, and I recognized him as a customer of Terry’s.  He said “You know the guy next to you.”  I said yeah. 

  
  

  “He’s fucking crazy.” 

  
  

   I said, yeah, like what else is new.  

  
  

   ”He was trying to get a quad started, and started screaming and cursing when he couldn’t.  His wife tried to calm him down and he started cursing at her.”
  
  I was not surprised.  Earlier in the summer, I opened up one Monday after working a gun show in Anchorage over the weekend, and someone told me that a screaming match between Terry and his wife had reached such a pitch that someone called the troopers.  The troopers come out to Felony Flats a lot.  They would probably like to see it all burn to the ground–I know a lot of the local nimby’s would.  Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Terry’s wife for months.  Maybe she wised up and lit out.  I see his little kid, a boy maybe three years old they call “Bubba”–the kid is being programmed to be a loser–whose face is always dirty and always has a sort of blank look on it.  He putters around among the stolen (?) vehicles, seems to be happy enough.
  
  Over the summer, Terry has had a succession of helpers, hangers-on, or whatever.  On many days during the summer, I could smell the pot smoke coming from a tent-like shelter that housed his flea market stuff–Mike the deranged jarhead Viet Nam vet likes to smoke there, and Beergoggles (he earned this nick when he drunkenly hit on my wife and groped her, despite the fact that she has grandchildren near his age) lives in a camper shell that is on blocks behind the place.  Sometimes he leaves his empties of Steel Reserve (beer that is 8.6 percent alcohol) on my frontage–I just dispose of them and thank God that I wasn’t the one who drained them..  Some salty old fart with a Texas accent used to hang out there, but I assume he got sick of Terry’s lies and malfeasances, and now he hangs with the next dealer down, who also sells mostly wheeled things.
  
  One guy in particular stood out.  He looked like one of the crowd–fairly short–maybe five-seven or so, thin, dark, intense-looking, usually wears camo BDUs, a t-shirt and a ball cap.  What made him stand out was that he was a genuinely nice guy–well-spoken, quiet, hard-working.  In other words, he was nothing like loud-mouthed, profane Terry, who is maybe six feet tall, 180 pounds, sort of moon-faced, very light-complected (when he doesn’;t have the tell-tale alcohol flush), buzz cut gray-blonde hair, no facial hair. I used to wonder what a nice guy like him was doing there–surely he could do better.

  
  

  The other day, after Mike got done telling me about how Terry was going to jail soon for his DUI mishap (driving drunk after dark  on a quad, on the highway, and with no lights), I asked him,   what was the deal with the quiet guy and what was his name.  Turns out his name is Jerry, and he is Terry’s twin.  Hence the title of this blog.

  
  

  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

  
  

  Coming up someday–the ballad of Gimli and Bluto–another tale of Felony Flats.
  

  • 11:16 pm
  • 2 Comments