Mt. Washington III
During the latter part of the 1960s, Carey owned Mt. Washington. Each weekday he visited people's homes on every street on the hill for conversation, a cup of coffee or to play with the family dog. Carey drove a route for Sparklettes when the 5-gallon, 40-pound bottles were still made of glass. He drove one of those ugly green company trucks up and down the impractical network of steep, narrow and winding lanes that cover the mountain. At every stop, he took 2 bottles off the truck and carted them into customer's homes. He grasped each bottle by the neck, holding the first down by his side and the second perched on his shoulder.
Carey was the only Sparklettes' employee to regularly carry more than one full bottle at a time. In addition, company policy forbade resting a bottle on your shoulder lest the glass shatter and decapitate the driver. Mt. Washington has very little level ground. From the street to the front porch often requires climbing up or down long steep driveways or flights of stairs. The stairs in front of Candy Pruitt's place had 85 steps. To Carey's way of thinking it was better to double up on the bottles than to make another trip. Carey was an animal, delivering to over 1,200 customers every 2 weeks on his route, a daily average of 240 bottles and nearly 5 tons of water.
Residential customers on other Sparklettes' routes would typically take delivery of 1 bottle every 2 weeks. Carey never delivered less than 2 bottles. Some customers left a note or met him at the door explaining that they didn't need 2 bottles. Carry would leave 2 bottles anyway and either jot down on the note, or tell them, "I'll skip you next time." With one exception, Carey never skipped anybody, ever.
The exception was a single guy living in a 1-bedroom apartment who stayed home from work on his delivery day to meet Carey face-to-face. He asked Carry inside to show him the 18 full bottles lined up around the base of the living room walls. Carey skipped him that day and went back to 2 bottles the next time around.
Carey would constantly promote the health benefits of the product and scold customers for not consuming enough of it. Carey was so relentless on this point that some customers would apologize and feel guilty if they didn't use up their 2 weeks' supply. Guilt or no guilt, they all knew that 2 more bottles were headed their way.
A good share of a route man's pay was based on the number of bottles delivered. Carey delivered more bottles and made more money than any other driver. This included residential routes that covered level ground as well as commercial routes with fewer stops but larger quantities. The only break for Carey's customers came when he went on vacation. Those that filled in for him would drop off only a single bottle to each customer but it took 2 full-time relief men to cover his route. The poor bastards that took over for him were shot at the end of each day. The legging up and down the rollercoaster terrain was tough but the endless wrestling with the delivery truck through 3-point turns on narrow hillside roads was also exhausting.
For each 3-point turn on the route, Carey had broken down the maneuvering of the truck into small steps – apply brake, grab top of steering wheel with left hand, downshift with right hand, etc. He fine-tuned the steps into the most efficient sequence and then committed them to memory. Many maneuvers were carried out with him on automated pilot. At the east end of Rome Drive one morning, he heard a loud noise coming from under the rear of the truck. Someone had left a living room couch on the spot in the street where Carey routinely executed his 3-point turn. He had followed the programmed instructions in his head without bothering to see if the coast was clear. He got down from the truck and could see that the couch was crammed snugly into undercarriage. It was more than a mile before the banging and bumping ended and the last of the couch broke free from the bottom of the truck. A few blocks later he was hustling down Cazador Street when the truck was slowly brought to a stop by some unseen force. Carey never took his foot off the accelerator nor did he apply the brakes, yet the truck simply came to a halt. A large spring from the couch had managed to coil itself around the truck's rotating driveshaft and then gradually tightened to the point where it could only be removed with a welding torch.
Carey and I had gone through school together starting with kindergarten. In the 1950s the secondary education we were offered matched the tenor of the times. School was mind-numbingly dull. We were subjected to tortuous repetitive drilling of the same math and English basics for years. If there was anything intriguing about science or history (I'm sure there was), it remained hidden in lesson plans held over from the 1940s, or older. It was in this gray fog, in an effort to maintain sanity, where Carey began to add a little flair to the way he did things. Mostly small things but they added up to quite a repertoire by the time we finished high school.
The first high five I ever saw was performed by Carey in the 3rd grade in 1953. It was offered to some unsuspecting kid who didn't have a clue as to what it was, let alone how to respond. I don't suppose Carey knew what it was either; he just did things like that all the time. The gesture was below the waist and with only 2 fingers but there it was, perhaps the world's first high five. There were countless modifications over the years until Carey became bored with it halfway through junior high.
There were no shortage of other diversions to try to make days at school bearable. For a few weeks he liked to stand on my shoulders and have me walk around the school campus. In a perfectly normal conversation he would suddenly add a melodic delivery to a spoken phrase or a single word, especially if it was a nickname. This was before Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He also invented odd-sounding words or phrases to replace familiar parts of speech that lacked pizzazz. The words he chose would be mispronunciations or a combination of 2 similar sounding words regardless of their meaning.
Carey was physically gifted and played lots of sports. He placed in 2 events at the state level and won a national championship in track and field. However, his main focus in sports was to fool around until he developed some sort of flourish that no one had ever seen before. In baseball, when he was in the on-deck circle he would whip and spin the bat around like a Chinese acrobat. In Babe Ruth League, the umpire that called most of our games once held up his hand to signal time and took off his mask so he could watch Carey finish his routine. In basketball he never shot or passed the ball the same way twice.
He found ways to inject this creative flair into the grind of daily water delivery. He would arrive at the customer's front door holding the bottles and loudly say, "SSSSSparklettes!" In high school he somehow developed the ability to blurt out a short, ear-splitting shriek of a whistle when he pronounced any word that began with an "S". It was like a reverse lisp at 80 decibels. With the whistle burst still ringing in their ears and confounded by the double talk, the customers never quite knew what was going on but they liked the show.
The real highlight for the customers came when Carey would go into their kitchen and offer to replace the empty bottle sitting on top of the cooler. The customer would watch spellbound as Carey, in one clean quick move, would lift, spin and drop a new full bottle into place. The torque from the spin would transfer to the water, creating a perfect whirlpool that would rotate for about 10 seconds as the water level dropped and filled the cooler below. The effortless manner and the speed with which he carried this off was something to behold.
Carey was also fascinated by a few of the customer's pet dogs. I went with him one afternoon to visit a few. There was a Basenji at the first house we stopped at. These dogs originated in Africa. The breed is barkless and known for hunting lions. They are so damn quick that when a pack of them surrounds a lion, one at a time, a single dog will shoot under the lion's belly when it is looking the other way, bite its belly, and scoot away before the lion can react. They take turns, repeating this tactic until the lions innards fall out and the lion keels over.
The owner handed Carey a tennis ball and we went out into the street with the Basenji. The dog knew just what to do since this was routine with each water delivery and he positioned himself 30 yards away from us in the center of the street. Carey tossed me the ball and dared me to throw it past the dog. I soon discovered it wasn't possible. No matter how hard I threw the ball down the street to either the left or right of the dog, he would dash in front of it, catch it in his mouth, and bring the ball back to me and drop it at my feet. The dog loved it and each time raced back to his position after returning the ball.
The second stop was at a customer who owned a Pitbull named Bo. Carey carried a spray bottle filled with ammonia on his route. If a dog threatened him he would defend himself by spraying the ammonia in the dog's face. It only took one spray for a dog to run like hell and remember to take cover in the future anytime Carey returned. Carey had tried this on the Bo through the slats of the customer's fence one day. Bo was unfazed even though Carey emptied the full bottle directly into the dog's face. Carey was very impressed. We met and sat down in the side patio with the couple that lived with Bo. The husband was ex-military and took great pride in having disciplined Bo to within an inch of his life. Bo never took his eyes off Carey. He desperately wanted to get at him. Bo would attempt to inch toward Carey every minute or so until the husband noticed that he was no longer by his side and would then yell at the dog and yank him back in place. This was repeated several times over the 20 minutes that we were there.
Some 4 decades after he quit Sparklettes, Carey was living in Colorado and looking at job openings one day. He was amused to see where a bottled water company was looking to hire and train a new route man. He thought, "What the hell," called the number, and went in for an interview.
The company owner was beside himself when Carey told him about his experience. Sitting in the owner's office, Carey noticed that the bottle on the cooler needed to be replaced. Carey gestured at the cooler and asked the owner, "It's been quite a while but would it be okay if I gave it a shot."
The owner said, "Knock yourself out."
Carey removed the empty bottle and then picked up a full one from the floor and executed the whirlpool trick.
The owner was stunned, "22 years in this business, I've never seen that before."