Fortunately, Gerry Williams gave us all that opportunity at TentCo.

 

There was a reason Gerry Williams had a beer gut.  Gerry liked beer.  Plain and simple.  He would occasionally dabble in the harder stuff, of course, but his day-to-day beverage of choice was beer, beer, beer.  Each morning, you didn't have to ask him why he was moving a little slow or glassy eyed or sweating profusely at dawn.  But he'd sure tell you.

 

"Holy crap, I think I drank about a million beers last night."

 

And we'd all laugh, because that was his "thing."  He never apologized, he never made a bunch of excuses for his hangovers, and he pretty much showed up on time whenever he woke up in his own bed that morning.  By TentCo standards, he was at the head of the class.

 

His dedication to the sudsy life meant that Gerry had a true "beer gut."  It was incredible to behold simply because all of the added pounds from all of those added beers settled in just one place:  his gut.  His arms were about average, his legs were about average...  All around, he was pretty much average looking.  Except for a gut that made you want to ask, "do you know if it's a boy or a girl?"

 

It was definitely a stealth gut, too.  If he had a t-shirt on, you simply didn't see it coming.  Women would sometimes chat him up on the job sites, and one time a girl told him he was cute and asked for his number.  After she left, all he could say was, "wait 'till she sees my gut!"  Of course, we were no strangers to a beer or twelve and were all packing a few extra "lb's," so there was only so much we could laugh.  But we did anyway.

 

Gut or no, he was a solid member of any TentCo crew.  Like many fans of barley soda, he was a rugby player, which came in handy when it came time to throw wet bags of canvas tents around the site.  Of course, it also meant you didn't even have to ask him, "should we pick up a few beers for the ride home?"

 

TentCo life had its ups and downs, but a few beers in the cab of an F350 with no air conditioning on a hot summer day was definitely one of our finer pleasures.  It didn't happen all the time--sometimes you'd be riding with the boss, sometimes you'd be broke, sometimes you were still too hung over from the night before to think of beer.  But it happened enough to take the sting off the traffic jams while we tried to sneak peeks at women in passing cars. 

 

Something evil happened, though, whenever we'd cross the New Hampshire border.  The TentCo shop was down on Boston's South Shore, but, given the small number of tent companies out there with a warehouse full of tents as big as 80' by 300', we'd sometimes get calls from the Granite State.  Inevitably, those jobs sucked--the drive was far, the guy ordering it was always a prick, and you'd always forget something you needed a hundred miles away.  The only thing that would take the sting off the job was the drinking on the ride home.

 

There was only one problem:  the temptation of the New Hampshire State Liquor Stores every other mile on the highway was too much to pass up.

 

If they'd made them a little harder to get to, maybe advertised them a little less, we'd probably have been content to get an 18-pack of Bud cans and call it a day.  Instead, those blue and yellow signs would taunt you until someone finally broke down and said, "fuck it.  Let's go get some tequila."

 

Oh, you'd still get the beer, of course, but for some reason a fifth of tequila made sense at that point.  Believe me, TentCo had even stranger stories about the things that made sense at the time.

 

TentCo had its share of "beer guys," and Gerry was certainly their king.  But "beer guys" or no, they also knew the time-honored codes of the social drinker.  Every beer guy would make sure he had his share of the tequila, and Gerry could certainly hold his own.  But one day, it was his downfall.

 

Gerry, Don and I had trekked back to a job in New Hampshire to do some maintenance work on a tent we'd put up the week before.  Turns out one of the ropes had come untied.  Five minutes and a bitching-out from the guy who ordered the tent later, and we were on our way back to Mass.  Like I said, the customers were always pricks in New Hampshire.

 

Yet again inspired by the "Live Free or Die" motto of that fine state, we picked up a few social beverages for the ride home, much to Gerry's dismay.  The previous night had not treated him well--oh, he still made it to work that morning, but you could tell he was struggling.  Lunchtime wasn't good to him either, as the tuna sandwich he so foolishly picked from that roadside stand "wasn't sitting so well..."  But, like any TentCo trooper, he grabbed his can of Bud and took a swig of tequila when it came his way.

 

This was followed by a look of panic.

 

"Holy shit, Don.  Pull over, I've got to shit."

 

Don chuckled as he took a drink before assuring Gerry, "OK.  I'll pull over at the next gas station."

 

For some reason, we both looked at Gerry to see if that was cool with him.  It most certainly wasn't.

 

One look told us that Gerry was in that space where any stray motion--a hand gesture, a spoken word, even a raised eyebrow--could soil the truck cab for quite some time.  Traffic laws be damned, Don crossed three lanes in about three seconds and Gerry bolted into the New Hampshire woods.

 

He was in there a long, long time.  At one point, Don and I debated going in after him, but if something really was wrong, none of the outcomes were going to be anything we'd want to deal with.  So we decided to wait-and-see a little longer.

 

Gerry finally emerged from the woods, still a bit unsteady, but able to climb back into the cab of the truck without a surprise encore performance from his "system." 

 

"OK, cool.  Thanks, Don.  Now let's get as far away from there as possible..."

 

Gerry was obviously as eager to get away from the nastiness as we were, but Don suddenly noticed something that he wasn't going to let go.

 

"Gerry...  where are your socks?"

 

I looked down at his feet and sure enough Gerry's traditional tennis socks (for which we gave him a ton of shit, believe you me) were gone.

 

"Um, yeah...  They had to take one for the team in there."

 

Don and I couldn't stop laughing.

 

"Dude, why didn't you use leaves?"  I didn't want him to feel like an idiot, but he was surrounded by nature's Charmin.

 

"I never learned to tell any of the poison shit from the friendly plants.  So I didn't want to take any chances."

 

His logic had a logic of its own... 

 

We rolled back onto the highway and were another beer into the drive, when a sudden bump in the road apparently started a bit of a chain reaction in Gary.  Fortunately, it didn't go too far, but the look of panic was there.

 

Don didn't even have to ask.

 

"I gotcha..." was all he had to say as he pulled another incredible feat of navigation and Gerry didn't even wait for him to stop.

 

"Hey, man!  What are you going to do now--you've got no socks!"

 

Don couldn't stop laughing as he said this.  Apparently we had been wondering the same thing.  All Gerry had to say was, "I'll fucking figure it out when I get there."

 

Again, it must've been a very unpleasant time for Gerry, as Don and I worked through another beer or two waiting for him.  Then, with a victorious fist-pumping march, Gerry emerged from the woods.  Shirtless.

 

"I guess I don't even have to ask, do I?"

 

Don didn't even look at him as he said this.  He just put the truck back in gear and rolled on down the road.  As I handed Gerry a fresh beer, I couldn't stop myself from staring again at that impossible beer gut, just sitting there.  My obvious stare was interrupted as Gerry perfectly balanced the can on it, like it was some kind of portable table.

 

He just grinned and looked at me and said, "why fight it?"