I don’t dislike electricians per se; I dislike all arrogant and haughty jerks and an awful lot of electricians just seem to fit that category. They aren’t all that way of course, but the majority of the ones we used on our home building projects were cut from the same cloth. Their attitude may stem from them having the toughest apprenticeship program, not only to get into in the first place but also to complete, or it may have been because they are paid the highest wages of anyone in the building trades. They also tended to be rather militant in support of their union. The other trades work together and it isn’t unusual for a carpenter or sheet metal worker to help a plumber or other tradesman with a heavy or hard to handle bathtub or shower enclosure to eliminate having to have an otherwise unneeded second man on the job. Try that with an electrician and they threaten to walk off of the job. If another man is needed the company will by God send another electrician out to help, even it is for only a five-minute job.

They are also extremely protective of their knowledge and are usually unwilling to share any of it by answering the other tradesmen’s questions. It seemed like about everyone on the job was also building or remolding their own homes back then and they would help each other out a lot after work or on weekends in sort of a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ symbiotic relationship. Not the electricians; a simple question would be answered by either silence or a long drawn out technical explanation that was impossible to comprehend. Pressed a little further they would just throw a catalog sized National Electric Code book at you and tell you to look it up yourself.

Lester was a typical electrician and then some; he had outscored all of the other applicants on his state test, his two-barrel 289 Mustang was the fastest car in town and he always caught more fish and got a bigger deer than his hunting partners. The only casino gambling back then was in Nevada, and Lester always came back a winner. His wife was better looking and his kid and dog were both much smarter than anyone else’s. I’m sure he would also claim a nine-inch cock. The fact that he was a good electrician was probably the only reason Dad allowed him on our job sites.

Not only was Lester Lectrician, as we called him, the world’s best electrician he was also a world-class bullshit artist. Anyone who has spent some time around job sites or factory lunchrooms has probably heard most of the classic stories that Lester attributed to himself. “I was having a drink with my boss/commanding officer – take your pick- when this really hot babe walks in. I say that I’d sure like to fuck that gal. He says ‘Really? I’ll introduce you. She’s my wife/daughter,” or “My buddy had a ranch and they were losing a lot of sheep to coyotes, so I went to this meeting with him. An environmentalist lady says that the most humane way to control coyotes was to round them up and neuter them so they couldn’t multiply. So I stand up and tell this snooty bitch that the coyotes aren’t raping the sheep, they’re eating them,” or “ I got to talking to this gal in a bar, and I offered her five hundred bucks for a blow job. She finally agreed, so I told her ‘ Well, sweetheart, now that we have established what you are we’ll discuss the price,” and about how he came home and found a strange car in his driveway and some guy bopping his wife. He took his ready-mix truck and filled the guy’s convertible full of concrete. I have no doubt that some of those incidents actually happened but Lester sure as hell wasn’t involved in any of them, much less every one. The only thing he lacked was war stories. He had been too young for Korea and too old for Viet Nam, although he did claim that he had been in the Army. I got to where I just kind of ignored his tall tales and I doubt that any of the crew believed his bullshit.

We were having lunch one day when Lester casually told Carl, the foreman, that there was no way in hell that an electrician would ever wear bib overalls like those Carl had on.

“Oh yeah?” Carl replied. He was enough of a gentleman not to just ignore Lester or tell him to shut up like the rest of the crew would have done.

“Yeah. That rivet on the bottom of the fly can get you into real trouble if you get around high voltage.

“Really?” Carl said. He had been wearing heavy overalls all of his working life, and they all had rivets reinforcing the fly and pockets.

“Yeah. This is a true story. I remember when I was working on the missile silos,” Lester started in on another of his specialties.

I cringed. His tales were all “true stories” and he had already told us about the missile silo projects that he had worked on in the early 60’s. They were scattered all over the West and they had kept a lot of construction workers busy for a long time, and were obsolete by the time they were completed. The new solid fueled shoot-from-the-tube Minuteman missiles that replaced the old Atlas liquid-fueled rockets didn’t have to be elevated to the surface and fueled before launch like the older Atlas, so new sites had to be built. The old sites were junked out and they started all over building new ones. Not only had Lester told us how he personally had overseen the wiring of most of them, he had also sneaked a peek at the supposedly top secret firing circuitry and had discovered that the gray feenumbulator wire mistakenly was connected to the confabulator terminal instead of where ever the hell it belonged, and as any fool could plainly see that would trigger the warhead at missile launch. He had personally notified the pentagon and had gotten things corrected in time, thereby preventing the nuclear holocaust that would have ended life as we know it on the planet. I never did get around to thanking him.

“We had this dumbshit apprentice,” Lester continued, “and he didn’t like getting dirty so he wore those all of the time. Cost him his balls.”

I hadn’t heard this one before, so I started paying at least a little attention to what Lester was saying.

“We were finishing up on one of the silos when this kid came on the job. He had just turned eighteen but didn’t look like he was over fifteen. You know, squeaky voice, no beard, always asking goofy questions. He was a skinny little turd; must not have weighed over a hundred pounds, so I sent him into the service tunnel to install some earthquake braces. It was pretty tight in there and I figured he could handle it by himself. Wasn’t much to it really, all he had to do was drill some holes and set the anchors in them, then run short cables to the conduit.” Lester explained.

“Anyway it was hotter than hell in there so when he came out for lunch he took off his shirt and jeans and just wore the overalls and his skivvies. I was working on something else and I happened to look in on him. He was straddling this high voltage conduit and was just kind of rocking back and forth, looked kind of weird, in fact. I hollered at him and he turned part way around and then I could see that the front of his overalls were tented out. The little fuck had a hard on even though he wasn’t touching himself. I told him to get his ass back to work so he slid down the conduit a few feet and started putting in another anchor. The next time I looked he was right back at the old spot on the conduit and he had another boner.”

“You watch for that stuff, huh?” Carl asked him, only half joking.

Lester ignored the implication and continued his story. “The site was located way out in the middle of nowhere, so instead of paying us to drive back and forth the company gave us subsistence money and told us to fend for ourselves. It was a two hour drive to the nearest town so most of the guys either had travel trailers set up to live in or stayed at the roach motel.”

“What’s that?” I asked, not familiar with that term.

“Some guy bought a bunch of old singlewide mobile homes and turned them into bunk houses,” he answered. “There were about eight beds in each one with thin joiner panels thrown up to allow just enough room for a single bed, and one common bathroom in the whole trailer. They tried bunk beds, but that didn’t work too well; most guys liked a little privacy. There was also a cookhouse trailer set up and he charged just a little less for room and board than our subsistence paid, so most guys stayed out there all week and went to town or home on weekends. We were working twelve hour days anyway so nobody much cared about there not being much to do out there. All of the missile sites had something similar unless they were close to a town, which few were.

“He had the room next to mine and I had just about gotten to sleep that night when his bed started shaking. Hell, he was going at it so hard that it shook the whole damn trailer. I hammered on the wall and hollered at him to knock it off, and a couple of the other guys seconded my motion. The horny little fuck shouldn’t have been out there if he couldn’t go a couple of days without jacking off.”

I had been in the Army and I knew what he meant. Jerking off was okay, and expected of healthy young men, but it wasn’t acceptable to do it right next to other guys who are trying to sleep. You either learned to masturbate silently or you found some private place where no one could hear you thrash away. The official party line was that the filthy, perverted act was prohibited, but since the alternative was a bunch of normal teenagers having wet dreams in their bunks nothing much was said. They knew you were doing it, of course, but everyone else was too so nobody flicked you shit about it unless you made a big production out of it or got caught. Boot camp’s total lack of privacy was a challenge for even the horniest kids, but after that ordeal we all managed to find our own little hidey-holes for the couple of minutes that was required. About the time that I left Viet Nam we got a directive stating that due to the high incidence of VD among the local prostitutes it was okay to masturbate. It was not, however, to be considered a direct order to do so.

“Anyway the next day the kid was back in the tunnel,” Lester said, continuing his story. “He slid down the conduit, paused for a minute in his favorite spot, then continued on when he turned and saw me watching him. That night I heard him leave the trailer and go out into the desert for a while. Anyone want to guess what he was doing?”

“You followed him outside and watched?” Carl asked.

“Hell no!” Lester sounded shocked at the suggestion. “You know what I mean. Anyway, the next day the kid didn’t even bother with putting his jeans on. He knew he would be going back into the tunnel to finish up so he just wore his overalls. He climbed onto the conduit, slid down to his favorite spot, and let out a big scream and then just sort of slumped down, unconscious. The first thing they teach you is to never touch an unconscious electrician if he is touching anything electrical, so I got an insulated rescue pole, hooked onto him, and pulled him out. He was breathing but unconscious. The crotch of his overalls was smoldering so I pulled them off of him. The bottom of his ball sack was burned clear off and his nuts were as black as Old Coalie’s ass and still smoking. One of his nuts fell off as soon as I rolled him over. He was still breathing and wasn’t bleeding, so we just waited for the ambulance. By the time it got there his other ball were starting to smell pretty ripe, like rotten meat does when it is cooking.”

“What happened?” Carl asked, now also caught up in the story.

“I got to looking at his overalls, and not only had he not worn underwear that morning he had also put a little piece of aluminum foil in the bottom of his fly, right where the rivet would touch his nuts. It turned out that there was a bad wire inside the conduit and a thin place on the conduit’s plastic outside jacket. The first time he slid across the thin spot he must have felt a little tickle from the rivet to his balls, maybe just enough to give him a boner. His skivvies probably insulated him from it enough so that it wasn’t much of a jolt. As soon as he tried it with the piece of aluminum foil he fried his nuts.”

I had heard so many “true stories” from Lester that I didn’t even pretend to believe this one was true. It wasn’t until a couple years later when Lester had headed for greener pastures, probably as a special consultant for NASA or something similar befitting his abilities, than I got to wondering about his tale. A fire sprinkler installer who wasn’t prone bullshitting told me a similar story. In his version a negligent electrician supervisor had left a cover plate off of a junction box after testing circuits in a service tunnel. He then sent a young apprentice in to do some routine task, and in the process the hapless youth brushed up against the open wires and gave himself a 440 volt three-phase vasectomy. The supervisor was determined to be responsible and subsequently lost his license. According to the sprinkler fitter the only work the guy could get after that was residential wiring jobs in towns where he wasn’t known.

For all I know both stories are bullshit. If not, there is a guy out there somewhere who probably wishes to hell he’d never decided to be an electrician.