Sunday, March 23, 2014

Barry Clifford: Tales From New York continued - Mad Bob (part 2)

And so it was: Bob was my new best friend on this constuction site. It was not love at first sight, more a marriage of convenience.  I, for the most part, would be on a hanging scaffold somewhere about thirty floors from the bottom, give or take a floor or two, repairing damaged brick and damp problems, and Bob was always above me on safer ground on the roof terraces. I needed bricks and mortar passed down and Bob was my conduit to giving them to me by putting them in a bucket hanging on a rope and slowly lowering them to me to put onto the scaffold. Trust played a big part and there was not much around here, and I always asked Bob nicely for things, very nicely. Asking him the wrong way might just lead to my early demise with visions in my head of Bob cutting through the steel cables, that were the only things between life on this planet for me and whatever was beyond the clouds for my soul. You see there was a blank spot beyond Bob's eyes that not many breached and it was not advisable to try.  

With the little trust there was about I got to know Bob a bit better and liked him. He was not a bully and very apologetic if he thought he had pushed against you too hard physically by way of an accident. He was a hero to all who knew him as far as I could see because two months before I started with the company a terrible accident happened and it was Bob that saved a man from certain death.

When you drop a hanging scaffold from a tall building you need something to hang it to, like a strong chimney on the roof terrace or a bulkhead of some sort. In the absence of that, a series of concrete weights tie backs is put in place to offset the weight of the scaffold, and the bricks to be put on it combined with the total weight of the men who will work it. A mathematical formula was normally used for this but the foreman on this day was not good at maths. When the scaffold started to decend from twenty eight floors up with three men on it, it creaked and groaned under it's massive load and started to collapse as if in slow motion. One man lost his arm on the way down from a plank that had morphed into a missile hitting him hard and he lived for another hour; the second man was dead on arrival when he hit the ground while the last man hanging was literally doing just that, clinging onto a steel bar from the roof terrace as his life started to pass before him. Bob happened on the scene before it passed altogether, grabbing Jamaican Geodfrey’s hand just before his grip loosened further under his own weight of two hundred and forty portly pounds and some muscle. If it was anyone but Bob that day that extended his hand, Geodfrey would not have made it or perhaps the man that would have tried with him. Only a man of Bob’s strength could have done it and Geodfrey would be one of Bobs greatest admirers thereafter and forever more. One day, feeling comfortable, I asked Bob to tell me a story abut his life in prison. The story he was to tell was so crazy and funny it could only be true.
To be continued.......
By Barry Clifford    

    

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