The Greatest Generation’s Greatest Grandpa

My grandfather had no soul. His soul had been amputated at birth and all that remained was a raging thundercloud that hailed brimstone and human skulls. After the removal of his heart, a jet engine had been lowered into his chest cavity with an industrial crane, to accommodate for the fact that he had no blood in his veins, but only surging currents of molten iron. His skin was flesh-toned medieval steel, and his eyes were priceless blue, razor sharp diamond chips. His facial expressions came in only two varieties: Grim and Grimmer. We were paused at a red light, and in one vice-like hand he held a cup of root beer and sipped at it through a straw, until an annoying crackling noise was produced from the mixture of air and root beer popping in the straw.

“Grandpa, I don’t think there’s anymore root beer left in there.”

My grandfather grunted, turned to me, spewed a cloud of sulfurous ash out of his nostrils and said: “Waste not, want not.” The slurping sound continued for another minute. Deciding I agreed, I picked up my own depleted root beer and joined in. The sound in the car was like raindrops on a tin roof.

We had just spent all day taking Little League sports pictures, and were on the way home after stopping off for fast food. In the twilight of his years, my grandfather had become a local photographer for youth sports. I helped him handle the kids. For one reason or another, his stony face could not make small children in dodgeball uniforms smile, even when he pulled out his pro-move and replaced the classic “Cheese” line with “Fuzzy Pickles.” My job consisted of making the team sign, doing exaggerated motions with my hands to get seven and eight year olds to look at the camera, and shouting, “Smile!” For this he paid me minimum wage, and taught me how to use a camera.

Occasionally, but not often, a parent would step out of line. They would yell at their children in an abusive manner. My grandfather would walk up behind them, tap them on the shoulder, and when the parent turned around they did not see a truculent old man. They saw “Master Chief George William Barlow” a name synonymous in the minds of many with God or Satan. He would tell said parent that their child’s turn had come up. The parent would gulp. My grandfather would murder their soul with his eyes. The parent would hand him their pay envelopes almost in the way of an offering to an avenging Norse deity. My grandfather would grunt, and that was that. Master Chief George Barlow did not suffer from a short fuse. He suffered from no fuse at all. Action. Reaction.

The light turned green, and my grandfather took a second to put his drink back in his cup-holder. A horn honked behind him. His drink hovered above its place in the cup-holder. The diamond of his eyes screeched against the metal of his eyelids, as they scoped to the rearview mirror.

“Hurry up, old man! Get your fucking ass on the road!” I turned around in my seat. It was a group of nineteen to twenty-one year old thugs. Three or four of them, hanging in various states of disarray out of the windows of a small Ford pick-up, had their middle fingers raised. My sixty-seven year old Grandfather shifted the car into park.

“Those poor, poor children,” I mumbled.

The driver’s side door opened. The car’s right side jumped up as two leather shoes hit the pavement. As I watched my grandfather walk slowly away from the car, I was filled with the same kind of dread a criminal feels when the chain on a guard dog suddenly snaps.

The first thing the would-be thugs did was laugh. The first of them to realize that laughter was inappropriate was the driver. His laughter faded when the shadow of Master Chief George Barlow fell across his face, blotting out the sun. Like an Aztec priest, my grandfather possessed the power to summon eclipses.

“Can I help you with something, son?” his voice rumbled like an earthquake. I heard it not with my ears, but experienced it as a vibration throughout my entire body.

His voice struck them all like a tranquilizer, running through their tissues, wrapping their organs in thick paralyzing gauze, before shrouding their minds in a dense haze. Disoriented, all they knew was that the old man made them afraid, and that it pounded down at them from every direction like a hammer. The ground beneath them, the sky above them, all were owned and dominated by the old man. They existed only by the whim of his mercy, and they were made to know this with every gravelly syllable he uttered.

He did not need to insult them. He did not need to swear. The power of his voice was the only tool he utilized. He spoke, too softly for me to hear anything but a few words.

For seven minutes, as I watched the car clock click over as time slowed, all traffic for a block in either direction came to a stop. The hooligans in the car were nodding their heads too quickly to look cool. One of them had pulled up his pants to hide the rim of his underwear from view.

Finally, the driver extended his hand to my grandfather. It was taken, pumped twice, and released. As my grandfather turned back to me, and left the hooligans behind, I heard several cries of “Thank you, Mr. Barlow!”

He climbed back into the driver’s seat. The light was red again. He picked up his root beer and started to slurp.

“What did you say to those guys, Grandpa?”

Out of the corner of his mouth, without interrupting the popping soda bubbles, he said, “Fuzzy Pickles.”

When the light turned green, he depressed the accelerator and took me home.