A St. Valentines Day Massacre

It had been a long cold day working high up on a new construction job in Manhattan.We had done a double shift and the fifteen men sitting around the shanty table were too tired to talk or move and just waited for the clock to tick off the last few minutes until the shift ended.They were dirty and sweaty and in a semi non-somnolent state as they counted the minutes till these birds could fly, bringing their worms home to the nest.

Being a Friday night I thought about what chores I had to accomplish the next day and realized that today was February 14, Valentines Day!

"Oh no,” I exclaimed out loud! I had no card or candy and it was 11:15 pm.

Carlo broke the silence asking me what was wrong .

“It is Valentines Day,” I told him.

Everyone of the men suddenly started to wake up, rubbing their eyes and cursing at the same time. They were extremely animated and had the look of a deer in the headlights as panic showed on their faces. Even the foreman had forgotten about it and now the stores were getting ready to close, if they had not done so already.

“Damn this is an emergency. Let's leave now and forget about the last fifteen minutes of pay,” insisted the foreman.

Keep in mind this was a rough bunch covered in hair, muscles, dirt, sweat, and capable of jumping off a forty story building into protective nets to fix something at a minutes notice with testosterone dripping from every pore. The look of panic and fear was comical. What kind of she-devils were they coming home to?

At the foreman’s suggestion we all left, running down the stairs like rats abandoning a sinking ship, fanning out across the neighborhood to find stores with anything left to redeem themselves.

The next week they all showed up for work so I guess they had survived their ordeal and avoided a St.Valentines Day Massacre.

Jim - Feb. 2019