The Tangierman's Lament by Earl Swift

Author:Earl Swift [Swift, Earl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9780813937205
Google: hgyQBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2014-12-19T00:25:27+00:00

Flush with Success

It happens every day, often several times a shift: Winfred L. Griffin will be piloting his big tanker truck through traffic, or stop to pick up payload, when a passing stranger will read aloud the slogan painted down the truck’s sides and stop to ask: Is that for real? Griffin will smile, and nod, and say yes, that really is the motto of the E. W. Brown Septic Tank Service. Has been for decades, since just after the company’s creation in 1945.

So it is on this raw February morning: Griffin stops at a 7-Eleven for ice water, and the clerks marvel over the slogan; Griffin pulls up to a pineshaded home on Lynnhaven Bay, and the owner chuckles at the truck’s paint job. And close to lunchtime, Griffin prepares to pump out a grease trap, a steaming vat of gray water and congealed fat hidden beneath a manhole cover out back of a Norfolk restaurant.

He’s prying it open when a delivery van stops nearby. Its driver, staggering under the weight of a big sheet of Plexiglas, slows as he passes Griffin’s truck. “‘If it don’t go down,’” he reads, “‘call Brown.’”

Griffin nods sagely. “That’s right.”

“If it don’t go down, call Brown,” the man says again, this time booming. He walks on. Griffin watches him weave toward the open grease trap, oblivious to the danger.

“Watch out for that hole, or you will go down,” Griffin yells. The man corrects his course as Griffin adds: “And ain’t nobody from Brown gonna pull you back out.”

If they worked for any other septic tank service company, the men of E. W. Brown might crisscross the region incognito, their mission all but overlooked, the contents of their 3,000-gallon tanker trucks a mystery. As it is, they enjoy a minor celebrity status. Griffin’s truck provokes smiles in traffic, waves, shouts of recognition.

The slogan is one of those rare pieces of advertising copy that transcends salesmanship to border on art. It is funny. Its unabashed honesty feels oddly nostalgic, almost sweet. It is graced with haiku’s brevity. It is instantly memorable, partly because it rhymes, and partly because its ungrammatical “don’t” makes it monosyllabic. And it’s a little gross, the “it” unnamed but universally understood.

“Everybody says something,” Griffin says, downshifting his truck with a stick a yard long. “I hear it, probably, three, four times a day.

“One thing about this job: You meet some really nice people.”

The job most days requires Griffin to visit six or seven homes and businesses. Today’s first stop: A two-bath Virginia Beach house with a septic tank that hasn’t been emptied in years. Griffin pierces the lawn with a metal probe, eventually hears a hollow knock, then shovels away turf to expose the concrete lid to a 4-by-8-by-6-foot crypt. He pries it open. The hole utters a fragrant sigh.

Griffin marches to his truck, backs it to the lawn’s edge, pulls on a pair of gloves, and latches a four-inch-wide, celery-green hose to the truck’s vacuum pump. The other end he snakes into the lawn’s dark chamber.

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