HUNK SHOTS || m/m, b/b, BL

2: MANNY & TINO - MEETING UP AGAIN YEARS LATER

PHOTO above - Manny
PHOTO center - Tino

*A Little Italy Story*

Sometimes it takes freaking forever for true love to bloom ...

It was a hell of a wintry night for early spring. A nor'easter had roared up the East Coast burying the shoreline states with two-three-four feet of snow, all wind-whipped wildly into drifts that had buried cars and pickup trucks and even small buildings. I'd been out landscaping with my crews all this last week, but yesterday, with the storm warnings in the forecast we had to gear-up for snowplowing again and put the plows back on the trucks.

I should've known better than to take them off. You're not safe from snow anywhere along the upper East Coast until May first. But we dudes want to get those plows off the trucks. The weather's warm and the sun's shining and you want to be outside working, thinking positive thoughts that winter's over and it's not coming back this year for a surprise attack.

Even though it doesn't usually work out that way. It seems that almost every year two or three storms come along to remind everyone that a whole lot of America has more wintry months than warm sunny ones. And I was right here in the thick of it, the East Coast nor'easter belt.

They're already calling it the Storm of the Century. That's all I heard on the radio the last eighteen hours in the truck. It beat out the one from last year and two from the year before, the announcers were saying. But just twenty-two years into the century, I figure it's jumping the gun to call it the worst storm already. One of the older guys in the business I saw earlier at Starbucks agreed with that.

"Fuck, this ain't nothin'," he said, as he and I downed some grande mochas to help keep awake. "Shoulda been around in the Eighties and Nineties. Almost every nor'easter that came along topped the previous one. There were so many really bad ones I don't remember which one actually got crowned the worst."

And they complain about global warming? Looks like we need even more. It was already the first week of April and here we were buried in snow again. We'd finished up plowing all the driveways and parking lots and I sent the three other drivers home to get some sleep. We'd have to go out later in the morning to mop up, but things were pretty good for now. The snow had stopped after almost a twenty-four hour steady downfall and it sure did look pretty as I drove back down to Little Italy from the suburbs. The roads were passable but, especially as I got into the city, a lot of cars were stranded, abandoned, and buried in drifts. It would take a couple days of hard work for crews to dig everybody out.

I had to ignore a lot of people flagging me down for help. It was a company rule that none of us helped anyone stranded unless it was one of our customers on their own property. We couldn't take the chance of breaking down trying to tow out stranded motorists we didn't work for. We had too much work to get done to take that chance.