The Story of Ol' Pegleg

A Fight Against Homophobia

Back in the early 90’s I was a young lad working at the local glove factory. You meet all sorts of people at a factory. People of different ages, different sexes, different races, different sexual orientation. There are the party people who smoke dope in the parking lot, the drunks who kept beer in the restroom toilet tanks, the pill people, and the straights. And by straights I mean your average, everyday go to church on Sunday living in their three bedroom house with the picket fence.

Adapting to that situation, when you are pretty much locked in a room with these folks for eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, gives you a pretty diverse perspective about humanity. You have to become almost a chameleon. At the same time you learn that what unites us, on a personal level, is greater than what divides us.

I became friends with all of these people. More like family really. It was third shift, 11pm to 7am, which is a whole other subset of freaks and carnies, myself included. But every once in a while, a new person would come in, or someone would transfer in from first shift or second shift, and they would need to be broken in, so to speak.

Some people made it through the ball busting and became one of us, others didn’t. But what I loved, what I loved was busting on the homophobes. Lots of very openly gay people on the third shift, lots of very closeted gay people on the third shift who would fight any person who called them gay, some people who would quietly judge or play along, but there was no hate. We simply would not tolerate it.

Now and again a Joe Dirt-looking character would come into the world and try to cozy up to some of us other Joe Dirt-looking characters. And homophobia was strong in the early 90s. It was at the end of the AIDS epidemic. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was the word of the day. And people threw around slurs like “fag” and “queer” all the time.

Until they tried to come into the circle, and say something like, “look at Jimmy over there, he looks like a fag.” Now I’m about as straight as they come, but I would look back at them and say something like, “he looks like that, but his cock tastes great.”

The look on their faces would be like a scene from A Bronx Tale..

I can’t recall the exact year when my buddy Richard got the CB radio, but it was a great time. Me and Richard and Rick would go out on our 20-minute break around 2am and listen to all of the people talking. It was like if the Phil Hendrie show was for real.

We would listen and smoke pot and laugh at all of the characters as the five dudes all vied for the one woman who was on there. Heartbreaker was very protective of Blue Eyes. One night he came up with the best line ever: “I savor a woman.”

And wouldn’t you know, one night, some dude started railing against fags and pussies and all that macho stuff. As if it was a symphony, Rick looked at Richard, Richard looked at me, and then Richard handed me the mic.

“Breaker 1-4 this is Pegleg anybody got their ears on.”

Now, keep in mind, we had one twenty minute break each night. So this went on for weeks and weeks. Pegleg was a Desert Storm veteran who lost his leg in the war. He thought that America was weak for not just taking over the entire Middle East. He was a hero…until…

“Ya know Heartbreaker, you’ve got a damn sexy voice. Any chance we could meet up sometime and maybe you could fuck me in he ass?”

This did not go over well. An American hero was now a disgusting “faggot” who needed to get off the radio. And then Pegleg would start talking about all of the other CB guys he had made love to, and they protested, loudly.

It got so hot for a while that we would sit in the factory parking lot and watch cars with whip antennas drive up and down the highway trying to triangulate our position. They wouldn’t have liked what they found, as it would look like something from the biker bar scene.

So we would let it cool off, we would heat it back up. Pegleg would apologize, saying that he was a lonely war vet, who perhaps had some PTSD, and just couldn’t control himself. The people on the radio would then argue with each other about how Pegleg deserved respect for his service, and it was okay that he was gay, he just needed to calm down on talking about it so much.

Pegleg would go at it again. From loved, to hated. “Now Pegleg, there you go again we’ve talked about this, we respect your service but keep that shit to yourself.”

I’d guess this ran on for a month, or two. Rumor had it that a couple of CB guys “found” Pegleg and ripped his radio out of his car and busted it. I don’t know that this actually happened, but it was enough for me to say, okay, we’ve gone too far here. We’re not changing minds we’re putting people in actual danger.

So our 20-minute breaks went back to smoking pot while Rick played guitar and Richard told lies and we talked about the next concert we wanted to see. A year or so later Rick quit and Richard went to first shift. I hung around until the factory closed in 2001 and a couple years later, well, another war in Iraq.

As I write this, I’m not really sure whether Pegleg was a force for good, an unintentional populist agitator, or someone getting laughs at the expense of others. I know what it was intended to be. An attempt to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I will close with a song tribute to my buddy Jimmy, who worked at the factory and was, I’m sorry, obviously gay, but didn’t come out until after it closed. He died of an opioid overdose in the early 2000s. In the day though, he and I did our fair share of coke in his late-model BMW. And while he never hit on me in any way, he played this song a lot.