Rip said he'd be over in about 10 minutes. So I waited.
An hour later, he hadn't appeared. Still I waited. Rip Watkins had cast a spell upon me. I was under his power and was willing to wait for him for over an hour.
Rip had told me he'd get a special radio antenna I needed.
Then, when I stopped by his store to pick it up, his brother, Major, told me Rip wasn't working at the time. He was, Major reported, at home, so we called him on the phone.
Rip said he'd be over in 10 minutes. And then he took his time.
First, Rip told us, he'd have to "Stop at the warehouse" to pick up the right model antenna. That sounded fairly reasonable. Stop by the warehouse. I imagined it was located in a modern industrial park outside Waterford.
Later, Major told me what that meant.
"Ya," he said, "that's Rip's catch-all line: 'I got that at the warehouse.' It could mean anything. What he calls 'at his warehouse' could be anywhere you could think of. He might have to stop for it somewhere, but it ain't gonna be no warehouse."
Finally Rip showed up, bursting with a huge smile into the dusty darkness of the showroom of his TV repair store. What began as an ostensible "10 minutes" had become more than an hour. That made Rip chuckle, and within moments, the three of us were standing there laughing about it.
"He's always been this way," Major had explained to me during our long wait for his phantom brother.
"Guys that's known him 15-20 years will all tell you that. They just accept it. They don't hold it against him…it's just the way he is. If there's something he don't want to do, he can procrastinate like you can't believe."
Rip, I finally guessed, was one of those completely irresponsible guys who - through some means or another - are able to get away with living that way.
"He's got certain defense tactics," Major explained as we stood near a row of dated black-and-white TV's, talking wine and women and waiting for his brother.
"Among those who know him, he's a legend," Major said.
Major's stories about his brother began warming up nicely.
Rip - it was becoming evident - was Pontiac's answer to Fred Sanford. I found a pencil.
"Rip's quite an unusual character," said Major, who installs burglar alarms for a living.
"As a businessman, he's amazing. It's almost like he makes a living by accident. I know he could make three times as much money if he ever made up his mind he wanted to."
Instead, Rip procrastinates. Or snoozes.
"One time he fell asleep in his car while he was pulled up at some railroad tracks, waiting for a train," Major recalled. "This guy came running in here and said, 'Hey!, Go wake up your brother, he's got traffic lined up all the way back to the golf course.'"
Major and I got something of a roar over that one.
"I'm sure he's got anxieties, just like everyone else but I don't know about them," Major said with authority. "The man's a character.
"He can fix a TV just about as good as anybody around here," Major said. "He's got an ego thing about it. He's at his best when people bring him sets that other shops can't fix - when he's in his prime."
I was beginning to understand the power of Rip Watkins.
"In the old days, Rip could really stall," Major said. "Like when we were kids and had to do the dishes, Rip would do just about anything he could to get out of it.
"Then, on those nights when he'd finally had to face up to it, he'd just leave the water runnin' so it sounded like he was washing and then he'd fall asleep leaning on the oven door. If it's something he don't want to do, he can really procrastinate."
That sounded familiar.
"Some of our brothers still say that sleeping on the oven door baked Rip's brains out but I don't think so," Major theorized.
"If it had, he wouldn't be able to work on those TV circuits the way he does."
Rip works all night in his cluttered back shop sometimes, his stubby cigar always in place.
"He does better at night," Major said. "It's easier tracing all those circuits when the phone's not always ringing."
That's how Rip can act like a loser and still be a winner, I realized.
Like everyone else, the man just needs his space.
Incidentally, the price was right on the antenna.