goat

there is a faint tap in my head, a trip, trip, tripping of dainty cloven hooves echoeing one level above my conscious brain. the further west i get, the deeper into this trip the clearer he seems to ring.
 he comes and he goes, was gone for a while and like a goat sometimes wasnt welcome when he was here.
i imagine him roaming steel decks and void tank spaces in the barges and ferries where he was born bleating quitely just to here his goaty voice echo.
 The goat came to be suddenly, yanked from thin air into existance with one sentence. not even a sentence, an expletive. "Hey goat boy!" from across the shop floor a couple years into my shipbuilding career.
 I had done some steel work proven myself among the old men with scars and mustaches and dinge and stories. a few of them took real liking to me and amongst them my first friend and coworker in this tribe of shipbuilders was Brian Starling. he introduced me as the kid. "Hey this is the kid i been telling you about!" 
He wasn't around when Brent johnstone called me goat boy on my second morning as an aluminum fabricator for the provinces flop of a fast catamaran project. but enough people where there that it made it back to him. Hes still pissed 15 years later that he didn't get to nick name me. but he didn't. brent did. and would live to regret it almost instantly.
 I've never been really good at the snappy comeback thing and always kinda shy but it was obvious he was fishing and i had to say something or forever be trod upon. still it was a suprise to me even when i piped up with a question.
"Are you calling me goat boy because you know i'm from saltspring and your too chickenshit to call me a sheep fucker?" just 22 and not stupid, jaw drops and stuttering begins. Goat boy is born.
  It stuck like glue. i was goat boy for years, then the boy got dropped. bosses would introduce new guys to old guys they would be working with. you are with brian starling, you, pete maggoria. you go work with steve sharp. and you can get in the manbasket with the goat!
startled sideways looks, questioning voices. "umm....the goat?" which is where i would be expected to go baaahhhhh...
 Poor brent, he was a prick to everyone and he tried with me but i had him from then on. I really did feel sorry for him from time to time because he obviously never met goats before. I know goats.
 We had milk goats when i was a boy on saltspring. They are good people for the most part and pretty much anything they do to convince people otherwise is just in the nature of the beast.
 goats will survive on anything but they seem to actually relish the stuff others wouldnt know how to approach. roses. goats love to eat roses, and thistles! but roses never seem to get grown for food. so when the goat eats every last rose bush down to the mean spiky stem in the dirt someones gonna be mad.
 goats like to see around them and can climb very well, hooves on car roofs are never appreciated...
likewise eating clothes of the line, which brings us to another goaty point. getting mad at a goat is fine. if you like being mad. kicking a goat is a sure way to break your foot.
 So i lived a goaty existance it wasn't hard. the shipyards are a great spot for a goat. we worked hard and we played hard and sometimes the two would overlap to the point where living and working where the same and playing was something you did at both.
 The night i got my horns was like that.