God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (15 page)
Okay, Okay, I’m a Girl—
Just Fix the Damn Car
As a general rule car-related problems are best dealt with by human beings possessed of penises and very low estrogen levels. And here’s what happens when you (a girl type: no penis, lots of estrogen) try to do something sensible for yourself about a car-related issue. Two of my nearest and dearest guy types, Allen Payne and Trey Hunt, had borrowed my car to return to Jackson from the Neshoba County Fair in the blistering heat of a Mississippi August. On their way back, something happened to the car that made the power steering stop doing that thing it does. It also made the air conditioning stop and the power windows not work. The upshot of all this is: It took both of them to steer the car. The steering wheel was just short of the melting point and, as luck would have it, they had no oven mitts, and they could not even roll the windows down. It is a wonder they didn’t drown in their own sweat.
Now, I contend that movies portraying us Southerners as sweating all the time are grossly inaccurate—up to a point. They show us just going about our everyday lives, sweating like pigs at every turn—lawyers in court with big ole sweat rings under their arms, shirts unbuttoned, sticking to their backs; women working in the drugstore, rivers of sweat running down between their bosoms; kids all red-faced, hair matted to their little heads. Now, most of the time, this just doesn’t happen because we invented high ceilings, ceiling fans, and sitting on your ass. The only time we really and truly sweat like they show us doing in the movies is on that odd occasion that that thing in the car that makes the power steering, the power windows, and the air conditioner work—happens to break.
So Allen and Trey rolled up at my house looking like a couple of movie rednecks. They sort of fell out on the ground when we opened the car doors. They begged us to move the sprinkler over there by them and just let them lie there for an hour or so. Feeling a certain amount of responsibility for their current slow-roasted condition, I popped the hood of the Volvo, as if I understood the first thing about any of the stuff under there. Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit, if I didn’t look down and there is this little belt-looking thing, just sort of hanging off this little wheel-looking thing, and I picked it up and said, “Hmmmm . . . I bet this is all it needs.”
Thinking that car repair is not nearly so complicated as they make out, I, with broken belt-looking thing in hand, take myself to the car-parts place. It is a Saturday, midmorning, and the place is hopping. I’m talking fifty cars in the parking lot of the car-parts place. They are out there in shorts, no shirts on their hairy backs, beer guts hanging—that and no shoes. Just crawling up under the car, frying on the hot pavement, getting dirt, small bits of gravel and gum wrappers hung up in the hair on their backs, thankyouverymuch. Who are these gross individuals and where did they come from? And don’t they have mamas, wives, and/or mirrors to tell them not to go to the store half-nekkid? I am gagging so bad I nearly forget why I am there, which is to buy another belt-looking thing for my car.
I go on into the cool, and the car-parts guy axes can he hep me, and I hold up the broken belt-looking thing and say, “I need a new one of these.” Which I thought was pretty clear in and of itself, but I went on to explain in typical Southern fashion, meaning in great detail, how some friends of mine had borrowed my car and the power steering, air conditioning, and power windows all quit working, and I bet they were plenty hot up in that car, didn’t he reckon? I told him how we wondered what in this world could have caused all this mayhem, and even though none of us knew shit-diddly about cars, we were compelled to look under the hood anyway, and what did we find when we did but this little broken belt-looking thing hanging down and we just bet anything that’s what was wrong and so here I was to get a new one and did he have one?
So he goes to his computer and fiddles around with it and says that, well, it could be four or five different belt-looking things, which one did I need, whereupon I held up the busted one and said I want one just like this, only not busted. So he made several trips “to the back” and he brought out a different belt-looking thing every time. I, the unskilled and unschooled, could tell from a block away that each and every one of them was twice as long and half as thick and so they were more than likely not the right ones, but he went through this painstaking process of holding them up together and comparing them closely before he determined for certain that he needed to go “to the back” and try again. He was really studying my problem hard and hmmmming and pondering a whole lot. He said, now, you don’t have any idea which belt this is, do you? And I said no I didn’t; all I knew was the power steering, the air conditioning, and the power windows all went out at the same time. He said, ho, that was just what he needed to know, and I said that’s what I figured and that was how come I
told
him all that the
first thing
. Anyway, he finally went “to the back” and got it, but I had to take it home with me and have it put on.
I tried to get Moon Pie to meet me at the parts place in nothing but a pair of shorts and scoot around on the hot pavement under the cars with the real men. But he was too shy. It’s just as well. He doesn’t have what it takes to fit in with that crowd—no hair on his back.
Hey! It Works!
Truly the way to a man’s heart is to ask him for help—with anything, anything at all. I promise you, it doesn’t matter what it is—they love it. My friend Bruce Browning’s business card is so revealing in this regard. It simply shows his name, and right underneath reads, “Perhaps I can help,” and gives his phone numbers. He just lives to serve, and we do love to oblige him. Before applying this globally, we thought that this was a theory that needed road testing.
So Tammy and I went to a big barbecue shindig and hung out with the team from the Viking Range Corporation in Greenwood, Mississippi. We picked them for a number of reasons, the primary one being that since they have the best barbecue equipment, they would also have the best barbecue, and barbecue is very important to us. One thing you can count on at a barbecue contest: lots and lots of guys doing guy stuff, and this means that all but the most stouthearted women have been run off a long time ago. We dearly love a bunch of guys doing guy stuff, and we knew that the women who had not been scared off would be our kind of women as well. And it would be a great proving ground for our theory about Men Loving to Help.
We hadn’t been there five minutes before Tammy announced to the team leader, Bob Gregory, that she was pretty sure that I was starving to death, so could he maybe help us find a little something to eat. (“A little something” is our favorite food because when you ask for it, you’re assured of getting a big lot of something, and you know how we feel about that.) Before I could sigh deeply even once, Bob had slammed down a full slab of Viking-roasted ribs in front of me. I am happy to report that not only were they perfect, there was plenty of them, and nobody else even ate one of them. I ate the entire slab.
Then, simply by asking for their help, we got them to fetch beers, find music we liked, and dance with us. But then I put it to the ultimate test. As Tammy stared at me dumbstruck, I, with a completely straight face, told one of the guys that I could not get my beer can out of the huggy—would he help me with it? Well, you’d have thought I’d asked him to lift the rear end of the car off my mother, he was so happy to help me and so proud that he was chosen for the honor and positively bursting over his success in this endeavor. Then I pushed it—and Tammy—completely over the edge when I thanked him, blinked slowly, and asked if he would mind opening my new beer for me; it’s so hard with long nails, you know. Since Tammy and I are more the type to break off the top of a stubborn beer bottle and drink the broken glass, it is beyond the realm that we would ask for help opening a pop-top. Tammy still gets hysterical whenever she thinks of it. Being a girl will just flat wear you out, I’m saying.
Occasionally there does come a situation when you’ve just
got
to have a guy—like when there’s a spider, for instance. Your basic spider scenario creates the absolute necessity for a guy—your girlfriends are worthless to you in the event of a spider. When my friend Janet Mayer first moved to town, she and I bonded in quite a few ways, one of which was a healthy fear and loathing of spiders. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know, they are dandy little creatures that accomplish undeniable good in the world (although I personally have never observed them doing anything worthy of note). I don’t care, I hate them. I wish they were all dead and gone. But Janet,
Janet
had a full-blown phobia of anything with eight legs, and when she shared with me the genesis of that phobia, well, all I can say is it would have put that Muffet chick in her grave.
Janet had just moved to a new apartment in a new town and she eagerly awaited the delivery of her new sofa. The store delivery guys brought it and put it in place. That evening, she settled in for an evening of eating crap and lolling about on the new sofa, watching TV, when her eye wandered admiringly up the back of the new sofa. There—right by her very head—was a spider the size of a dachshund just looking at her. She naturally levitated to the ceiling on the far side of the room, where she pondered what to do. New in town, she knew no one. So she called the police and told them there was someone in her apartment. They hotfooted it on over and arrived to find her sobbing and shaking outside her front door. She ’fessed up.
They yelled at her for calling 911 over a bug and turned in disgust to leave, whereupon she threw herself on their mercy and at their feet, literally, shrieking that they had to help her! Please! Since she made enough noise that people were starting to look out their windows, the cops figured they had to go inside with her. She pointed tremulously at the dreaded sofa. One cop held the flashlight, while the other one bravely yanked the cushions off. Suddenly the spider appeared and cops, flashlights, and “Whoa—shits!” were flying to all points in the room. Janet, vindicated, was yelling, “See? See? I told you! I told you! Getitgetitgetitgetitgetit!”
What with all the hubbub, Godzilla retreated to parts unknown. So then the three of them, Janet and the two policemen, were paralyzed. What to do? What to do? The cops were wishing she had called the fire department. Janet just wanted to climb out a window and abandon the whole deal, maybe move to Jersey and change her name. They had to do something. Janet suggested torching the sofa. They agreed the idea had merit, but what if there were more spiders in there and the fire just flushed them out? No, they decided it would be better to track and kill the one and then she could return the sofa as “defective,” which it most certainly was.
17
Vacations: His and Hers
T
here is a disparity between what we (female types) think is a great vacation and what they (male types) think is a great vacation. Now, me, I think a cruise is just about your perfect vacation. One of the main selling points of a cruise is the time available for not doing Jack Shit. You can not do Jack Shit for the entire duration of a cruise. One reason is there is nothing that you can possibly need that is not on that boat. Add to that the staggering number of lackeys; as a passenger, you have at least twelve to fifteen of them assigned to you personally, and their sole reason for being is to prevent you from having to do Jack Shit. In addition, a whole covey of free-floating lackeys will come to your aid should your own personal set be out performing some other task for you when another urgent need arises—maybe a new umbrella for your drink. I do so love lackeys, and there are just hardly any at my house. Truth be told, there is only one—and she is me.
Another great thing about a cruise is the excellent food. The first qualification for food to be excellent, in my book, is that somebody else prepare it, and all I have to do is show up and eat it. And there needs to be plenty of it—especially if other people want some of it, too. On a cruise, somebody else does all the cooking and apparently they do it round the clock because there is food everywhere you look, whenever you look. You can even order every single thing on the menu at every single meal and nobody will bat an eye. I love to do this because I always want to taste everything, and plenty of times I want to eat every scrap of it. But then, I am a notorious pigwoman.
Some of my fellow Queens are also notorious pigwomen. Actually, all of us are notorious pigwomen. Our very favorite spud stud, Skippy Nessel, took two of us out to eat one night, and, notorious big spender that he is, even Skippy was staggered by the bill. Not that he complained, mind you. Our Skippy is generous and indulgent to a fault, which is, of course, why we adore him so. That and the fact that he personally purchases our fishnet stockings every year. In exchange for his purchase, he has been named the Official Seam Straightener for the Sweet Potato Queens and, as such, is responsible for making absolutely certain that each and every one of our stocking seams is straight all the way up the back of our lovely legs. It takes a real man for this job, and that would be our Skippy. No one else is allowed to call him Skippy, of course. Skippy is our pet name for him, and he is our pet and ours alone. But anyway, when he took me and Tammy out to eat, he got into a lively discussion with the waiter about the quantity of food and drink consumed and the very large bill that resulted. At some point in that dialogue, we acquired the label of pigwomen. But we are Skippy’s pigwomen, and we are all happy about that.
What I’m saying is that the Queens like vacations that are luxurious and pampering in nature, ones that involve lots of lolling about in lush surroundings. Guys, on the other hand, do not.
The following is an absolute true-life example of what can happen if you give a guy a bunch of money and a travel agent. It should provide all the proof you will ever need to support this ironclad rule: Never Let a Guy Plan a Vacation.
A good friend of mine recently returned (by the skin of his teeth) from a “dream vacation” that cost a gazillion and a half dollars. My friend Bill and his friend Ron put their heads together to figure out the farthest-away place that would cost the most
possible
money and time to reach, and would offer the
worst
accommodations imaginable, where they could go to and try to kill something big. Hmmm. How about Bearplop, Alaska?
So Bill and Ron coughed up big bucks and went to an inordinate amount of trouble to go to this godforsaken place in the nether regions of Alaska in order to hunt moose and grizzly bears. See, this is what the other women and I think qualifies this trip under the stupid category. Who of sound mind would go out of his way to try to have a confrontation with a grizzly bear? A guy, that’s who. And clearly, a guy with not enough fiscal responsibility weighing him down. These guys have got that old problem (I never have it myself): You know what I mean, when you get too much money in your checking account, it will start backing up on you. You have to keep it moving freely through there in order to avoid the backup problem. When the money gets backed up, you resort to absurd measures to clear it out in a hurry.
Anyway, they have to fly for a couple of days to get to the part of Alaska that has people living in it, before they can head out to their forsaken vacation spot.
Forsaken
may be a misnomer; somebody would have had to live there in order to then forsake it, and I don’t think anybody ever has or ever will live where these guys went. And don’t you just imagine there’s a good reason for that? I mean, look at Gulf Shores and Destin—you can’t sling a dead cat without hitting a condo with a thousand people in it. That’s because those are desirable locations. Where Bill and Ron went, you could sling a dead cat for a couple of thousand miles and not even hit a gas station or a mobile home park. Which, in and of itself, doesn’t sound all bad, but the climate isn’t exactly what you’d call a big draw. Y’know?
Wheee! They are on the trek to their final destination, getting on progressively smaller airplanes at each leg of the journey, until finally, it is just Bill and Ron and the pilot in this itty-bitty plane, which the pilot informs them is still too big to fly into where
they’re
going. They land on this bald knob on top of a mountain and the pilot tells them to “get out and wait right here ’cause I’ll be right back.” And with that, he took off, leaving Bill and Ron on top of the bald knob with no food, no water, no nothing, including no idea when the pilot was coming back. Ostensibly he was going to get yet a smaller plane, but his parting words were no comfort to our intrepid travelers: “There’s a tent in that box over there. You guys can put that up for shelter, in case I don’t get back.” Now, I
gotta
tell you, I’d have been stroking out big time. No way would I have let that guy fly merrily off into the wild blue yonder without my person being on that plane.
So Bill and Ron were stranded on the bald knob, somewhere in Alaska, and several hours later, the pilot returned, circled the knob, and flew away. This was perplexing to our heroes, a radio being high on the list of the things they did not have, along with food, water, shelter, guns, toilet facilities and/or paper. But by and by—ten hours later—the pilot came back and landed, and took Bill away with him, with promises to Ron to “be right back.” Happy Ron. “I’ll be right back” is my all-time favorite line. And when
I
use it, what I really mean is: “Good-bye! If you’re looking for me—I’ll be the one that’s gone! Just try and catch me! If I ever come back, it will be one chilly day, buckwheat!”
Eventually both made it to their vacation home, and were they ever happy then. “Home” was a Quonset hut on the side of what we in Mississippi would call a mountain or an Alp; the indigenous folk of Alaska liked to think of it as a “hill.” Meals would be taken “down the hill.” And down the hill it was, too—three hundred feet straight down the hill. You practically had to rappel down three times a day. Meals were then followed by the inevitable climb back up the hill. Now, our boys were both in what I would call really good shape, but nothing they had done here in the relative flatlands had prepared them for this “hill.” For the first two days, they threw up whatever meal they had just eaten, getting back up the hill to the Quonset hut.
Remember, they came on this fire drill to hunt, specifically moose and grizzly bear. A fool’s errand, if you ask me, but, of course, nobody did. They hired “major-league hunting guides,” who sound an awful lot like garden-variety igmos to me. (But again, that is strictly my totally unsolicited opinion.) In the whole two or three weeks they were stuck off up there in the exact center of nowhere, how many moose and/or grizzly bears do you think they saw? Well, let me put it this way: I saw just as many in my very own backyard. “Hunting” with these wily woodsmen—these very expensive wily woodsmen—consisted of either (1) crashing through the brush, making enough noise to alert every bear and moose within a two-hundred-mile radius, or (2) sitting by themselves on a stump, personally selected for them by their wily woodsmen, for ten to twelve hours at a time. Sure makes me want to take up huntin’. Boy hidee, it just sounds like a bucket o’ fun. I envision Bill and Ron off warming stumps, while all the bears and mooses were in the Quonset hut playing cards with the wily woodsmen.
After killing virtually nothing, not even the crazy guy who kept them up all night, every night for ten nights running, the morning of departure dawned bright and clear. Ron was the first to be extricated. Bill was remaining until early the next morning, and this gave him time to squeeze in one more round of stump sitting. (Ron was so jealous.) Remember, they had to come and go from this Eden in a two-seater—counting the pilot—plane. So Ron bids farewell, happily, to the whole shooting match and starts the air trek back to what passes for civilization in Alaska.
Bill endures one last (he thinks) night and hops up on his last (he thinks) day in the wilds to race out to the woods and sit on a stump. Back from another exciting day of stump sitting, Bill readies himself for pickup. Sure enough, right on time—this will be the first thing to go right the whole entire trip (he thinks)—what does he hear but de plane!
De plane!
And out he runs with all his gear, looking up expectantly, only to see his transport plane circle the area and leave. There is still plenty of time to make his connections, so Bill is fairly understanding about the mountain winds and the difficulty of landing small planes. By and by, he hears the plane again, and once more he trots out expectantly with all his stuff. Again he gets the big flyover. Visualize this process repeating itself all day long—until all hope of connecting flights is dashed. Meanwhile, Ron, who got his happy hiney out the day before, is flying home, solo, with no info on Bill—like is he dead or alive, maimed, lost, did he run off with an Eskimo, or what? Nobody knows and nobody has any way of knowing because there ain’t no phones or radios or any other type of communication equipment back at the Quonset hut in paradise.
This also means Bill gets to spend yet another night in the hut. Oh, it was a sad, sad night. We were feeling pretty pitiful. One little lamb lost in the woods. It was a long and lonely night for our Bill, who did confess to lying in bed and actually crying. But the night’s sniveling vanished in the morning with the actual landing of the plane!
Oh, happy, happy day! This was in the top three best days of Bill’s entire life. He didn’t even mind (too much) his stint on the bald knob with a guy who said he was a doctor of some sort and whose conversation revealed him to be the cheapest man in the universe. Doc was living up there in the wilderness, it seems, on account of it only takes about four thousand a year. Well, I don’t think we would have to resort to the wilds of Alaska to be complete and total tightwads, do you? I bet you could reside in New York City for under four thousand a year if you lived in a box with no heat or lights or running water. I mean, I think he was a little off the deep end on this frugality thing. Bill even overcame his mild bout of trepidation when he discovered that the tent in the box that could be erected for shelter, in case the pilot was unable to return that night, had been eaten by a bear.
But, as luck would have it, the pilot did, in fact, return for Bill and he did, in fact, make it to the actual airport where they have big airplanes. This brought up another issue. Out in the wilderness, it was either unnoticeable or irrelevant, but in the relative confines of the big airport, Bill could not help but notice that he smelled like a goat, although perhaps that reference is slanderous only to the goat and flattering to Bill. Bottom line: He had not had a shower in a long time and it showed—so much so that he himself could not bear it. And so, as if it made perfect sense, he goes into the men’s room—handicapped stall—and strips. The man is completely naked in the men’s room at the big airport, trying to de-funk himself with lavatory soap and wet paper towels. Quite a picture, no?
Several days late and somewhat scruffy, Bill did make good his return, amid great rejoicing by friends and family, who had no idea whether he would make it back alive or they would be claiming a box containing his stinky remains. All’s well that ends well. Alaska is safe once more for the grizzlies and the moose.
If we were going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a vacation, there would be things called “Sea Goddess” and “Ritz Carlton” figuring prominently. Hell, we could have plastic surgery and recuperate in a fancy hotel for that kind of money. All we can think of is how very glad we are men don’t try to make us go with them and how hilarious it is that they seem to think they are pulling something over on us by slipping off on these expeditions without us. We are laughing ourselves sick all the way home from dropping them off at the airport, are we not?