God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (6 page)
7
I’ll Get You, My Pretty
A
s a writer, one is called upon frequently to appear on radio and television programs around the country. This helps sell books, which for a writer is just about as good as it gets. More times than one likes, however, one comes to the crushing realization that one’s interviewer has not read one’s book. Indeed, quite often, the interviewer has not even read the press kit or the liner notes on one’s book. The interviewer is, as they like to say, winging it, or as we, the writer, likes to say, completely screwing up something as simple as a sack lunch. I mean, we know you don’t have time to read every word we ever wrote, as precious as they are to us personally: You’re overworked as it is and they don’t give you a time slot at work for “reading.” But please, it will be less painful for all of us if you can at least give the book a cursory glance before we go on the air. Or just tell us ahead of time that you haven’t read it, so we can provide you with a list of questions to which we know the answers.
I personally had one such interviewer who kept asking me, regarding
SPQBOL,
to give him details about the revenge stuff. He said he understood that we talked a lot about getting revenge in the book. Well, since there is not one single solitary word about revenge in the whole entire book—I can’t recall even the word itself being used—I just blabbered about something completely unrelated that in fact had the distinct advantage of actually appearing in the book, which it is my purpose to promote. This suggested something to me, though: that there is a group out there who wants to hear about revenge. Now, the truth is that we like to keep everybody happily in line so there’s no need for anything like that, but if we find that the pushing has indeed come to shoving, well, we like to think we’re pretty resourceful and can acquit ourselves handsomely, if need be. So here, I got your revenge right here.
My friend Janet Mayer, who is a completely grown-up woman married to Jim Johnston, who claims to be completely grown up even though he is a man, showed up at this churchy kind of function swathed to her chin in turtlenecks and scarves, all in a stouthearted effort to conceal the fact that she was completely covered up in hickeys—passion marks, love bites, or whatever your high-school crowd called them—she had a whole big bunch of them all over her neck. She was mortified and her discomfiture was exacerbated by our hooting and howling over it. Add to that the irritating look of smugness on Jim’s face—well, it just was not to be borne is all you can say. Mr. Jim was pleased with himself and his little joke for about a week, and Janet let him have his little moment and be lulled into a false sense of security by the absence of swift retribution. That’s just the way she wanted him—lulled. Oh, she nailed him all right. He just lulled himself to sleep one night, the night before a big board meeting at which he had to make a major presentation, and he awoke to find himself the proud owner of a hickey the shape and nearly the size of Texas, directly beneath his left ear. Katharine Hepburn doesn’t have a turtleneck high enough to hide this thing. I would score that one: Battle, Jim; War, Janet.
Not too long after Janet had married Jim, she was trying to impress him with an act of wifely Suzy Homemakerishness by sewing a button on his shirt. She had made sort of a big deal out of it, implying possibly that he was too big a simpleton to sew on a shirt button. Anyway, she got so carried away with her own wifely Suzy Homemakerishness that she didn’t think about what she was doing, and when she reached for the scissors to cut her thread, she stuck the needle in the bed. Ordinarily this would have been fine except that it was a water bed. She wanted to wriggle under the thing and hide, knowing the major ribbing she would have to endure for her stupid mistake. And so she did the only thing she could do under the circumstances: nothing. She just got up (from his side of the water bed) and hung up his newly rebuttoned shirt. When no raging torrent of water appeared, she crawled into her side of the bed and went to sleep, and she let him do the same on his side of the bed, right on top of what would become, by about three
A.M.
, Old Faithful. He woke up, soaked to the skin, thinking that he had wet the bed and was desperately trying to figure out how he was going to hide it. It is a major disappointment to me that she did not let him go to his grave believing himself to be the oldest living bed wetter. Who knows when again in this life she will be presented with such an opportunity?
But enough hearsay, you say. What about action undertaken and dished out by the actual Queens themselves? Well, there was this one time that some of us kinda sorta did a fairly mean and dastardly thing. One of the Queens, Tammy, had gotten a d-i-v-o-r-c-e, but she had not retrieved all of the stuff that was rightfully hers from one of her and her ex’s several residences. Thinking that it might be a painful and traumatic experience for her to go into that house among all those memories by herself, we decided that we should help her out. It was a good thing, too. No sooner had we gotten in the front door and quickly surveyed the contents of every room than we found just what we had feared the most: evidence of other women. Oh! It just cut us like a knife and we weren’t even ever married to him, so imagine the mental suffering of our poor Tammy. We just looked at one another, knowingly, and sent one of the other Tammys out for cigarettes. Oh, not for us—we don’t smoke, even though we would look so grown up doing it—we needed them for his closet. The former Mr. Tammy is not a smoker either; on the contrary, he is one of the most avid nonsmokers you will ever encounter. Did I say avid? I meant rabid. So, I ask you, what else could we do but sit in his closet, smoke cigarettes, and blow smoke up the sleeves of all his fresh-from-the-cleaners shirts? We must have been in there for an hour or more, laughing fit to kill, about to puke from the smoke. I’ve heard it said that revenge is sweet, but it sho’ do stink.
And then there was the little anniversary celebration the Queens put on for one of our friends—not a Wannabe exactly, more of a hanger-on, but a friend nonetheless. By chance, what would have been her wedding anniversary had she still been married happily coincided with a little girl-trip we were taking to the beach. We persuaded her to get in touch with an old flame of hers who lived in the area we were visiting. He met us all for a drink, and one by one we made ourselves disappear, leaving the two of them alone at the romantic beach bar at sunset. We went off carousing and generally having a delightful time, secure or at least hopeful in the knowledge that our little buddy was having one as well. By and by, we got curious about how delightful a time she might be having, and so we drove to the beach house to see if his car was outside. It was. Not only that, all the lights were out. Yippee! we thought as we drove off. We hadn’t gone far before one of us remembered it was her special day and we hadn’t thought to acknowledge that, so we turned the car around, killed the engine at the beginning of the street, turned off the headlights, and coasted down close to the house. We got out and crept up in the bushes beneath the window of the bedroom we thought they would most likely be occupying and commenced to sing—very loudly—“Happy anniversary to you! Happy anniversary to you!” and so on. Helpless with laughter, we made our way clumsily back to the car. As we were turning around, headlights on now, the beams caught movement at the front door. There stood our little buddy—and let me just say that naked is naked, but somehow it looks a whole lot more so in the headlights of a car—just waving and smiling. As we pulled by, we could hear her hollering, “Thank yew!” We remarked on her politeness and her nakedness, both extreme, but she did seem to be having a most delightful time, working fervently to prove the theory that living well is, indeed, the very best revenge.
And Your Little Dog, Too!
One of the Queens, Tammy, had a dog to stir up some trouble for her. YardDog, Tammy’s mutt, once got into her neighbor’s chickens and ate a whole mess of them all by his ownself, not even bothering to bring a single one home for Tammy to cook. The neighbor lady complained real loud to Tammy about it, too. Tammy was just starting in as to how could she be so certain it was YardDog who ate her precious chickens when who should appear grinning at her back door but YardDog himself, covered in feathers. Tammy just apologized and offered to pay for the chickens. Neighbor lady said nope, Tammy had to replace the chickens. Nine o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, just what Tammy feels like doing with her day is shopping for live chickens. Forty of them. YardDog just loves chicken, and any old way you want to serve them is just fine with him. He obviously thought these were like McNuggets with legs—a little fuzzy, but tasty nonetheless.
It took Tammy a while to focus her eyes and find the telephone book, the yellow pages, and, finally, the chicken stores. YardDog had consumed a large quantity of some off-brand variety of baby chickens, you see, and the neighbor lady wanted the exact same kind in replacement—just your basic yellow puffball wouldn’t do. After securing the delinquent YardDog in the house, Tammy lit out for the chicken store. She placed her order and received it—forty live chicks in little brown paper bags. They loaded them into the backseat of the air-conditioned Volvo, Tammy being afraid it would be too hot for them in the trunk, and she wanted no more dead chickens on her conscience that day. Well, Tammy is not one of your leisurely drivers even on a good day, choosing rather to sit up on the edge of her seat, cigarette hanging off her lip, white knuckles gripping the steering wheel, reenacting Talledega and striking fear into the hearts of fellow drivers—and that day the baby chickens, too, who, by their very nature were chicken-hearted to begin with, and were peeping loudly and straining at the confines of the paper bags. As Tammy careened to a stop at a red light, the bags tipped over and half the chickens made good their own escape, freeing their comrades still clawing impotently at the walls of their brown paper prisons. Soon all forty of them were hopping and peeping and pooping all over the Volvo. Tammy was thrilled to have her car’s interior instantly redone in Early Chicken Coop at no extra charge, so she wheeled into the neighbor lady’s yard, honking the horn. She hopped out, yanked open the rear door, shooed all the puffballs out of the backseat, and yelled, “Here’s your chickens!” And Tammy roared off in a cloud of dust, cackling. That has a vengeful smack to it in my opinion.
A delightful and most resourceful reader in North Carolina wrote to describe how her erstwhile husband had made a complete drunken ass of himself at a party one night and then, when finally forced to head for home, proceeded to throw up all over himself in the backseat of our delightful and most resourceful reader’s automobile. Here is where the “delightful and resourceful” parts start: She pulled over to the side of the road even though they were in the worst possible part of town and to do so was risking their very lives. He makes quite a picture: well-dressed man-about-town, on his hands and knees heaving his beets onto the already-filthy sidewalk. He finishes and is allowed back in the vehicle. They travel all of about two blocks, and he cranks up again. With somewhat less patience this time, our heroine pulls into a bank parking lot and makes him get out and take off his puke-soaked clothes, which she hurls into the bushes. He is now riding home in his underwear, and just before they get home, he barfs again—this time all over the backseat of the car itself—and being the fastidious bastard that he is, he climbs over into the very back of the station wagon and passes out. Having had just about enough of him by this time, she pulls the car into the garage, locks it, and goes on in to bed, leaving him snoring in the cargo compartment of her wagon. He wakes up at some point during the night, still so drunk he can’t figure out how to get out of the locked car, but in his travails, he manages to roll around in the vomitus he’s left on the backseat. He is conscious enough to know that he has done so, delicate darling that he is, and this completely discombobulates his sorry ass. By the time he sobers up enough to work the door locks, he has smeared barf from one end of the car to the other. Smelling almost as bad as he looks, he stumbles into the house to berate her for locking him in the car. To which she calmly replies that since he has ruined her perfectly good Camry, he can expect to be out buying her a new Land Cruiser by that afternoon. Don’t you just love that new-car smell?
8
No, It’s a Hole in the Head We Don’t Need
A
pparently a few readers—all men, if memory serves—somehow deduced from
SPQBOL
that we do not need them. One of them, in fact, recently asked me to compile a list of the top five or ten reasons Sweet Potato Queens don’t need men. I thought and I thought about that. I must confess, I failed utterly in this task. After all, I asked myself, if there were no men, Aretha would have had no cause to sing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” without which the world would be severely deprived. Bonnie Raitt would never have sung, “I wanna man to love me like my backbone was his own,” and then where would we be? I could go on and on, but also consider this: If not men, then who would ever sing to us such memorable words as “I wanna drink your bathwater, baby”? Only a man would ever even think of such a thing. If there were no men, there would be no Johnnie Taylor to sing about the “Big Head Hundreds” and what all he wants to buy us with them. Oh, yes, sisters, we need men all right. We need them and we love them for these and many other reasons. The one and only reason I could think of that would justify our saying that we don’t need men is this: We cannot borrow their shoes.
Okay, so we’ve gone and admitted that we need men. The problem then becomes, as related to us by many of our sisters: Where do you find them? This has just never been a problem for the Queens, as you may well imagine. Our problem is usually more along the lines of keeping the numbers manageable; therefore, we are in an excellent position to offer advice.
“They makin’ ’em thangs ever’day,” my daddy, who was very wise indeed, always said. Now, granted, he was referring to some manufactured product, but we can certainly give it just the slightest stretch, and it easily applies to men as well, at least in our minds, where, as you know, anything can happen and often does. The fact that they makin’ ’em thangs ever’day just shows us, to our great relief, that there is no shortage. Men are in plentiful and readily available supply at all times. This is a big load off our minds, because they are so dang much trouble once you have them, that if you had to go out and hunt and scrounge around for them to begin with, well, it just might not even be cost-effective.
So, if men are everywhere, just waiting for us to pluck them off the vine, then the next question is: Which vine? Indeed, it is our experience that there are so many of them, at every turn, it is easy to get overwhelmed or even jaded and just not even bother plucking any of them. This is not a good set of circumstances. It feels awful, and we find, upon further examination, that it is often an early symptom of a hormonal imbalance; so whenever one of the Queens expresses a disinterest in men, we all immediately gang up on her and make her assess her hormones. If it’s not her hormones, it may just be that she’s bored with the current crop and needs a change, just like your cat will be completely enthralled with that fake bird on a bungee cord with the bells and feathers and strings hanging off of it, will play with it for hours on end and then, suddenly, it’s over. The thrill, as our beloved B. B. King says so well, is gone.
When this happens, there’s nothing for it but another trip to PetSmart to get a new cat toy. Sometimes you just got to have a new cat toy. But you know how it is, you go to PetSmart and there’s aisle after aisle of nothing but cat toys as far as the eye can see, and they all look pretty good. I mean, it’s the same basic premise with all of them—they’re on some kind of springy cord attached to a stick, they all have things that jiggle and wiggle and catch your eye. Some are bigger than others, some make more noise, some are fancier while others are more no-frills and serviceable. But you can’t really try them out in the store. Oh, I know, they encourage you to bring your pets in there and all that, and that may work fine with some dogs, but cats are just not really who you want to take to the mall, now are they? Even that most famous of Southern cats, Willie Morris’s own Spit McGee, is not a good shopper. Cats just don’t get the theory of going to the store to look at new stuff. And anyway, most of the cat toys are sealed up in wrappers, so you couldn’t try them out in the store even if you could induce your cat to go shopping with you. And would you really want to buy a floor-demo cat toy for your kitty? So it is with us, sisters.
There’s tons of men out there, but the only way to know if you like them is to try them out for a while. Mercy, how do you settle on one or two to try? A number of folks have shared their Rules for Dating with us. From Pensacola, Susi writes that when she and her friends were in their thirties they had the ten-year rule—you couldn’t date anybody more than ten years younger or older than yourself. But Marjorie, from another Southern state, writes that, at sixty-five, she is beginning to find her fifty-year-old lover a bit old for her! Yippee! is just all I can say to that. Now that the Queens are older and, we believe, wiser, we have amended this to the new Mommer’n’em Rule, which requires that you must be younger than his mama and have never dated his daddy. The Menopause Mafia of Louisiana (they are all named Taffy because they’re all teachers—and teachers get chewed on many times each day) has as its number one rule: Never date a man whose mama is not dead.
Well, the Queens have come up with a system that works for us. We find we do best in situations when we can really focus our energies and attention. For this we need a theme, and that is what we are recommending to you today: Theme Dating. It doesn’t really narrow the field, just your area of focus for the moment, but for that reason makes the field more manageable for you. The theme is completely arbitrary and at your total discretion. You may select any theme, pursue it for as long as it amuses you, and then change it, with no prior warning to anyone else. It’s your theme, do with it what you will. As I said, a bunch of the Queens are married and so their themes are pretty much set, for the time being anyway. For the rest of us, the theme is a constant source of entertainment. We had a long-running Jewish theme there for a while. We dated only Jewish men. At the outset, I recalled a conversation that had taken place many years before with my good friend Helen Murphey Austin, whom I actually credit with introducing me to the Joys of Jews. She was dating a man named Edward Cohen—a Jew who has grown up to be a very fine screenwriter and recent author of
The Peddler’s Grandson,
which is the story of his growing up Jewish in the South. Helen and Edward got me to go out with Edward’s best friend, who just so happened to be Jewish as well, named Ralph Salomon. To provide the extremely little persuasion it took to get me to go out with Ralph, truly one of the most handsome men I have ever dated, Helen assured me that “Jewish men and Southern [non-Jewish] women get along like a house afire.” That may sound like, may indeed be, a cliché, but it is nonetheless true. You have only to consider the average house and then visualize it completely engulfed in flames to know you’ve got a fair amount of energy and excitement going on. A blazing house can be loud, but it is certainly not boring, and I can guarantee you will never forget your house burning up—or down, as you prefer. And of course, one thing you can always count on with a fire of any kind—it’s damn hot, and with one of this magnitude, even when it dies down, it’ll still keep you warm for a long, long time. Oh, my, yes, we do love Jewish men.
For the last good while, though, we have been on a Bob theme. This is not as limiting as you might think on first examination. Just to show you how very versatile this theme theory is: You’ve got your Roberts, your Robs, your Berts, your Bobbys, Robbys, Berties, in addition to your basic Bobs. And half the men on the planet are named Robert, or at least their middle name is Robert. Then there’s the surname factor—Roberts, Robertsons, and the like. We are just covered up in Bobs and/or Bob derivatives. Then there’s the battery-operated boyfriend (BOB) that never lets us down. Yeah, buddy, as long as them Eveready boys stay in bidness, we can rest easy. BOBs, gotta love ’em.
I was in Santa Monica not long ago with one of the Queens, Tammy, and we met a very fine young man at the Starting Line athletic shoe store. (If you are ever in Santa Monica, go there and buy your sports shoes—it is the only place I have ever been where they (a) actually give a rat’s ass if your shoes fit; (b) actually know how to determine whether or not they do; and amazingly (c) won’t sell you a pair of shoes that do not fit perfectly.) So me and Tammy are in the Starting Line buying shoes, as we do at least twice a year, and we find that we are quite taken with our shoe salesman. It is hard not to fall in love with a really well-trained, highly motivated, very attentive shoe salesman, is it not? I mean, he’s on his knees in front of you, caressing your feet and paying attention; we can ask little else from a man. Naturally, we fell to fawning over him and praising him to the skies, which only served to increase his fervor for our feet and the shoes in which to enshrine them. Oh, it was a happy, happy circle we had going.
By and by, during this shoe purchase/courtship, Tammy asked our young man his name, to which he replied, “Adam.” A momentary silence ensued. “Mind if we call you Bob?” I asked. He graciously, speedily, and without question replied, “Why no, of course not, please do.” This just pushed us right over the cliff in love with him on the spot. Here was a guy happily willing to do whatever it took to please us. So fear not if there is a dearth of Bobs in your home area: A willing attitude makes up for a lot.
No Humans Harmed in This Research
Quite a few great analogous stories from the animal kingdom have been reported to me. Occasionally I will read something for myself and remember a fair number of details; more often, however, somebody else will read something interesting and tell me about it, and of that, I will remember the parts I personally find entertaining. Whether or not they are founded in fact is completely immaterial to me, as I imagine it is to you as well; otherwise, you’d be reading
Scientific American
instead of this book. No animals have told me any of the stories discussed herein. Animals don’t talk to me directly, although a cat we had once willed me telepathically to name her Debbie. Otis, the brown dog who lives with my nephew, Trevor Palmer, in New Orleans and sometimes with his mother, my sister, Judy, does talk to Judy occasionally. He very softly says “Wow” when he is particularly moved about something, usually the prospect of eating a plateful of pink weenies up in the middle of Judy’s bed. Otis loves them pink weenies, and he does love to eat in bed.
At any rate, I heard a story about a bird. I’m pretty sure Martha Thomas told me about it. Martha has a genius IQ, is always reading and remembering and telling me what she reads. Being the one-trick pony that I am, I make a joke out of the stuff. Anyway, I think it was the Alaskan snowy owl, but I could be wrong, so if you’re a bird fanatic, don’t get all in a wad. The story is what’s important, and if we are attributing a characteristic to the Alaskan snowy owl that belongs to some other bird, what possible difference does it make? Don’t tell them, and they won’t care.
It seems that the female Alaskan snowy owl will not acknowledge the existence of the male Alaskan snowy owl until such time as he presents her with a dead mouse. Not just any ole dead mouse—it can’t be one he just had lying around that maybe some other, very picky, girl owl rejected. It must be an extremely fresh dead mouse, and it must be of the appropriate size as to demonstrate clearly the degree of esteem in which he holds her, the object of his affection. He may bring dead mice for days and weeks and she will, of course, eat them right up. She will just eat and ignore him. Until the perfect mouse is presented—the, say, three-to-four-carat mouse—she will not acknowledge to her suitor that the mouse came from him. He is, by this time, wild with desire—and only for her. Doesn’t he give up and write her off, taking his dead mice to a more receptive girl owl? Oh no. He becomes completely transfixed by her. He is driven to please her and only her with his mouse prowess. If he goes without getting laid for a month of Sundays, he will persist in hauling dead mice for her perusal/consumption, clinging blindly to the hope and belief that he will prevail.
Now, the story told to me did not include any suggestion that the girl Alaskan snowy owl might ever be so mindless as to just give it up for a substandard mouse, or worse, for gratis, or worst of all, just to make
him
happy. But we don’t have to stretch our imaginations too far to get a picture of it, do we? I, for one, have started demanding to see some dead mice around here, and right quick, too. My current fiancé lives two hundred miles away—which makes me like him just a whole lot more—and he has to run up and down the highway all the time just to see me. He seems happy to do so. This is the appropriate attitude for a fiancé, certainly. I shared the dead mouse story with him, and he caught on to it right quick. “You want jewelry, don’t you?” he asked, in a not-unpleasant tone—in fact, he actually seemed pretty jovial about it. I sighed and said, Yes, I suppose I do—just no solitaires at this point unless they are on a chain, and don’t be eyeing my left hand, either, buckwheat. I’ve just gotten him broken in good as a fiancé, I ain’t messing up this deal any time soon, thank you.
He wanted some help in picking out the right dead mouse, and I was more than willing to give it to him. He said men hate buying gifts for women because they always get the wrong thing, and even though we make a fuss over it, they can tell we hate it. So what I do, and what I advise all of you to do as well, is cultivate a relationship with a good jeweler—one who will write down what you like and keep it handy in case anybody comes in asking. Of course, your best friend should look out for you as well. When my best buddy, Allison Church, was celebrating the tenth anniversary of her marriage to the gift-igmo David, I took matters and him in hand and had the most fabulous ring in the history of the world made for her. David was overjoyed to give her something she so obviously loved. He was less than thrilled about paying for it, but hey, he got over it.
I think we should get together regularly with our girlfriends and talk about what kinds of dead mice we’d like and everybody pick somebody else’s boyfriend, fiancé, or husband—maybe draw names—and advise them. Call it a Dead Mouse Party and make all your favorite Sweet Potato Queens party foods and beverages. This is as good an occasion for a party as I personally have ever heard.
About the same time I was doing all that heavy thinking about snowy owls and mice, I was also reading that “Mars and Venus” stuff about men and women. I hate to say it, but that John Gray guy makes sense. He includes at least twenty-five conversations that I personally have had with assorted men over the years—I’m talking word for word practically. Anyway, John Gray says that many problems in relationships are caused by women doing too much for guys. When they like us and we like them, we naturally want to do more and more stuff for them and be sweet to them. What could be wrong with that? Well, it just doesn’t work—that is all. They hate it when we do that. This totally supports the theory advanced in
SPQBOL:
Treat ’Em Like Shit and Never Give ’Em Any and They’ll Follow You Around Like Dogs. And I think John Gray was saying exactly that, too, only with more genteel language. And then this snowy owl business comes up. In that particular study, there was no mention of a girl snowy owl ever bringing a dead mouse to a boy snowy owl—not once, not ever in the history of snowy owls. Those snowy owl bitches have figured out the deal and they are sticking with what works.
Now, it would seem that creatures with penises are highly likely to be hardwired with a need to please creatures without penises. And since they only value what they have to work hard to get, we should cease and desist doing anything nice to attract them. It goes against their nature. Instead, we should allow them to bring us presents, but we should not be entirely satisfied with any of them, so that they can work harder at pleasing us in the future. To make them completely happy, we must reject a certain number of their offerings to provide them with even more opportunities for pleasing us.
I think I’m getting the hang of the scientific method.