God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (9 page)
The social debut of the rubber chicken was a smashing success. It went everywhere with the newly nups. The standard “make me puke” wedding photos were transformed by the addition of the chicken. The ring photo featured the hands of the bride and groom clasped tightly around the neck of the chicken, in the time-honored celebration of the ritual of choking the chicken. (If you don’t understand this term, you are undoubtedly a woman who has led a sheltered, brotherless life. Ask a guy or a woman with teenaged sons.) The gorgeous array of food took on a new aura with the rubber chicken languishing amongst the shrimp and cellophane noodles. (A hit-and-run reception with excellent eats is, after all, just a phone call away. A good caterer will do anything you say for the right price.)
Captured forever on Kodachrome is That Guy gazing adoringly at Fran, as she looks mysterious yet fairly well pleased about the whole thing. Further examination of the photo reveals the chicken’s feet dangling from underneath the otherwise demure wedding gown. Instead of that ridiculous garter, picture That Guy rakishly removing a rubber chicken from Fran’s silk-clad thigh and tossing it over his shoulder to the clamoring crowds.
The camera captured bride and groom offering the wedding cake, not to each other, but to the chicken. Soon everyone was snapping souvenir photos of the chicken and the happy couple and trying to wedge themselves into the photos as well. A blinding moment of flashbulbing occurred when the chicken posed between two slices of white bread just about to enter Fran’s mouth—sure to be a poster one day. Someone wondered how the chicken was going to hold up under all this activity. Bets were made on the condition of the chicken post-honeymoon. Now, if only Fran had listened to the part about living in a duplex . . . he chicken fared better than the actual marriage.
Where’s His Mother When You Need Her?
I really would like to take issue with the guy—and don’t you just know it was one, too—who wrote those marriage vows that everybody so blithely takes all the time—specifically, the part about “in sickness and in health.” Apparently there is different fine print in the vows the men take from the ones we take. Theirs says something like, “I can just get a little out of sorts and take to my bed and whine and moan and you have to wait on me and fetch and tote and I get to loll about and make your life hell.” In ours, well, there apparently is no provision for getting sick. It is business as usual for us girls, deathbed notwithstanding—get over it. Shake it off, and by the way, what would be for supper? It is not just that nobody cares if Mom is sick; it’s really more that nobody even notices. You are expected to carry out your duties regardless of any unpleasant or unsightly physical symptoms you are manifesting.
I once spoke to a women’s group, and my opening line was “My life is over: My husband has the flu.” A universal empathetic groan went up from the audience. Come earthquakes, come floods, come plagues and pestilence. Never mind wars and rumors of wars. Forget economic disaster. Staggering debt, be it national or personal, signifieth nothing. Everything and everybody can just go up in a puff of smoke for all I care—just deee-liver me from a man with a fever.
I remember, not with any particular fondness, a time when I was still married to Moon Pie. For the sake of clarity, there are a fair number of times that I do remember with particular fondness; however, not the time about which I am going to tell you. I had been fairly miserable myself the week before, having endured the flu myself. My daughter, BoPeep, who would have been about five then, had been sick as well. She had the flu on her fifth birthday, as a matter of fact. She and I weathered the storm as well as might be expected. We pretty much just took to our beds and waited it out. We got over it, rescheduled her birthday party, and emerged unscathed from our little bout with the flu bug.
Or so we thought.
Before Tragedy struck: Moon Pie got it. And we wished we had died with it when we had the chance.
This is the man who—when he had his wisdom teeth removed—complained that I filled the ice bags wrong. Wrong? I’m no nurse, but I really thought this was within my scope of capabilities. Gee, guy, it looked to me like you just unscrewed the top, put in ice cubes and water, and screwed the top back on. He had me jackknifing all over the house trying to get the ratio of ice to water correct in his ice bags. He wasn’t happy if the bag was too “smooshy.” I did this for one entire day, at the end of which I put the whole ice bag—ice, water, and all—in the freezer. The next morning I presented him with his totally non-smooshy ice brick and suggested, sweetly, where all he might put it if it didn’t suit him or his sore jaw. Hint for the soon-to-be-married: Make him have his wisdom teeth removed before you marry him.
When ’Peep and I came down with the flu, I insisted that ’Pie call his doctor and get a prescription for amantadine, since it can help keep you from getting it if you take it soon enough after being exposed. He complained and bitched—not about having to call the doctor, but about me telling him to do it. He stomped out of the house when I suggested that the sooner he got it, the better. He would call when he was ready and go to the store when he was ready. Imagine my surprise when, several hours later, he returned with the pills, and I, just as a matter of conversation, you understand, since I truly didn’t give a rat’s ass at this point, asked if he had taken any of them. I’ll have you know, he forgot. Self-reliance, what a wonderful thing. He didn’t need me to tell him to call the doctor, and he certainly didn’t need me to tell him to go to the drugstore. Someone dropped the ball, however, when it came to telling him to take the stupid pills. Apparently, that was when I was supposed to speak up. Live and learn, I suppose.
Everybody Loves a Stun Gun
Not so very long ago, my good buddy Bill Brown decided to take unto himself a wife, and for this purpose, he selected the charming Linda. I went to the Everyday Gourmet to consult with the owner/Queen, Tammy, about an appropriate gift for Bill’s latest and most excellent adventure. We knew we were looking for something appropriately manly for the intrepid Bill. Tammy and I took our time to find just the right thing.
The first part was easy: I knew he had just bought himself a very large, very manly grill, so we just found the largest, manliest set of grill tools ever assembled. Done. The next part was even easier. Tammy and I went straight to it, like moths to a flame as it were. It was, of course, the Personal Bug Zapper. You must have one of these. It looks like a very small tennis racquet—only with batteries and a wire face. All you have to do is swat in the general direction of the offending insects, and it fries them on contact. Sort of a fly-swatter/stun-gun combo. How macho can you get?
Tammy said all her employees at the Everyday Gourmet and the Everyday Gardener had hooted her big time when she came back from market bearing the Personal Bug Zapper and then announced with a completely straight face that they would be stocking it. Well, of course, they cannot keep them on the shelf. The Personal Bug Zapper people are having to work overtime just to keep the supply coming fast enough. Half a dozen people bought them when I did, just because my enthusiasm was so contagious. You could tell that some of those people had plans for zapping something else besides bugs: They had some two-legged pests in mind, I do believe.
I could tell from the immediate and extremely wicked gleam in Bill’s eyes when he opened his Zapper that he envisioned himself the Ruler of the Universe now that he had the only virtual cattle prod in the house. He declared that he was getting one for the office and one for the car as well, so as to never be powerless again. Just possessing it would give him, he believed, the power to subdue errant wives, children, and/or stepdogs. He would probably never even have to use it—just the knowledge that it was there would give him the Power. I read the label to him several times: “WARNING! THIS IS NOT A TOY!” But I could see the wheels turning nonetheless.
That very evening I received a phone call. The woman, laughing uncontrollably on the other end of the phone line, eventually managed to identify herself as none other than the charming Linda and new Mrs. Bill. I could tell she was calling me from the floor, where she was rolling about, shrieking with laughter. She just wanted me to know, as soon as possible, that Bill had come right home, assembled his Personal Bug Zapper, and promptly shocked himself with it! And furthermore, it was her opinion that the thing worked like a charm. I was delighted to hear it. I was equally delighted to see that, clearly, the charming Linda will be able to hold her own, and then some, with the intrepid Bill. I do so like to see couples evenly matched, don’t you? Just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll get Linda her own Personal Bug Zapper—I think they need to be a Two-Zapper Family.
Two of the Tammys were at a party at a fabulous house in the mountains in North Carolina. They both agreed it was easily the most fabulous house they had ever seen and, they noted, their hostess was wearing what was easily the most fabulous diamond ring either of them had ever seen. The Tammys intuitively knew there was a story here, and they made it their business to get to it. By and by, they found themselves chatting with the hostess, and they just couldn’t help but comment on her ring, which was only slightly smaller than a Volkswagen. The woman threw back her head and laughed one of those wonderful laughs of delirious glee. She was obviously quite pleased with herself and, as it turned out, for good reason. The Tammys demanded to be told the tale and the woman said, Oh, there wasn’t much to it really. She had found this fabulous diamond about the same time that her husband had found this fabulous house. He informed her that she would have to choose—she couldn’t have both. Which would it be, the house or the diamond? What did you say? the girls wanted to know. “Ha!” she said. “I picked the diamond. Shoot, I knew
he
wanted this house!” And so it came to pass she got them both. This may be the smartest woman ever to draw breath.
11
Sex, Fritos, and the Talking Vagina
W
hile the Queens may render a split decision on the subject of marriage, sex is something on which we are in complete accord. We do dearly love it. We all think it is a good thing. Sex is so good, Martha Stewart could have invented it had she been on the arrangements committee when the need came up. If Martha had been in charge, however, it would probably be a lot neater, more dignified, and possibly color coordinated, but, all things considered, we are pretty happy with it the way it is. And we love talking about it nearly about as much as we like having it—in some particular instances, more, but happily that doesn’t occur often.
Once we were having an informal gathering at my house—just the Queens and a few Wannabes and one or two hangers-on. Let me explain that “hangers-on” is not in any way a derogatory term that we have assigned to these, our good friends, but rather the term with which they have chosen to designate themselves. They are not quite ready to take the plunge and come out, as it were, to the world as full-fledged Wannabe Wannabes, but they desire fervently to be in our presence as much as possible and soak up as much Queenliness as they can and thereby gain the necessary courage to own up and live up to their own secret desires. So, anyway, we’re all there in the kitchen, and it was just like a scene from
Little Women,
each of us having a hand in the preparations and much jovial feminine chatter filling the air. One was making Fat Mama’s Knock You Naked Margaritas, another was getting out bowls for Fritos.
Have we talked enough about Fritos? Can enough ever be said about Fritos? Is there a more perfect food on the planet than Fritos? Tammy and I love to go to the movies together—and trust me, when we do, we are the only ones who are enjoying it, so deplorable is our movie behavior. I have a giant purse, which we call my movie purse. With it, we can carry in any and all manner of foodstuffs not available at the concessions stand. Like, for instance, margaritas—the movie purse will hold a two-liter bottle full of them plus some plastic cups. And if we are having margaritas, we find that we must have Fritos as well; and, of course, if we’re having Fritos and margaritas, we just gotta have Armadillo Dip. Fortunately, all of the above will fit handily inside the movie purse. Let me just say, there is a reason why they don’t sell Fritos at concessions stands at movies. Suffice it to say, everyone there knows when you are eating Fritos during a movie. The only way to eat a Frito quietly, we have discovered, is to just put one in your mouth and suck on it until it is soft, and trust me, if you do this, you won’t want more than one, so don’t do it. You’re never going to see any of those people again anyway, and with any luck, they’ll give up and go to another theater, and we didn’t want a big crowd of people in there in any event. I actually prefer nobody else to be in the theater.
Another thing we found will fit in the movie purse is Krystal hamburgers. Do they have Krystals where you live? They are similar to White Castles, and they are one of our very favorite foods. The two best times to eat Krystals are at four o’clock in the morning—but only if you’ve been out all night partying, which we are too old to do now. We are much more likely to have just gotten up at four
A.M.
—and believe me, you don’t want a Krystal then. The other good time to eat Krystals, luckily for us, is anytime you can sneak them into the movies. The pleasure of eating them in the movies is multiplied many times over by the fact that nobody else has any—they know you’ve got them, because nothing else smells quite like a Krystal—and they now want them so bad, they’ll probably leave any minute to go get some.
Actually, there is one other time that I and one of the Queens, Tammy, love to eat Krystals and that is New Year’s Eve. I personally have never had a good time on New Year’s Eve in my
entire
life, so in 1982, when I buried my daddy on that day, I said, Well, fine, let’s just quit this altogether, and so I did. I have not observed New Year’s Eve since 1981, and I can’t remember what I did that year, only that it wasn’t fun. I wish I could remember it, though—it’s one of those Southern things we do, remember years by the bizarre events that were taking place at the time. Like Tammy and her sister trying to remember what year it was they went to Memphis to see the Rolling Stones, and the way they finally figured it out was that it was the same year that “Mama drove the car off into the reservoir,” and they remembered that it was, in fact, a brand-new car and they would never forget the year the family got a brand-new Cadillac convertible, would they? And then, of course, we were all diverted from our original discussion about the Rolling Stones on to the much more intriguing tale of how it came to pass that their mama drove the brand-new Cadillac convertible off into the reservoir—in much the same way that I started out talking about sex and somehow got branched off into Fritos and New Year’s Eve.
Anyway, a few years back, Tammy let it be known that she shares my aversion to New Year’s Eve. We had a long discussion about the many disastrous parties and awful dates we’d been privy to on that evening, and, of course, we moved on into what we would really like to be doing on New Year’s Eve, in a perfect world, which would be to eat a giant bag of Krystals (Tammy likes extra mustard and extra onions; she doesn’t even care if they put the meat on there, if they put enough mustard and onions and cheese) and then just pile up in the bed with a pan of Chocolate Stuff and some black-and-white movies and happily drift off toward morning. And we looked at each other and said, as we have said to each other so many times about so many even more outlandish things we were contemplating doing, “Why not?” So we did. We began our own, now time-honored tradition of spending the early portion of New Year’s Eve at the Krystal, eating those precious little burger-tiles, and making a double batch of Chocolate Stuff so that we each have a pan to take home to our respective beds for the actual New Year’s festivities, although after eating all that, we rarely, if ever, manage to remain awake for the actual stroke of midnight. Delightful. We have never had a bad time doing this, we’ve never gotten a ticket, never had a fight with a presumed loved one, never awakened with a hangover or a stranger: We offer this course of action to you with our highest recommendation.
But, as I was saying way back there, we were having a girls’ gathering, and someone was getting out the bowls for the Fritos, someone was putting ice in the glasses, I was making Chocolate Stuff, naturally, and someone else was making Armadillo Dip. Only one in our company had been sitting idle this entire time, holding up her end in the chatting but not doing any real work—lolling, as it were—and by and by, she asked if she couldn’t do something to help. I surveyed the work at hand and suggested that she might want to chop the onions for the Armadillo Dip. She said okay, got up lazily from her perch at the kitchen table, looked sort of far-off, and then she said, to no one in particular, “I guess I should wash my hands first, I just had sex an hour ago,” just as casual as you please.
Well, things in the kitchen came to what you would call one of your screeching halts—meaning nobody was doing shit anymore and everybody was screeching at her, “Whaddayou mean you just had sex an hour ago? You’ve been here for forty-five minutes, and you haven’t said a word about just having had sex right before you walked in the door! Who were you having sex with? Where were you?” Oh, all manner of questions were hammering her, but she was just irritatingly dreamy-eyed and vague. I think possibly somebody may have whacked her with a big wooden spoon—just to break the spell, don’t you know—and once we had her attention, the quizzing resumed. The “who” turned out to be a salesman who passed through her office on a semi-regular basis. Seems he’d been under consideration for quite some time, and today just turned out to be the day. The “where” was in the attic space of her office. “The attic!” was the loud refrain from the audience. “Yeah, I’ve got cobwebs in my panties.” “Well, all I can say is they sure as hell didn’t grow there!” someone said sharply; it could have been me.
Whenever Tammy and I go to Los Angeles to visit our friends Ned Walton and Peter McQuaid, we make a mandatory trip to the Pleasure Chest, an enormous emporium featuring every possible accoutrement for sex that you can imagine—and many others that you probably cannot envision in your most exuberant fantasies, even with pharmaceutical assistance. There is no such store in Mississippi, where we are from, and if there was, we couldn’t be seen going into it, of course. After all, we have our reputations to think of. Since we are most widely known for wearing green sequinned mini-dresses with giant tits and even more giant butts built into them, black fishnet hose, hot-pink sequinned gloves, majorette boots, and big red wigs while dancing in a trashy manner on a moving float on a public street, that may sound like a needless precaution to you. So be it. Going to the Pleasure Chest in L.A. is one of those activities that make being “out of pocket” so beguiling.
We turn into the Clampetts when we go in there, and it is humiliating for Ned and Peter, but they buck up and go with us anyway because they love us. Everybody else in there is shopping in a dignified, adult manner for the items that appeal to them personally. Tammy and I are careening around the store, picking up things and wondering aloud: What in the world can this be? Where do you reckon you put it, and, more important, why? We don’t actually say “Go-llee” like Gomer Pyle, but we think it a lot.
I can’t imagine how they conjure up all these trinkets for people to have sex with. Is the inventor having sex him/herself and, all of a sudden, thinks, “Gee, I wish I had a big, electric, squishy, wiggly, prickly, furry, hard, throbbing thing to do whatever with,” and then gets up and manufactures it to sell to others who may have never wanted such a thing before, but when they see it, suddenly it makes sense, and they go, “Aha! I’ve gotta have it!” I don’t follow the thought process is what I guess I’m saying. Somebody’s job is to invent new sex toys. Surely somebody else’s job is to make them and test them out. Our only job is to figure out what goes where and why and buy them—or not.
The most tantalizing product was the Talking Vagina. That’s what it said on the box, which was not open—indeed, it was shrink-wrapped in heavyweight plastic—and I am still sick about that. I badly wanted to see a talking vagina, had visions of Chatty Cathy. People as old as I am will remember this doll: You pulled a cord on her back and she talked. Did the Talking V. have a cord like Chatty Cathy? A button? Was it voice- or sound-activated? Clap on, clap off? My doctor-boyfriend Richard Pharr has a candy dish in his office that looks like a cow, and when you reach to get a piece of candy, it moos at you real loud. Would the Talking Vagina have a similar trigger? And what exactly would one say? I never thought about such a thing before, being the proud owner of my own vagina; I admit that in all the years I’ve had it, I never so much as once thought about what it might say.
So naturally, when I spied it there on the store shelf, all boxed up and inaccessible, I hollered across the store to Tammy, who was inspecting the handcuff selection, “Tammy! They got a Talking Vagina over here.” She ambled right on over. We picked up the box and turned it this way and that, trying to see if it was like one of those little boxes with farm animals on the sides and you turn them over and they go “moo” or “oink” or “cockadoodledoo.” There was nothing audible coming from the box. We chattered away about the possibilities of what vaginas might say, now that they’ve got the chance. A guy was loitering nearby, eavesdropping, so we turned on him, sudden-like, and demanded to know what he thought it might say. “Go cut the grass!” he barked, in a gravelly, whiskey-sounding bitch voice. We dropped the Talking Vagina, we were laughing so hard. Tammy said, “Mmmmm! Things not so good at home, I take it?” He blurted that answer out so fast, you know he’d heard it before and with feeling, too.
And then Tammy comes to me with an ad printed out from the Internet for a Vaginal Substitute. The ad is nothing short of fabulous. By the time we finished reading it, we even wanted one, and we’ve already got real ones! It said that with the Vaginal Substitute, you (the guy, we suppose) could avoid any risk to yourself and/or us from STDs, and it certainly eliminates any risk of pregnancy. In our opinion, it will not do a whole lot for our sex life—this does not strike us as an intimacy-builder for couples or a precursor to any postcoital cuddling either, but still it was developed by a “medical doctor who is a world’s authority on orgasm.” Says he’s got a patent on an orgasm monitor, even. From what we could tell, this whole thing is pretty guy-oriented. We didn’t get the feeling that this medical doctor has any interest in the female orgasm, if, indeed, in his mind, it even exists, and the Vaginal Substitute makes no claims for any sexual pleasure, real or imagined, for the woman, even though it is suggested that you might want to use the device with your partner. We assume this would relegate us to spectator status.