You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (3 page)

This is the small-town Southern lawman at his best. If you want to hear about him at his worst, consider the time the deputy encountered a freshly escaped convicted bank robber on the streets.

“Man, you look just like that bank robber that just escaped from the state penitentiary,” said the lawman. “Yep. That’s the damndest thing. You got the, uhhhh, same eyes. Same hair. Same, let’s see here, yep, same skull and crossbones tattoo on your left earlobe. Yep! I’d say you’re a humdinger-dead-ringer for that convict.”

As the story goes, the escapee’s jaw dropped and he waited for the handcuffs and gun to come out in a blur. No point running now.

Instead, the lawman tipped his deputy’s hat, said, “Yep, that’s quite a co-inky-dinky. Nice day, now,” and headed on to his daily lunch of pinto beans and cracklin’ cornbread.

When the Yankee was told that Miss Lou needed her license more than he needed his car door, he gave up and eventually moved back up North where, according to him anyway, no one had ever lost a single car door to the same crazy old woman.

What a glorious and strange land that must be!

Many’s the time that I’ve had to explain to someone not from around here why we’re such awful drivers in the South.

My theory is that we’re so damned tired of being sweet
the rest of the time that we save up all our hatefulness for the relative anonymity of our cars. Southerners are all, “After you, no you, no you first!” until we get behind the wheel.

You blink your turn signal for us to let you into traffic and we just pretend not to see you. Hey, your ass should’ve left home earlier. You wanna know what your problem is? Poor planning, that’s what.

On the road, the average Southern driver takes on a “wouldn’t give you air if’n you were trapped in a jug” mentality.

Turn signals? For years, I’ve told Yankees we don’t use them because we know where we’re going and it’s nobody else’s damn business.

We also believe that when it comes to traffic signals, red is the new yellow. Also: the green arrow requires at least a seven-second delayed response ’cause we love to see that little vein pop out on your forehead as you sit and stew behind us.

In the South, at a four-way stop, the rule is simple: The truck with the biggest tires always has the right of way. In the event that there is no truck, just cars, then the right of way always belongs to me. I’m serious.

One more thing: We know we drive too slow in the left lane on the interstate. What can I tell you? That popping vein thing just never gets old. Crazy, I know.

Small Southern towns embrace their crazies, which is something that a lot of “outsiders” can’t understand.

My friend Mindi routinely deals with that plague of the
South, the water bug, by shooting at them with a BB gun in her own house.

“It took me seven shots but I got the bastard,” she said. “I’d had me a tension headache all day but I want you to know that when I saw his guts splattered across the ceiling, well, bless God, my headache just melted away like butter on a biscuit and I felt like I’d really accomplished something.”

To truly appreciate this story, you should understand that Mindi is a college graduate, a professional woman who belongs to the local country club. A lousy aim, though. I’m sure as shit that I could’ve killed that water bug with three shots, tops.

It speaks volumes that a Southern woman can consider it normal, even commendable, to shoot bugs off her ceiling in broad daylight.

My friend Nina channels the wisdom of her Southern ancestors when her young’uns throw a tantrum. She politely goes to the refrigerator, removes the gallon Tupperware jug of ice water that she keeps handy at all times and pours it on ’em, midtantrum, then tosses them a towel and tells them to clean up their mess.

Everybody’s just a half bubble off plumb in the South. Even our crackheads have more personality than most.

Take Skipper and Poo, a local couple who were trying, despite an unfortunate addiction to crack, to have a Norman Rockwellian Thanksgiving dinner with their food-stamp turkey.

At least Poo was. She had just pulled the turkey out of the oven when, like a flash, Skipper snagged the golden-brown bird, tossed it into the basket of his bicycle, and rode two miles to Old Bethel Road to trade it for crack. Witnesses said that Skipper was equal parts afraid of Poo’s wrath—she chased him down the road on her own bicycle—and the pack of wild dogs that followed a trail of fragrant, turkey-scented steam wafting on the wind during that unseasonably warm November day.

Redneck Southern women can be fiercely creative when push comes to shove, as it so often does in the rural South.

Flo applied for a job at the bacon plant. She failed the drug test but she had a good reason. The state investigator asked her what she meant by that and she politely and thoroughly explained that a neighbor, whom she didn’t really get along with, had recently been arrested for growing marijuana. And, see, her husband, being an avid hunter and having hunting privileges on the property where said marijuana was being cultivated, had killed a deer who, unbeknownst to them as they feasted on venison that evening, must have grazed on the patch of marijuana.

Therefore, Flo had accidentally ingested “pot-meat” and had tested positive. Anyone could see that was perfectly logical.

Then again, this was the same woman who, having failed a drug test the year before, claimed it was because her husband was “a very casual cocaine user” and they had had sex
the night before the drug test and obviously he had transmitted the cocaine residue to her through “his bodily fluids infecting me during lovemaking.”

If Southern women are just a little bit crazy, it’s probably the fault of the men in their lives.

My friend Sarah, who lives in Louisiana, said her first date with her fiancé was memorable because he arrived to pick her up in a red pickup with full camouflage interior and then drove her deep into the woods where he pointed, with tears in his eyes, to a nondescript patch of dirt and said, “That’s where I shot my first deer.” The gravity of the moment wasn’t lost on Sarah who, having older brothers, understood that you wouldn’t share such a special moment with a woman unless you were planning to marry her.

In the South, we have more critters than elsewhere and we mingle with them fairly easily.

Most Southern children can recite at least one story involving the witnessing of a frog being swallowed whole by a passing water snake. And if they can’t, their ancestry is questioned and possibly ridiculed.

When a Southern child grows up and ventures out into the world, he or she may be puzzled to learn that, in other parts of the country, people usually just have one name and, what’s more, might not even have a proper nickname!

Reading an obit the other day in a Mississippi newspaper, I was impressed at how every male family member had a
nickname listed. The deceased was “Gobbler”; and his brothers and assorted kin were “Spike,” “Hun,” “Doots,” and “Tiny.”

Speaking of obituaries, some newcomers to the South don’t understand that when we say we’re going to go see so-and-so “up at the funeral home” it means that so-and-so is, well, dead.

My friend Natalie, who is as Southern as hoppin’ John with Texas Pete sprinkled all over it, was mortified to realize that she didn’t understand that for the longest time.

“Granddaddy would say, ‘Well, I’m going to go see Bobby. He’s up at the funeral home.’ ”

It took her years to understand that Bobby, or whomever, was in a pine box up at the funeral home and respects were being paid.

OK, one more thing that all Southern children know, and this may be the single most important advice I can ever give a non-Southern male marrying into a Southern family: Never, ever wash your wife’s cast-iron skillet.

Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.

“On Mother’s Day, I got to sleep late, which meant about ten ’til eight,” she wrote. “While I was sleeping, just my Mother’s Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I’d left on top of the stove.”

Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.

“This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming black bottom that I could see my reflection in.”

I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.

“Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he ‘got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.’ ”

Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.

“You mean my
cast-iron
skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?”

Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. “That’s the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!”

He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.

Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.

And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y’all. New is not better. Shiny is overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y’all can say “amen” now.

Here’s a recipe that I’ve made in my own lovingly seasoned cast-iron skillet, which I keep in the oven 365 days a year, where Duh will
never
find it.

Sure, you could catch your own crabs down at the dock with some string and a chicken neck or two, but it’s OK to cheat and buy it at the fish house. Serve this with shredded slaw and hush puppies. The recipe comes from actor Robert Duvall, who bragged about them on
Oprah
one day many years ago, and I’ve been making them ever since. When he came to film
Rambling Rose
in our town, I got to interview him for the newspaper. Nice guy, fabulous crabcakes . . .

• 1 pound backfin crabmeat
  
• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise (Duke’s, if possible)
  
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
  
• ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  
• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
  
• ¼ teaspoon salt
  
• ½ onion, grated
  
• ½ tablespoon dry mustard
  
• 18 Ritz crackers, smashed up (I like to put them inside a Ziploc bag and then roll over them with the rolling pin a few times)
  

Combine everything in a big bowl. Form into six patties. Fry in enough butter to keep everything from sticking, over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes per side. Garnish with lemon and tartar sauce.

As we settled into our seats for the second act of a splashy stage production of Disney’s
High School Musical
we’d driven 150 miles to see, I did the math: two mezzanine tickets, plus gas, $140; one oversized peanut-butter cookie and chocolate Dippin’ Dots shared in the lobby before the show, $6; one youth medium-size
HSM
T-shirt, $20; sitting among kids and grown-ups who spent the entire two-and-a-half hours obsessively text-messaging and ignoring the show, priceless.

Yes, I get it. You have the attention span of a gnat and rather than enjoying the show, it was
very
important that you tell someone, perhaps even the media, where you were and what you were doing.

Oh! This just in: No one cares.

To tell the truth, I was a little surprised to see the tweens
texting their friends. It wasn’t like parents were demanding that their kids sit through all eighteen hours of Wagner’s
The Ring
, now was it? So, yes, I was a little disappointed that the target audience spent the show staring glassy-eyed at the little blue screens in their palms instead of savoring the real world in front of them.

That said, I accept that kids are put on the planet to confound us and steal our liquor.

My beef’s with the grown-ups. If you’re bored with what’s on stage, why don’t you haul your rude butt out into the lobby and text yourself into an exhausted puddle? Text until the paramedics have to come and sew your stupid thumbs back on. But don’t pretend you’re doing something important. You aren’t punching in missile launch codes; you just told your husband to pick up dog food at Costco. You are a moron.

Throughout the play, the woman beside me feverishly text-messaged while her tween looked over her shoulder to read, giggle, and offer (in a loud, annoying whisper) suggestions for other people to text. They were so cool. They were at the
HSM
stage show. Except they weren’t. The woman was well into her forties and was letting her kid know that (a) performers really don’t deserve attention or respect after months of rehearsals and (b) I repeat, she was a moron.

This wasn’t Broadway, but that was lucky for the audience, the way I saw it. If you pulled this junk in New York,
they’d toss you out of the theater and onto 42nd Street before you even had a chance to pretend you were just checking on your dying grandma.

I’m a little sensitive, maybe, about all things
high school musical.
If you must know, I have such an awesome crush on Zac Efron. Not in some creepy Mary Kay Letourneau let-me-have-your-baby-you-man-boy way, but in an isn’t-he-a-nice-young-man kind of way.

In fact, I have an awesome crush on the entire cast and so do many of my “mom” friends.

If we really want to piss off our daughters, we gently stroke the
HSM
messenger bags on the rounder at Limited Too and say, a tad too loudly, “Ohmigod, could Corbin Bleu
be
any cuter?”