I could’ve easily told my wife to turn off the heat and lights, but thought this: if she couldn’t withstand an entrepreneurial mishap—especially after everything else I’d endured in regards to jobs and the Guinness World Records anthology—then I wasn’t going to give her any pointers. I never found out, but I might’ve been roaming aimlessly in my mother’s house actually saying aloud, “Turn off the heat and lights if you want to quiet my so-called pets,” when I realized that a woman stood on the porch, cupping her hands into the screen door.
She wore a nametag with ADAZEE printed out in block letters. She said in a quiet voice, “I know you. You’re that guy in the famous book.”
My first words to Adazee, as she stood there wearing an apron, holding one of those cheap, unhealthy, overly frosted rectangular sheet cakes, were, “No. No, I’m not in the Bible.” It’s a response like that that got me fired from my last job, something I said drunk to strangers wanting to pay good money for a sub-par education.
Listen, not everyone knew my story. People already knew that Louise left me, probably, but not everyone in the county knew how my father gathered bald-faced hornets’ paper nests and then sold them to the Chinese for medicinal purposes, how he would shoot nests the size of medicine balls off of oak tree limbs with a .22 and I would stand below to catch them so they wouldn’t get damaged. My father used high-powered binoculars and watched the prospective nests for activity. It’s not like he was an idle, irresponsible father. Before I helped him he had learned the nuances of paper nest–collecting through trial and error; then—after I became his thirteen-year-old assistant and the accident happened—he never relied on first frosts killing off all members of the hive.
I said, “I’m kidding. I know what you’re talking about. Yeah, I’m still in that book, from what I understand,” though to be honest I bought the latest edition each September and looked for my name. “It’s plain called the Guinness World Records book, by the way. Most people call it the Guinness Book of World Records, but they’re wrong. It’s the Guinness World Records book, and then a year after it.” I didn’t go into how a few of the new editions had special features, like how the 2008 anthology had glow-in-the-dark sections, and 2009 featured “all new 3-D photography.” Personally, I thought the Guinness people should go back to a plain old black-and-white format, but that’s just me.
“Tell me how many times you got stung,” Adazee said. I thought, oh, I get it: A to Z. Her parents were idiots.
I said, “Do you want to come in?”
Adazee didn’t move. “I work over at Tiers of Joy bakery, and we’ve been remiss in sending you a cake. No one’s ever made it official, but we’re like Calloustown’s Welcome Wagon, especially now that we don’t have a florist anymore.”
“I forget how many stings,” I said, and hoped she didn’t bring up how some guy named Johannes Relleke got stung 2,443 times by bees back in 1962. First off, that was in Rhodesia, which isn’t still around. Two, a bee’s stinger is probably one-third the size of a bald-faced hornet’s. I said, “I still carry some stingers beneath my skin, they say, so the official count’s not exactly official.”
Beneath her apron spilled out on her chest an A and a Z, left to right. I wouldn’t know until later that she wore one of those tourist shirts from Alcatraz, with a number beneath it, as if the old famous convicts wore such garb. Adazee said, “Buzz something. Your name is Buzz something or other.”
I shook my head. “I was just thinking about cake, I swear to God,” I said, but didn’t go into details about how I’d been shaking and wanting booze.
No, I thought about how I got called Buzz, all right, from the moment I returned from the burn clinic in Augusta—I still have no clue as to who thought that would be the proper setting for a boy with a thousand-plus hornet stingers in his body—to my desk at Calloustown Junior High, then right up until I understood that I needed to vacate my hometown’s limits, go to college, get married, attempt to change the world, lose my job due to “unprofessional behavior and insubordination,” then return half-heartedly without my wife to settle my mother’s affairs.
My father, still alive, couldn’t work as the executor seeing as he lived in prison for selling bald-faced hornet nests to the Chinese without fully understanding antitrust laws plus forgetting to pay taxes over twenty years, among other questionable practices in the realm of business ethics.
“Buzz Munson? Buzz Harrell?” Adazee said, hopeful, smart enough to know that since ninety percent of Callous town’s population ended in a “Munson” or “Harrell” she would likely hit the mark.
Man, by this point there with lovely Adazee—I had already experienced my near-daily flashback of standing beneath a paper hornet nest that hadn’t gone inactive, mid-November, my father aiming for the slight branch that sagged from the gray orb’s weight, the shot’s crack, my perfected soft catch, and the hornets streaming for neck, face, hands, and bare arms—I jonesed for booze worse than a stung boy yearns for a slather of saliva-enhanced cigarette tobacco atop his wounds. I looked at my wristwatch and said, “If you ain’t coming inside, how about you show me the closest bar in town? I need a drink. I’ll buy.”
Adazee smiled. “Here you go,” she said, handing over the cake. “It’s the freshest we had. Well, it’s tied for freshest with six others that no one came to pick up. Ever since they changed the requirements for high school graduation, not everyone quite made it, I guess. Or their parents forgot what they ordered, but I doubt it.”
She handed over a cake that read MISTY: CLASS OF 2010! CONGRATULATIONS! in gray and black frosting, the school colors for the Calloustown High School Fighting Ostriches.
I said, “I don’t get it,” because I wondered if she meant to bring the cake to someone else. “I’m not Misty. My real name’s Luther Steadman.”
Adazee said, “Seeing as we’re not officially the Welcome Wagon, we just give out cakes that we either messed up or that the people didn’t come get.”
I flipped back the cellophane-windowed cover, scooped out about two thousand calories, and shoved it in my mouth right there on my parents’ old front porch. I’m talking I scooped up MISTY with my bare hands and funneled her in. My teeth hurt from what refined sugar scraped against my enamel. I tried to say, “I am Luther Steadman” again, but blew crumbs out of my mouth.
“So, they’re saying that you might be moving back for good, and that you’re wife isn’t coming with you,” Adazee said. “And do you really think you should go back to drinking? I always heard that you had a slight problem, and that it started right after you got stung over a thousand times.”
I don’t know if any psychologists have delved into this, but if you ask me there’s nothing but trouble that can happen to a person who comes from a small town, gains notoriety that’s deserved or not—which causes locals to either hate said person or treat him like a celebrity—then have that person move away, return begrudgingly, and try to fit in. I don’t know if there’s something called You-Think-You-Too-Good-for-Us-Now-Son? syndrome, but there should be. I left Calloustown for college, found out that most guys on my hall didn’t care about how many times I’d been stung, didn’t care that I was the only person at the college with his name in about one-point font inside the Guinness World Records book, sulked for a few years, graduated, and immediately got a job at the college in the admissions office as a “recruitment specialist.” Someone there figured out that I might be valuable as a recruiter of prospective students in the Carolinas, say things like, “If someone like me can graduate, then you can, too!” all giddy. It should’ve been “like I can graduate,” I know, but the higher-ups didn’t want me coming off like I had an IQ over 96.
On top of this great job, which kept me on the road meeting some of my state’s more low-bar scholars, I made money on the side as a pitchman for various exterminator companies doing well enough to buy radio and/or TV ads. “You don’t want to end up in the Guinness World Records book like me, so call up Perry Connor’s Pest Contr
ol and have him come snoop around your eaves for wasp nests. Annual check-ups might keep you from getting stung!” Stuff like that, which, too, should’ve been “in the Guinness World Records book like I,” but most people who hired out Perry probably went to my alma mater. Hell, my work even bled into areas having nothing to do with hornets. It’s my voice saying, “I got stung by so many hornets that it didn’t look like I had a future. Remember, people, that you can’t spell ‘furniture’ without ‘f-u-t-u-r-e.’ So go on down to Crazy Mike’s and tell him, ‘Who needs IKEA!’” which I’m surprised they didn’t make me call “Me-KEA.”
Then my father got thrown in prison. Then my mother died. Then some people starting talking about things I said to prospective students about how perhaps they should move out of state, or work at McDonald’s. Then a lot of overblown stories went around about drinking I’d committed in prospective students’ hometowns—I’m pretty sure these rumors emanated from Calloustown—and the next thing you know I got released from my college job and the radio spots evaporated. Sometimes, when I’m trying to dig out a long-standing stinger from my inner bicep, I wonder about all the cause-and-effect types of features in everyday life and wonder if maybe the answer showed up in a course I once took in existentialism. It’s not like I could fully pay attention in that class. The professor was one of those nature guys who made us sit in a circle outside most warm days, and with bees buzzing by, or Weed Eaters going off in the distance, I pretty much sat around cross-legged expecting another swarm of hornets while trying to keep my sphincter from shaking hands with my uvula.
Adazee told me I could follow her a couple miles down the road to a place called Worm’s. I picked up the cake from my mother’s dining-room table and left the house without even locking up. If it matters, Adazee drove the bakery’s van, which had bumper stickers that read PASTRY CHEFS DO IT UNTIL THEY’RE GLAZED and REAL MEN EAT MUFFINS.
Listen, I loved Louise before she took off, and I love her now. She was and is a beautiful, smart woman. I met her in college. She studied pre-veterinary, didn’t get into vet school—man, that’s harder than getting into med school—and got a job at AfriCall of the Wild, a fancy over-bloated petting zoo that catered to school groups and drew the ire of PETA, the regular zoo in Columbia, and the NAACP, according to Louise. She fed old ex-circus lions and elephants. She mucked stalls. I don’t think her father ever said anything about how his investment in her college education didn’t exactly pay off, but I can’t be sure. He didn’t talk much to me.
After we parked side by side and got on the sidewalk near the bar, I said to Adazee, “You seem to be a beautiful, smart woman.” Looking back, it was all the goddamn sugar from the Misty cake. I doubt I would’ve been so bold without a diabetic onslaught on the horizon. “I don’t need to have a drink anymore. If you don’t want to go to the bar, that’s fine by me.”
“Well, I believe I might have carpal tunnel from the whisk. I need a drink every day. And just so you know”—she took off her apron as we walked in—“you’re old enough to be my father, so don’t get any ideas. I mean, I’m all excited to hang out with you and everything, but not in a romantic way.”
I said, of course, “I’m not but forty. How old are you?”
This is where I saw that Alcatraz shirt, and her—again, I still loved Louise, so it’s not like I started limping across the street—gigantic, ungainly breasts. Between dealing with a whisk, hunching over a mixer, and standing on her feet all day as a chef of one sort or another, Adazee had nothing but a scoliosistic future teeming with greedy chiropractors and hyperbolic support-brassiere manufacturers.
She said, “I’m twenty-nine. According to that book you’re in, there has been an eleven-year-old daddy, so there. Or maybe someone around here was eleven, I forget.” She opened the door for me so I didn’t drop the cake. To the man behind the bar she said, “Hey, Worm. You remember Buzz Steadman, don’t you?”
I knew Worm from the old days growing up in Calloustown. Back then he went by plain Stuart, as far as I could remember. He was one of the Harrell clan. Worm said, “No. Never heard of him,” like that, which is what everyone had always said to me, even when I came back home for Christmas during college.
We were the only patrons. Stuart Harrell stood behind the counter, half of his gray short-sleeved shirt untucked. He wore work boots and blue jeans and could’ve been mistaken for most meter readers in the area. One of his eyes seemed to go off in a funny direction at times, and he might’ve cut his own hair. The place looked like every neighborhood bar I’d come across during all my years traveling the Carolinas after meeting in a high school counselor’s conference room with students who planned to take the SAT again in order to make a 420 on both parts so they could say “Four-twenty!” as often as possible and light a joint. Dark walls and black barstools with foam rubber hemorrhaging out of mid-cushion rips. Lampshades that advertised Pabst and Budweiser. Burn marks trenching the wooden counter. Last year’s calendar up on the wall from an auto parts company. I said, “Hey, Stuart. Or Worm.” Instead of music, a man spoke over the bar’s speakers. I said, “What’s that?” and pointed to the wall.
Worm said, “Some kind of made-up ordinance. Before they’d let me open up this bar—we’re within a hundred yards of a church—I had to agree to let Reverend Mixon make me play some cassette tapes he made of sermons he’s said. Sometimes he sends in members of his congregation to check me out, see if I’m actually playing them. They drink and drink and drink, and all the time say they’re making sure I’m playing his goddamn sermons. I don’t know what’s worse—having to play his sermons, or when the off-key Calloustown Second Baptist Church choir starts singing.”
Adazee said, “I’ll have a screwdriver.”
Worm said to me, “I’m not supposed to serve you anything stronger than mixer. Your ex-wife called up and said she figured you might be coming by here soon.”
I didn’t go, “I thought you didn’t know me.” I said, “I don’t want anything to drink anymore. It passed. You got a Dr. Pepper back there?”
He reached in the cold box and pulled out a can. “Four dollars. We’re having a hard time getting these in. Supply and demand.” Now, understand, in the old days I wouldn’t have put up with a man who enjoyed being called Worm and who prided himself on getting one over on a man who’d remained in the Guinness World Record book for over twenty-five years. But I’d been reading up on some breathing techniques, and along with the muscle relaxers I took quadra-daily, I could handle just about every situation outside of the minor pangs of remembrance.
I said, “Can I run a tab?”
He handed Adazee her drink. Worm said, “I’da thought you’d want a tequila, what with all those Mexican jumping beans you got in your house.”
I said, “A-HA!” like that, and stood up. “If you don’t remember my living in Calloustown back in the day and even going to school with you, how do you know about those jumping beans?” Adazee didn’t seem affected whatsoever. She looked at herself in the mirror and brushed flour out of her hair.
Here’s the story: While driving around from high school to high school over the years, I noticed that no convenience stores sold those little plastic boxes—two by two by one inch deep—that held Mexican jumping beans. I thought, man, as a little kid I loved having those things around, and listening to them clack when I turned my desk lamp on. I thought, America has fallen into a deep chasm in regards to national pride, and perhaps it all goes back to small children not being able to understand the inherent hopeless qualities of the Mexican jumping bean. Sometimes while talking to prospective students I asked them about Mexican jumping beans, and they had no clue what I was talking about, or the smarter kids would accuse me of being politically incorrect.
So in a moment of weakness, between losing my job, my mother dying, and my father sending me a letter from prison asking me to come visit him some time and bring a cake with a sharp knife inside so he could cut off his cellmate’s dick, I took out my savings
, cashed in my retirement, and contacted a man named Guillermo down in the state of Chihuahua, who got me in contact with an ex-drug smuggler named Jorge. Meanwhile, I talked to some people at PlastiConCo and ordered little clear jumping bean containers that snapped open and shut. I typed up little instructions to be placed inside the boxes that pointed out that the Mexican jumping bean was really a moth larva living inside a pod produced by a shrub, and that the beans needed to be watered at times, and that the larva responded to heat.
I went all out. The beans showed up at my house in six boxes with COFFEE stamped on the outsides because, as it ended up, it was illegal to mail the things across a border without proper documentation and whatnot. I tried not to think about how some guy in Mexico was my father’s doppelganger. Inside the boxes—which could’ve held large microwaves, or medium-sized television sets—were burlap bags with COFFEE stamped on them. In retrospect, I should be surprised that they even showed up. It would’ve been easy for my sending money down to Guillermo, who would take a cut before sending money to Jorge, and then those two hombres plain disappearing.
A box that size can hold a lot of Mexican jumping beans, by the way.
I got to work shoving the beans inside their containers. Louise came home and said, “I hope this works,” but she was skeptical.
I wrote the main people at 7-Eleven, The Pantry, E-Z Mart, Stuckeys, Kum ’n Go, and all of the convenience stores attached to BP, Texaco, Citgo, Shell, Sunoco, Hess, and Exxon. I wrote to everyone. And talk about being politically incorrect and xenophobic: Every response I got back, somewhere between the lines, pointed out how Mexican jumping beans would either A) cause white people to think that the convenience store didn’t care about border patrols, immigration laws, and so on, and then they’d boycott the store, or B) cause Hispanics to think that the convenience store made fun of them, and then they’d boycott the store. One vice president wrote to me personally and said his company learned a lesson when they chose to sell “rattlesnake eggs,” some idiot kid choked on the paperclip and rubber band housed inside the envelope, and the company lost a lawsuit that made any too-hot-coffee-from-McDonald’s settlement look like a parking ticket violation.
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