Once in a while we would see an establishment that offered soft-serve ice cream—for some unknown reason, Daddy called it a “geedunk.” Now, that was Daddy’s weakness because it reminded him of homemade ice cream, so no matter how many stops he had already made along the way to appease us, if a geedunk sign appeared on the horizon, he would be whipping in and ordering three. (Two of ’em were for us.)
Daddy never outgrew his lifelong love affair with homemade ice cream and geedunks. It grew at least partially out of his love and admiration for—as well as his competition with—his favorite older sister, Moggie. The “skill” that Moggie possessed—that eluded Daddy his whole entire life—was her ability to stuff about a cup of homemade ice cream into her mouth at one time and then devour it WITHOUT getting that most painful of childhood maladies—BRAIN FREEZE. Daddy watched in worshipful awe his entire life as Moggie would, with a cavalier, devil-may-care look in her eye, load up Maw’s biggest cooking spoon with a veritable mountain of homemade ice cream—arguably one of the coldest things on the planet—and stick the whole thing in her mouth and swallow it down without so much as a flinch or a wince, while a mere heaping tablespoonful of the glacial goo would send most mortals, Daddy included, into rigors of head-clasping, facial-contorting, high-pitched-wailing, teeth-grinding, often even ground-rolling frozen-brain misery that seemed to last for hours with no relief.
One childhood brain-freeze experience is USUALLY enough for most humans—that’s one lesson we do not EVER want to repeat, and even the most stubborn and slowest-learning amongst us usually spend the rest of our lives giving extremely cold food and beverages the respect they deserve, consuming them with constant caution and care, lest they once again cause us to feel that we have somehow slammed our heads in the car door. A-a-a-a-and then, there was Daddy. He never lost his admiration and envy of Moggie’s strange ability—and he could never qui-i-i-ite give up his quest. There was always at least one geedunk each summer that would lure him into just one more attempt at that somewhat dubious unreachable star. He would look at that geedunk and sense Moggie grinning at him, daring him, taunting him to go on—give it a try, little brother—even after she was long-since dead and buried, and her inexplicable gift with her. His recovery time usually allowed me and Rhon to eat a couple more geedunks and replenish our stock of Archie comic books, so his temerity served us well and we were loath to admonish him for it.
Check-in Chicken Run/Chicken Egg
Sooner or later, no matter how many Stuckey’s stops were made, regardless of numerous detours dictated by nabs and geedunks, we would eventually reach our destination—the Holiday Inn of Holly Springs or wherever Daddy’s work required him to appear. In those days, in our minds, a Holiday Inn was Lady Luxury’s very lap—the towels alone were a wonder worth the trip—what with “HOLIDAY INN” actually woven RIGHT INTO the middle of the towel in bright green threads, it was easy to see why it was the national pastime to steal them—and we could not wait to languish in that luxurious lap, especially after a rigorous day of riding in the car and eating crap while reading comic books.
Back then, even mo-tels had bellboys, and no guest was ever allowed to actually sully his hands or strain his back by toting his own luggage through the lobby, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to his second-floor poolside piece of heaven. Daddy did love to torment him some bellboys, too.
There must have been a pretty high turnover rate in the bellboy ranks back then because I never saw one fail to fall for whatever prank Daddy was pulling on him—and so they all had to be new guys. I’m quite certain that NONE of them ever forgot him.
Cases in Point
The bellboys would always precede the guest to the room, unlock and open the door, and then step aside, saying, “Will this be all right?” with an expansive wave of his hand, with an air of “VOILÀ!”—as if revealing to the guest for the first time an opulent suite in the Palace of Versailles. (I never wondered at the time what his response would or could have been should the accommodations ever be found by the guest to be wanting—since every single one of the rooms was 100 percent exactly alike.) One of Daddy’s most favoritest things to do involved this little room-approval ritual. Rhon and I could tell right off when he was gonna do it because he would be lagging a bit behind on the trek to the room—we knew this was to allow him room to make his running start—which was in and of itself one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my whole life.
Daddy seldom ran, but when he did it was memorable for two reasons, the first being that he ran like a chicken. If you’ve never been lucky enough to actually witness a chicken running yourownself, I’ll tell you, it’s pretty entertaining. Their legs go like lightning but the rest of their bodies are completely motionless. So if you were to film a chicken running—you could divide the screen and the bottom half would show two chicken legs moving back and forth so fast you could hardly see them and the top half would show a chicken just sitting there. If you filmed Daddy running, you would see the same thing. Little skinny legs justa pumpin’, and above them, a fairly rotund body at rest. Hilarious to watch. (It should be noted that neither my seester, Judy, nor myself was blessed at birth with the THIGHS of our father—who had lithe and lovely bird legs until the day he died. We both got our mama’s THIGHS, and if you were to take a photo of the three of us standing together in swimsuits—well, for starters, you’d need a wide-angle lens, not to mention a stun gun, to capture the vision, since we wouldn’t be volunteering to pose for this—it would look like three regular-sized women perched on top of six manatees.)
The second thing you couldn’t help but notice about Daddy’s chicken run was that it was REEEALLY fast.
So when he was not right on the heels of the bellboy, we knew he was giving himself room for a chicken run at the room. The bellboy would throw open the door for the big reveal, and when Daddy didn’t immediately issue an affirmative response to the sight of the room, the bellboy would glance back to see what was going on.
What he would then see was a large fat man chicken-running down the elevated walkway, bearing down on him and the room. Before the bellboy could have any sort of reaction to THAT sight, Daddy would blur past him into the room, and commence jumping wildly, up and down, to and fro, on all the beds and furniture. After about forty-five seconds of this performance, he would abruptly stop, not even winded, walk over to the bellboy, take the key from his hand, replacing it with a generous tip and ignoring the bug-eyed, slack-jawed expression on his face, and say, “This’ll do fine, thankee,” and close the door.
Understandably, I think, Rhonda and I never grew tired of this performance nor did any of our friends ever tire of hearing about it. Indeed, not too long ago, I had an e-mail from our old friend Paul Canzoneri asking me did I remember when my daddy used to jump on motel room beds—and it was well over forty years ago that it happened and Daddy’s been dead for the last twenty-six. Every man has his Legacy.
Yes, well, moving on. Lots of your higher-class mo-tels back then had “Magic Fingers” on the beds. You put a quarter in the little box on the nightstand and the bed would commence to throb and vibrate so intensely it would rattle your fillings and make your nose itch. This would go on for about ten or fifteen minutes and then it would be time for another quarter. I cannot imagine how these ever fell out of favor and I think the fine folks in the hospitality industry would do well to consider staging a comeback.
Suffice it to say, Rhon and I were totally enamored of the Magic Fingers and we would require Daddy to supply us with piles of quarters to feed our insatiable desire for the shaking beds. These things were closely akin to the electric pony rides that were, at the time, stationed outside every grocery store in America. There was really no “ride” to it at all. The fake pony would simply quiver a bit and perhaps move an inch or so forward and back—hardly the thrill of a lifetime—and yet we were all driven quite insane by the manic desire to mount up that was enkindled in our young breasts at the very sight of them, and if our mo
thers EVER wanted to get home before botulism began growing in the bags of provisions, she was well advised to just cough up the damn nickel and wait the forty-five seconds while we rode the stupid pony.
The pony rides, as it turned out, were just a gateway drug for our generation. As so often happens, Rhon and I had had our pony-lust gratified so many times, we were hooked, and so naturally, as we grew older, we could no longer be satisfied with a little pony ride. (Also, we could no longer fit on them, but that’s beside the point.) We graduated to the Magic Fingers bed and, of course—just like marijuana costs more than Mad Dog 20/20 and heroin costs more than hash—our habit went from a nickel every week to ten days, depending on how often Mama had to go to the store, to maybe fifty to seventy-five cents A NIGHT if we were in a room that had a Magic Fingers. I’m sure there’s a Wayward Youth parable in here somewhere since, not speaking for Rhonda, I can however testify to the amount of money I was personally, in later years, to spend on vibrators. I’m just sayin’…
Anyway, one night we had arrived at our Holiday Inn for the night and had pleaded and cajoled our ration of quarters from Daddy, dropped one in the slot and stretched out, prepared to be at least shook and rattled if not necessarily rolled. Nothing happened. We put in another quarter—same zero result. We put in one more quarter and gave the box a resounding whack—which has always been the universally accepted and employed first-choice method for repairing any unresponsive mechanical device—it STILL did not work AND it now had three of our quarters.
Daddy was summoned. He, of course, had to personally put one more quarter in and give it his own man-sized whack just to be sure it was, in fact, not functioning properly. Satisfied that the unit was not only NOT going to perform, it was also NOT going to give back what had grown now to be a full dollar’s investment, Daddy called the front desk and the manager promised to send someone up to attend to the matter promptly—which he did.
Our erstwhile bellboy returned to our room and gave the box a most serious looking-at. He stopped just short of stroking his nonexistent goatee and uttering a pensive “Hmmmmm,” but I’m sure he thought of it. Instead, he picked up yet another one of OUR quarters and, before we could stop him, plunked it into the comatose machine and gave it his own authoritative whack, which produced exactly the same result that all previous coins and whackage had wrought. He then DID say, “Hmmmm,” although with no accompanying chin-stroke, turned on his heel, and headed for the door, pausing only to speak those time-honored words that, in any language on earth, actually mean “You’ve seen the last of me, suckers” but nonetheless sound like “I’ll be right back.”
As we heard his footsteps moving languorously down the elevated walkway in front of our second-floor poolside room, the lack of any discernible urgency in that sound assured us that the bellboy would not be swiftly returning, if indeed, he ever did so at all. This did not sit well with the occupants of room 212, but only one of those occupants got an evil eye-gleam and headed for the car, chortling to himself, as he strode and then drove happily away.
He returned to the room a short time later carrying two things: one of them was a screwdriver. Instructing us to close the drapes, wait outside, and knock if anyone approached, the fiend set about his work. A few minutes later, he called us inside and told us, with a wicked cackle, to watch and say nothing. He called the front desk again and told the manager that we were still waiting for our Magic Fingers to be repaired and indicated that our patience was wearing thinner all the time.
Daddy could tell from the manager’s tone that a good-sized fire would soon be lit under the slackass of a certain bellboy, and sure enough, in just a minute, there was a knock on the door. The bellboy had arrived with his own screwdriver and the threat of termination almost visibly hanging above his head. He set to work disassembling the Magic Fingers bedside box and Daddy could scarcely contain his gleeful self as the young man, tongue pressed between tight lips, feverishly fumbled with the screws.
At last all the stubborn screws were wrenched from their slots and the cover of the box came away. It would be hard to say which expression was worth more: the one on the face of the beleaguered bellboy who had just taken the cover off a recalcitrant Magic Fingers box and unbelievably and inexplicably discovered a large white fully intact hen egg sitting on top of a buck twenty-five’s worth of quarters—or the face of the man who had just unbelievably and inexplicably PUT it there. I’d have to say both them faces were worth a whole lot more quarters’ worth than that little box would hold.
Asset-Preserving Tip
Well, if I could, I’d give everybody a daddy just like mine—but I can’t and I can’t even loan you mine on account of he be done passed. All I can do is make you laugh by telling you about him—and hopefully inspire you to be for somebody what he was for me. The way to do that would be to be willing to play, anytime, anywhere—but also to be willing and able to see the humor in all things and just refuse to take ANY-thing too seriously, most importantly yourownself.
12
Security Level: Fuchsia
I know some folks who are as old or even older than I am who not only still have a lust for wandering but are still eager to indulge it. We don’t hang out much. It is not an age-related development for me, however, that, aside from the fact that I am your basic homebody—no, I take that back—I am not the BASIC model at all—I am the superdeluxe KING-sized homebody—I don’t want to go anywhere, ever, for any reason. I don’t care what they got there, I don’t want to see it. I want to be AT home, preferably on my back porch or out on the lake, ALL the time and I am not exaggerating—at all. I WILL go to church but only because Lelon Thompson sings like an angel and so does Baby Jan—it’s worth the hour’s drive to hear them. And Keith Tonkel does always manage to have the Word I was especially needing to hear that day, so fine, I don’t mind listening to his preaching, scattered in amongst the singing.
And well, of course, I WILL go to the grocery store, but only because I love to cook and I love to eat even more than that. I actually enjoy going to get the groceries—it’s putting them away that I despise. But anyway, church and groceries are really about the only two reasons for leaving my house that don’t make me terminally crabby.
Please note that this is merely local travel, and I view and avoid even this as if it were plague-ridden. From that, it can be extrapolated that out-of-town travel sends me figuratively into orbit—since literal orbit would be waaaay too far from home.
At one time, I regarded the prospect of long car trips with the same enthusiasm I would feel for long prison sentences. It is therefore astounding to me that some person or persons unknown have somehow contrived to make driving twelve thousand (understand me: twelve THOUSAND) miles in a big giant RV with my husband and two (TWO) semilarge to enormous dogs seem like a DREAM COME TRUE when compared with even one short hop on an airplane to anywhere. You may as well just start hopping—as in up and down on the ground—and work your way to your destination—it’ll be quicker and less stressful in the long run.
On my last two book tours, I did, in fact, travel by the aforementioned big giant RV—with the aforementioned spouse and canines—for the aforementioned twelve thousand actual road miles. The signing dates at the various bookstores around the country required our appearance in a different city every day for about forty days. At first thought, this seems like a delightful cross-country excursion with one’s favorite beings, doesn’t it?
And it would be, except for the fact that, when one is on a book tour, one must appear at the assorted stores when THEY want you and can fit you into THEIR schedule, and unfortunately, no matter who one is, one will not be the only one of one’s ilk out there on a book tour and so one will inevitably run into scheduling conflicts and find one’s self plunged into what is known in literary circles as “Book Tour Hell.” And yes, that IS redundant.
While I cannot say that I have ever met an author who does not LOVE meeting and greeting his or her book-buying public—I have als
o never met one who does not visibly cringe at the words “book tour.” This is because, while the events themselves are nothing but a pure de-light—what one has to go through to GET TO the events makes running barefoot through the various compartments of hell seem like park romping by comparison and one would willingly sign up for the run instead if one only knew how—and, of course, could be convinced that it would somehow sell a book.
When we first got word that my esteemed publishers, Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster, would be sending me out and about the country via land-based travel in lieu of, shudder, flying both thither and yon, I, for one, was ecstatic. However, my enthusiasm for the prospect was pitifully pallid compared to the back-flipping display put on by my husband/business manager/Cutest Boy in the World, Kyle Jennings—because, you see, HE was to be the Designated Driver of the Big-Ass Bus that, we were told, was approximately forty-three feet long and twelve and a half feet high. Two words: Wet. Dream.
Our dogs were equally thrilled at the prospect of two whole months of 24-7 togetherness with us, the Centers of Their Universe. Plus, lots of Cracker Barrels are involved and that always means “bacon for the dogs,” so there was that added inducement for them.
What it meant to me personally was not having to unpack and repack a suitcase every single day for two months. It meant not surviving on nothing but minibar jellybeans and Pringles for sometimes days on end. It meant not having to origami my enormous frame into ever-shrinking airplane seats. No loud talkers, no screaming babies, no fucking PRETZELS. Is there a more irritating nonfood item than a pretzel? I think not. I can’t think of anything that pisses me off more when I am starving than the proffer of a pretzel. But that’s just me.
American Thighs Page 15