Lizard Tales

by Ron Shirley

  After thinking about the situation and looking up at that ’coon staring down on me, madder than a bobcat tied up in a piss fire, I decided that maybe a pet turtle would be just as cool. So I ran after my buddy, hoping I could talk him into going to the pond.

  [People]

  1. He’s so little, he’d have to run around twice to make a shadow.

  2. He’s so small, he’s got only one stripe on his PJs.

  3. She’s finer than a frog hair split eight ways.

  4. He’s as graceful as a Sherman tank in a china shop.

  5. He’s luckier than a Thanksgiving turkey on Christmas Day.

  6. He’s lower than a mole’s belly button on digging day.

  7. He’s more stubborn than a ten-year-old government mule.

  8. She’s prettier than a mess of fried catfish.

  9. She’s smoother than a baby’s tail after a waxing.

  10. He’s smooth as a pig on stilts.

  11. He’s meaner than a skillet full of rattlesnakes.

  12. He’s as tore up as a football bat on a Friday-night light.

  13. He’s wilder than a peach-orchard hog.

  14. She smells worse than the outhouse door on a shrimp boat.

  15. She’s so blind, she’d miss Ray Charles playing cards with a crawdad.

  16. She’s lower than a snake’s belly in a wheel rut.

  17. She’s as subtle as an unflushed toilet.

  18. She’d put a rattlesnake in your pocket then ask you for a light.

  19. She’s got bees in her bonnet and ants in her pants.

  20. That girl’s riding a gravy train on biscuit wheels.

  21. He looks like the cat that swallowed the canary.

  22. He’s lower than an ankle bracelet on a flat-footed pygmy.

  23. He’s worse off than a rubber-nosed woodpecker in a petrified forest.

  24. He’s like a pet raccoon: he can’t seem to keep his hands off anything.

  25. He’s like a billy goat: hard-headed with a stinkin’ tail.

  26. He must’ve learned to whisper in a sawmill.

  27. That boy’s higher than giraffe nuts.

  28. That boy would talk a wooden Indian out of his mind.

  29. Too many freaks, not enough circus.

  30. He’s wilder than a two-mouthed bass at an earthworm family reunion.

  31. He was more excited than a hockey player with his first fake tooth.

  32. He was prouder than a camel jockey with a three-humped camel.

  33. He’s more out of control than a racecar with Ray Charles at the wheel.

  34. She’s got more wrinkles than an elephant’s ball sack.

  35. He acted like I had left his sister in the bowling alley on a Friday night.

  36. Everything he ever learned I think he got from watching Gilligan’s Island.

  37. He couldn’t see a set of bull’s balls if he was standing between its hind legs.

  38. He’s stronger than mule piss with the foam farted off.

  8

  Whoever Said You Can’t Buy Happiness Must Have Been Dead Broke

  I grew up on a street in Lizard Lick that everybody called Jackass Road. I’m still not exactly sure why it’s called that. We never had much money growing up and there wasn’t much of anything to do. We were so poor that if we found a quarter, we’d cut it up and divide it into four pieces between us. But there was a junkyard across the street from my parents’ house, and Jason and I were always sneaking over there to steal parts off cars to sell. We eventually discovered that in all these old cars were a bunch of Playboy magazines. All these old men had dirty magazines in these old cars, so sometimes we’d spend hours over there. We knew we could sell them at school. Like I said, we were so poor our front door was our back one too, and we were definitely early age entrepreneurs.

  Jason was always building stuff, so he started making a weekly trip over to the junkyard. He would come back with tire irons, window cranks, and radios—basically whatever he could get out of there. He probably started going over there when he was ten years old, and by the time he was seventeen, we had our own little auto-parts salvage out back. Our backyard looked like Sanford and Son. He decided he was going to build his own car. He was handier than a bear cub playing with itself with mittens on.

  On Jason’s seventeenth birthday, I told Momma I wanted to throw him a surprise birthday party. I wanted to do something really special for Jason because I love my brother like Peter loves the Lord. I wanted to do something really cool for him. I told my parents to go out to dinner that night, and I called up all of our buddies. We probably had about ten or twelve guys coming over, and I went out and bought beer and liquor for us. Once the party started cranking, my buddies were more messed up than Lindsay Lohan at a pharmaceutical convention.

  What Jason didn’t know was that I’d hired him a stripper for the party. It was a big deal because we didn’t have much money. When we went to town, the first thing we said was, “We don’t want to pay the light bill.” It took us forever to pool enough money to pay for a stripper. We probably collected bottles on the side of the road for a month. It was a really big deal. During the two weeks prior to the party, when Jason would wander over to the junkyard, I took Polaroid pictures of him when he wasn’t looking.

  On the night of the party, I had the stripper meet me up the road. She was hotter than a gasoline cat walking through hell with a kerosene tail. She was dressed as a police officer and looked tighter than two coats of paint. I handed her the photos of Jason in the junkyard and told her the whole story.

  She came to the house a few minutes later and pounded on the front door. It was like, Bam! Bam! Bam! We opened the door and she yelled out: “Is Jason Shirley here? Is Jason Chad Shirley here?” We were like, “Yeah, he’s right there.” By that time, Jason was more screwed up than a steel-toed flip-flop. He was looking at her and thinking, “What in the world have I done?” He was more confused than an Amish electrician. She told him, “You’re under arrest for breaking and entering and larceny.” She started showing him the pictures from the junkyard, and he started sweating and shaking his head. We were all sitting there trying to play it cool and acting all serious. We thought we were slicker than a BP oil spill.

  Jason stood up from the couch, and she swung him around and slapped the handcuffs on him. When she slapped the cuffs on him, she was supposed to start dancing. But Jason was more upset than a two-dollar hooker on dollar day. He was upset because he knew Momma and Pops were going to kill him for getting arrested. All of a sudden, Jason yelled, “Heck, no I ain’t!” He took off toward the bathroom and dove through a closed window like a seal. He looked like Flipper swimming away from Shamu. He went through that window faster than a cheetah on Amtrak, and it took three or four of us to pull him back into the house.

  We were like, “Come on, dude, just play it cool. Calm down and we’ll get you out of this.” But you’ve got to keep in mind that Jason is slicker than a greased pig turned politician. He was like, “OK, y’all. I’m cool.” The stripper put her arm around him and started walking him outside. The next thing you know, Jason is gone. He disappeared like a fart in a tornado or new rims at a Puff Daddy concert. It was pitch dark and he ran off into the woods. Now, keep in mind that there weren’t any lights outside my parents’ house. It was so dark that when we grew up, we were doing homework by the fireplace. We couldn’t find him.

  It was pitch-black, Jason was stoned drunk, and he still had the handcuffs on. We kept yelling to Jason that she was a stripper, but he didn’t believe us because she wouldn’t strip outside. She was worried we were filming her or something. We kept yelling, “Jason! She’s a stripper!” And then you’d hear a voice from the woods: “No, she ain’t no stripper. Y’all are lying. Y’all set me up!” He was more confused than a blind man at a silent movie. It took us about an hour to get him out of the woods.

  When we finally got Jason back inside the house, she started stripping. Jason was still in his handcuff
s. We were more excited than woodpeckers in a lumberyard. She took her shirt off and then she took off her pants. Then she turned around, picked up her things, and left. “My hour’s up,” she said while walking out the door. We were more confused than atheists at a tent revival and hotter than forty acres of burning stumps, but that’s one night none of us will ever forget.

  You know, I learned a valuable lesson that night: Whoever said you can’t buy happiness must have been dead broke.

  [Things I’ve Found to Be True]

  1. Brain cells come and go, but fat cells live forever.

  2. If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all the evidence that you even tried.

  3. Junk is something you throw away three weeks before you need it.

  4. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

  5. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.

  6. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing in this world would ever get done.

  7. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

  8. No one is paying attention until you make a mistake.

  9. Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

  10. The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.

  11. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.

  12. He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless dead.

  13. Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.

  14. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

  15. Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.

  16. In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

  17. He who laughs last thinks the slowest.

  18. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

  19. No matter what happens, someone will find a way to take it too seriously.

  20. The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

  21. The colder the X-ray table, the longer your body is required to be on it.

  22. Don’t take life too seriously; you won’t get out alive.

  23. Anything good in life is usually illegal, immoral, or fattening.

  24. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

  25. A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you’re in deep water.

  9

  Don’t Ever Mess with Nuthin’ … That Ain’t Messin’ with You

  One of my favorite things to do when I was growing up was to go hunting. I used to spend the summer picking tobacco leaves, hotter than a devil’s henchman caught in a wildfire, and dreaming of the upcoming days I could spend in the woods or the fields slinging bullets and arrows.

  The week before deer season, I never could sleep. Most kids dreamed about bikes and games and girls; all I could see when I closed my eyes was racks and rubs, which made me happier than a fat puppy chasing a parked car. We might never have had much money, but we always had a freezer full of meat. Heck, I think we could have given it to Burger King their way, right away, anytime they ran low. If it flew, crawled, swam, or ran, we put bullets in it and spent many a night by the campfire swapping tall tales and remembering the one that got away. Fact is, every time I told my stories, the deer’s rack would grow quicker than Pinocchio’s nose at a women’s Weight Watchers meeting.

  Of course, my passion for hunting grew—and with it, the desire to hunt different game and see different states became an obsession to me. I’d save most every dollar I made, and planned to one day go on a trip and take my pops, since he had spent so many days in the stand with me—days when I made more noise than a blind billy goat with bells on his horns at a Sunday-morning service. We’d leave with nothing but dreams of tomorrow. I had decided that one day I was taking him to the place of no return for a country boy from the deep and dirty South: We was going north. Way north. So far up there you couldn’t find grits or cornbread.

  So I started looking around. When you work the fields and grow up on a dirt road, there ain’t much you can afford. And I was tight with my money, too—tighter than a bull’s butt on fight night. But I found this ol’ boy way up in Maine that offered backcountry bear hunting; I figured this ol’ boy right here might just have the setup we was looking for. So I booked a bear-hunting trip just a few miles from the Canadian border. The ad said they had all the amenities of the backwoods and would provide a real hunting and outdoors-in-the-wild experience. I talked ol’ Pops into going—which was hard to do, ’cause he’s funny about leaving the area around the house. But with enough persuasion (in the form of a fresh batch of his ’shine), I got him loaded up and away we went.

  Now, I didn’t know that Maine was basically on another continent. Heck, it took us more than twenty-four hours to drive there—and that was without taking any breaks. So by the time we pulled up, I was ready to pull my hair out. In fact, I would have rather driven a gasoline truck through a forest fire with a leaky valve. And if I had to hear any more of Pops’s stories, I swore I was gonna swallow my tongue and beg it to beat my guts out.

  When we did get there, I was more excited than a fat baby looking at a chocolate cake. We turned into a driveway that was seven miles long. Now, I’m from the cut and lived my whole life in the Lick—where snails are gag gifts, not hors d’oeuvres. But going down this path worried me just a little. We came to a little shack in the middle of the forest, and this guy came out to meet us. He was a big ol’ mountain man, and as soon as he spoke, I just knew that by the way his breath smelled he had to have just chewed the butthole out of a skunk. Then some girl came out behind him that was ugly enough to stop a bucket of calf slobber in midair. But I must say, they was some of the nicest people I had ever met—at least, I’m pretty sure they was people. They showed us around the place and we hit it off like birdshot in a baited field. The guy took me to a hole with four two-by-fours in a square around it and a bucket of sulfur, and he said, “This is our outhouse.” Now, like I said, I’m country, but at least we have walls on our outhouses so you don’t have to worry about the neighbors (or the fire ants) getting too nosy! Well, I just figured there were plenty of woods around, so we’d make do.

  Next we walked over to this long hose attached to a pump handle. I followed the hose and it ran straight down to the stream. Mountain Man said, “This here is our shower.” I pumped that handle twice and the water that hit me was colder than a witch’s breast in a brass bra in the Arctic. I knew right then and there that a blind hog had a better chance of finding his shadow than I did of using that thing.

  Our next stop was the sleeping quarters, which was a makeshift bunkhouse on a dirt floor. Now, I had spent the better part of my life roughing it, but I quickly realized that this was rougher than a cowboy’s rear end after wiping with 20-grit on the dusty trail. I also knew that if we were this deep in the woods and didn’t find a bear, he was sure to find us! That made me happier than a two-headed dog at a cat show.

  Well, that night I was colder than an Eskimo’s butt on an ice toilet at Christmas, and was never so glad to see the sun coming up. The guide told us that you only hunt bears in the evening. So in the morning we’d go and bait the stands and work the area, trying to see where the bears were moving. Now, I know there were days I probably could have failed my IQ test, but I didn’t see any need to go messing around on the ground near a bunch of bears. But since Pops always told me to be like a banana and hang in there with the bunch when we’re out of our element, I figured I’d tag along and at least see the countryside. But that guide had a better chance of nailing wet Jell-O to an oak tree than he did of getting me on the ground at a bait site.

  As soon as we started out, I was pretty sure this fellow was riding a gravy train on biscuit wheels, ’cause we jumped into a four-door 2500 series Dodge truck and he hollered, “Let’s go to town!” Now, again, I’m no bear-hunting expert, but I was pretty sure the bait sites wouldn’t be on the main drag. So when he pulled into
a Hardee’s forty-five miles away, in a town so small that the stoplight was a piece of colored construction paper that was green on one side and red on the other and directed by the wind, I was sure this guy must have been so dumb the only reason he got out of third grade was his momma gave him a crowbar.

  He pulled up to the back of the restaurant by the grease vats—them great big ones that always sit by the Dumpster—and started filling up five-gallon buckets full of grease. Me and Pops just sat there in wonderment. But things really started getting interesting when he pulled up to a local doughnut shop and started rolling fifty-five-gallon barrels of old doughnuts up to the truck. He yelled, “Hey, do you mind getting out and helping me load these?”

  I eased out of my seat, slightly apprehensive at what we were doing, knowing I wasn’t gonna go to some Podunk jail for heisting larger-than-life Cheerios. I finally broke down and said, “Bo, what in the world are we doing? Are we gonna bait bear or fetch our dinner?”

  He just laughed and said, “Sonny, we’re picking up the bait! We’ve gotta swing by the gas station and get the lobster leftovers and add them to the mix. Then we put all this together and set it at the sites. Them bears will be all over this mush like bees on a honey-dipped hamburger.”

  True to his word, we pulled into a gas station that had a little room where you could get Maine lobsters for four dollars apiece—they’d even steam ’em right there while you got your gas and stuff. First thing I did was jump on that like a beaver on a petrified tree, and I ate my fill of them red devils.

  It was about then I decided that there was no way I was going in the woods with this cat. I was getting the impression he was crazier than a corn-fed ’coon on coke. We headed forty-five miles back into the cut and got to the first bait site. That’s when those lobsters started getting to me a bit. I probably should’ve stopped at one, but we didn’t have food like that down South (and I couldn’t afford it if we did). I told Mountain Man and Pops I was feeling like I’d been drug through the mud and left on the fence to dry, and I was just gonna hang out in the truck and wait for them to come back. I could tell from the look in his eyes that Pops was hotter than a gasoline-dipped hen at a chicken roast, but I just grinned and settled in for a short nap.