Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life

by Lewis Grizzard

  Sadly, Cureton and Cole’s has been boarded shut, never to open again. At least they haven’t torn it down and put up a disco. I can see it now: J. W.’s Juke Joint.

  Bailey’s General Store in Jones Crossroads is a lot like Cureton and Cole’s. It has a front porch and two chairs for just sittin’. It has a screened front door and a thermometer so old men can look at it and greet one another with, “Hot enough for you?”

  Inside, there are hardwood floors and an air-conditioning system—a floor fan. I saw some flies. A fly is never at home until it is buzzing about a country store on a hot afternoon.

  The lady inside said her daddy, Mr. Bailey, ran the store before he died. Worked hard all his life, she said, until the day he found out he had cancer. He lived five more weeks.

  “Daddy did a lot of business here,” she said. “Mama took it over after he died. Things have sort of gone down hill since then.”

  I checked out the merchandise. In the back were sacks of hog pellets and scratch feed for chickens. There was a meat box with bologna, the kind you cut directly from the loaf. A yard rake was for sale.

  There was a classic candy display case. Zagnut must be out of business. Behind the counter was more snuff than your grandmother could dip in a lifetime of evenings in the front porch rocking chair. There was Bruton’s snuff, and Dental snuff, and Tops snuff, and I think I spotted a can of Rooster.

  I couldn’t resist any longer. From inside Bailey’s drink box I pulled out a Nehi orange bellywasher. From the cookie and cracker rack I plucked a “Big Town” chocolate moon pie.

  I walked outside and sat me down on the front porch. The marshmallow filling inside the moon pie had become runny from the heat, but the cold rush of the orange bellywasher released its hold from the roof of my mouth.

  For a moment I had been ten again, with a dime burning a hole in my jeans, and with all the pleasures a child could imagine encircling me and dazzling me. For a moment, I thought I could hear Lee Evans talking to J. W. Thompson. For a moment, that moon pie was chateaubriand and my big orange was a gentle and soothing nectar of the gods.

  IT’S OKAY TO CRY

  THINGS MY MOTHER TOLD me would come true when I was grown that I really didn’t believe at the time:

  The older you get, the harder it is to quit smoking.

  You might turn up your nose at turnip greens now, but there will come a time you can’t get them and you will want them more than T-bone steak.

  Love is the greatest gift one person can give to another.

  Money can’t buy love.

  The kind it might buy isn’t worth having.

  People will tell you they love you when they don’t mean it.

  There are no answers in the bottom of a cocktail glass.

  It’s easy to go into debt. Getting out is next to impossible.

  Marriage is a two-way street.

  You will never meet a good woman in a nightclub.

  One lie begets another.

  If you don’t take care of yourself when you are young, you might not live to regret it.

  Even if you don’t agree with everything the preacher says, it won’t hurt you to sit still for thirty minutes and listen to him.

  It’s okay to cry.

  Never let a friend down. You will need him someday.

  You don’t need to talk dirty to prove you are a man.

  The Lord listens to your prayers.

  He doesn’t answer all of them.

  The best way to tell somebody you care is to show them first.

  It’s not written anywhere that life is supposed to be fair.

  Money doesn’t grow on trees.

  Always wear clean underwear. You might be in a wreck.

  Children and old people appreciate kindness.

  So do dogs.

  Be careful when you buy a used car or an insurance policy.

  Pay attention when somebody older tells you something. You can learn a lot from people who have already been down the road.

  Being stubborn won’t get you anywhere.

  Women don’t like men who drink too much.

  There will be times when you are very lonely. Just remember your mother loves you and always will.

  People who shout to make themselves heard usually don’t know what they are talking about.

  When you get older, your back will hurt and it won’t be that easy to get to sleep.

  Someday, a man will walk on the moon. And Pepsi Colas will cost a quarter.

  Pretty faces can be deceiving.

  Always say “Thank you” when somebody does you a favor. You will get more favors that way.

  Ball games aren’t the most important thing in the world.

  Income tax will eat you alive.

  You will regret not keeping up your piano lessons.

  A MOTHER WILL WORRY

  I HAVE ALWAYS DISLIKED hospitals. They even smell like people are sick. And everybody who works there dresses all in white. That makes me uncomfortable, too.

  Every moment I am visiting in a hospital, I expect one of those people in white to attempt to puncture my body with a needle. In medical science, when in doubt, grab a needle and look for a victim.

  She was lying there in her hospital bed, asleep and attached to a strange looking machine. There was a needle in her arm. It was attached to a tube which led to a bottle of solution.

  The solution, a drop at a time, rolled down to the tube, into the needle, and into her body. Each time a drop fell from the bottle, the machine made a clicking sound. The Chinese, I am certain, are behind such a torture-rendering machine.

  I don’t know what awakened her. Perhaps it was simply my presence in the room. I hadn’t made a sound.

  She looked tired. I have seen her like this so many times before. Once, when I was a child, she was sick and in the hospital for a long time. That was for something else, something she eventually whipped.

  I am praying for an encore this time.

  My mother first fell ill to her disease fifteen years ago. She went through a long, treacherous operation the day John Kennedy was buried.

  She was better for a time after that, and then worse, and then better and then worse again. One day last week she said, “I haven’t felt this good in years.”

  But it was no time before she was back in the hospital again and I was standing over her again, trying to say something that would help and instead talking mostly about myself.

  One thing I never bring up to my mother is any involvement I might be having with the opposite sex, but she always asks about it because one thing she would like to be—like most mothers, I suppose—is a grandmother, and so far, she hasn’t been close.

  “There’s plenty of time for that,” I always tell her.

  “Maybe for me,” she laughs, “but how about you?”

  The preacher came by. He was a soft man, who literally crept into the room and introduced himself to me by saying, “Hello, I’m a Baptist preacher.”

  He told my mother he was praying for her, and she thanked him. He didn’t stay long.

  “He goes by to see just about everybody,” my mother explained. Visit the sick and calm the grieving. Nobody does it better than a small-town preacher.

  I was there maybe a couple of hours. I finally pulled a chair near the bed toward the end of my visit. I think my mother sensed I would be leaving soon.

  I am thirty-two years old. I have a good job. A car. A nice place to live. Friends. And more health than I deserve.

  My mother is sick, lying in a hospital bed with a Chinese Solution Torture Machine attached to her arm. But here is how our visit ended:

  “Are you eating well, son?”

  “Sure.”

  “Remember to eat well. Sweets are bad for your teeth.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Don’t ever pick up a stranger when you’re driving at night.”

  “I would never do that.”

  “Do you have enough cover for your bed?”

>   “Plenty.”

  “I wish you would stop smoking.”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “Try harder.”

  “I’ll try harder.”

  “Don’t bother to get me anything for Christmas. I don’t need a thing.”

  “I want to get you something.”

  “And don’t worry about me.”

  ”I can’t help that.”

  “Do you have enough cover for your bed?”

  “Plenty, mother. Plenty.”

  MOTHER’S DAY

  SHE MARRIED LATE IN life, compared to other women of her day. When she finally found her man, he would soon leave her and go off to war.

  He was a brave soldier and performed many heroic deeds, and he lived through it all. When he returned, she loved him dearly and he loved her. A boy child was born one October morning.

  But came another war that took her man away again.

  She got the news from a yellow telegram. The child was playing in the yard, chasing butterflies and wrestling a playful bird dog. He can still remember her scream from within the house. He can still remember her tears. He was too young to understand why she was crying, but he tried to comfort her the best he could.

  Her brave soldier, said the telegram, was missing in action. An enemy force had overrun his company’s position on some barren hill a million miles away in Korea.

  The child wondered about this “Korea,” what it was, where it was, and why his daddy was there.

  On Christmas Eve, there was a telephone call, followed by more tears. The soldier was alive. He was calling from a hospital in Pearl Harbor. He would be home soon.

  “Do you still love me?” he asked his son.

  The child did not yet understand the telephone. He nodded a “yes.”

  “Of course, he does,” the mother assured the father. “And so do I.”

  He returned in triumph. He had been captured and imprisoned by the enemy. He had been tortured. But he had escaped. For weeks, he was hidden in an underground cave and cared for by a South Korean boy who brought him rice and kept him alive until he could make his way back to his lines.

  He was weak from the diet and the fear. His feet were so severely frostbitten, they would crack open and bleed each day of the rest of his life.

  He was a patriot, still. He made speeches throughout the land, his wife and son at his side. He told of his experiences and he assailed those who would keep American forces out of distant lands threatened by the spread of Communism.

  He would say many times, “There is no soldier like the American soldier. The rest of the world needs us to keep it free.”

  But those many years of combat had taken their toll. He had changed. When he returned, the woman thought their long periods of separation were over. She would be disappointed again.

  He brooded. He awakened nights in a cold sweat, screaming. He drank only a little at first. But then he would sit up those nights, alone with a bottle.

  The Army, despite his many decorations for valor and his years of service, decided him unfit for further military duty. He wandered aimlessly, at a loss for a purpose.

  The mother and the child would see him whenever they could. They would visit him in other cities and she would pretend someday they would be together again.

  But she knew they wouldn’t. A thousand nights, thinking the child next to her was asleep, she prayed aloud for help.

  Finally, she gave up on her husband. She had no other choice. He was a hopeless alcoholic, a man lost in an imagined shame that was nearly demonic in its possession of his life.

  She educated herself. She struggled to work each day and to evening classes at night. Somehow, she still managed to bring her son toward manhood and she told him, “Always respect your father, no matter what.”

  She would eventually remarry. She would take a man steady and kind to her and to her son. She would find at least a share of the contentment and security that had avoided her for so long.

  The father, the brave soldier, would die alone. The son would grow and leave her. But he would think of his mother and her plight often. On occasion, he would remember to thank her for the sacrifices she made in his behalf.

  Sadly, her burdens have never ceased totally. Today, it is an illness she battles. The doctors say it is incurable. She deserves a miracle.

  She wanted to be with her son today, and he wanted to be with her on Mother’s Day. He wonders if he made the right decision to put off a visit because of business demands.

  He did send roses, however. And because she means so much to him, and because she was strong on his mind, and because he wanted to remind himself of the long road she’s been down, he spent an afternoon and half a night writing what you just read.

  2.

  OFF THE WALL

  People ask me, “Where do you get your ideas for columns?” I never know how to answer that question. Sometimes I look under rocks. I think that is where I got the ideas for the following pieces. At any rate, I do hate liver and I remain convinced the world would be better off without airplanes.

  THEY GAVE THE BALL WITHOUT ME

  FOR THE THIRTY-SECOND consecutive year, I did not receive an invitation to the annual Harvest Ball at the Piedmont Driving Club. Obviously, there has been some kind of mistake.

  Every year, I anxiously await the arrival of the white envelope beckoning me to what is certainly one of Atlanta’s most prestigious and gala social events.

  And every year, I am disappointed. Could the problem be I have moved around too much and they don’t know where to find me?

  I could just drop by the club and pick it up, you know, and I promise to leave the truck on the street.

  What happens at the Harvest Ball is some of the city’s loveliest and tenderest and most charming young girlpersons, whose daddies also have a big stash, make their “debuts” to society.

  That makes them “debutantes.” I have never quite understood exactly what a debutante is, but I’m sure there are lots of good things to eat and drink at their parties.

  “When a girl makes her debut,” somebody who should know told me, “it means her parents are presenting her to their friends and that she is now a part of the social scene.”

  I think the male comparison to that—on a lower social strata—is your old man taking you for a beer at the VFW and letting you shoot pool with Scooter Haines who was once eight ball champion of all Heard County.

  They held this year’s Harvest Ball last week and, again, I had to be satisfied with reading about it in the paper.

  It was a grand affair. Proud fathers, said the report, beamed as their daughters curtsied to the audience in their expensive and chic gowns.

  One of the debs did express concern her escort might get too drunk to cut in on her father when it came time for the evening’s waltz. That shocked me.

  I can understand getting too drunk to shoot eight ball with Scooter Haines, but the Piedmont Driving Club ain’t the Moose Lodge, sport.

  Dinner was divine, the story went on. Everybody had tomato aspic with shrimp, breast of chicken, spinach soufflé with artichokes and almond mousse and even Scooter Haines, who once went all the way to Houston for a pool tournament, never wrapped his gums around anything like that.

  Sadly, the closest I have ever come to a debutante ball was the annual Fourth of July Street Dance in front of the knitting mill on the square in downtown Moreland with a live band that played “Down Yonder” over and over again because that’s all the band knew except for “Alabama Jubilee” which it didn’t play so well.

  What always happened at the dance was farmers from as far away as Luthersville and Arno-Sargent showed up with truckloads of daughters they wanted to marry off. If any of them had teeth, they got to ride up front in the cab.

  Some grand old girls got out of trucks at those street dances. The only curtseying they did, however, was over behind the depot where nobody could see them. We were a polite society, too.

  There was Cordie Mae P
oovey. Cordie Mae always came in her “bermudalls.” That’s a pair of overalls cut off just above the knee. Cordie Mae couldn’t dance a lick, but don’t tell her that because she weighed a good 220 and was stronger than she smelled.

  And who could forget Lucille Garfield? Lucille carried her pet pig everywhere she went. The way you could tell the pig from Lucille was the pig wore a hat and was the better conversationalist of the two.

  Betty Jean Turnipseed didn’t miss a dance for fifteen years. Betty Jean wasn’t very smart. One time somebody brought an armadillo to school for show-and-tell and she thought it was a possum on the half-shell.

  But Kathy Sue Loudermilk came to the street dances, too, and when she danced, even the preacher broke a sweat. Nature blessed that child beyond the limits of this timid vocabulary.

  It’s like my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr., a great American, said of her: “That dog can hunt.”

  So I’ll probably never make the Harvest Ball. But I would have paid to have seen Kathy Sue Loudermilk debuting at the Piedmont Driving Club.

  One curtsey from ol’ Kathy Sue in something tight and low cut and the whole crowd would have been knocked squarely on their tomato aspics.

  INTERVIEWING MYSELF

  I GET LETTERS FROM journalism students and other assorted weirdos wanting to know how I go about putting together a column five days a week.

  “I have to write a term paper for my JRL 101 class,” began one recent letter, “and I have chosen you as my topic. I want to know, in at least 2,000 words, how you go about putting together a column five days a week.