Grandma Camp also introduced me to TV trays, and I will always love her for that. They were aluminum, with a clay-pot-and-flower design. Soon after we moved into the Hapeville house, my mother decided her parents needed fiberglass TV trays decorated with expressions from Laugh-In. Things like “Sock It to Me, Baby” in weird block letters. My grandparents still have them. There are few things you can count on in life, but those trays are one.
My mother’s cousins, Dolores and Buddy, were also two of the funniest human beings alive. Sometimes Dolores would imitate someone she’d seen on TV. Or she would tell wild stories. Dolores always loved the one about the son of the lady who cleaned her house getting arrested again.
Dolores acted the housekeeper’s part: She said, “They framed him. It was not his fault. He had loaned his jacket to a friend. The next day the friend had given him his jacket back, and he was just walking down the street, minding his business. But the police grabbed him and arrested him. The problem was that he had not checked his jacket pockets, and he did not realize that he was carrying somebody else’s pistol and $3,000 in cash.”
Or maybe it was only $150 and a penknife. My family remembers stuff and then elaborates. As the years pass we back up each other on our embellishments. It’s like the “guy thing” that happens when two men are deer hunting. If one year you shoot a spike deer that weighs ninety-eight pounds, then every year the deer gains a couple of points and another twenty-five or thirty pounds. While you tell the story, your buddy, who was there with you, just sits and nods.
“Remember when we shot that twelve-pointer? That deer musta weighed three-hundred-and-sixty…”
No matter what, the story will never outweigh the accumulated BS.
This story needs no elaboration. It’s one of my earliest comic moments. Perhaps my finest.
When I was ten and my brother, Jay, was five, he had a…problem. Not a serious problem. Today he might say it was more of a personal choice. What I mean to say is that he would go days and days without going to the bathroom. My mother worried constantly, when she wasn’t annoyed.
We had just moved to Union Avenue when the city decided to expand the airport and build a runway that started at the end of our street. One day after a light rain, Jay and I were playing in the construction site and discovered some particularly nice mud. Not too wet, not too dry, sublimely textured. It was destiny. Rather than wallow in the mud like normal kids, I had a great idea: Build a turd.
We used a two-by-four as our platform. The finished product was close to three feet long. It was probably as big around as two fists put together. This thing would have done Man o’ War proud. We picked out all the rocks and tapered one end. We really did a nice job.
After we let it dry in the sun we took it home. I carried one end of the two-by-four and Jay carried the other. We snuck it into the house—maybe the McGuires saw us, but they never said anything—and then into our only bathroom, where we installed it.
We put the blunt end down and stuffed it into the toilet as far as it could go. Then we wrapped it around the bowl once, and brought the tapered end out of the water, almost to the lip of the seat. It looked very much like somebody had forced an anaconda into a fishbowl.
After my brother and I discussed our plan, he nodded and set off to do what I said.
I went into our bedroom, lay on the floor, and laughed for fifteen minutes while he quietly sat in the bathroom, not making a sound. Pretty soon I heard his little voice going, “Mo-om!! Mo-om!!”
By this time I had moved to the closet, where I rocked back and forth with my hand over my mouth. I could hear my mother’s footsteps in the hall. I heard the bathroom door open; she took three more steps. I moved from the closet to the bedroom door and cracked it an inch so I could hear. But I could only imagine the innocent look on my brother’s face, gazing up at my mother as he slid off the commode. Then I heard her: “My God! Jay, when was the last time you went?”
“I think I went last week,” he whispered, almost on the verge of tears. He was great. He was perfection. The next thing I heard was my mother rushing out of the bathroom, heading for the hall phone.
“I’m calling Dr. Seevrit. This is not normal.”
I staggered into the hall, still laughing, and hit the phone switch hook. Then I told her. “No! Mom! It’s not real! We made that out of mud!”
She should have killed us both. But I think she was too relieved to put up much of a fuss.
To this day my brother and I still love to bring up that story, particularly when there’s company. “Hey, Mom, remember when we made the fake turd and fooled you?”
She just turns a bright shade of red.
I didn’t realize it, of course, but somewhere in my little ten-year-old Redneck brain my future was sealed.
To kids, hygiene is pretty much just a greeting. We brushed our teeth and considered ourselves clean. When I played Little League, I’d rub dirt on my arms and hands between innings. Later when I got out of the tub, the water looked like mud. Dirty water was a badge of honor. The dirtier the better. I’d actually call people in to verify it.
“You think I didn’t play hard? Take a look at that tub. Bathed yesterday. Got that dirty today.” I had to clean the ring afterward, but it was worth it if I could make a witness say, “Oh my God.” I suppose I could have taken a shower, but back then, Rednecks didn’t have showers. Well, yes we did, but we called them garden hoses.
When she met my father, my mother was a keypunch operator for the state of Georgia. While repairing a machine in Carole’s office, Big Jim, in totally Big Jim fashion, flirted with the girls. He asked Carole out, and three months later they were married. Within two years I was born.
Big Jim has a magic way with women, and he is a legendary figure among my friends. Big Jim could romance women in a convent. You’d drop him off out front, and dollars to doughnuts, an hour later he’d leave with his arm around a nun. Recently, he got married for the sixth time. Each wife has been ten years younger than the one before. My brother, sister, and I are scared that if he gets hitched one more time that we’ll be walking his wife to school in the morning.
“Look both ways, Mom.”
She’ll probably be a good cook, though, with that Easy-Bake oven. I love those cakes the size of quarters.
When Big Jim and Carole were still married, he was a Sunday school teacher and a deacon in the First Baptist Church. When we were old enough to understand, Mom informed us of his other interests. We were living in Greenville, South Carolina, when my mother figured out that Big Jim was fooling around with his secretary. Carole has always seen what she wants to see. Her attitude is “Fool me once, shame on you.” By the time she and Big Jim separated, her attitude was “Fool me forty-seven times…” Big Jim was just a charmer. If Carole could have put up with Big Jim’s ways, I think she might have stayed. In fact, I believe Big Jim could pick up the phone and call any woman he’s ever been with, and I guarantee you they would start throwing things in a suitcase and come back.
When the marriage ended, Big Jim moved to Washington, D.C., for a few years, then back to the north side of Atlanta. We moved to Hapeville. Grandma and Granddaddy Camp stayed with us in their house for about six months, and then moved a couple of blocks away. We didn’t drive them away. My grandparents just kept moving for the heck of it. They’d buy a house and as soon as they’d get the couch positioned properly in the den, they’d start house-hunting again. They moved six times within a three square mile area before I got out of high school. Apparently, no one had ever explained to them the meaning of equity.
When my grandparents moved out, my uncle Jack, the kindest, nicest human being I’ve ever known, moved in. A couple of years later my mom remarried. My stepdad’s name was Paul. He worked at the same place my mother worked—a distribution center for small, off-brand grocery stores.
We all lived in the Union Avenue house for a while, then moved to College Park. I didn’t like living there because none of my friends were aro
und, and soon I started riding the city bus back to Hapeville High. However, I did manage to make a few friends in College Park. One, Buddy Hammond, lived two doors away. To this day, he remains one of my best pals.
With Buddy, you could take the “might be” out of “you might be a Redneck…” Buddy still eats sardines at 5 A.M. with a cup of coffee. He once made his mother a change purse out of deer testicles, as a present. Buddy took the scrotum sack, tanned it, and laced in a drawstring at the top. What mother wouldn’t be proud to carry that? (I don’t know what he did with the actual balls, but they probably wound up in someone’s secret recipe, with butter and salt.)
Today, despite an obsessive interest in taxidermy that sometimes costs him more than his annual income, Buddy is a software specialist with IBM. And he’s still a Redneck. Buddy trained himself to wear the wingtips and the jacket and the tie, but he has not been able to give up the chewing tobacco. The boss still yells at him for using a spit cup on his desk in front of other people.
“[spit] You know what you need to do with this here computer? [spit] You need to…”
When I was in college, I shared an apartment with Buddy. Our place looked like a salute to stuffed animals. Buddy had actually apprenticed at a taxidermist’s one summer and took home everything that nobody came back to claim, including a goat. (Tell me, when is it goat season?) But I couldn’t blame Buddy for his fascination with dead animals and parts thereof. Taxidermy is a male preoccupation. You never hear a woman say, “You know what would look nice over the sofa? A big dead fish. Wouldn’t that look great?”
I’ve learned that women don’t like anything from a taxidermist. In fact, if there weren’t any women, men would have apartments full of dead, mounted animals. They’d spend the whole day showing them off to each other.
“C’mon in here, George. Take a look at this. That there is a white-tailed deer, a mallard duck, and a Siamese cat. Had to run off the road to hit the cat. They’re quick!”
Don’t write letters. It’s a joke. I have two cats—one on either side of the fireplace.
Pawpaw is Big Jim’s mom. She grew up on a farm in Denmark, South Carolina, about an hour south of Columbia. Now she’s in her eighties. When I was little, we’d spend about a month with her each summer. The farm was in the middle of nowhere. We learned to milk cows and ride horses, and to otherwise amuse ourselves. (When I got older, amusing myself meant looking for girls. Girls in farm country get bored easily, too.) Pawpaw’s brother, Bob, used to say, “When we were kids, we had no toys. We had to learn to walk a barrel.” So one summer I mastered walking a trash barrel. Unlike some subjects I had to learn in school, barrel-walking has come in handy. You do it all day long in show business.
Another advantage of having relatives who lived on a farm was that we learned to drive early. I started when I was ten years old. By the time I got my learner’s permit I’d been driving so many years that it was no big deal. Other kids were proud to do cartwheels in the living room. I could parallel park before my first kiss. I had the parking down. All I needed was the girl.
Bob taught me to drive. He put phone books under me and I had to stand up on the seat. My first car was a truck with three-on-the-tree, meaning the stick shift was on the steering column. But Bob figured it was no big deal because the tractors had twenty gears. The adults thought nothing of letting kids drive because then you could do stuff for them on the farm. They didn’t have time to bullshit around, they needed the help.
It was always, “Take this trash to the dump.” Or “Go take the truck down there to Bobby’s house, put those shingles on it, and bring them back up here.”
My dad taught my brother, Jay, to drive. He took the truck out in the middle of the hayfield and said, “This is how you stop it, this is how you start it. Practice.” It was a 200-acre field. You couldn’t hit anything. My brother did. He hit a tree.
Jay said, “Daddy, I scratched the truck.”
“Right,” said Big Jim. “Scratched the rear quarter panel right off of it.”
I should tell you right now that I am not the most famous product of my hometown.
Hapeville is where they invented the Chik-Fil-A. It’s like a piece of breaded chicken on a buttered bun that, if you put one on top of your head, your tongue would beat your brains out to get to it. It’s hard not to touch yourself when you’re eating a Chik-Fil-A. We don’t have Chik-Fil-A in California, but on the East Coast the mere mention of a Chik-Fil-A guarantees a gasp.
The first Chik-Fil-A was served at a restaurant named the Dwarf House, in Hapeville. I’m not making this up. The outside decor featured the Seven Dwarfs carved out of wood; they were painted and mounted on a movable track. Doug Davis, a Hapeville artist famous enough to have a street—Doug Davis Drive—named after him, had painted the Seven Dwarfs. I’m not sure where Snow White was. But the contraption never seemed to work and a couple of the dwarfs fell over out of sheer boredom. The restaurant also had a little bitty door that we, as kids, were obligated to go in and out of.
Everyone from high school hung out at the Dwarf House parking lot. I had my first sexual experience there, and my first bloody nose. Same night, same person. Also, my first Chik-Fil-A. I wanted no more out of life, except maybe to have a street named after me. And wouldn’t you know it, recently Hapeville asked my mother if they could put my name on every city-limits sign.
Like I said at the beginning, I’m a blue-collar guy at heart. Now you know it’s true. One reason I make Redneck jokes is, well…I have to. Otherwise, having to endure an attitude from the rest of the country that Southerners are stupid and backward would be too depressing.
Apparently we get our reputation because of how we speak. People think they need an interpreter to understand us. I’ve never met anyone who thinks Southern is the world’s most intelligent-sounding accent. When people hear me talk they automatically want to deduct a hundred IQ points. (This may be at the root of many of President Clinton’s troubles.) To be honest, I sort of feel the same way. None of us would want to hear our brain surgeon say, “Aright…now what we gon’ do is saw the top of yer head off, root aroun’ in ’er with a stick and see if we cain’t maybe find that dadburned clot.”
You’d say, “No thanks. I’ll just die, okay?”
This is also why Southern financial advisers have such a tough time. Nobody wants to give their money to somebody who talks this way. “[snort] Well, the key is you got to di-ver-si-fy wi’ yer money. What we’ll do is we’ll take half of it, put it in a big mayonnaise jar, bury it out in yer backyard. The other half we’ll take down to the dog track and bet on the one that does his business right before the race starts.”
I’m still proud of where I come from. We may have words nobody’s heard of, but we also have strong values. Most everybody goes to church and is pretty family oriented. Boy scouts, Little League, and scoring points for roadkill are a way of life.
And believe it or not, sometimes we’re also guilty of being snobs. We rarely trust someone who isn’t like us. We worry about people who would rather go to work than go fishing. But I’ll tell you a secret rarely whispered north of the Mason-Dixon line: What we’re really doing is keeping a good thing going. Our whole image of overalls, no shirt, no shoes, eating grits, chewing tobacco, butt cracks, and acting stupid is intentional and a total farce.
We just do that to keep the rest of the country from coming down here.
Y’all Watch This!
What are a Redneck’s famous last words?
Simple.
“Y’all watch this!”
Whatever the foolhardy act, his friends always oblige. In fact, they probably put the poor guy up to no good in the first place, just for a laugh. Not that he minds. Men know that their friends are going to get them in trouble. They expect it. That’s why they’re called friends. Have you ever heard a guy describe friendship? There’s always trouble involved.
“Ole George, boy, he’s a great friend. He’ll come get you out of jail at 3:00 in the mor
ning.”
That doesn’t sound like friendship to me. If George was a great friend his ass would also be in jail, sitting on a cot, smoking a cigarette, going, “She didn’t look like no cop, did she?”
The things we do for friends.
I once jumped onto a hay bale, off the back of a pickup truck moving at forty miles an hour. I was seventeen and my best friend, Larry Burns, talked me into doing it. It was easy. All Burns had to say was “You know, there’s not anybody in the world got the guts to do that.” We were at my dad’s farm, and already a few under-age beers into the twilight. “But I guess if anybody had those guts, Foxworthy,” he continued, “you’d come closest. But nobody’s got that many guts.”
Five minutes later we were racing through the 200-acre pasture. I tried to keep my balance in the truck bed. We passed the hay bale and I leapt. It looked soft—made of hay, right—but it was packed as solid as a rock. I hit the bale, broke my nose, and passed out. I woke up to the sound of Larry laughing. Later, the doctor asked, “How did this happen, son?”
I told the truth. “My friend dared me.”
I met Larry Burns in fifth grade, on the first day of school. We instantly became best friends. He can still verify what I was wearing that day: orange plaid pants and an orange shirt with a zipper. I went all out. I figured it would be hard to forget a kid so stylishly dressed. My Southern sense of cool also explained the blue plaid pants and the blue zip-up shirt in my closet—I wore them in the school pictures—and possibly why I was so hot with the fifth grade girls. Because of my fashion sense, Tracey Young and I went together for two or three months. We never touched or, I think, spoke. But that had nothing to do with Tracey and everything to do with where my real affections lay. I was really “going with” Burns and the guys. We were inseparable..
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 2