Once Burns convinced me to run through an apartment complex buck naked.
“Jump out of the car,” he said, “and Chastain [Danny, the third member of our group, and a year older] and I will pick you up on the other side of the building.”
I was such a dumbass. I took off my clothes and got out of the car. No sooner had the door slammed than Burns locked me out, turned on the bright lights, and started honking the horn. I streaked, all right, right into a stand of nearby trees. Then Burns and Chastain drove off and left me. You don’t have many options when you’re naked in the woods at night. A discarded McDonald’s bag starts looking like possible clothing, even a bag for a small order of fries.
Was I pissed? Yes, but only for a moment. After all, I could just as easily have put Burns up to bolting through the building wearing nothing but his horn-rim glasses while I pulled the double-cross.
This incident hardly dimmed my enthusiasm for being naked in public. (Only winter weather can do that because what man wants to look like he’s carrying around a thirty-cent stack of dimes?) Later that year, Burns, Chastain, and I put on stocking masks and our football helmets and streaked through a high school assembly. We figured we were really clever and mysterious. But two minutes into the next class the PA system crackled to life: “Would Jeff Foxworthy, Larry Burns, and Danny Chastain come to Mr. Givens office IMMEDIATELY!” Okay, so we were caught, but the worst part was that somewhere on the smirk-filled walk to the principal’s office we figured out how. Our team numbers were on the backs of our helmets. The saddest thing was that we were some of the smartest kids in the school.
I first heard the term “Redneck” when I played baseball and football for Hapeville High. When we’d compete against teams from Atlanta’s north side—the money side—they’d always call us “a bunch of Rednecks.” Then, the term was still something of an insult. Now it just means a glorious absence of sophistication. Naturally, we found ways to make the high-society boys pay—with compounded interest.
For instance, every year we’d play Pace Academy, a private school for rich kids, located right by the governor’s mansion. Even in the ninth grade, Burns and I were already on the varsity baseball team. We just weren’t good enough to start, so we mostly warmed the bench. During the Pace game we watched as their first baseman kept elbowing one of our guys, Danny Beck. Finally, Beck said, “If he does it again, I’m gonna hit the guy.” Burns turned to me and said, “If Beck hits the first baseman, I’m gonna beat the crap outta the kid at second base.”
Sure enough, an inning or two later, Beck singled. Pace’s first baseman used his elbow, and Beck turned around and popped him. The benches emptied and so did the field, as everyone ran toward first base. Except Burns. He made a beeline for the second baseman and blindsided the poor guy.
From then on, and for the next four years, Burns beat this hapless kid, Chad Redman, into dogshit every time we played Pace in sports. During basketball Burns would say, “If I get in, I’m gonna deck Redman.” Somebody would shoot the ball, everybody would look for the rebound, and Burns would…boom! hit Redman in the stomach. Then we’d have nine guys running down the court and one guy lying in the foul lane.
The weird thing was that Redman always knew it was coming.
We didn’t discover why Burns had it in for Redman until our senior year, when someone just happened to ask him. We could never have guessed the reason, but the answer also didn’t surprise us. It was pure Burns. “He’s got orange hair,” he said. “I hate orange hair.”
Just my luck, I suppose, that he didn’t mind orange clothes.
Knowing a kid’s parents often explains the sometimes irrational acts of the friend you hang out with every day. Even if his ways still make no sense, you at least know what to expect. Later in life, this is why it’s a good idea to meet your prospective in-laws long before the word “marriage” is ever mentioned. Just in case there’s insanity or a severe case of midlife ugliness in your intended’s family, it’s not too late to get out and join the witness protection program.
Larry Burns’s dad drove a truck that carried cars for the Ford Motor Company. I don’t think I ever saw Mr. Burns with a shirt on. He had a gut like the front end of a ’55 Buick, only without the headlights. Well, one big light in the middle. His navel was the size of a hubcap. He was a big, big man. Every kid in the neighborhood was scared to death of him, even though Mr. Burns’s bark was far worse than his bite.
I remember once I called their house looking for Larry, and his dad answered.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Burns, this is Jeff Foxworthy. Is Larry there?”
“Ah, for cryin’ out loud!”
“Something wrong?”
“Eeyeah.”
“What?”
“Well, I been watching this movie for the past hour and a half. Guy finally gets the girl. Invites her back to his apartment, they have a few cocktails. They’re on the sofa, they start kissing around a little bit. He talks her into the bedroom. Gets her in there, gets her blouse off, pulls her skirt off, gets her naked. He takes his pants off, pulls his shirt off. He’s climbing into his bed, he’s about to get on top of her…and the damn phone rings and it’s YOU wantin’ to know where LARRY is!”
Another time I went to visit Larry, and Mr. Burns was all smiles and glad to see me. He said, “Hey Fox! You want some homemade peach ice cream? Just made it.”
“Yessir.” He handed me this bowl of stuff. I took a spoonful and I can still remember that it was some of the worst-tasting glop I’d ever eaten in my life. But Lord knows, I didn’t want to offend Mr. Burns. I managed to get the whole thing down and I carried my bowl into the kitchen.
He said, “Hey, you want some more!”
I said, “No sir, I’m full.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“No, it was really good. I’m just full.”
He started laughing: “You dumb shit! That wasn’t peach ice cream! That’s a thing of apricot yogurt. Been in the refrigerator for a couple of months.”
I knew that meant Mr. Burns liked me. Otherwise he wouldn’t have wasted his time. He was not a cruel man. In fact, his attitude pretty much explained Larry’s way of confronting life. He always had this look in his eyes like he knew something you didn’t. It was usually true. I miss him.
I loved hanging out at my friends’ houses, especially Deke Cole’s. Although Deke’s dad had died, his mother was great because she allowed us to drop by at all hours.
At Deke’s house we perfected our technique of dropping M-80s down street gutters, just to hear the explosions. Also, because we could hide behind the shrubs near the driveway, we could take a stuffed animal, tie it to some fishing line, and drag it across Jonesboro Road at night, right in front of an oncoming car. You could get some pretty nice-looking skids going. Until you’ve seen a family of four doing a “three-sixty” in a Ford wagon, you really haven’t lived.
By the time we were in the tenth grade, Danny Chastain had become legendary for his gas. On more than one occasion, anyone driving in a car with Chastain as a passenger had to pull over and get out on the roadside, just to prevent asphyxiation. Chastain could clear out an ROTC platoon, even though they knew that if they moved an inch they would have to do fifty push-ups. You had to move.
Because of Chastain’s prowess Burns and I decided it was only right that we make our friend a World Heavyweight Championship belt in metal shop. We engraved it with those words, and a big cloud. Burns’s dad, who made money on the side reupholstering furniture, supplied us with black vinyl. We added metal studs as a final touch.
Chastain was pretty proud of that belt, but one of the cooks at the Dwarf House complained that to give Chastain a trophy without a title bout just wasn’t fair. He wanted to challenge Chastain for the crown.
We needed a place to hold the contest. Pete Riggins lived across the street from the Cole’s. Pete was Hapeville High’s ninety-eight-pound weight class wrestling champ three years in a row. He wasn�
��t big, but he was quick and nimble. Also funny. His dad was the pharmacist at the local drugstore.
We held the fifteen-round championship showdown in Pete’s living room. (You learn to entertain yourself a lot in a small town.) Burns and I were Chastain’s trainers. The afternoon of the fight we made Danny drink three beers, and his mother, who was also in on it, made hard-boiled eggs and a pot of broccoli. We loaded him up.
Pete Riggins, Steve Raymond, and Doc Riggins were our judges. They even had official clipboards. Now remember, with an event like this we had to create the rules because we had no previous competitions to go by. We decided that each guy had two minutes per round to work up his best effort. We judged by sound and stench.
To our complete amazement, Doc Riggins took his responsibilities very seriously. I will never forget him getting up, walking across the room, wafting the odor up with his hand, saying, “Oh my God!” and marking the score on his clipboard. He did this with each attempt. What a great dad. Even if I thought he was totally nuts, I had to respect the man.
I think he was totally nuts.
Burns and I also liked to hold contests at school. One was the King Slob competition. The idea was to determine who could dress the grungiest for a whole week. From Monday through Thursday we were both pretty equally matched: torn shirts, dirty tennis shoes, muddy pants. On Friday I decided to go all out to beat him. I didn’t shower, wash my hair, or brush my teeth. I wore my three-day-old football practice undershirt and hunting pants, and added whatever extra dirt I could think of. When I got to school I looked around for Burns, confident I had him beat. Suddenly he walked up wearing the prettiest three-piece suit I’d ever seen.
“You win, Fox,” was all he said. That was enough. I heard those words in my head the entire day, while I sat in class looking like the world’s biggest dirt pile, and Burns beamed like a million bucks in his new threads.
A major rite of passage in Hapeville was the trip to Shit Creek. Sorry, but that’s what we called the two-mile stretch of woods through which ran the drain-off from the sewage treatment plant between Hapeville and Forest Park. The creek wasn’t scary in the daylight, but when the sun went down no one was safe.
See, the rumor was that Goat People—half person, half goat—lived in the woods. And Waterhead families: people with really big heads. Supposedly entire clans of these freaks existed nowhere else in Georgia but in the woods surrounding Shit Creek. As far as we know today, that’s still true.
The older high school kids would take the younger kids to Shit Creek at night. My initiation trip was in Ricky River’s Volkswagen. I was in the eighth grade. Pete Riggins, Steve Raymond, and Tom Flood were there as well. We’d driven about a mile into the woods when several guys thought they saw a Goat Man on the edge of the woods. Then suddenly Ricky’s car broke down in the middle of the road. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Goat People and Waterheads were everywhere.
But Ricky said, “Stay calm. It’s done this before. All we have to do is push-start it and the engine will kick in.”
Warily, we all got out on the dirt road. I swore I could hear the Waterhead families doing whatever Waterhead families did in their houses, back in the dark woods. I stood behind the Volkswagen, ready to push, when suddenly Ricky fired the engine. Flood, Riggins, and Raymond jumped in, Ricky put it in gear and took off, leaving me in the middle of Shit Creek.
I yelled and screamed for what must have been two or three seconds. Then I clammed up. No sense letting the Goat People and Waterheads know exactly where I was. Instead, I took off the way we came in. Had someone been standing by with a stopwatch, I would have set a new school speed record.
Everything that could possibly happen to me flashed into my head as I raced through the dark. I knew that calling my parents to come and get me was the least of my concerns. I feared that by the time the Goat People and Waterheads got through with me, there would be nothing left to take home. I imagined the kids at school talking about me the next day:
“Poor Jeff. So young, so funny. So dead.”
“And brave. He knew it was coming.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know? Before he died he wrote his name and ‘I died at Shit Creek’ in blood on a big rock.”
“The Goat Men and Waterheads have him now.”
Of course, my friends were waiting for me in the clearing at the end of the road. I saw the car when I was a good hundred yards away. They sat around drinking Miller beer from pony bottles and laughing like hyenas. When I realized I would make it out alive I did what every victim of this ritual has ever done. I slowed, wiped the snot off my face and the tears from my eyes, and gathered my composure. Then I sauntered up acting all pissed off.
“You bastards! Leave me in Shit Creek! The Goat Man was right behind me! He was this close to catching me!”
I don’t think they believed me.
Shit Creek was a scary place and it smelled bad. Being left alone there prepared me perfectly for one day getting my own sitcom on television. Stepping out onto the soundstage for the very first time is like being dropped off on that dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Right from the get-go they ask you to push, to help jump-start the show. Then they take off without you. Soon you’re crying, you’re scared, and you’re pretty sure you’re surrounded by Waterheads.
“Bomber One to Mother Hen. Come in Mother Hen.”
“This is Mother Hen, Bomber One.”
“Yeah, Mother Hen. Bomber One requests permission to fire on ’77 Ford Galaxy.”
“Affirmative, Bomber One. Do you prefer to press or hang?”
“Prefer to hang, Mother Hen.”
“Roger, opening hatch. Lock, load, fire when ready.”
“Hatch opening…Firing…Omigod! Direct hit. They’re in the ditch! Repeat, they are in the ditch! Granny is out of the car and clutching her heart!”
No, this is not an excerpt from the long-suppressed Mother Goose Meets Mad Max. This is the game of “Search and Destroy” as played by three crazed teenagers speeding down the interstate in my father’s Chrysler (with the electric bomb bay doors—I mean windows), mooning innocent motorists. What’s even better, it’s a true story.
Mooning was a great sport. Nobody ever got hurt. You didn’t have to be in shape to play. The fatter you were the more you brought to the window. I’m still not sure why it was such a thrill to make somebody look at our naked butts; I just know we did it compulsively. Unfortunately, any time you mooned someone, you were also open to retaliation. Yes, it’s funny to moon, but it’s not so funny if it happens when you’re with your mother. Once, when I was in the tenth grade, I remember riding to church with my mom, when I looked over to see my best friends drive past with a pressed ham against the passenger’s window. Thank God my mom hadn’t worn her glasses.
“Oh look,” she said. “Uncle Buddy got a haircut. Looks good, don’t it?”
We mooned whenever the opportunity occurred. One night, while we hung out in the Dwarf House parking lot, somebody told us they had discovered where Danny Chastain had parked with his girlfriend. They’d spotted his car under a magnolia tree by the mortuary. We immediately gathered ten guys, found the car, took our pants off, and crept closer while Chastain made out in the front seat. Someone counted very quietly to three and BOOM! Every ass was on all available window space. Chastain’s date screamed his tongue right out of her mouth. We knew it would take a great deal of sweet talk and Windex to rectify the situation.
Almost nothing was sacred, except that Burns would never moon a car with kids inside. More than once he almost killed himself yanking his ass back through the window because, just as we pulled alongside our intended victims, he’d see a child or even a child’s car seat.
“No! No! I can’t! There are kids in the car.”
If only Chad Redman had been smart enough to wear a diaper whenever he thought Burns might be around.
Church buses were the most tempting targets, but also off-limits. We were God-fearin
g and figured that if we gave in to temptation that one day we’d have to account for everything. We didn’t want the Lord booming, “YOU MOONED THE CHURCH BUS.”
“But, sir…”
“THOU SHALT NOT MOON. COMMANDMENT FIFTEEN. LOOK IT UP. NOW GET OUT OF HERE.”
It was safer to be mooners with morals. But morality had nothing to do with why we didn’t moon the girls we knew. Call us practical. Mooning a high school coed wouldn’t get anyone on the have-to-date chart.
“Oh, everybody’s seen his ass. I must go out with him!”
Mooning had many derivatives. We called them “BAs” for bare asses, and when we played high school football we cared less about our won-lost record than scoring BAs.
You could do BAs two ways. Drop your pants and bend over and wait for your victim to turn around. Or do the “red eye.” A tasteful way of putting this is “a BA with a spreader.” Either way, a guy had to admit when he saw it. It was a point of honor. You had to concede when you’d been scored upon.
We got bored with that pretty quickly, possibly because we did it all the time! So we created more elaborate variations. For instance, every guy knows that there is a complete lack of privacy in most men’s restrooms. There are stand-up urinals and sit-down commodes, none of which have doors. This is especially true in athletic locker rooms. Before football practice, two or three guys would always be dropping a couple of “friends” off at the lake, so we’d creep in and do a little number that we liked to call a “train BA.” Picture many teenage boys locking arms and bending over, while flashing past an unsuspecting halfback relieving himself in the set position. A common defense against the train BA was to immediately look skyward. That way you only saw one bare ass whiz by, and it didn’t count. We defended against that move by silently positioning another man on top of the stall, doing the red eye. The victim looked up and he was had.
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 3