No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem!

by Jeff Foxworthy

  “Jerry Duncan.”

  “Yessir, this is Clay Felton, I had a message from you.”

  “John, glad you called me back. We’ve got a secret installation going on at NASA this weekend. We’re pulling about twenty guys from throughout the country and you’ve been selected as one of those going.”

  “This weekend?”

  “Yes, Clay, and I have to tell you: This is going to look extremely good on your resume.”

  “When would I have to leave?” Felton asked, clearly unhappy.

  “Well, we need you to leave right away, Clay. God, we’ve got over one hundred and fifty 420s to install.”

  “I’ve got to call my wife,” said Felton, looking for any way out.

  “Clay, we’d ask that you not call your wife, it’s top secret.”

  “Okay, sir. Thank you,” said Felton. Then he hung up, defeated. We laughed for a good five minutes, then beeped Felton. When he called back I said, “Felton, listen, by the way: Do you recognize this voice? ‘Jerry Duncan, headquarters.’”

  All we heard on the other end was a scream and the words, “You sonsabitches!”

  Yes, working for a big corporation was more fun than I’d expected. The servicemen never knew what hit them. I did one of my favorite tricks whenever a guy named Mike Lewis called in. He was way too upbeat.

  “Hey, Jeff! This is Mike Lewis! What’s going on!”

  I’d go, “Hey, Mike, listen, you gotta call…ufacturing…and what…going…and they need…3-8…0-2.”

  “Jeff, you’re breaking up.”

  “Mi…go…”

  “You’re breaking up, I’ll call you back.” Then he’d hang up. Since he was in a phone booth, I’d think, “There’s one quarter.” Then he’d call back. I’d say, “IBM dispatch.”

  “Hey, Jeff! It’s Mike! Man, God, that was weird! You were breaking up like crazy!”

  “IBM dispatch.”

  “Yeah, Jeff, it’s me, Mike!”

  “Hello? IBM dispatch?”

  “Jeff, it’s me, Mike!”

  “Hello? Hey, if you’re there, call me back.” There’s two quarters. Then Mike would call back again.

  “Hey, Jeff, it’s me, Mike! Something wrong with the phones up there?”

  “I don’t know, Mike, we’ve been having problems with them all day long. It started…,” and I’d just cut the line dead. There’s three quarters.

  Now you know why it took so long to get IBM’s machines fixed. The servicemen usually spent all day in a phone booth just trying to get their assignments. Do you think we were at all responsible for the big layoffs at Big Blue? Nah.

  We didn’t limit our practical jokes to the men in the field.

  The main receptionist used to drive us bonkers because she was so stupid. She’d always disconnect us, or connect us to the wrong place, or cut our callers off altogether. (Come to think of it now, maybe she was just giving us a taste of our own medicine!) It got so we hated her and we made it our mission for a month just to mess with her.

  Once we had Joe Luckie linger in the lobby and watch her. Then Jesse called the receptionist and said, “This is Jim Johnson with the telephone company. We have a reported problem with 555-6200.”

  The receptionist said, “Yes, I have been having problems with this line.”

  “What we’re gonna do,” said Jesse/Jim, “is have a gentlemen working on that line for about the next five minutes or so, so we’d ask that if it does ring, please don’t answer it because we’re sending a burst of power across the lines. If you pick up, the electricity could severely injure the phone repairman.”

  The phones were set up so that if no one answered after about three rings at the receptionist’s station, the lines would roll over down the hall to the secondary receptionists. We waited about sixty seconds and called the main receptionist. Joe Luckie, our lookout, later said that the woman just sat there staring at the phone as it rang. No way she would answer it. Suddenly, he said, her eyes got as big as saucers and she jumped up from her desk and took off running down the hall.

  “DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE! DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE!” she yelled. But the call rolled over, someone answered it, and Hillary screamed. “ARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!”

  Next thing we knew the receptionist was in the break room with a cold washcloth on her head, saying, “You killed the phone man! You killed the phone man!”

  Another time, again posing as repairmen, we told her to put her entire phone console into the trash can because we were going to blow the dust out of the lines and we didn’t want her to get dirt all over her desk. And she did it.

  I worked in dispatch for a year, but I could tell there wasn’t much room for career growth. Fortunately, the company held aptitude testing and I signed up on the chance that I might get a better position. When the results came back, they said, “You have an aptitude for sewing names on hats.” Just kidding. They wanted me to become a serviceman and fix machines. I just had to go to the IBM school.

  ARRRGGGHHH!

  I guess I deserved it. The weird thing was that if I opted to go to school and didn’t pass, I couldn’t go back to dispatch. I’d lose my job and I’d really have to sew hats, or worse, work with tar. Though naturally pragmatic, as you know, I took the leap and went to school. I passed. My big reward was a transfer to Sarasota, Florida.

  I was the youngest guy at that backwater office and got to handle every crappy assignment. If three calls came in—two blocks away, four blocks away, and 185 miles away, I got to take the long drive in my Volkswagen Beetle with no air-conditioning and no radio.

  Of course, whenever I had to call dispatch, my old friends tried to mess around with me. I didn’t mind. Even if I was the junior repairman, I was at least out on the road and my quadmates were still in the office.

  Okay, there was a downside. Because it was a suboffice, I often went on calls to repair machines about which I knew nothing. In retrospect, this was also good comedy training. I had to walk into a strange place and pull it off. Sometimes I’d stand there, with my arm resting on a big metal something, and say, “So, where’s the machine?”

  They’d go, “You’re leaning on it.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, acting like I knew what I was doing. “This baby here.” I had to read manuals to learn how to take the covers off some machines. But I learned that if the customer liked me, I could buy a little time. It was just like making hotel guests like me for tips. Then I’d fix what I could and for the rest I’d scream for help. Mostly, on pure instinct, I did okay.

  IBM was a good employer and I wanted to do well on the job, no matter how many practical jokes I orchestrated. My dad had helped me get on board and I wanted to make him proud. In fact, I pretty much wore my cheap suits into the ground doing so. Then one day I found a really good deal—$89—for a gray wool suit. (Maybe because I bought it in June?) I bought it because, based on my performance in dispatch, the company had invited me to one of those breakfast-with-the-president functions.

  I decided I would introduce myself to the bigwigs and let them know exactly who Jeff Foxworthy was. And that’s just what I did, very confidently. Afterward, as I stood in a corner, drinking my little good-morning orange juice, a guy I worked with came up and whispered in my ear: “Hey, Fox, check out your pants.” Not only were they unzipped, they gapped open wide enough to fly a Frisbee through. I was mortified. Meet the president then zip your pants. I looked over at the higher-ups, standing by the podium. I knew what they were saying.

  “Did you see that goofy Foxworthy kid with his pants unzipped?”

  Hey, at least they remembered me. What more could an entertainer want?

  Roommates and Their Habitats

  Sooner or later, we all have a roommate. Parents and siblings don’t count because they’re just part of the deal—unless they come to live with you when you’re an adult. Then, they’ll call themselves houseguests. After a couple of days you want to call them anything you can get away with, including a taxi. With our spouses,
we supposedly had a choice about being together, though I’m certain many of us don’t remember it that way. Don’t even get me started on in-laws.

  Roommates are tough. You’ve got to pick someone you can beat up on because you never get along with everybody always. Even if you shared an apartment with the Pope, I guarantee that three weeks into it you’d be going, “Hey, you mind picking up the cape, man? And quit leaving the papal miter on the kitchen counter.”

  I’ve always looked for a roommate with a sense of humor, someone roughly like me, only different. I’m not so sure living with myself is any piece of cake. You definitely don’t want someone wilder than you are. You want the same degree of wildness. If you’re the wild one you’ll feel like you’re living with your Aunt Florence. If your roommate is the wild one, you’ll feel like Aunt Florence while he’s holding a naked Twister Bingo session in his bedroom—or worse, in the living room, where you can see it all. You both need to stagger in side by side. The Odd Couple approach never works.

  An ideal roommate has a horny sister. Or is someone’s horny sister. Or is one and has one. Or knows one. I’m not just kidding around here.

  Paying the rent on time is also a good quality.

  One person to absolutely avoid as a roommate is an ex-wife, no matter what sick circumstances drive you to again share the same living space. First, you don’t want to be around when she’s getting phone calls from other guys. Second, she doesn’t want to be around while you’re burning her clothes.

  No matter how you fare during these days of swine and losers, I promise that you will soon miss the times when you were wild and free and living with someone you could just move out on at any time. Maybe for no other reason than that I’m a sentimental guy, about five years ago I got nostalgic for the apartment life. Then Gregg got pregnant. She ate all my food and threw up once a day. It was just like having a roommate all over again.

  When I first left home, I got lucky and lived for a while with my dad. You can just imagine the fun we had.

  Big Jim lived on Atlanta’s north side. He drank, threw parties, smoked, and cussed. Yeah, Big Jim was pretty cool to have as a father. When I was still in high school I’d try to spend the weekends at his condo. I had a car and I’d drive to Big Jim’s Friday evening with my girlfriend.

  Jim would say, “Hey, you kids wanna spend the night?” Music to a teenager in heat. I’d say sure. Then my stepmother would call my girlfriend’s mother and go, “Is it okay if the kids spend the night?”

  Did I already say he was cool to have as a dad? Now you know why I moved in with him as soon as I could.

  When I couldn’t stay at the condo legitimately, because he was at the farm, I’d sneak over—again, with a girlfriend. But I didn’t want Big Jim to know. I was so meticulous in covering my tracks that I’d even measure how high the window blinds were off the sill so I could put them back in exactly the right place.

  “Okay, I think it was an inch and a half below the middle of the window.”

  “Are you sure,” my girlfriend would say?

  “Get dressed and then get me a ruler, okay?”

  It would take me an hour to get the house right.

  Ten years later, for reasons that still elude me, I confessed all this to Big Jim. “But I bet you never knew I went over to the condo.”

  “Of course I did,” he said. “You went there every weekend when I was gone.”

  Kids. We think we’re so smart. Parents know everything because they’ve usually done everything themselves. Then Big Jim continued, “I’d always come back and go, ‘That little bastard’s been here screwing.’”

  “You should have told me you knew,” I said, as I tried to keep my composure.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You could have saved me a lot of time cleaning that I could have spent doing, uh…other things.”

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything. I even had to let the maid go because you did such a good job.”

  But if Big Jim did me a favor by letting me use the condo—though he was clearly well compensated—I took care of him, too. For instance, sometimes Big Jim would say, “Look, you and I are going out and having a few drinks tonight.”

  I’d say, “Daddy, I can’t. I’ve got a date.”

  “Well, I know that,” he’d say, “But if anybody asks, you and I are going out for a few drinks tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay. Where did we go?”

  Nothing like covering for your dad.

  Once he called me, excited and upset, and said, “I’ve locked my keys in my car.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the bar at the end of the street.”

  “At the end of your street?” Big Jim wasn’t married to my mom at the time, but he was married. So I delivered his keys and found him drinking with his secretary.

  “Dad,” I said. “I’m eighteen years old, and even I know to get farther away from the house, for God’s sake. If you’re going to fool around, at least get out of the sight line of the kitchen!”

  Big Jim took risks on his own, but he wasn’t about to let me be an idiot. When I lived with him he had a rule that when I went out I should always call him if I was, say, too drunk to drive and didn’t plan to come home that evening. I respected him and called when the situation arose. But once it got to be four in the morning, I was plastered, and I was scared to death to call. I decided I had to drive home, but my friend Eddie wouldn’t let me. (He was right.) I said, “I ain’t calling home at four in the morning and waking up Big Jim. I’ll take my chances.”

  Eddie said, “I ain’t letting you in the car. I’ll call him.” We went to Eddie’s apartment. I lay down on the sofa and Eddie called my dad. I could only hear his end of the conversation.

  “Mr. Foxworthy? This is Eddie Harlen? I’m fine, how are you? Oh, good, yeah, school’s going all right. Yeah, yeah, I’m still going out with her. Anyway, I just called to say that Jeff’s had one too many and he’s gonna be sleeping on my couch tonight. Oh, I appreciate it. I surely will. Okay, bye.” He hung up the phone and I was speechless. Finally, I said, “He didn’t get mad?”

  Eddie said, “Nope. In fact, he just came in the house five minutes ago himself.”

  After my dad moved to Tampa I shared an apartment with my sister, Jennifer. Poor Jennifer. The only thing worse than being a Redneck is having a Redneck brother.

  We were pretty pathetic.

  The needle on our record player was so worn out that we had to pile spare change on the arm to make it work at all. It started with a penny, then a penny and a dime, then a nickel, then all three. By the time we got to a dollar twenty five it was time to break down and get a new needle. But at least we’d saved enough money.

  I also seemed to collect food. By the time I married Gregg, I had refrigerator items that had lived with me in eight different apartments. I just couldn’t throw them out. We’d been through too much together. I’ve still got a jar of olives that’s been with me since the beginning. I just don’t think it’s fair to move to the nice house with the subzero refrigerator and throw away stuff that’s stuck with me as long as it took me to make something of myself. I figured the olives should live the good life, too.

  Jennifer and I belonged to the Utility of the Month Club. You don’t really want to be a member. That’s when something different is shut off each month. This always seemed to happen when my dad came up to visit to check on how we were doing. I remember the phone being cut off and having to drive to the 7-Eleven to make calls. The next month it was the electricity. I made my sister go down to the department of water and power and tell them our aunt lived with us, and that she was on a dialysis machine, so they would they please turn it back on.

  They did.

  Eventually we got all the utilities running at the same time. That’s when General Motors Acceptance Corporation tried to repossess my wheels. I worked at IBM and I had to have a two-tone Rally Sport Camaro. Big Jim had said that if I got enough for a down payment, he�
��d match it. I saved the money and after a series of “walk away” negotiations—Big Jim did the walking while I drove my friends past the car lot and pointed to the Camaro behind the fence and said, “There’s my car!”—I got it. It had close to $1,000 worth of stereo equipment, including an equalizer and a power booster. Even at minimum volume it would make the windows shake.

  But I was behind in the payments. One night the GMAC guy showed up at the door about 6:00 P.M.

  He said, “Mr. Foxworthy, I’m from GMAC. I’ve come to get your car. You haven’t made a payment in three months. Unless you can give me $500 right now, the car’s going with me.”

  I said, “500 bucks? Who keeps that kind of cash on them?”

  He said, “Can’t you write me a check?”

  “A check? Hell…yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money.” So I wrote him a bad check and hid the car in a friend’s garage until I got caught up on my payments. I couldn’t believe he took the check. I was tempted to pay the whole thing off right there. Maybe even say, “Tell you what, here’s $500 extra. Go get your wife something nice.”

  I’m gonna be a congressman when I grow up.

  Eventually my sister and I did break up, but not because we’d lost interest in each other. Nope. It was because of Bear.

  Bear was a little white poodle—as you know, one of my least favorite dogs—that Jennifer insisted on having in the apartment. Bear always crapped on the floor. Jennifer and I worked all the time, and often stayed out all night, so it wasn’t really Bear’s fault that no one was around to walk him. Thank goodness he only weighed four pounds. It was relatively simple to clean up after him. But it was nonetheless a nuisance.

  One night I finally decided I’d had enough of Bear. I decided to make my sister pay for bringing him to live with us.

  It was Halloween. While we were out “trick or treating,” Bear had again relieved himself in the apartment. I came home first and could smell it but could not find it. I searched for half an hour, then gave up and plotted my revenge. I took a big Tootsie Roll out of my candy bag and as I watched TV and wondered where the dog had buried his treasure, I kneaded the Tootsie Roll into a familiar shape. (Remember, I’m good at this.) I put a little bend on it and a little taper on one end, and then I put it on the floor next to the couch.