The more I thought about it the more I understood that families are like chameleons. They can put on a good face and fool the outside world. However, put them all in the same house for a long weekend and they fall apart like a papier mâché bathtub. It’s because everyone in the family knows everyone else’s weaknesses and will gladly exploit them for the sake of an argument or for a good laugh. Addictions, unemployment, and undesirable physical features are all fair game where loved ones are concerned. If someone doesn’t cry, throw a punch, or leave, it can’t really be considered a family get-together can it? Each outing with loved ones should produce another level of emotional scarring for at least someone present. This in turn helps to feed the economy through the purchase of therapy sessions, self-help books, and alcohol. I think if families were well adjusted the economy would go into a tailspin.
Suddenly I had an epiphany that made me realize why my family was nothing at all for me to worry about.
I remembered my first trip to the state fair. If you’ve ever been, this will work for you, too. In less than five minutes you could be saying, “You know what? We’re all right. We’re dang near royalty.”
A state fair is the only place where you can see people who were born, raised, married, and had families without ever leaving their own property. You see people to whom you know walking upright is a fairly new idea. You see people who make you feel guilty for ever thinking you had a weight problem. You see people K Mart would ask to leave. You see people so ugly that you have to get somebody else to verify it.
“Come here, y’all gotta see this man! Get outta line, it’s worth it! Over by the cotton candy. Don’t look, don’t look. Is that the hairiest back you’ve ever seen. Looks like Bigfoot in a tank top. Oh God, it’s a woman! Oh, and she’s got kids. Somebody slept with that woman!! Oh no, it’s Aunt Betty!”
I think it’s only right that if I reveal secrets about my family I have to share a few intimate details about Gregg’s. After all, our daughters are the product of our genes, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Gregg’s mother, Jane, God bless her, is the adrenaline poster girl. No matter what, she’s always got a pot of coffee brewing at her house. She drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes day and night. If Jane goes to bed at 11:00 P.M., she’ll be back up at 11:35. She’ll have a cup of coffee, couple of smokes, and go back to bed until one, when she’ll get up and do it all again. I finally said, “Jane, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps all this caffeine may be interfering with your sleep?” Deadly serious, she said, “No, hon. Coffee has never messed up my sleep. I get up every hour or two and have a cup.”
Any time that Jane stayed at our house I could sleepwalk in the middle of the night and be sure I also had a conversation with Jane. She was always down in the kitchen with her coffee and her smokes.
Her husband, Elliott, doesn’t drink anymore. He probably hasn’t tossed back a stiff one in over a decade. That’s saying a lot. He used to own a bar in New Orleans. Elliot’s got some fabulous stories. It’s a city of characters and everyone who came into the bar had a name. There was the Mannequin, who always dressed impeccably. He named another guy Crime, because he never paid. He called two young women who hung out at the bar the Tar Babies, because if you ever touched them you couldn’t get rid of them.
Elliot’s funniest story is from the time when he used to drink. Apparently he was out one night and didn’t quite make it home. The next morning about 7:00 A.M., he called Jane and said, “Jane, you gotta come get me. I don’t know where my car is.”
Naturally, she was awake and had already cleaned the kitchen. Jane said, “Elliott, where are you.”
“I’m at the big building.”
“Elliott, we live in New Orleans,” she said. “There’s lots of big buildings.”
“You know, Jane, the big building.” But he wasn’t making any sense and Jane got pissed.
“Elliott, put down the damn phone and go ask somebody where you are!”
He set down the phone and a minute later came back. “I’m at the Gulf & Western building, Jane.”
“Elliott,” she said, “you’re across the damn street!”
Elliot later told me he called it “the big building” because when they stood on their balcony and looked out the window, there was this big building obstructing the view.
The odd thing about my family is that we’re all so different. Big Jim and Carole were married for fourteen years. Big Jim smokes, drinks, and is a womanizer; Carole doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and goes to church five times a week. (I’ve always wondered what they had in common.) My brother is totally gregarious. He wants to try every food and everything in the world once. I’m that way, too. My sister prefers to stay at home.
When my folks divorced, it was probably hardest on Jennifer. She’s always heard a drummer that Jay and I didn’t hear. When she turned twelve, she got a phone for Christmas. We didn’t really see her again until she got married. We called her bedroom “the vault” because she always locked the door. We’d play in the yard and she’d sit in her window smoking cigarettes, with the fan blowing the smoke out, talking on the phone with her friends. My mother never knew that my sister smoked cigarettes until the day she cleaned out my sister’s closet and found seventeen shoe boxes full of empty cigarette packs. I still don’t get it. Why did she keep the packs? And what was wrong with my mother’s sense of smell?
As you know, divorce is a way of life in my family. In fact, my brother, Jay, is probably the first Foxworthy since Columbus landed to have stayed married to his first wife. This has caused us some concern. It’s not that we don’t love Rhonda, but we had a streak going. On more than one occasion I’ve called Jay and said, “Hey, I saw your wife downtown drinking with another guy yesterday.”
My brother and I, and even my sister, have often said that we wouldn’t be surprised if someday the doorbell rang and there stood a young woman who said, “Hi, I’m your sister.”
What would surprise me is if it didn’t happen at least four or five times.
Perhaps you have finally decided that all the cliche
´s about Southern families are true. You know the ones: We all marry our sisters and look for UFOs. Well, they’re not true. I’m just dating my sister and I couldn’t swear it wasn’t a weather balloon.
I think we did have some cousins marry on both sides of the family. Well, I’m sure on my mother’s side. But they weren’t first cousins because that would be sick. I think they were first cousins once removed. Most states have laws against intrafamily marriage, anyway. Unfortunately, having to pass a law to prevent something that to many seems entirely natural doesn’t make us Rednecks look too good.
Once, a fan asked me to try and describe being Southern. I know he didn’t mean Redneck, but the answer was still easy. I said it was a night at Stone Mountain.
Stone Mountain, just outside Atlanta, is the world’s largest rock. They call it a mountain, but it’s a single piece of granite. On one side there’s a pasture in a clearing and every night from spring until fall it’s the biggest tourist attraction in Georgia. Families gather at sundown with picnic baskets to watch the laser show on the side of the rock. They play music and the beams flash and draw pictures and the characters dance. The theme is always patriotic. The lasers will trace pine trees and make a picture of Ray Charles, and he’ll sing Georgia. They’ll also throw in God Bless America and Proud to Be an American. People just sit there with their kids and their coolers of beer and sandwiches, and stare like these were visions from heaven.
Carved into the other side of Stone Mountain are the Three Horsemen of the Confederacy. It’s the world’s largest carving—bigger than Mount Rushmore. During the laser show the thing goes jet-black and then the laser outlines it in perfect detail. The horses are dead still. Then Elvis starts singing Dixie. One of the horse’s nostrils flares and he shakes his head, and the horses start walking. Soon, Dixie blends into The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the horses start runni
ng. That’s when you see the hair on the necks of grown men in cat hats and flannel shirts stand up. They drop their chicken and dissolve into sobbing messes.
“You okay, Daddy?”
“No no no, I’m not okay.
By the way, for singing the song, Elvis gets all the chicken that hits the ground.
Another great thing about Stone Mountain is the game ranch, where you can walk through and pet different animals. They stock the place with magnificent white-tailed deer; native to the East Coast, they sport huge antler racks. Every three years or so some guy can’t stand it anymore and shoots one through the fence. That’s real hunting. He always gets caught trying to drag it out.
“Where’d you get him?”
“He was right next to the candy dispenser. Just gave him a graham cracker and boom! I popped him.”
A Redneck for sure. No “might be” about it.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was part of my family.
Redneck or Not…Here I Come
People always ask me “How do you come up with these Redneck jokes?” By now you realize it’s not like I had to do a lot of research. It’s pretty much a case of “Welcome to my life.”
But for those of you who still don’t get it, I thought it would be fun (and instructive) to share some of the real stories behind a few of my favorite Redneck lines. Think of it as a peek inside Granddaddy’s shed. Maybe you’ll finally discover what those plastic bags of rabbits’ tails are really for.
“If you know how many bales of hay your car will hold…”
Ten. I had a Camaro. I could put three in the trunk, six in the backseat, and one in the passenger seat. The reason I know is because Big Jim decided he could make some extra money by selling farm hay. On my days off from school he would send me to the farm to get the hay which he’d sell at two bucks a pop. For instance, the people down the road needed ten bales for their horse. Like the pizza man, I delivered. I’d drive four hours just to make twenty dollars, of which I had to spend sixteen for gas.
“If you see no need to stop at rest stops because you have an empty milk jug in the car…”
That’s how we dealt with bathroom stops on the way to the fair. It takes too much time to pull of the highway and pee. You lose two valuable minutes and guys don’t want to waste that kind of time on a road trip. You can pee in a milk jug instead. Just hope you also brought the cap with you. Even mom would do it if it was cold.
“If Thanksgiving dinner was ruined because you ran out of ketchup…”
Honestly, this isn’t that funny to me because we have ketchup on the table during Thanksgiving dinner. We do! Sometimes people come over for dinner and observe our liberal use of ketchup and get grossed out. If there’s ever a ketchup ban, my family will die. I put ketchup on everything. I used to put it on scrambled eggs. When I did it as a kid my dad would look at my plate and go, “Oh, for God’s sake, looks like a damn Korean war over there.” I also put ketchup on grits. And turkey. Tried it on ice cream once just because somebody said, “You’d probably put ketchup on ice cream.” I’ll tell you the truth, it’s not that bad. Ketchup is also good with potato chips. We call it the poor man’s dip. It makes a fine spaghetti sauce, too.
“If you’ve ever hit a bump on the highway and lost half your worldly possessions…”
Big Jim again. When we had the farm, Big Jim always made us load up the truck with junk from the farm and take it to the dump. Thing was, we always came back from the dump with more than we took. In the middle of throwing things away, Big Jim would say, “Oh, man, somebody threw away a good toilet down here.” So stuff would be going out one side of the truck and in the other side. It was a good old Chevy truck, too. We knocked the passenger door off three different times. I’d be trying to back the truck through the woods into the dump and my brother would hold the door open, look out, and say, “Come back! Come back!” Then I’d hit a tree he wasn’t watching and the door would pop right off.
After we unloaded and reloaded at the dump we took our new possessions back to the farm and put them in the place where the old junk had been. A year or so later Daddy would go, “God dang, we’ve gotta clean out behind the barn.” Then we’d pick up that stuff and go off to the dump again for a new load.
Whenever we did this we weren’t really big on the tie-down theory. We’d just throw the junk in the truck bed and take off. So many times cruising down I-285, the interstate in Atlanta, we’d have to pull over to the side of the road so Big Jim and I could run out to the center lane to pick up a sofa that had bounced off the back of the truck. It was embarrassing to a fourteen-year-old. Cars sped by at eighty miles an hour and we were out there trying to pull a sofa off the highway. The sofa wouldn’t even be worth twenty bucks, yet we risked life and limb to save it.
Once my friend Steve and I were hauling two mattresses and box springs we’d gotten at Goodwill back to Big Jim’s farm to use on the homemade bunk beds at the farm. At some point during the drive he threw a cigarette out the window. I turned to Steve and I said, “That didn’t go in the back of the truck, did it?”
“No, no.”
About five miles later I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the back of the truck engulfed in flames. I pulled off the road, jumped in the truck bed, and started hauling the mattress onto the shoulder. My first thought was to pee on them, but if you’ve ever tried to put out a mattress fire then you know it’s damn near impossible. Mattresses are like the trick birthday candles that you can never blow out. So Steve got the cooler out of the cab and began pouring perfectly good cold beer over the fire. I said, “That’s good beer, man! Don’t be wasting our good beer.”
When we showed up at Big Jim’s we had one box spring and half a mattress. He wasn’t real happy about that. It was an investment of eleven dollars down the drain.
“If you’ve ever shot rats at the dump for entertainment…”
My granddaddy used to take a magnetic flashlight, stick it to the side of a .22 rifle, and shoot rats at the dump at night. It’s great and cheap entertainment since .22 shells are probably two cents apiece. That’s a hundred shots for two bucks.
If you hit them just right they usually roll. Sometimes when the flashlight beam hits them they’ll just sit still and you can pick them off easy. But that isn’t really a sport, so it’s best to have a friend holler at the rat while you’re aiming.
“If you refused to watch the Academy Awards when Smokey and the Bandit was snubbed for Best Picture…”
The last time Big Jim went to the movies was to see Smokey and the Bandit. I think he felt like it would never get any better than that. It had it all: a cute woman, car wrecks, fights. You don’t need anything else. Plus, he loved Jackie Gleason. My dad could quote his lines. In fact, he’ll still walk into an old Hickory House restaurant and go, “Gimme a diablo sandwich and a large Dr. Pepper, and make it snappy ’cause I’m in a damn hurry.” Thanks, Dad.
“If you’ve ever stolen a bulldozer…”
One of my stepbrother’s friends stole a bulldozer and got pulled over while driving down I-75 in Atlanta. I know what you’re thinking. I don’t know where he was headed, but he wasn’t getting there very fast. It’s hard to blend into traffic. I don’t care if you tuck in behind a van, it’s hard to look nonchalant when you’re sitting in a bulldozer on the interstate.
“If you’ve ever been too drunk to fish…”
That was me. When I worked at Kroger a couple of coworkers and I drove all night one time to go fishing. It didn’t dawn on us that perhaps we might need sleep. Or that we shouldn’t drink. When we got there in the morning we didn’t even have hangovers; we were still so drunk. But how drunk do you have to be not to fish? I kept having little blackouts—two or three seconds max—and I dropped my hundred dollar rod and reel straight to the bottom of the lake. Those things don’t float.
“If ‘Foxy Lady’ is airbrushed on the front license plate of your car…”
Saw it in Panama City, Florida. Swear to
God.
“If you’ve ever driven a Camaro into the top of a tree…”
This happened down near where my uncle lives at Lake Jodico. Somebody got drunk, drove off the road, and the car got airborne and landed in the tree next to the house. You know and I know that somebody took his friends back down there to see it, too.
“Come here, you ain’t gonna believe this shit.”
“If the Salvation Army ever declines your mattress…”
When Gregg and I got together she did something that all women do when they’re getting ready to move in with a man. They go through your stuff and see if anything you own is anything they want in the new place. Don’t count on it. Nothing that the guy has is ever going to make it onto the permanent list. You’ve got to fight like hell for just one or two items.
“Well, you know, I really like that table.”
“Okay, we’ll use my dresser and we’ll use my bed. And, oh God, what is this? I can’t imagine.” I ended up taking a bunch of stuff to the Salvation Army, including my mattress. When we took it off the truck they took one look at it and said, “No. No thank you.” They were right. Lord knows who all had slept on it. It had so many stains on it. It was really nasty.
It really makes you feel good about yourself when homeless people cannot use the stuff that you’ve been living on.
“If your dad walks you to school because you’re both in the same grade…”
This was inspired by a guy who was in the fourth grade with me. His name was Eddie. The rest of us weighed fifty pounds, he drove a car. He used to mesmerize us in the bathroom by showing us his pubic hair.
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 19