This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  “Well, don’t look at me,” I said, “mine is just medium. But I know the biggest dick in Johnson County.”

  “No, you don’t!” she said excitedly, then grabbed my crotch. She thought I was being coy and talking about myself. I know what you must be thinking: “Ralphie May, are you telling me a drunk, cock-crazy Coal Hill girl misread a social situation?” I know, alert the media.

  “No, I didn’t mean me,” I told her, “but don’t you worry, just go on into the back bedroom, turn out the lights, and we’ll bring in the guy with the biggest wiener you ever saw.”

  “You mean he’s here?!!” she yelled. Nothing got by her.

  “Right here at this party.

  “Keep in mind,” I prepped the Coal Hill girl, “he’s been drinking all night and he’s already a little fucked-up.” I wanted to create a plausible cover story for why Rusty might look all Down’s syndrome–y. “I’ll tell him to go slow at first so he doesn’t puncture your fallopian tubes.”

  “Oh my God, how big is it?!”

  I held up my hands about a foot apart—basically the length of a two-pound Big Piney bass.

  It’s hard to distinguish between terror and excitement when you’re buzzed, but I chose to believe her wide-eyed, stupefied look was born of enthusiasm because, I mean, c’mon, she’s from Coal Hill.

  “Go get naked and get that pussy warmed up.” She was going to need all the help (and spit) she could get. She disappeared down a hallway toward the back of the house. When she was out of sight, I went into the backyard where most of the people were hanging out and grabbed Rusty.

  “Hey, Rusty, there’s a girl in the back who wants to fuck you.” Simpler is always better.

  “Oh. okay.” No comprehension was in his words.

  “You just gotta go in there, get your wiener hard, and put it in her. Nice and slow at first, then a little faster and a little faster. Don’t shoot the cums in her, but ya know, you can put it anywhere else. Like at school. It don’t matter.”

  Rusty said, “Okay,” about twelve times, like someone repeating a filler word while his brain catches up to the concept he’s trying to grasp. By the ninth “Okay” I think his brain caught up. He understood what was about to happen and was excited. We got him all pumped up. Right before he went in there, he yelled, “Go, Panthers!” He was going to do her for the team. God bless that goofy sonuvabitch.

  He was in the bedroom for no more than thirty seconds before he came out with his wiener in his hand, screaming, “There’s something wrong with her. She don’t got no pee-pee.” Rusty thought everybody had wieners. It had never dawned on us that Rusty had no understanding of the differences between male and female bodies. He treated everyone equally, so he thought people were equal in every way. He figured they were just like him.

  “No, no, it’s in there, buddy, it’s just really tiny and covered up. Just have her do it. Have her put you inside of her.”

  I don’t think he quite understood what we meant, but, boy, I tell you what, Rusty took to it like a goddamn natural. He fucked her for thirty to forty minutes straight. I mean, can you imagine? Your first piece of ass and you last for half an hour, and she’s screaming in ecstasy the whole time? Rusty came out of that back bedroom a new man. I bet that girl had to sit on frozen peas for a week.

  If that had happened to me, if I’d come out of the gate and punched my v-card like a champ, I could have dropped dead right then and there, content with having lived a full life at sixteen years old.

  We asked him how it went.

  “Oh, she’s a good girl. I like her a lot.”

  That was Rusty. A sweetheart of a man.

  If I go to Heaven when I die, it’ll be because of this.

  * * *

  I lost track of Rusty for a while after I moved to Houston and started doing stand-up. We reconnected a couple times over those early post–high school years when I’d come back to Arkansas for holidays or gigs, but eventually we lost touch for good. A few years later I found out from my friend, Jon Byrd, that Rusty had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS is a bitch for an otherwise healthy adult. For someone with Down’s syndrome, who is already immunocompromised, it’s a complete fuck job. He died not long after.

  Rusty taught me more about what it means to be a good human than anybody else in my life up to the point that we parted ways. Teacher, parent, friend, mentor, you name it. None of them matched the impact Rusty had on me as a person in the world.

  Thanks to Rusty, growing up, I had no idea that retarded people were that different from normal people. I learned to treat everyone the same by watching him do it.

  Thanks to Rusty, I firmly believe that retarded people are the best part of our society: They don’t wage war, they love everybody, and they work bad jobs and are oftentimes so happy to have them that they’ll fucking steal them from you. They are model Americans. I’ve known this my whole life, but snobby intellectuals have tried to keep it a secret from everyone by using code words and politically correct phrases, because they don’t want us to realize that they are the completely useless ones, not the retarded people. I’m pretty sure Rusty would agree.

  Thanks to Rusty, I learned how simple it is to be happy if you let yourself be. You know what made Rusty happy in elementary school? His Scooby-Doo lunch box. It was one of the good metal ones with the thermos that could keep pea soup hot until four o’clock. He looked at that lunch box like he’d hit the damn kid lottery. He was genuinely happy with what he had. In high school it wasn’t much different. He liked hanging out with us. That’s all he needed.

  Most of us will never be as happy as Rusty was while he was alive. We’ll try, and we’ll get close for about twenty-six seconds every year, right at the apex of a really, really, really good orgasm that we didn’t have to beg for, but that’s as close as we’ll get most times. I wish we all could be more like Rusty. I try every day. It’s not easy, but it’s worth the effort, because Rusty was retarded good.

  3.

  THE LORD GIVETH AND HE TAKETH AWAY

  By the time I entered high school, my granny had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and begun to deteriorate rapidly enough that my mom had to quit her job to take care of her. This meant that we May kids were on our own most days. That was no problem for my brother, Winston, or my sisters. They were older and already doing their own thing. They had jobs and spending money. If they didn’t show up to work, they’d get fired, and nobody else would have to know about it. For me, it was a little trickier. If I didn’t get out of bed on time to make first period every morning, I’d have teachers and administrators up my ass, which meant they’d call home or come around asking after my mom. Her plate was full already, I didn’t want to add more to it. So to give myself a little bit of flexibility and get around the potential inconvenience of administrative interlopers, I convinced my mom to let me get a hardship driver’s license—at fourteen years old.

  A hardship license is basically permission from the state to drive before the technical legal age because circumstances outside your control have left you high and dry. Depending on the state you live in, a few criteria determine your eligibility: Do you need it to get to school? Do you need it to get to work? Do you need it for a long-term health issue? Yes, yes, and, unfortunately, yes. There are usually only two stipulations: One, you have to keep a C average. Okay, fine, whatever. Two, no pleasure driving whatsoever. Well, fuck you very much, Uncle Sam.

  I was psyched to be able to drive myself around. It wasn’t the driving itself that was so cool. Most kids from rural areas grew up driving tractors and work trucks around their property as soon as their feet could reach the pedals. What was cool was being a freshman pulling into the school parking lot in your older brother’s 1986 blue-on-blue Chevy Silverado, blaring the Eagles’ Greatest Hits album out of the tape deck while eyeballing the sophomore girls like you were a senior, all before you were old enough to shave.

  The government said I couldn’t drive for pleasure; they did
n’t say I couldn’t drive with pleasure.

  In the beginning, I followed the rules. Home to school and back. That was it. Then I got a job. Home to school to work and back. For a time, the euphoria of being one of the only kids in my class who could drive on the streets was enough to sustain me. But eventually, like any kids who are given a little bit of extra freedom and responsibility before they are ready for it, I started to test the boundaries.

  “Well, depending on how you look at it, Deputy, the bowling alley with the bitchin’ arcade is between my house and my school.”

  Slowly but surely over my freshman year, the rules governing my underaged driving vanished like brownies at a potluck. I was third-generation Clarksville, after all. Everyone knew what was going on with Granny and my mama. They had sympathy for us when they saw me cruising around at a time and a place that was clearly not school or work related. As long as I didn’t run over anybody’s kid, nobody asked any questions.

  * * *

  When you’re poor, nothing beats earning your own money to buy your first car. It’s a particular achievement when the alternative—borrowing your brother’s truck—becomes too difficult to coordinate and you actually need a car as much you want one. I was able to earn enough money to buy and fix up my own car by the time I got my real driver’s license in February of my sophomore year, thanks to my buddy Duane Parnell’s dad and a Chevy truck full of drugs.

  Duane’s daddy worked in the regional office of a federal drug enforcement agency. His division did all manner of raids and property seizures, so anytime we were out of school, he’d bring home cars that they’d seized and impounded on drug raids or traffic stops and pay us to clean them up real nice for auction. We’d set up a cleaning station at the end of the Parnell family driveway just in front of their garage, and Mr. Parnell would let us run the cars through our little setup. Over the summer between our freshman and sophomore years, he ran cars through like they were on a conveyor belt. I wasn’t complaining—more cars equaled more money—but even then it seemed like we had a lot of business for a place as out of the way as Northwest Arkansas. Was this whole detailing gig even part of Mr. Parnell’s job? Were these cars really going to auction? Or was he running some kind of side hustle out the back gate of the agency’s impound lot? Neither of us was ever really sure.

  On the one hand, Duane’s older brother ran with a notorious biker gang who I will not name since I like staying alive, and they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so maybe Mr. Parnell was a fence. On the other hand, an actual part of Mr. Parnell’s job that we knew about was to go around to all the schools in the surrounding counties and scare the hell out of kids about drugs. A man like that isn’t running a chop shop out of his driveway, right? Mr. Parnell was straight. He was all-in on the antidrug thing. He had a whole presentation with a display case full of drugs and stories about all the bad things each offender had done while on the drugs. He even let you come up and get a close look at both the drugs and the mug shots of the people the troopers took the drugs from. He really wanted it to sink in. This could be you.

  For a good number of the God-fearing Johnson County youth, Mr. Parnell’s display case chastened them just the way he hoped. For some, it made no impact. For Duane and me, the display case became our personal drug cabinet. On days when we had multiple cars to wash, we’d race through the first one, then go into the garage where Mr. Parnell kept the case, grab some of the drugs (only the smokable types), then fire them up in the backseat of one of the cars at the back of the line. That way, if he came outside unexpectedly, we could quickly stuff the drugs under one of the front seats and blame the druggies whose car it was.

  “Wooo-eee, Mr. Parnell, this one here’s a real stinker. They must’ve been some serious druggers you took this from, huh? It’s gonna be extrahard to get clean, I think. We should probably get paid double for this one.”

  “Nice try, May,” he’d say, shaking his head. “Dinner’s at eighteen thirty sharp, son. These best be done in time for you to wash up before.”

  “Yes, sir,” Duane would say. Then, after Mr. Parnell went back inside, we’d use whatever we could find to replace the drugs we’d taken.

  One time we replaced a chunk of hash with a piece of petrified dog poo from the neighbor’s yard. This little butt nugget looked exactly like the Kush we’d just smoked. And it was sitting right there in front of us, like the face of Christ in a piece of toast. It was amazing. Duane stood watch while I carved off a piece of the turd with his mother’s garden trowel. He picked it off the tip with a napkin from the glove box of the 1986 Ford Mustang GT we smoked its doppelgänger in, then replaced it in the display case while I made a production out of getting started with the next car.

  We thought we were so slick.

  A few weeks into the summer after freshman year, we discovered that Mr. Parnell’s cabinet of delights wasn’t our only source of good times. Early one afternoon we were going through a cherry 1972 Chevy truck, buffing out every scuff, polishing every chrome knob and handle, when Duane bumped a hidden switch and a secret compartment popped open underneath the passenger-side dash. At first I thought it was just the glove box that had accidentally fallen open, but the compartment was too big and opened too far to be a factory install. Duane reached over to close it back up, but it was too heavy to move with just a flick of his fingers like a normal glove box. I bent down to investigate. There staring back at us were ten half-pound pouches of marijuana, a small brick of cocaine, and $8,000 in cash.

  I would like to say that when Duane and I set our eyes on this bounty, we were so cool that all we saw were dollar signs and images of porny debauchery. The reality is, we fucking panicked. Somebody wants those drugs back—could be a bad guy, could be a good guy—and somehow they’re going to know that we are the people who have them. That’s how the thinking goes in the mind of a teenager whose primary frame of reference for drug dealers is episodes of Miami Vice.

  Duane ran to get his dad. I stood there frozen. When you’ve never seen that kind of weight before, it feels like you’re staring into a crystal ball that’s showing you a future of getting butt-raped in a jail cell.

  I shook off the flash of paranoia just in time to stop Duane before he reached the back door.

  “Duane, don’t!”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t tell your dad. Not yet.” Duane saw the gears turning behind my eyes. He knew that look. “We should keep it, “I said as he came back over to the Chevy truck.

  “We can’t do that, Ralphie. Those are drugs.”

  “No, that’s money. And that’s just a little reefer.”

  “Yeah, but that’s cocaine!”

  “You’re right. We should give him the coke.”

  “Thank you. Okay—”

  “But we keep the rest.”

  I understood the pickle Duane was in as the son of a federal law enforcement employee. Yes, cocaine is worse than marijuana, so it’s good that we were telling his dad about it, but keeping the weed wasn’t somehow less illegal. Something is either legal or illegal, that’s it. That’s how Duane was taught.

  I was not interested in that kind of black-and-white distinction—not back then. Life was shades of gray. Or in this instance, shades of green, and the only distinction I cared about was the one between “kind bud” green and “cold hard cash” green. Ours was Mexican dirt weed, which sat somewhere in the middle.

  Before his dad came outside and stumbled on our mother lode, I needed Duane to understand where I was coming from: mainly that ever since my granny got real sick and my brother started being a dick about letting me use his truck, I needed to find as many ways as possible to make money. Washing cars for Duane’s dad was a good start, but it wasn’t nearly enough. I needed to get a car. I needed to buy clothes and shoes for school, and school was right around the corner. I needed to pay my Boy Scouts dues for the World Scout Jamboree in Australia later in the year. And most important, we needed to party our balls off befor
e summer ended.

  “You don’t really think it was a coincidence that you just happened to hit the exact right spot in that moment for the compartment to open, do you?” I pleaded. “No, sir, Duane Parnell. This is a sign. We were meant to find this stuff. You and me, nobody else.”

  As a baptized-but-lapsed Methodist I was prepared to go full Christian Revival on Duane to make him see the light. If I had to conjure the spirit of our Lord and Savior through John’s earthly vessel to convince him that the secret compartment in this 1972 Chevy truck was our personal Ark of the Covenant, well then, it was time to testify. As a good Christian, a great American, and an even better friend, Duane didn’t let it get that far. He was in. We split the cash, sold a bunch of the reefer, went to tons of concerts, and what we didn’t spend throwing big bonfire parties in the woods with a bunch of kegs, I used to buy a 1979 burgundy-on-burgundy Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with notchback velour bench seats and a 5.7-liter 350 Rocket V-8 engine. A bona fide all-American fuck machine.

  * * *

  The fall of 1987 passed like my first month of third grade … times a million. Our football team was good, I still had a bunch of weed left over from our summertime fire sale, and best of all I had a girlfriend who I could drive around in my very own car. When you’ve got all 350 of the horsies in that Cutlass pulling you around sweeping country roads as smooth as a ribbon of silk, with the ass end sunk into the road and your girl’s ass sunk in right next to you, you can’t help but feel like the king of the world.

  Riding in the Cutlass was like floating in a cocoon forged out of freedom. It provided a sense of security and comfort that had largely been missing from other areas of my life up to then. When I was behind the wheel, all felt right in the world. I drove it everywhere, every day.

  One weekend early in the spring semester, just after my birthday, central Arkansas experienced an unseasonable warm spell, and a group of us decided to go camping down south at Lake Ouachita to take advantage of it. The Cutlass is good for cruising, it’s good for screwing, but it ain’t no good for camping. So I begged by brother, Winston, to switch cars with me. His Silverado was ideal for hauling a bunch of gear.