Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Gene Laughridge - Morganton, NC
Facts of Life
As dreams go, it was pretty coherent. Twang Eddy’s rendition of “Rebel Rouser” was playing romantically on the jukebox. A longhaired, doo-ragged being looking more like Bigfoot than like a human had just hit on Kelly Lynch, who herself was in the roadhouse undercover, pretending to be a medical doctor named Elizabeth Clay. Bouncer James Dalton, looking more like Patrick Swayze than Swayze does himself these days, came to the lady’s rescue. Bigfoot chugged his non-lite beer and pulled an entrenching tool and threatened Dalton with qualifying for bar mitzvah. Our favorite bouncer declined by employing an erotic scissors move he had learned from inmates during a previous incarceration in a women’s prison, or possibly on a cross-dressing road trip. But that’s another movie.
In any case, the beast produced a double barrel shotgun and attempted to saw off one of Dalton’s arms. That was making me rethink my theory about which killed people, guns or other people. But it was at about that point that the dream began to get silly. Red-necked zombies supporting Bigfoot faced off against a group of super models and other zombies posing in support of their Hollywood cronies. Then Ric Flair leapt over the bar with a can of pepper spray, and together he and bouncer spirited lovely lady through the brawling crowd and out of the roadhouse. In the gravel parking lot, Flair bit through two of the oversized tires on Bigfoot’s raised Ford 150 while Swayze ### Dalton loaded Lynch ### Clay into her Dodge Challenger.
Flair seemed to be screaming “Go, go, go,” like a demented SWAT leader, but I suddenly awoke and realized it was my mother Elmajean screaming “No, no, no!”
As it developed, my daddy Elijah Joe—whom my mother occasionally called Elijah for short—had just told my mother that he had traded the family goats for a hoard of monkeys.
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it,” my mama kept saying. My daddy finally took her out of the doublewide and showed her where he had recyled chicken wire to cover the windows of our collection of broken cars so our new slew of livestock could not escape. He went over to a Chevelle, the one with the GTO fenders, and pointed proudly to one of the monkeys.
“Don’t she look just like Jancie Dickinson?” he chortled, pointing to a skinny monkey that had just taken a tiny bite off a banana before tossing it aside. “And that other’n with her—the one smoking the cigarette—appears a little like Carol Alt!” I was looking around for Christy Turlington, Heidi Klum, or that fantasy-of-times-gone-by Cheryl Tiegs, when about that time our dog Snot made a funny noise and wiped his nose on my daddy’s leg.
“Who is going to cut our grass?” mother asked. “What are we going to do for milk? Who is going to haul off our trash? Are we going to eat dogs, like the Asians? What were you thinking?” These losses to our way of life began to sink in to daddy. He absentmindedly wiped his hand over the leg of his overalls. Then he quickly looked at the hand and wiped it off on the other leg.
To make a long story short, daddy promised to get our goats back. But when he got to town, they were already gone. Rather than come back with the gaggle of good looking but basically empty headed monkeys, he traded them for something he knew that mama had always wanted, a complete set of the works of Burt Reynolds.
A perceptive person such as yourself might draw a number of morals from this incident, which, by the way, is not disputed on Snopes.com. Incarceration in a women’s prison can be educational. When given a choice between biting through tires and driving away with Kelly Lynch, professional wrestlers can’t be counted upon to make the right decision. Chicken wire has many uses. Things that look good aren’t always as useful as things that smell bad. Dogs named Snot may have gotten that name for a reason. Overalls have two legs for several reasons. And, there’s no telling what a person might get for a complete set of the works of Burt Reynolds.
If those are not true facts of life, I don’t know what are.
comments
I now see a couple of things that I failed to change following my reread of my first draft. The reference to “red neck zombies” should be to “redneck robots.” “Ford 150” should be “Ford F150,” and the statement that “overalls have two legs for several reasons” should say “overalls have two legs for more than one reason.”
Posted by Gene Laughridge on 08.09.2008 at 12:54 pmAny omissions are easily forgotten due to the many awesome Swayze references, Gene. I liked this one a lot.
Scott
Posted by Scott on 08.13.2008 at 07:07 pm
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