American Thighs (16 page)

There were two lines—one for the units marked “Ladies” and the other for those labeled “Either.” Now, for me, that begs the question—either or WHAT, exactly? Could be ladies or gentlemen—could be ladies or skanky-ass hos, though. At any rate, there were men and women (of varying demeanor) in the Either line, and they made, I think, the wise choice with that line on account of it just does not take guys very long to pee under any circumstances but the performance time for women is generally substantially increased by the fact that we are hampered by the close quarters and the fact that the stifling heat causes all our clothes to immediately become shrink-wrapped to our bodies, and our horror at our surroundings does little to expedite matters. So at least the men in the Either line offer some hope for a speedier queue.

Sure enough, their gamble paid off and Queens Lynne and Jules quickly found themselves entering the two side-by-side Eithers. Lynne emerged from her sweatbox first and stood waiting and panting in the shade of Jules's Either cubicle until presently, the door swung open and out came the sweaty but strangely ebullient Jules, exclaiming loudly that THAT was, by far and away, the NICEST Porta Potti she had ever had the pleasure of being forced by her throbbing feet to use after ten-thousand other people in the blazing sun.

And what, Queen Lynne wondered aloud, could possibly rate such an effusion of enthusiasm regarding a sweltering, festering public loo? Well, gushed Jules, at least it had that handy
little place to put my purse—it must have been designed by a woman; who else would realize how important it is to have a place to put your purse while you pee?

Upon hearing this revelation, Queen Lynne spontaneously erupted with a true belly-grabbing, rolling-on-the-ground “bwahahahaha” that drew quite a curious crowd from the surrounding area. Jules, reigning Queen of Igmos, had, of course, placed her precious Prada purse—smack IN the URINAL of the Either potty. For years now, everyone (with the notable exception of Jules) has so enjoyed that story. Sorry to propagate it, Jules, but—well, naahh, not really—it's too good NOT to. Surely, you're over it by now? No? Oh, well.

Okay—Now, I Swear—Back to Stuckey's…Saw It, Had to Have It, Pitched a Fit, Got It—and It's Never Enough

When the Stuckey's signs finally advised me that, in addition to an insulin coma and a nice potty, I could also avail myself of “SOUVENIRS!”—well, I was just about wild to get there.

Fortunately for my parents' fragile sanity, it was not necessary for me to ask that age-old question that reverberates endlessly within the confines of all moving automobiles containing children—and has since moving vehicles were invented—that being, “HOW MANY MORE MILES IS IT?” There was no
need to verbalize that query since Mr. Stuckey himself was providing me with a mile-by-mile update on that situation. That service alone should have been enough to endear him to adult motorists everywhere—at least those whose children were old enough to read mile markers.

My burning desire for sweets and souvenirs would not have been enough to persuade Daddy to veer off the path with much frequency—but Stuckey's billboards promised “Clean Restrooms,” and that positively guaranteed that I was gonna get to stop at every single one of 'em as long as Mama was in the car. One sampling told me I was not going to become a lifelong fan of the Pecan Logs or the Divinity—but the Souvenirs were quite another matter.

Many of y'all know of my fascination and fondness for all things Tacky, and it is a rare thing indeed to find so MANY genuinely tacky items handily assembled for one in such a convenient location, and then to find that location replicated over and over, every couple of hundred miles or so, is just beyond even the wildest dreams of Tacky Heaven. In one visit to one single Stuckey's, you could buy—or at least lust after—a small wooden outhouse, complete with a patron inside who would turn around, look surprised, and pee on you when you opened the door; a ceramic ashtray shaped like a tiny toilet; a wooden paddle emblazoned with an amusing limerick sure to tickle the funny bone of even the dourest child-beating customer (what a sick slant THAT was on the whole “souvenir” concept): just
about anything you can think of covered in tiny seashells (I still have a seashell-covered poodle that is rendered even more lovely by the shade of lavender it is painted); a can of “peanuts” that, when opened, would allow a giant snake made of springs covered in snake-print fabric to fly directly into one's terrified face and would, upon further examination, be found to contain not even one single peanut, thereby compounding an already injurious situation with further insult; anything and everything from salt-and-pepper sets to ball caps depicting either The Lord's Supper, a magnolia, and/or the outline of the state of Mississippi; and all manner of toothpick dispensers—both the passive kind that just sit there holding a wad of toothpicks as well as the active variety that somehow mechanically deliver a single pick into your waiting hand, which would allow one to begin picking one's teeth at the earliest possible moment.

Nabs and Geedunks

On our summer trips with Daddy, though, Mama didn't go along—it was just me and Rhonda and Daddy, and that was some slow-going, let me tell you. Rhon and I wanted to stop at EVERY Stuckey's—in case this one had a larger stock of papiermâché clowns and genuine birthstone rings—but we didn't like the nabs there, so other stops had to be made with what Daddy considered to be alarming frequency.

Okay, “nabs.” Once upon a time, Nabisco sold packs of peanut butter crackers and they were called Nabs. Nowadays, in the South—any pack of snack crackers is called nabs, and we all know what it means, but Outsiders mostly don't. Okay, fine.

When Yankee-boy Jeffrey Gross first met red-dirt Mississippi-boy Allen Payne, a discussion of lunch came up, during the course of which Allen allowed as how he was not in any big hurry to eat just then, having recently had “nabs,” and it was weeks before Jeffrey could bring himself to inquire as to what exactly a nab was and how come it to kill one's appetite so completely. He was pretty relieved to learn that the truth was something edible and not contagious.

Anyway, me and my seester, Judy, don't actually care for snack crackers, nabs or otherwise, much at ALL, but we do like the name nabs, so we started calling ALL snacks and party food by that name. Actually, we call just about all food nabs. If we talk on the phone and I tell her I'm going to a gathering at Tammy's house, the first thing Judy will ask is, “Will there be nabs?” Meaning, will there be food? When we used to travel together and we wanted to know where a good restaurant might be found, we would ask everybody we encountered, “
Donde estan
nabs?”—which was particularly confusing to them if we didn't happen to be in, say, Cozumel or some other Hispanic locale—but even if they did speak Spanish, the nabs part would throw 'em. We got a lotta laughs out of it ourownselves, though, and that's all we really care about. Clearly, we have not had ANY
trouble finding the nabs, wherever we happen to find ourselves.

So anyway, me and Rhon were not partial to the nabs available at Stuckey's back then—it was all Pecan Logs!—and Divinity! It seemed to us there was only one production run of those products ever in the history of the world and we were pretty sure it was about the same time they made that one Claxton Fruit Cake. We wanted Sugar Babies and Milk Duds and Zero bars and Peanut Butter Logs and Chick-a-Sticks and Fritos and Co-Colas—and occasionally a MoonPie and a Big Orange drink.

Once in a while we would see an establishment that offered soft-serve ice cream—for some unknown reason, Daddy called it a “geedunk.” Now, that was Daddy's weakness because it reminded him of homemade ice cream, so no matter how many stops he had already made along the way to appease us, if a geedunk sign appeared on the horizon, he would be whipping in and ordering three. (Two of 'em were for us.)

Daddy never outgrew his lifelong love affair with homemade ice cream and geedunks. It grew at least partially out of his love and admiration for—as well as his competition with—his favorite older sister, Moggie. The “skill” that Moggie possessed—that eluded Daddy his whole entire life—was her ability to stuff about a cup of homemade ice cream into her mouth at one time and then devour it WITHOUT getting that most painful of childhood maladies—BRAIN FREEZE. Daddy
watched in worshipful awe his entire life as Moggie would, with a cavalier, devil-may-care look in her eye, load up Maw's biggest cooking spoon with a veritable mountain of homemade ice cream—arguably one of the coldest things on the planet—and stick the whole thing in her mouth and swallow it down without so much as a flinch or a wince, while a mere heaping tablespoonful of the glacial goo would send most mortals, Daddy included, into rigors of head-clasping, facial-contorting, high-pitched-wailing, teeth-grinding, often even ground-rolling frozen-brain misery that seemed to last for hours with no relief.

One childhood brain-freeze experience is USUALLY enough for most humans—that's one lesson we do not EVER want to repeat, and even the most stubborn and slowest-learning amongst us usually spend the rest of our lives giving extremely cold food and beverages the respect they deserve, consuming them with constant caution and care, lest they once again cause us to feel that we have somehow slammed our heads in the car door. A-a-a-a-and then, there was Daddy. He never lost his admiration and envy of Moggie's strange ability—and he could never qui-i-i-ite give up his quest. There was always at least one geedunk each summer that would lure him into just one more attempt at that somewhat dubious unreachable star. He would look at that geedunk and sense Moggie grinning at him, daring him, taunting him to go on—give it a try, little brother—even after she was long-since dead and buried, and her inexplicable gift with her. His recovery time usually
allowed me and Rhon to eat a couple more geedunks and replenish our stock of
Archie
comic books, so his temerity served us well and we were loath to admonish him for it.

Check-in Chicken Run/Chicken Egg

Sooner or later, no matter how many Stuckey's stops were made, regardless of numerous detours dictated by nabs and geedunks, we would eventually reach our destination—the Holiday Inn of Holly Springs or wherever Daddy's work required him to appear. In those days, in our minds, a Holiday Inn was Lady Luxury's very lap—the towels alone were a wonder worth the trip—what with “HOLIDAY INN” actually woven RIGHT INTO the middle of the towel in bright green threads, it was easy to see why it was the national pastime to steal them—and we could not wait to languish in that luxurious lap, especially after a rigorous day of riding in the car and eating crap while reading comic books.

Back then, even mo-tels had bellboys, and no guest was ever allowed to actually sully his hands or strain his back by toting his own luggage through the lobby, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to his second-floor poolside piece of heaven. Daddy did love to torment him some bellboys, too.

There must have been a pretty high turnover rate in the bellboy ranks back then because I never saw one fail to fall for
whatever prank Daddy was pulling on him—and so they all had to be new guys. I'm quite certain that NONE of them ever forgot him.

Cases in Point

The bellboys would always precede the guest to the room, unlock and open the door, and then step aside, saying, “Will this be all right?” with an expansive wave of his hand, with an air of “VOILÀ!”—as if revealing to the guest for the first time an opulent suite in the Palace of Versailles. (I never wondered at the time what his response would or could have been should the accommodations ever be found by the guest to be wanting—since every single one of the rooms was 100 percent exactly alike.) One of Daddy's most favoritest things to do involved this little room-approval ritual. Rhon and I could tell right off when he was gonna do it because he would be lagging a bit behind on the trek to the room—we knew this was to allow him room to make his running start—which was in and of itself one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my whole life.

Daddy seldom ran, but when he did it was memorable for two reasons, the first being that he ran like a chicken. If you've never been lucky enough to actually witness a chicken running yourownself, I'll tell you, it's pretty entertaining. Their legs go like lightning but the rest of their bodies are completely mo
tionless. So if you were to film a chicken running—you could divide the screen and the bottom half would show two chicken legs moving back and forth so fast you could hardly see them and the top half would show a chicken just sitting there. If you filmed Daddy running, you would see the same thing. Little skinny legs justa pumpin', and above them, a fairly rotund body at rest. Hilarious to watch. (It should be noted that neither my seester, Judy, nor myself was blessed at birth with the THIGHS of our father—who had lithe and lovely bird legs until the day he died. We both got our mama's THIGHS, and if you were to take a photo of the three of us standing together in swimsuits—well, for starters, you'd need a wide-angle lens, not to mention a stun gun, to capture the vision, since we wouldn't be volunteering to pose for this—it would look like three regular-sized women perched on top of six manatees.)

The second thing you couldn't help but notice about Daddy's chicken run was that it was REEEALLY fast.

So when he was not right on the heels of the bellboy, we knew he was giving himself room for a chicken run at the room. The bellboy would throw open the door for the big reveal, and when Daddy didn't immediately issue an affirmative response to the sight of the room, the bellboy would glance back to see what was going on.

What he would then see was a large fat man chicken-running down the elevated walkway, bearing down on him and the room. Before the bellboy could have any sort of reaction to
THAT sight, Daddy would blur past him into the room, and commence jumping wildly, up and down, to and fro, on all the beds and furniture. After about forty-five seconds of this performance, he would abruptly stop, not even winded, walk over to the bellboy, take the key from his hand, replacing it with a generous tip and ignoring the bug-eyed, slack-jawed expression on his face, and say, “This'll do fine, thankee,” and close the door.