There’s an extremely shabby bar in town where I like to hang out. There’s an old codger who works there as “security” a few nights a week, whom I’ll call H. (H is a tough mofo, I should add; he’s old and looks feeble, but I’ve seen him bust some heads when the need arose.)
Anyway, H was telling me once about a camping trip to the south Louisiana bayou, and describing the mosquitoes down there. (You have to imagine this in a Southern accent so thick that a Northerner probably can’t understand it.) “I tell you no lie, jackelope,” H said, “them mosquitoes could stand flat-footed and fuck a turkey.”
There was this old guy waiting on line at the ice cream truck at the beach one summer. The kids waiting were being rather boisterous and knocked into him. He turned to them and said “Don’t push me ‘cuz I’m close to the edge/ I’m tryin’ not to lose my head.”
All the kids just about fell down laughing after hearing an old white guy rap The Message.
Some of my grandfather’s lines that I try to keep alive:
“That boy is dummer than a room full of chickens.”
“I’m sweating like a sick whore at prayer meetin’.”
“Queerer than a six legged duck with a tuba.”
About Cher (when he was 86 and she was just divorced from Sonny): “I would drink that gal’s bathwater and gargle with her toilet water… that is one fine majestic she-beast of a woman.”
As far as Cholo’s original question goes, my nomination comes from a rerun of a circa 1973 Match Game episode recently aired on the Game Show Network. The sentence to be completed was something like: “When I flew on the new hippie airline, the stewardess asked me: 'Coffee, tea, or BLANK?” Obviously, “marijuana” or some synonym thereof was the expected response. Yet the contestant’s answer was “My place!” Cracked up Gene Rayburn, the panel, and the audience.
Would I hijack this thread with an old woman? Because I’m going to anyway.
Last Saturday, there was a party thrown for my great-grandmother’s 102nd birthday. She had all sorts of fun; she’s losing her hearing and sight fast, and is shrinking more and more, but is otherwise doing fine.
While we are at the party, a dozen red roses appeared on her dining table. My grandma, who flew down for the party, took me and Mom out to dinner post-festivities. Afterwards, when we got back to say goodnight and goodbye, Grandmother announced that she’d found out where the mysterious roses came from. “The man who sits behind me at dinner gave them to me.” Pause. As I was trying to think of a way to say this –
“I have a boyfriend!” she announces proudly. My grandma, mom and I all about die laughing.
My father was visiting his parents a while back and apparently my grandfather was very sick at the time. Something he ate. My father was conversing with my grandma and they were interrupted by loud retching from the bathroom. My grandfather was puking hardcore. Very loud, very violent. Not something terribly healthy for an older man to be experiencing. Both my dad and my grandmother freaked out and ran into the bathroom to check up on him.
When they got there he was exhausted and they were more than a little concerned. In between breaths, my grandfather broke the silence with the following:
“Could ya check the toilet? I think my asshole’s in there.”
I thought of another one by a different old fart I used to paint with. He was quite a character…he was 70 years old, never drank or smoked in his life and he was strong as a bull. You didn’t mess with him but he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever run across. Anyway, he had been married for 50+ years and he would always say…“I’ve been married for 50 years…same damn woman” with a look of disgust on his face that would crack us all up.
One particular time as Fred was holding court (at lunchtime) somebody asked him how do you stay married that long. Without missing a beat said:
“You gotta keep em’ guessing. If dinner isn’t ready when you get home, be sure to throw a fit! And if IS ready…don’t eat the sonofabitch!”
On two seperate occasions, I went to a Boy Scout High Adventure base near Ely, Minnesota. Canoeing in real Canadian wilderness was the high adventure. Absolutely pristine. Thirsty? Dip your cup over the side of the canoe and drink, my friend. (For those of you familiar with the area, we were north of the pussy-assed Boundary Waters area. We were up in Quantico. Hard-core camping.)
On one of the trips, the grandfather of a couple of my fellow Scouts went along with us. Old Man Hancock is how we referred to him. Damned cool old guy.
We had 3 people to a canoe – two paddling, one in the middle. One day on the a shallow lake, Old Man Hancock was in the middle, and rips a TREMENDOUS fart. The water only amplifies it. The 8 of the crew who weren’t Old Man Hancock all turned to look at him. His response: “A fart is just a turd honking for the right-of-way.”
These stories are so precious! Some somber & sweet others regaling & funny.
The one that comes to my mind is once when I was waitressing.
Waiting on this old man- 80’s?- as he was finishing his meal I asked him if he was thinking of dessert. He was eating a dinner roll with jam on it and looked at the roll and said: “That jam’s my dessert”. From then on I’ve refered “jam” as a dessert!
A saying my Aunt used to say when you asked her how she was was “fair in th’midlan” (fair in the midland).
My grandfather died from Alzheimer’s but about three years before he died [before it got really bad] he would tell us the story of his life, from his first day of school to the day his second wife [my grandmother] died, condensed into about five days:
"On the first day of school I didn’t want to go so my dad dropped me off and I ran all the way home and he drove me all the way back. After that I went into the war and when I got home I met this girl named Carmen. She was a really nice girl, but her daddy didn’t like me. Then she got sick, and she died. And then I met Helen. She was a nice girl . . . "
The best thing, I think, was that about halfway through he’d start yelling in Dutch [he was the only member of his family born in the US] and we had no idea what on earth he was saying.
Also funny, but very sad, was the time when he freaked out because the couple sitting on his table weren’t moving, just staring at him all the time – The couple was a picture of him and my grandmother taken about seven years before she died.
My grandfather would always sit with me and share important life lessons. “Now,” he said to me “you take some guy, he don’t know which way he wanna go, y’know? Says ‘You show me yours, I’ll show you mine… Ooh, you got a nice one.’ Next thing you know, he’s eatin’ on his dingy!”
Last night, working in the emergency call centre for the electricity utility company, after a main circuit failure with a few hundred people off supply :
Customer : “What on earth is happening”
Me : “main circuit failure…blah blah…could be two hours or more…blah blah…sorry sorry grovel grovel…etc”
"Customer “WHY???”
Me : “Dunno yet…engineers investigating…sorry grovel sorry grovel”
Customer “Look I’m eighty-two year old, and I want to know what I’m supposed to do about my girlfriend’s vibrator???”
I suggested Duracell batteries but advised that unfortunately I could not guarantee that the company would reimburse him for them.
Now, it wasn’t just one line, but a rather uneasy conversation (one sided at that) that goes into my memory. I worked at a local pizza joint here in town, and we would prep the dough by cutting it into small bits and rolling them into balls and putting them on a tray. I was working on that, and there’s a little glass counter in front so everyone can see what we’re doing. This 70 something year old man walks up, watches me for a while, and says:
“Man, that looks like a tray full of titties!”
You know, I never really thought of that.
“I bet they feel like titties, don’t they?”
No, not really sir.
“I bet they do. I bet you get a hard on handlin’ all those titties.”
At that point, I pointed out his wife just walked in and was looking for him, and he rushed away. Most awkward moment in my life (or, at least one of the top five).
