Mmm…death chicken sounds tasty!
Preview’s your friend. Mayberry*.
Not to give a spoiler, but… I must go ahead and state that there is/was no outting (though I did do a de-fag of the place- I actually keep a list on the computer of things to check for in case of a visit from her or my mother [my mother knows I’m gay but I de-fag as a courtesy and to avoid a scene, because we have had some really truly thoroughly nasty saying-things-better-left-unsaid and then not-speaking-for-weeks and 'GOD-DAMN! I’M MORTALLY WOUNDED BUT LET ME WITH MY LAST BREATH SAY THAT THAT WAS A GOOD SHOT! [on both sides]" fights over the subject, but none in many years.
I’m tied up for the afternoon so it will be the evening before I post a continuation.
The next one involves dogs, dogs and more dogs.
Sampiro: our own mixture of Armistead Maupin, Tennesse Williams and Truman Capote.
GodDAMN man, but you are funny.
I would imagine that if you did a Garrison Keillor and wrote about the interesting bits of your day to day life, not only would it be a helluva lot funnier, it would sell millions of copies.
Seiously, write a book.
I recently read Ruth Reichl’s autobiography, Tender At The Bone. She recounted her childhood with her bipolar mother, and I swear, Sampiro’s stories about his mom are creepily similar.
Reichl’s mom’s specialty was finding terrific “bargains” when in her manic state. The bargains were junky yard sale crap, semi-spoiled food bought from restaurants, etc. She would then organize big social functions and serve the rancid food to her guests and act personally insulted when they all came down with food poisoning. Add unabashed manipulation, threats of suicide, screaming accusations of not being loved, black weeping depression, and there you have it. Reichl’s older brother just gave up on the whole mess and cut off communication with his mom, but Reichl herself stayed and “raised” her mom herself. This thread brought it all back.
::weeping with laughter::
Please, god, let it be something for overactive bladder… I’m about to pee myself laughing here.
That book sounds interesting- I just wish-listed it. Thanks!
Comfort Me With Apples is also very good.
Oh dear Og, I’m all confused now. Did you go to the beach and eat fried corn without your mother?
I am willing to sit and enjoy while you untangle all the threads from your family saga…each one leads down a different path, but they are all fascinating.
Hurricane Dennis was supposed to be a Category Four storm that would hit the Gulf Coast somewhere between Ft. Walton and Mobile and blow South Alabama back into the dark ages (google “Roy Moore” and “inauguration of”). My sister has always given us reason to concern ourselves whenever there’s a hurricane.
As I mentioned before, Kathy has three dogs, all of them huge. Cookie and Okra are extremely shaggy Collies, but they’re no problem at all. They’re frigging huge- I think their grandparents still had tusks- but they’re sweet and gentle and spayed and calm. Their adopted evil stepsister is Dixie, a Belgian Malinois Shepherd who is literally the only dog I’ve ever met that I absolutely hated. She’s pretty in that way that shepherds are pretty, but that is the only positive thing that can be said for her.
Brief aside about Dixie’s puphood: Kathy recognized that Dixie had anger management problems when the dog was still a puppy. At three months she enrolled her in a local Dutchman’s obedience training course. The Dutchman was proud of the fact that he had never had to muzzle a dog. At their first lesson, the Dutchman instructed her to “Lig Neer!”- “lie down!”, which of course Dixie didn’t understand, so he explained to Kathy and her husband “Of course she doesn’t know what I am saying, but she will. Just like a child, you repeat until they know, ja?” whereupon he said again “Lig neer!” and pushed her into a lying position. Dixie bit him.
“It is a natural reaction… Deeksie does not know I am a freend, so I just try again… ‘Lig Neer!” and he pushed her down again. And Dixie bit him again. “She is temperamental, ja? But she will learn… ‘Lig neer!” And by the fourth or fifth time, Dixie had indeed learned. That’s when he said “Lig neer!” and she bit him without him even having to push her down. Shortly after that she became the first dog he’d ever muzzled. Shortly after that she was expelled as “unteachable”.
The dog’s a horror. She attacks shadows. She attacks televisions whenever there’s a dog or children or cartoon or dancing on the screen. She loves to bark at inanimate objects and can do it for hours. When Marty visited once Dixie literally cleared a five foot high fence and grabbed him by the throat before I could pick him up- I told my sister that I got her to release by speaking forcefully to her [speaking forcefully here being a phrase that means ‘punched the ever loving shit out of’, which literally stopped her for about two seconds before she attacked again, but long enough for me to save Marty’s life by tossing him in the car and closing the door, which she of course attacked).
Dixie has torn holes in her metal dish and completely destroyed a Victorian era antique sofa in less time than it took my sister to hear the attack and come to its rescue. They’ve tried everything from medication to flat-out beating (which the president of PETA would endorse in this case) and the dog won’t respond. Everybody hates the dog- Kathy and John cannot get house-sitters because of the dog- but she’s my sister’s baby. Meanwhile, Cookie and Okra are gentle as lambs but are but bitches-in-waiting to Dixie Satana.
Cookie and Okra can ride in the back of a pick-up but Dixie has to be strapped into a car with the windows rolled up or she’ll attack, and even so she barks at anything that has atoms as they’re going down the road. Kathy has actually refused to evacuate in the path of hurricanes because of the difficulties in transporting the dogs. With Ivan, the last great storm, her truck was broken down so she couldn’t haul the collies out in one vehicle, and Dixie had to have a separate vehicle, so Kathy wouldn’t evacuate. We honestly were considering going into Gulf Shores and kidnapping her because she wouldn’t leave but the plan was stopped when the situation grew so serious that both sides of the Interstate were converted into Northbound to ease evacuation- no traffic could legally or physically enter Gulf Shores. Finally, minutes before the roads were closed, Kathy drove Dixie out in her convertible (roof down, doors bolted of course) followed by her husband in a Jeep with Cookie, followed by a well compensated former employee in his pick-up whose bed contained Okra and a ton of luggage. Kathy and Hermann Göring are the only people I know who refugee in motorcades with baggage cars.
A completely unrelated story about Kathy and hurricanes that I think I’ve told on this board before, but bears repeating. When Opal wiped out the Florida panhandle a decade ago, Kathy received no damage. (She’s never gotten more than the most moderate of damage- places she refugees to frequently get more, which is another reason she’s impossible to convince to flee.) I congratulated her and she told me “It was prayer. I pray everyday, God listened.” I told her “Well, it was also luck… the panhandle has plenty of churches and religious people who pray also.”
“Yeah, they do. You know what else the panhandle has? Gay pride marches! They had a big queer pride march just four months before the hurricane right there in Pensacola, then sit around and wonder why they got blown away by a hurricane! Hello, I think I see your problem.”
“You aren’t really suggesting that the hurricane happened because of the Gay Pride parade are you?
“The hell I’m not. God doesn’t have to explain his reasons. This was God’s way of saying ‘you fairies wanna see a blow job? I’ll give you one… WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! He blew them to Minnesota!’
Silence
“So… you’re saying… that God punished Pensacola for having a Gay Pride parade… by blowing away Ft. Walton and Panama City beaches (which are miles and miles and miles and miles from where the pride march was) four months later…”
“God doesn’t have to explain Himself. The panhandle is the panhandle to him. He made it all.”
[LESLIE JORDAN as BROTHER BOY]O-kayyyyyyyy…[/LESLIE]
So I was delighted when she actually for once said she was planning to evacuate early when Dennis was projected. Until she told me she was coming, with all three of her bison, to my place, with its 40 square foot back yard and totally naked television sets free to attack.
I told her the truth- she is more than welcome to visit me anytime (with sufficient notice), but the dogs…
“Well, we tried to get them into a kennel but they wouldn’t take them. They wouldn’t take Dixie because her reputation precedes her and they wouldn’t take Okra and Cookie because… well… kinda embarrassing…”
“Because they’re huge and they stink?”
“No, I bathed ‘em some, but… the damned groomers down here want a bloody fortune to cut dog hair!”
My sister literally owns more houses than I buy shoes. She buys real estate like I buy CDs. She’ll think nothing of paying $20,000 for part ownership of a WW2 cargo plane. She wouldn’t pay full price for a roll of aluminum foil if you held a gun to her head. She’s convinced that being cheap on day to day expenses is how she got rich (the fact that she made several times the average income as a pharmacist and was thus able to invest in real estate in coastal Alabama and pharmaceutical companies and computer companies before they all shot through the roof is incidental- it’s that 32 cents she saves by driving 14 miles past the Wal-Mart to the Dollar General that put her over the top. It’s “pulling hen’s teeth” to get her to go to a restaurant where the bill with tip is more than $10.00 and by far her favorite cut of meat is “Reduced for Quick Sale”. I suggested that she call her beach place “Hetty Green’s by the Sea” but that fell on deaf ears. (Kathi graduated college with honors, from high school as valedictorian and was offered scholarships all over the nation for her SAT scores, but prides herself on the fact she hasn’t read a book other than the Bible and Christian commentaries since graduation, unless you count *Forrest Gump * which she loved [Winston Groom was an acquaintance who used to come in her shop a good bit and gave her a copy] but then saw the movie and hated it, seeing this as an incentive that she was right all along about not reading non religious books. It makes sense to her somehow.)
“Well, they wanted almost a hundred dollars- A HUNDRED DOLLARS!- to groom Okra and Cookie! Hell, I didn’t pay a Hundred Dollars for Okra and Cookie when I got ‘em! So I said to hell with that, I’ll buy some clippers and cut their hair myself. And I did. Cost me ten dollars for the clippers at Big Lots.”
“And…”
“Well this is the first time I’ve tried trimming Collies. You learn by trial and error… the damned kennel wouldn’t take them because they thought they had mange.”
So thanks to a Category Four disaster coming at them and a really bad haircut, Okra and Cookie were Tuscaloosa bound. Unfortunately so was Dixie.
And unfortunately Mama found out Kathy was going to make like Azrael and pass-over her place this hurricane. She was… offended.
TBC
No, we never made it to the beach. I went to my mother’s place because she was cycling into depressive.
I have a weird talent- it’s marketable, I suppose, but not one I’d want to exploit. I call it “David’s Harp” or “Pathalog Pacifier”. I can calm down crazy people (including but not just my mother) with my presence and my voice. I have no degrees or training in psychology outside of college intro courses, but when I worked in mental hospitals/agencies for three years even professionals would call me to come talk to a person who was in mid-episode. Almost always, without saying anything in particular and whether it’s a masturbating very tall black man or a shrieking harpie threatening people with a steak knife (both actual cases) I could speak to them and get them to calm down within a matter of seconds-(long enough for the restraints, if needed).
I’m not the only person who has the ability- it’s almost like Parseltongue. I’m sure there are papers on it. There are also people with the opposite ability- without being at all rude or patronizing they will somehow make a catatonic patient jump up and hurl steaming grits at them.
Strangely my mother, who worked in mental health for many years (ironic, isn’t it?) has the ability. My own works on her. That’s why when she’s in a real state, I will go to her and calm her down, and it works. Within a day she was back to pretty much normal. But God it takes a lot out of you. (I left mental health for lower paying jobs because I felt like I was being sucked by vampires, and I sometimes feel that way around my mother, but it seemed to help them.)
Not sure why the point of that digression, but… oh yeah, it’s why I went to my mother’s even though I felt like warmed over death. And we never went to the beach because by the end my sister was no longer calling, the Fourth was over, and while my mother would never in a millennium admit it I think she was embarassed over her overreaction (but that embarassment she got over).
Okay, so you didn’t make it to the beach, and now your sister and her Dog from Hell are coming to escape Dennis.
Are your mother and sister talking again?
And what happens if Demon Dixie ever attacks a child?
Maybe she’ll stay away if you come out? (I’m surprised Dixie hasn’t been ordered to be put down).
Make yourself a cup of tea and get some rest, Sampiro. Then bring more stories.
This is terrible of me, but I have been at the farewell party for a co-worker whom I really like and am devastated to see go, but the whole time I kept thinking, "Sampiro’s updating the 'Dope on the latest developments and I’m not there to read it! WOE IS ME! I don’t know when a story has captivated me as much as this. I need to go to bed soon because tomorrow is a work day from hell, most likely and I have a dinner party to deal with tomorrow night. Still, nothing matters except the continuing saga of this most fascinating yet horrifying tale. Sampiro give me one more tidbit before I retire! PLEEEEAAASSSEEE!!!
Kathy’s driving Dixie in the convertible with, again, the top sealed tightly (I said “down” above because I was thinking “down on the car frame”- I meant that the roof was securely fastened) and Dixie seatbelted in and barking. Her husband follows in the old reliable Sanford & Son truck with the collies on back, and they follow the last scene of Fiddler on the Roof onto the Interstate. (“We are refugeeing to Tahk-sa-lusa, in Amedika… I’ll work hard Papa!”) Remember, Dennis was supposed to be a horror.
My mother was furious again. “She’s not coming here? She’s going to go all the way to Tuscaloosa?” [in Amedika] “That’s three more hours out of their way! And you have a two bedroom apartment and a postage stamp backyard and I’ve got three bedrooms and a large fenced backyard! Where’s she gonna put those damned shaggy Buicks she calls dogs?”
We’d worked it out that Okra and Cookie would stay in the back under a jerry-rigged tarp (which would take up half the yard) and if the weather got too violent could come downstairs. My sister, not even thinking, had suggested “We could use Ollie’s cage for one of them.” (Ollie weighs 18 pounds, roughly the weight of the tongues of these beasts.) Kathy calls my mother to tell her “It’s just because of the dogs… you have Marty and Ollie and my dogs can’t be around them.” (This would have made sense if it weren’t for the fact that the reason she had Ollie was because I hadn’t come back to get him [and could easily have taken Marty as well] because Kathy was coming to my place.)
Meanwhile, my mother’s 80 year old sister calls her and asks permission to stay with her when she evacs from Destin (where she lives far from the beach). My mother tells her to come on up. My mother has two full sized beds and a day bed, but is still complaining that “Kathy is just doing this to spite me… she’s going to Tuscaloosa just because she’s mad because I wouldn’t take my little Marty down to her house and let him be kicked into a wall by a redneck whale!”
The traffic is bumper to bumper. At some point, Kathy actually relents and thinks, maybe it would be better to stop in Montgomery, it’s a lot closer. I think it’s a great idea too but tell her that “Aunt Joan is going to be at Mama’s.”
“Well shit… that means it’d be a middle aged couple, three big dogs, two little dogs, and two old women in a two bedroom house… that’s too damned many.”
Kathy doesn’t have passionate feelings for our aunt one way or the other. Aunt Joan is annoying and, for the daughter of a lower-middle class railroad who grew up in a city of 50 people, very snobbish. She’s well-to-do herself and the status-conscious widow of a big behind-the-scenes player in the 1970s George Wallace administration and has an annoying habit of name-dropping “power” names from her husband’s political cronies, completely unaware that they’re 30 years out of date. “I had dinner the other night with [knowing look] Lorna Tyler and you’ll never guess who dropped in at our table… it was [dramatic pause] Simon Rodriguez! Of course he knew my husband really well and owed him a lot of favors, but Simon and his brother Pepper, well, you know that if it weren’t for them Luther Banks would never be where he is now…” (which is, in fact, 25 years retired from the administration of a long dead governor). But neither would she let Aunt Joan’s presence alone keep her from my mother’s house, but that added to the other factors makes her decide not to, sending my mother back into orbit.
My mother: “I just can’t believe that she would just rather drive through a HURRICANE ON SLICK CROWDED ROADS just to avoid an old aunt who loves her half to death and lives to see her and would do anything in the world for her!” (My mother grew up during the Depression when her family couldn’t afford hyperbole and so now she hoards it; Aunt Joan is fond enough of Kathy, whom she never sees and rarely asks about, but “loves her half to death” yada yada is overstating it by 1200%. “She’s going to be devastated when I tell her…” (Yeah Mama, this is going to concern her way more than the knowledge her house might be in Chattanooga now or the fates of her children and grandchildren who are still in the panhandle.) “She can judge me for not going down south to let some redneck whale beat up my dog, but will drive around the world to avoid seeing an old aunt who worships the ground she walks on! Well Kathy can just go straight to hell… I think you’d be in your rights to lock the door on her and pretend you’re not home!”
I’ll do that Mama. M-hmm. You take care and take the steroids with some Yoo-hoo and Evan Williams and you’ll feel better, I promise.
I will admit I was dreading her coming, but I’d bitten the bullet, relocated all unmarked videotapes, put away the rainbow paraphernalia and was waiting for her arrival.
“Then Buddha send… a miracle! Name of miracle is… flat tire!”
More later.
Og-dammit Sampiro, it’s been TWO HOURS! Post, dammit, POST!!!
Max 
This has made an excellent bed time story. Unfortunately, half way thorugh, I had to stop reading and go to bed. Did my little head fall to sleep??? NOOOO, my brain is all wakey wakey. So thanks, its 11pm and I’m out of bed, reading more of your story.
What’s next?? So I took another Ambien and came out to finish readin. And wouldn’t ya know it, he passed out and now I gotta pray to the internet gods he wakes and finishes this story by 8am.
OMG, you could be one wicked one and make us wait until we get home form work…
Really loving the story.
Now, if we did this right, and made a pretty book out of it, with hard cover and everything, how would that fly as christmas presents to all the parties involved this year? hmmmm?
THEN you can video tape the wild crazy reactions to the book and you can begin your first film! I"m brilliant!
I’ll sign off now and hope that some of what I typed was spelled right. I have new contacts and I cant see, yes, that’s my excuse.
I can’t wait for the next installment…this is all too familiar. And I am from the same area too, so I keep thinking we have to be related in some way.
I would finish reading this, but I can’t stop laughing.
You forgot Rebecca Wells and Shirley Jackson!
Sampiro, when this drama resolves, you do know you HAVE to go back and tell the “…but that another story, stories.” don’t you? please, please, please, please?