I was thinking earlier today that this story would make a brilliant movie. In my head I was watching two women duke it out on the tennis court, one grunting MOTHER and the other SISTER as they hit the ball, all while Sampiro’s head turned helplessly from side to side to follow it.
NOOOO!!!
It’s midnight, and the tale is not yet finished. I’m sure I’m going to lie in bed, trying to imagine the possible endings.
You got any pictures of the Isotta?
You know how you’re walking down the sidewalk and suddenly you stumble across a diamond ring?
This sentence brought me up short and completely charmed me. I shall now have a delightful image in my head all day.
Thank you.
Sweet merciful heavens! wipes away tears
::checks clock… sighs… twiddles thumbs::
How much you want to bet he’s on some other board, detailing an equally entertaining story about how he’s keeping us on tenterhooks?
I meant to ask earlier, what are Krystals? And why is it shameful to eat them in college?
[the.late.PAUL.WINFIELD.of.A&E.'s.CITY-CONFIDENTIAL]Bay Minette, Alabama is a charming place, a return to old southern grace, where moss hangs on the 400 year old trees being torn down for the new strip mall and people rush home at the end of the day to go to dinner at the All You Can Eat Partridge Place. A quaint colony of the New South, where the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners can meet at the Waffle House for coffee to discuss how much they both hate the Vietnamese immigrants. Where Mom and Pop grocers like Brooks and Jan Higginbotham can sit on their back porch watching the bug zapper and contemplating the changes since their wedding 40 years ago, and the probable whereabouts of their son Oswald who left town on his 18th birthday with a stolen Dodge, a chainsaw and the money he’d saved for a boob job. Where downtown on a busy Tuesday still manages to look like a mural, because all of the action in town is at the Junior College, or over at the illegal dog fights everybody knows take place in what was once the Zephaniah Baptist Church but became an illegal strip club when Zephaniah merged with Mercy Missionary Baptist after their minister was caught having sex with his tractor. The type of quaint Mayberry-esque tranquil place where… well, it’s a small southern city where nothing much happens. And nothing much happens to it here.[/the.late.Paul.Winfield.]
My sister and her husband, her in the convertible, him in the Sanford & Son truck, had been on the interstate for 10 miles when the front passenger tire blew. There wasn’t a functional spare, and Bay Minette, Alabama, the closest town, wasn’t always easy to get a tow truck from. On a Sunday morning. When a Category 4 hurricane was supposed to hit. And traffic was bumper to bumper.
[scheiß- gotta run- back later]
I found this site: http://www.krystalco.com/
They look like White Castles to me.
They’re small, square, cheap fast food hamburgers. I think you can get a dozen for a buck or something.
Not exactly haute cuisine.
However, they are fantastic drunk food. Small, square, steamed, hot is how they use to advertise em. The are also known as gut bombers because they explode upon ingestion.
If they’re anything like White Castles, it’s more like they explode upon ejection…
Sampiro, are you sure you’re not a famous writer? :dubious: 'Cause this is really good stuff. I’m waiting impatiently for the next installment. This right up there with Auntie Em’s missing co-worker–I want more!!!
ivylass, I loved the hyperbole line, too. Very nice.
Ahh, here in Seattle we have Dick’s. They aren’t as cheap, but get bombs none the less.
(ok you guys, behave 
)
Gut Bombs (sigh) :smack:
Well, eat too many of 'em and one could be prone to projectile ejection. And yeah, they are White Castles. We just call em Krystal down south. I shall probably be pitted by some crazed White Castles or Krystals afficionado but damn if I can tell any difference in em.
Sampiro I’m jonesin’ here! I need more story.
So, the tire is flat, there’s no spare. Even with AAA and the promise of a major tip, it takes her almost two hours to get a tow truck. She spends it with Dixie on a short lease, cursing, and on the cell phone while trying her damnedest not to touch the beer in her car. (She do love her Red Dog.)
She has asked me if there’s anyway, if necessary, that I can come down and haul the Collies to my apartment. There really isn’t: I drive a Saturn, which might have room for one of the beasties but the second one would be in the gas tank. The fact that I live over four hours away from where she’s broken down is also an anxiety producing factor but this doesn’t come up. Then she calls my mother. (This is based on “sworn testimony” of the conversation- I wasn’t privy to it.)
Mama: “Well I can come down and get ya- I’m only a couple of hours away and my SUV” [it’s really a mini-SUV like vehicle] “should hold the dogs…”
Kathy: Naw, that’s okay. Hopefully they can fix the tire and if they cain’t then Jon said he’d come down.
Mama: “Why do you want Jon to come down? He’s got bronchitis and lives seven hours away.” [Always best to grossly exaggerate when making your point.] “I’ll just come get ya and bring ya’ll to Montgomery.”
Kathy: “But I don’t want to come to Montgomery. There are too many dogs and too many people…”
Mama: “In other words you don’t want to come to Montgomery because I didn’t want to come down to your place and spend all of my money cooking freak diets for a ton of lard who kicked my dog!”
Kathy: Mama, you’re being ridiculous…
Mama: And because your Aunt Joan is coming. I can’t believe you hate that woman so much…
Kathy: I don’t hate her… Hell, I don’t even think about her. I haven’t seen her in years, I’m going to Jon’s place because of…
Mama: Well maybe now you can understand why I didn’t come down to your place, how the presence of somebody you can’t stand can just turn your longed for vacation into a…
Kathy: No Mama, it really doesn’t make me understand. MAYBE IF I WAS A SELFISH AND BITTER OLD CRAZYWOMAN WHO COULDN’T BE HAPPY IF JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF RODE HER ON HIS SHOULDERS AT DISNEYWORLD, THEN I COULD UNDERSTAND! BUT I’M NOT, SO I GUESS I’LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT TIL MY FIRST SENILE PSYCHOTIC EPISODE!
Well suh, I don’t know if Kathy or Mama was more stunned at this outburst.
Kathy: I didn’t mean that… I’m… I’m sorry…
Mama: Oh you’ve been wanting to say that for…
Kathy: No Mama, I haven’t… but I’m going to hang up now before I say some other things I haven’t been wanting to say and don’t necessarily mean.
And she did. And I got both barrels from both sources. My mother held it together pretty nicely, seemingly more shocked than hurt. Kathy was the one who was crying when she talked to me.
“I can’t believe I said that… I can’t…. it just… came out… I didn’t… shit… I can’t…”
“I understand. I’d had minor quibbles and quarrels with Mama before I was thirty but until then” (when I came out, or rather, was outed, but my sister didn’t need to know that part) “I never just exploded at her until I was over thirty and things came out that I couldn’t believe I was saying. I knew I had a lot of anger at her but even so I opened my mouth and part of me was listening to my own words going ‘I say goddam!’.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt her, I mean she’s crazy but she loves us and family’s the most important thing there is and I just can’t believe I said that and I hope she’s gonna be doing okay… I mean Aunt Joan is coming up and I don’t want Mama to be squalling when she gets there…”
“Oh hell, she won’t be. She’s the consummate actress. We’ve both seen her fire the pistol at Daddy while calling him every kind of child molesting son-of-a-bitch there was” (he wasn’t- this was just one of her accusations) “then two hours later walk into a room holding his hand with a smile on her face and you’d think they were the happiest couple on the planet. Then she’d get in the car with him and before the door was shut good she’d be going right back at him again…”
“Yeah but… the fact she can hide doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it. I know I’ve hurt her and I didn’t want to do that. She’s had a lot of pain.”
“She has suffered a lot. Never one time in silence but she has. And Daddy was a pretty lousy husband and his family would have made anybody crazy.”
“That part wasn’t hard.”
“And she lived under an unbelievable amount of stress for decades.”
“She didn’t handle it particularly well, but yeah…”
Silence.
Kathy: Of course what makes me feel really bad is that… it felt kinda good.
Jon [in probably the nelliest voice I’ve ever spontaneously and unintentionally mustered]: Sweet Jesus, didn’t it though! I swear to God the first time I called her a cold vindictive black-hearted feral nightmare I could feel my blood-pressure drop to normal it was like I breathed for the first time. I felt terrible for saying- I mean I wanted to shove the words right back in…but… oh damn…
Kathy: Hmmm… felt like eating chocolate ice cream while watching the sun go down from a luxury cabin on a Mississippi riverboat. Just total calm…
Jon: Of course you’re gonna hate yourself in the morning.
Kathy: Already there… but… it’s just like that luxury cabin on a Mississippi riverboat. It ain’t cheap, but damn if it idn’t worth the price of the ticket.
CONCLUSION COMING
NOOOOOOO!
Tell me about your haunted house! How your father died during a blizzard! The fake Ouija board messages! Your family on your father’s side and how they drove your mom nuts! How you got outed!!
I think I have given myself a brain tumor trying to hold back the laughter lest my cubemates know I’m neglecting my project from hell.
I used to say my Kentucky hillbilly family was like Faulkner on acid (cousin marriage, aunt running away with a hypnotist from the circus, uncle “falling” down steps with his wife and brother at the top, wife then marrying that brother, uncle getting thrown off the police force because a hooker got his gun away from him in a bar, etc.).
But my family is a 1950s sitcom compared to this….
More, more, more!!