I asked my daddy, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “Your mama names the body parts.”
What else could he say? He’s the poor boy who had a public circumcision at age eight after being told he was going in for a tonsillectomy, and still recalls the embarrassment of all the aunts and his own mother standing over his bed and peeling back the bandages so each could get a good view of the new and improved tallywhacker.
“Looks like he’s going to heal nicely,” an aunt would say, sipping her sweet iced tea as she gazed at daddy’s scabbing penis.
“He’ll have a much easier time with the women when he gets older,” another said, as if my poor daddy’s third-grade self wasn’t even conscious. Fact was, he lay in the bed mortified.
“Women don’t like a smelly region,” one of them whispered loud enough that my dad and his giant ears could hear. “My first husband wasn’t circumcised so you can bet he didn’t get much attention to his needs, shall we say. No one wants to play the ice cream cone game with one of those doggy danglers.”
Lunacy, the sticking-like-a-barnacle kind, is usually handed down many generations. It’s hard to shake it from the DNA and often mutates and regroups into other odd familial behaviors.
Mama, for instance, tended to take everything to the extreme. She meant well and everyone loved her and still does, but that’s her nature and she can’t help it. She was convinced we’d catch diseases and germs, and fall victim to kidnappers, carjackings, knifings, maimings and murder.
“Get sand in your hair and you’ll go bald,” she shouted because she didn’t want to wash our hair every night as we played in the sandbox back when we were living in a house built on a former landfill. “Let a boy stick his fat, wet tongue in your mouth and the next step will take you directly to unwanted pregnancy, teen motherhood and men with El Caminos.”
When my younger sister and I were little, she’d drive us by the county jail and say, “See up there on the second floor where those bars are? That’s where you’ll be if you don’t act nice. They don’t feed prisoners either. Nothing but rutabagas (she knew we hated them) and raw oysters” (another food we abhorred).
About once a month when we were naughty, she’d crank up the green Plymouth wagon with the fake-wood-paneled sides and off we’d go to view the county jail and endure her comments about their diets and lack of food. “Beans and water. On good days.”
The saving grace for most who have mothers on the histrionic side is that they tend to have fathers who balance the equation, daddies who go with the flow, read their newspapers after work, drink a few highballs and ignore most domestic situations.
On Saturdays, when not golfing or grilling, they’ll throw their children a few confidence-boosting bones and play with them outdoors or tell them how great they did during the cheerleading routines on Friday nights.
My daddy was hilarious and crazier than we were. He’d compete with his daughters as if we were his peers, setting up croquet in the yard and getting upset if he didn’t whip our scrawny butts. He once took an old curtain rod, painted it yellow and invented a game called Rolly Bat, which he just HAD to win or he’d sulk a bit. He was the kind of daddy that while quite demanding at times and punitive, was loads of fun, especially when half-loaded.
We grew up on a lake and had a boat parked at the marina where we’d stock the cooler with Millers and take my friends waterskiing when we were teenagers. He told off-color jokes and Mama would say, “They are going to need finishing school, Sam, the things you say to them!”
Maybe this is one reason I didn’t get into the Junior League, though I’m beginning to get over it after two decades’ of affirmations to ward off ghosts of past rejections. With all this in mind, it’s no wonder the Gambrell girls turned out the way we did.
“Remember that time we were in the movies, Susan,” my sister said, “and you whipped around to that bunch of boys we didn’t know and said, ‘Go get us a Coke and box of popcorn’—and they got up and did it?”
Oh, we had our charms and our ways, but normalcy wasn’t one of them. We drew from the DNA Deck and got a couple of jokers, good parents but ones who had their own creative and very different ideas about raising children, daughters in particular.
It all boils down to one thing: some of us are just not Junior League material. I thank the dear Lord every day I’m not nor ever was.
A DWI on Horseback and a Showdown with a Snapping Turtle
I can’t say this booze-drenched fellow’s real name because he’ll flat-out try to kill me. He’s the craziest son of a bitch I ever met. Make that sumbitch.
I’m going to call him Brewster, on account of how much he loves beer, especially Old Milwaukee, one of the cheaper kinds he drinks from cans while standing in his yard turning reddish purple from the sheer force of all that sauce abuse on his heart and organs. When I met him he was all belly, a not-bad-looking man (from 100 yards) straining to stand on his thin, wobbling legs in cut-off shorts. It appeared as if any minute he’d collapse from the heat of summer and the cases of beer over the years.
I had the pleasure of his acquaintance one day while strolling my then baby girl.
“Hey,” he slurred, waving his water hose. “Aren’t you that old Nancy woman who writes for the paper?”
I wanted to be friendly and neighborly, but could smell him from two houses away. He walked toward me on those drinking straw–like legs, round gut shaped just like a Nike basketball blown to the point of popping. He had a nice smile and friendly face, and even though it was eggplant purple, there was a certain kindness and humor etched in his semitoothless smile and pretty blue eyes. He had some sort of aura that forces one to stop in her tracks, even when her better sense and Mama’s strict raising says “Keep moving.”
It was as if a cloud of fairy dust floated from the sky for the sole purpose of mesmerizing and caused me to stop what I was doing and introduce myself. He had cast a spell with that Old Milwaukee in one hand and wriggling garden hose in the other. He didn’t seem to be watering anything but his gravel driveway.
I should have waved and kept walking, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. It is the weirdo magnet. Once activated, I have no control and slide smack into these creatures most normal people wouldn’t give the time of day.
I’m attracted to kooks because they are natural-born storytellers, who I could listen to for hours. They are far more interesting than are most men and women in suits and who wear Banana Republic on weekends. That’s not to say I’d be attracted to or date this man…I was only planning to stop for a friendly neighborly chat. He was so different from what my husband refers to as the “Patty White Crowd,” meaning the country clubers, Junior Leaguers (God love them) and other social climbers, who for the most part act as if cut from the same bolt of khaki cloth—all alike they are—forming a well-oiled machine of excruciatingly boring pretense.
Naturally, there are exceptions and I have friends, along with a mother-in-law, who frequent the country club, and quite a few friends (make that one) in the Junior League, to which I was never invited. Well, Sugahs, no wonder. None of them would be caught dead talking out in full public view with Brewster, yet, in my mind, people are people and if someone’s entertaining, I don’t care if he’s half orangutan.
Give me the weirdoes and kooks. Forget the Junior Leaguers, bless their hearts,
