a piece that was flawed in his big old teeth and whinny until I got it from him.”
They trotted down the two-lane, horse clomping and tapping like a clogger onstage. When he made it without incident to the bar, some three miles from his house, he tossed the reins of his fine goat/steed to the doorman, also known as the bouncer. “Make sure no one dents my Jag,” he said, winking and going in to wet his brain with draft beer.
“While I was inside drinking and having a good time,” Brewster said, “the doorman was letting different girls get on Smokey and walk him around the parking lot, and all over the neighborhood behind the bar. Some asshole up yonder ways spotted the horse churning up his lawn and musta called the police.
“I had no idea of this,” he said, face beginning to explode in sweat bubbles instead of just rolling down his cheeks and neck.
He continued with the story that made history, as he was the first, and maybe ONLY man in North Carolina to get a DWI on horseback.
He keeps saying he’s not proud, but I could tell he was getting a huge kick out of telling this wild incident. A few beers later and the rest poured out of him like his hose on the gravel drive.
“It was closing time,” he continued, “and I was ready to go home and so was Smokey. We left the bar, and both of us were hungry so we went right on through the McDonald’s drive-thru window and I ordered a Big Mac with fries and Smokey had a Happy Meal because he likes the toys, especially them Beanie Babies. I sure as hell wish you could have seen the look on that woman’s face when she saw me and Smokey and I told her, ‘Go ’head and put the handles of that there Happy Meal directly in his mouth. He’ll know what to do with it.’
“We galloped on out of there and a few minutes later I seen the flashing blue lights all around and my ears rang with pain the siren was so loud. I wasn’t about to stop, but was trying to find a quiet place for Smokey and me to have our picnic.”
The blue lights spooked the calm out of Ol’ Smokey, and Brewster held on for dear life as the horse let loose and tore through town as if he was in the Kentucky Derby and its rider a drunken jockey. They fled through the ritzy and sleeping neighborhoods of Asheville, both not wanting to drop their burgers because if Ol’ Smokey could keep his Happy Meal in his teeth during all of this, then Brewster could hold on to his food too.
“It was a wild chase that lasted over an hour,” he recalled, popping the aluminum tab on another can of beer.
Brewster thought he’d lost them at one point when he hid in the woods near the Holiday Inn Golf Course. For thirty minutes he and Smokey laid low, dipping their fries in ketchup, eating their burgers and catching a breather before taking off again into the kind of night when the moon is too full to stay up high and sort of sinks low and yellow, like it could hit the ground at any minute.
“Another mile and I’ll be home free,” Brewster thought.
But as soon as he got back on his road leading home, the lights of five patrol cars bathed him in troublesome blue. Behind the wheel of one of those cars was Lt. Leroy Barnes, a sour-faced sheriff’s deputy.
“How the hell you gonna stop that there horse?” boomed the voice of a fellow officer over Barnes’s police radio.
Barnes couldn’t resist being funny. He picked up the microphone and said, “I guess I’ll just have to yell WHOA!”
Using the public address system built into the patrol car, the officer took himself seriously and hollered, “Whoa!” loud as he could. But Brewster and Smokey kept going until they came to a dead end, where their journey was over. They were trapped, ketchup on their lips, cheese stuck between Ol’ Smokey’s chompers.
“I kind of got cornered by a house, fence and all the cars,” Brewster said. “Smokey was hysterical and his stomach hurt from the cheeseburger, I could tell. He was pretty upset the prize was the duck-billed platypus and not the zebra or pink flamingo because he just loves them there pink birds. He was on his hind legs with his front ones in the air, and I was having a time hanging on. I saw several guys get out and I thought we were both going to be shot.”
Instead of taking a bullet, they took Brewster to jail, where he was fingerprinted, photographed and arrested for driving while impaired and failing to heed the blue lights and siren. Lt. Barnes hauled the tired but otherwise healthy horse to a safe place for a little R&R.
“It was a very expensive night,” Brewster said. “It cost $90 to get out of jail, $100 for Smokey the horse, and $800 for a lawyer, who lost the case.”
“Whatever happened to Ol’ Smokey?” I asked as he handed me a brown paper sack filled with tomatoes, a very neighborly thing to do, I might add. He explained that Barnes, being a good lawman, brought Smokey home a few days after the arrest.
“He knew he was home,” Brewster said. “He started whinnying, and when we got him out of the trailer, I’ve never seen such a happy horse. He ran to the other horses, so glad to see them. He stood on his hind legs, going ‘Whee-oooo, Wheeooo’ and then ran around and cut a few flips. He’s the only horse I know that can do gymnastics better than some of them girls on the Olympics and a lot better than the one who’s now selling sanitary napkins on TV since her career is over.”
I tried to form a mental picture of the horse but couldn’t see it.
“My sweet Smokey laid down on his back, all four legs pawing the air. After he calmed down, I went and hugged his neck and gave him a new Beanie Baby and told him I was glad he was home. With those big eyes, he looked at me and I swear he said something very close to Meeeeee, tooooooo .”
I left with my tomatoes and a pretty good story, thanked him, and it was a while before I heard from him again. Then, late one afternoon he called the newsroom breathless and seemingly sober. Of course with him, it’s always hard to tell.
“Well, Susan,” he said, “I finally met my match and it weren’t no woman.”
I knew to get a fresh blank screen and let him dictate his oral jewels. He was one heck of a storyteller, especially after sixteen beers. “I met my match in a shell,” he said. “Meanest snapping bastard of a turtle ever lived, and that reptile’s ass nearly took away the very thing I love most.”
That would be one of two or three things. His horse, his claims to an 11-inch jibblybob or his Old Milwaukee beers.
“If it weren’t for me,” he said, “that screaming lady and her carful of booger-faced children might have been killed. All them stupid idiots were out in the road trying to call that turtle out from under the car like it was some kind of damned pussycat.”
I typed at the keyboard and he could tell I was taking notes. “You gonna write this up?
“I might.”
He seemed pleased. “I was driving down Milk Cove Road on the way to get me some refreshing beverages at the BP when I seen this lady and her young’uns flagging me down near the STOP sign. I was in my truck, took the screwdriver out of the ignition and was on my feet ready to help within seconds.
“Like all the ladies,” Brewster said, “she ran toward me fast as she could. ‘What’s the matter, woman? You been shot?’ I asked, looking for blood and bruises.”
“‘No…There’s…th…th…There’s a m-m-monster under my car,’ she says.
“And
