The Liquor Talking

It’s Tuesday, December 29, 2009 and we have to have:

We’re giving The Destructor Chronicles a rest this week. Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of good, old-fashion mayhem waiting there. This week, it’s about an incident from my childhood that has recently come back into my mind.

My dad was in the Air Force for 20 years, plus change. The bulk of his career was spent in the south, which put us in reasonably close proximity to both sets of our grandparents. My dad’s folks lived in a small town in eastern Oklahoma and mom’s lived on a sprawling cattle ranch in central Texas. As a result, my brother and I got to spend huge parts of our summers with each set. My aunts and uncles likewise ditched their kids for most of the summers. At any given time during the summers, my grandparent’s houses had between 6 and 16 grandkids crashing about.

On my dad’s side, my brother and I were among the youngest of the grandkids and learned a heck of a lot from our older, wiser cousins. Being a small town, Howe, Oklahoma offers scant opportunity for mischief, but my cousins were determined to seek it out and to maximize each opportunity.

One of their favorite games was to find new and interesting ways to annoy the old geezers that spent the day spitting, whittling and telling tall tales in the shade by the town’s one gas station. One of the games was to upset as many of their spittoons as possible and escape without getting hit by a rock. A couple of these old dudes could throw a rock with astonishing accuracy.

Thus far, the record was held by my cousin Anthony, who hid in the ditch beside the station and used a slingshot (home made of course) to knock over 4 of the six containers of tobacco juice before being discovered and driven away under a hail of rocks. Determined to best his record, I started casting about for a way.

A couple of nights later, Grampa loaded us up in his pickup and hauled the lot of us to the drive-in theater. I can’t recall the movie, but one part of it had the hero tying a bunch of garbage cans to the back of a police car, driven by his nemesis. The sight of a police car roaring down the road with a half-dozen garbage cans in hot pursuit inspired me.

Once everyone was sound asleep, I snuck out of the house and obtained a quantity of braided nylon fishing string. This I used to tie the spittoons together, leaving about 12 feet of slack between each. The other end was affixed to the bumper of a huge Oldsmobile, owned by the widow Hays who lived across the road from my grandparents. (I selected her car because the owner of the station had paid my brother and I a nickel to go and tell her that her car was ready and ask her to pick it up first thing the next morning.)

With the string carefully buried, I made my way back and spent the rest of the night keeping my cousins awake with my maniacal giggling.

The next morning, the widow Hays came over and asked Grampa to carry her up to the gas station. My cousins and I always tried to accompany my Gampa on these little errands because it usually resulted in an orange soda. Into his pickup we piled and headed down to the station. I had managed to keep last night’s mission a secret, but could scarcely contain my grin as I envisioned how this would play out.

When we arrived, the geezers were just getting settled in for a hard day of spitting, whittling and telling tall tails. They eyed us with some suspicion, no doubt concluding that the presence of so many kids from our clan would certainly result in at least one or two upturned spittoons. Yes, this many at the same time certainly bears watching.

They were especially right today. The widow Hays settled up with the station owner and went halves with Grampa on the round of orange sodas. These had to be consumed far from the eye of my Gramma who viewed soda as being less sinful than straight, moonshine whiskey, but just barely. As we stood around sipping our sodas, the widow Hays got in her car, fired it up and made ready to drive away. One of the reasons her car was in the shop was from a lack of acceleration. This she immediately put to the test by leaving the parking lot at a considerable rate of speed.

To a chorus of shouts (mostly variations of “What the hell?”) the spittoons one by one jumped into the air and took off after the widow Hays as if she owed them money. The geezers proved to be a right nimble bunch by their leaping about, trying to get away from spittoons that had suddenly came to life and were making a break for it. When properly motivated, geezers can move about with a considerable air of urgency.

I had assumed she would turn left and go back to her house about a mile down the road. Instead, she turned right and headed for Poteau, some 8 miles distant. Upon seeing the geezers yelling and waiving their arms, she smiled and returned their waives and drove out of sight with a caravan of brass spittoons tumbling along behind her like a pack of small, noisy hound dogs. I remember laughing as she crossed the railroad tracks and each spittoon jumped up as if to give a final goodbye.

Once she was out of sight, the geezers turned their attentions to us. Now, it was apparent that one or more of us were responsible for the spectacle we’d just witnessed and on the part of the geezers, participated in. It was my Grampa who broke the awkward silence by first drawing in a long breath and then laughing harder and longer than I’ve seen him laugh before or since.

Laughter being contagious, it was just a moment before observer and participant alike were laughing and via mimicry, attempting to recreate some of the more extravagant movements made by the geezers. After several minutes, the head geezer came over to announce that it was in fact the “damnedest thing he’d ever seen” but also to say that if any of us were seen within a rock’s throw of the gas station…

An uneasy truce ensued and remained in place the rest of the summer.

We only found one spittoon. It was lying in the highway and appeared to have been run over a number of times. I wanted to take it back to the gas station, but Grampa thought that would be like rubbing salt in the wound.

We never did find out what happened to the other spittoons. The widow Hays returned later that day with a bit of the string still tied to her bumper, but quite unaware that she had spent at least part of the day dragging a half-dozen spittoons around LeFlore County. The spittoons were replaced with a variety of plastic buckets and we had no interest in molesting these. I’m told that new brass spittoons were brought out only when it had been confirmed that my cousins and I had all in fact gone home for the rest of the year.

All the same, the record was (and as far as I know is still) mine.

In other news, the sparks are starting to fly around the failed attempt by a Nigerian would-be terrorist to ignite a crotch bomb aboard an airplane on Christmas day. It’s still “important” and “serious” to our senators and congressmen, but not yet important and/or serious enough to cut their recess short.

Yes, trust the good captain to see the silver lining here. While on recess, we don’t have to worry about them screwing this up too. I mean it’s bad enough that the head of Homeland “Security” could come on TV and claim that the system worked when it allowed an asshat who was on a dozen watch lists get on a US bound flight with a bunch of readi-mix explosives in his Fruit of the Looms.

Then she said it was fail but today is calling it only kinda-fail. Her rationale being that the flight didn’t originate in the US, so we can’t control the security measures taken in other countries.

This isn’t rocket surgery. You want to fly that plane into US air space? Submit to the following conditions….

Yeah, with AIRLINES picking up the tab. Meaning THEY put the security measures in place. Violate one rule, no matter how minor and you don’t get to fly planes into US airspace for a while. The loss of profits will be the fine for non-compliance. Yep, they’ll raise their prices to pay for the new requirement, but I’d bet my next three paychecks that they’d be able to do it a lot better and cheaper than the TSA (Too Stupid for America) could.

I just think it’s time to start letting the market place be the cops. We don’t need a huge federal presence at airports. The feds just need to ensure compliance…

Hmm… Yeah. The feds don’t have a particularly stellar track record when it comes to providing oversight to stuff they’re supposed to. Do Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ring any bells? So yeah, maybe the feds aren’t the people to be doing this sort of thing. Maybe a joint thing comprised of representatives of the airlines? They’d oversee it, ensure compliance and discipline (as in –Your planes all stay on the ground for N days) offending airlines.

In other news, a YouTube video is making a stir. Supposedly, it’s Montana Senator Max Baucus on the floor of the Senate, drunk as hell. The video is here.

Now, I haven’t spent any time to speak of with Max and have only listened to him a couple of times. My ability to tolerate bullshit has somewhat diminished over the years. I don’t however recall him being a blithering idiot. Just the regular kind. The Max in the video, even if not under the influence definitely has something wrong. From being a cop for nearly 15 years, I’ve seen my share of drunks and I would be hard put to not make some guy acting this way blow into a little pipe.

Ever ready to defend any democrat, no matter what, the Billings Gazoo said; “Baucus, whose public speaking style can be halting and awkward, is not slurring his words, but sometimes repeats himself during the five-minute video.”

Umm.. no offense but Max looks and sounds like he’s &#$^#*# hammered. “Halting and awkward” my ass. I get all halting and awkward too, after about half a snootfull.

In other news, my mother in-law is leaving tomorrow. I wish she could have stayed longer than just today and I damned sure would have liked some notification that she was coming. The wife says she’s told me at least a dozen ti…

Oh really? Well, mister Angry Teenager, let’s just see how you look as a pirate:

Anybody else want to pipe in here?

Anyway, she has to be at the airport at 5 and since I’m already up by then, I’ll be dropping her by.

In other news, look like someone is calling my oldest daughter’s cell phone at all hours and hanging up. Stay tuned boys and girls. Get ready to have some fun! Remember, I work at a phone company. “Restricted” and “Unavailable is only for some people. Yeah, that goes for your text messages too.

Well, another day shot to bits. I don’t like it when Chris isn’t here. It gets a lot busier than I like. I might just make him suffer for this.