Chapter One Complete

[jayngram.livejournal.com]

I'm new on here. I just found this site the other day and I am pretty excited about it so far. I recently posted a chapter of my comedical essay novel. I've finished four chapters but I'm doing edits on the other 3 as we speak. Anyway, I hope you guys can take a look at it and tell me what you think. The title of the chapter is "Speargate." I will post the story below.

I thought after escaping a marriage to my dad, sprinkled with mental and physical abuse, my Mom would lay off men for awhile. Well, she fooled me and everybody else by taking the opposite approach, marrying any guy that rang the doorbell.

 My Mother is a beautiful and sophisticated woman, but her choice in men was curious to say it lightly. The first one was the most lamentable of the bunch. We still haven’t figured out how it happened or why.

 After my Mother and Father divorced, she moved us to a trailer park in Franklin, a small town outside of Nashville Tennessee.  Now for anyone that has never lived in a trailer park, these affable little places are the redheaded step child of the more sinister ghetto. They are little tin boxes basically sitting on top of each other. You can feel the entire trailer shake whenever you walk in them. Anytime high winds come through, the butt cheeks definitely tighten up and you wonder if this will be the day that you will be riding that funnel to Kansas.

  The people that typically live in these aluminum habitats are the poorer white people, or as we are called by the so called educated people- White Trash. You would think it’s not the place to find a husband, or a suitor as they are called in the Deep South.

 

This particular suitor, we will call him BoBo the Redneck to protect his identity, lived across the street from us in a similar sardine can. None of us knew how his courtship with my Mom began or if it even did. To be honest, all I remember is one day looking up and I was sitting in a church. My mom is standing at the front with some tall, oddly shaped cowboy.

Why is the preacher talking to my mom and this strange looking hombre?

What…why did he bend down and kiss my mom? Who the hell is he?

“Meet your new stepdad boys,” my Mom introduces him to us, but she does it with a sad look on her face. It’s like she knew failure was inevitable.

 This cuntaro was an odd looking creature- tall, probably six foot four, with this odd looking slouch that made his head stick out about six inches past the rest of his body, so when he walked into a room, his head showed up before his body. He had a gut, which seemed to steal from his ass and he always wore the same dingy wrangler jeans and button up cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair was salt and pepper with a windswept comb job. He wasn’t crossed eyed, he just had a crazy eye that would do its own thing when he was talking to you.

That summer after my Mother decided to marry this walking slab of useless flesh, we moved out of the trailer park to the country with our trailer in tow. When you are a teenage boy, who would like to get laid one day, the last thing you want is for a cute girl to see your home being towed down the street. This place was about 45 minutes from Nashville but it seemed like it was on the other side of the earth. We drove through a town called Arrington. It had no traffic lights, one gas station and a rundown building that was called the General Store. Looking back, I’m glad that my young and impressionable mind had not witnessed the movie Deliverance yet.

 They bought five acres of dehydrated land with weeds, rocks and damaged trees. I couldn’t believe we moved here. I wondered if this was his plan- wine and dine a single mother with Pabst Blue Ribbon and a Big Mac. Then con her into moving her and the offspring out to the middle of nowhere and kill us, or worse make us his slaves- too many horror movies as a youngster.

 It didn’t take long to figure out our new stepfather was the worst interior decorator known to man. He had a very peculiar infatuation for African spears and mask. It was the eeriest thing living in a white trash trailer with a huge African spear stretched from one side of the living room wall to the other. When we walked to the bathroom we had to pass by this creepy African mask. I definitely learned to hold my bladder at night; I was too damn afraid to walk by that thing.

 “Wake up boys.” My mom gently called us the first day there. Oh yea, it sounds like she is going to spoil us for awhile. I can smell the food before I open my door. Oh man, maybe this won’t be so bad after all I thought. I figured my mother would give us a grace period; she did uproot us from our friends and move us to hell.

“I made some breakfast,” she said in her Betty Crocker tone. “Come get it while it’s hot boys.”

I was so excited to rip into a good home cooked breakfast that I was the first to reach the kitchen. Right then I knew I, we had been tricked.

 The angelic aroma of blueberry pancakes only diverted my attention briefly; the barbaric items tilted against the wall, by the door, grabbed the stage from my nose and stomach. There were three of them, neatly placed against the wall. There was a rake, shovel and a sickle just glaring at me, waiting to be chosen.

My younger brother Brandon came up beside me with a terrified look on his face, “what’s going on?”

“I knew it was too good to be true,” I looked at the devious grin on my Mother’s face. She realized we discovered the toys of displeasure that were leaning on the wall.

She wrapped her hair in a clip and put it on top of her head, “come eat boys, you’re going to need your strength to help him in the yard.” She was slapping pancakes on to plates with a depraved smile etched on her face.

Oh man, I knew we were in trouble. How does the saying go? The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well it’s true for naive little boys too. All three of us were just standing there now, as my brother Wes had joined our terrified party; we knew she tricked us- damn, evil blueberry pancakes.

 

 

As we were eating our last meal, BoBo sauntered into the diminutive kitchen. He was holding three pairs of gardening gloves in his hand.

“You kids will need these today,” he said as he turned his arms over, palms up to show us the gloves. The way he was showing them, you would have thought he was modeling some diamond bracelets.

He carried them over to the items of mass destruction, knelt down and put one pair in front of each weapon, turned around and gave us a crooked smile and walked outside.

“That is one sadistic bastard,” I said to my brother Wes. He just groaned and looked back down at his plate.

We were trying to eat as slowly as possible, but of course our mother caught on to that little trick. She turned from washing dishes and slapped the table with her palm, “come on boys, and finish up, Ed’s waiting on you.” She stood there and glared at us as we all looked down at our plates.

Dejectedly we all got up from the table, walked over to the door and grabbed our weapon of choice (mine was the sickle because of its menacing look) and drug them outside. We shuffled around back to find BoBo standing there with a cigarette in his right hand and his left hand on his hip. He was just staring out in the vast space of overgrown weeds and dead trees. This yard, if you could call it that, looked terrible. Most of the property was full of decrepit trees that struggled to hold on. They barely had leaves on them, and were leaning towards the ground begging for the end to come. The rest of the property was full of tall, thick weeds with an occasional sapling standing meekly amongst them.

“Okay, let’s get started,” he said.  He turned around and looked down at us, flipped his cigarette in the yard and pointed to my brother Wes who had picked the shovel.

“Okay, I want you to start digging the stumps out of the ground,” he said while pointing over at some tall weeds intermingling with dead trees.

Then he looked at Brandon, “you rake the ground down after he digs the stumps; I need ya to loosen the hard dirt up.”

He then motioned for me to follow him over to this section of tall weeds. “I heard you were the baseball player,” he said with a smirk on his cruel face.

“I need you to swing away with that sickle and chop all these weeds down. It will help you practice that swing.”

This sadistic routine in the unbearable Tennessee heat went on for about three weeks, all except the breakfast part of course. After about the third day, we were fending for ourselves at the breakfast table. We found out after about a week, we were clearing this so BoBo could construct a garden. He was so excited that he would keep us out there until the darkness of night consumed us.

He would tell us, “we won’t have to go to the grocery store for vegetables anymore.” Oh how I hated him, we all hated him. We were going through all this so he could stop buying vegetables at Kroger.

BoBo was so caught up in working in his garden; we would see him out there late at night, a broken white patch of flashlight drifting across greenery. He would wake up in the morning watering his green, square patched mistress. He was obsessed with that thing.

 My mom would get upset because he was neglecting her to spend time in that garden. “You love that damn garden more than me. Who neglects their spouse to hang out in a garden? “ Most husbands hide from their wives to hang out in bars with beer, rednecks and trashy women. But this yahoo ignored his old lady (as they are called in the South) to spend time with cucumbers, turnip greens and tomatoes.

 

 One Sunday morning, Brandon and I were sitting in front of the television playing Atari (yes I am that old). All of a sudden the muffled noises of battleships were interrupted by the distinct articulation of BoBo. He was yelling, “sonofabitch” several times.

We looked up to see him running out the front door. We heard him moving quickly around the side of the house, so we crawled over to the window to see what the emergency was.

“What’s up his butt?” My Mom asked as she was coming out of her bedroom.

“Not sure,” Brandon said, as we had our faces pressed against the window.

 “He just took off running like a bat out of hell,” was my contribution to the conversation.

About five minutes later, he came back in the door, “goddamn cows.” He muttered that over and over again while stomping to the bedroom.  My mom followed back to the room and we went back to playing video games. I was disappointed, I was hoping for some kind of spaceship or something but all I got were cows.

This went on for about a week, at least a couple times a day he would go storming out the door. A few minutes later he would come back inside muttering, “goddamn cows” over and over again. It was funny to us; we looked forward to those couple times a day. We despised him so much that we enjoyed watching the misery splattered on his face.

One morning it all turned weird. BoBo finally snapped. We were still in our bedrooms when I heard BoBo yelling something incoherent and my Mom trying to calm him down.

“I’ve had it with these goddamn cows,” I heard BoBo say.

“Just calm down,” she said. “They aren’t going to mess with your damn garden.”

“You bet your ass they won’t,” was his response.

I heard my mom yell, “what the hell are you doing?”

“Goddamn it, get back here you psycho,” she yelled. “You can’t do that.” Then I heard the door slam and heard him running around back. This I had to see, so I jumped out of bed and headed towards the living room window. Obviously it got Wes and Brandon’s attention too, because they were both scampering out of their rooms at the same time.

“What’s going on Mom?”Wes asked, as we were heading towards our usual perch at the window.

“He’s an idiot.” My Mom said as she started running out the door.

That’s when I saw the weirdest thing I had ever seen in my short life. We all saw it at the same time.

“Oh my God,” Brandon blurted. “What the hell is he doing?”

 BoBo was running towards his precious garden and all he had on were his Fruit of the Loom underwear and black socks. As crazy as that looked, what he was carrying was even crazier, his fantastically long African spear. He was carrying it like a soldier would carry an M-16 through the jungle. BoBo and his spear were headed straight for this black and white cow lumbering in his garden. My Mom was standing at the back of the trailer yelling something at him; I couldn’t tell what she was yelling, but she didn’t look happy. It didn’t matter, he was ignoring her. He was on a mission to save his garden from the evil cow.

“Is he about to do what I think he is going to do?” I asked.

“He can’t be,” Wes responded. “Do you think?”

He was a good twenty feet away when the cow finally noticed him, but he didn’t move; I think he was too stunned or maybe confused.  BoBo now had the spear raised out in front of him with the sharp tip pointed directly at the poor, evil cow.

 I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, this pasty, flabby white man in his baggy fruit of loom underwear, running towards a dumbfounded cow, and holding this long spear out in front of him. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel bad for the cow.

Now he was on top of the poor evil cow. Then…impact. He rammed the spear at the cow’s rib but it didn’t stick. It did scare the hell out of it though, causing it to leap backwards. 

 BoBo looked a little shocked that he had actually went through with it or that the spear didn’t stick, who knows. He did back off and pause for a second, just looking at the poor animal. Then, craziness overwhelmed him again and he lifted the spear to the ready to stab the poor, wicked beast again. The cow figured out this sudden, twisted turn of events and took off running through the back part of his garden before he could get stabbed again. This really pissed BoBo off. Instead of chasing the animal, he decided to chuck the spear at him.

 This is one day that I have never forgotten. My brothers and I have told this story to many people. They all thought we were kidding, making up a funny story. Sometimes I will just start laughing to myself, that image of BoBo wearing nothing but baggy underwear and black socks, throwing a spear while his loose skin was flapping around.  It was truly disgusting but yet hilarious. Thinking back on him, his love for his garden, and the cows that would defile his virtuous place, I am reminded of a quote. I always wanted to see him again one day so I would tell him this:

“Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.” I laugh out loud every time I imagine what his face would look like after I read that to him. I imagine he wouldn’t find it as funny as I do though.

BoBo and my mother divorced about six months after Speargate. I imagine this little incident had a little something to do with it. How could my mother feel proud being married to a man that would stab a cow (while in his underwear no less)? We also never heard from that cow again.