The great (topless) escape

Well…here we are, folks. The moment for which we’ve all been waiting, Alabama’s baptism by fire, if you will. After enduring a closer-than-expected battle with the Fightin’ Couch-Burners of West Virginny, and two slaughters of lesser sacrificial lambs on the crimson Capstone altar, we come to Bama’s first real test of the season versus the always-cagey Gators of Florida.

Now let me just say, I ain’t skeert. Rarely been skeert, if I’m being quite honest. There were a couple close scrapes with the law, health scares with the wife and/ or kids, a shoot-out here, car accident there. All of those things definitely sent a shock of trepidation through your ole boy OWB, to be sure. But for the most part, I (along with my trusty cohorts) have managed to hack through the jungle of fight-or-flight with relative aptitude.

But I will say that something about the Florida Gators this year gives me pause. Maybe it’s that Gator Coach Will Muschamp is the Vader to Our Dark Lord’s Sidious (well, in a strictly pedantic sense, as Muschamp has neither the prowess nor cunning of the Sith Lord, but you get the picture…the pedigree is there.) We all know how that one ended up. Maybe it’s that Florida defense, one of the only units in the league that can match talent with the Alabama D. Maybe it’s just that Vernon Hargreaves III is an abso-fkn-lutely freakish athlete who has kangaroo hops and can run through a wide receiving corps like a possum through a sweet potato patch.

I don’t know what it is, people, and I shouldn’t have to explain it in detail to you at this time. Have I, a true Hoodoo Operator in the flesh, ever led you, my faithful readers, astray? I think not. So this week, I will once again call down the Hoodoo from on high, as it is our duty to boost our team to victory and supreme worthiness in the eyes of yon Football Loki, for his will is fickle and his discipline harsh.

I was proud (check that, damn proud) of the Hoodoo you fine folk unleashed on these here pages in the last chapter. The Yella Buzzards didn’t even have a damn chance, you see. You definitely proved you have what it takes to Hoodoo to a standard, that you know what it means to treat every Hoodoo as though it has a life of its own. And God knows, we are going to need it this week, people, if Blake Sims is going to slice and dice that vaunted Florida D with the ole Amari Cooper scalpel. So bring what you have, place it on the table before us, and walk away…slowly. Everybody be cool…we cool? Aight, we cool. (Football Loki tends to startle easy these days…)

Now you people know that your courageous narrator has a damn Hoodoo well that’s purt-near a mile deep…halfway to China, even. I’ve been quite fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on one’s perspective) to have lived quite the collection of tall tales and lullabies in low these 40 years I’ve spent treadin’ ole Terra Firma. My Hoodoo flows wide, dark and deep like the ole Mississip’, and in keeping with the nautical theme, I would offer that it is as salty and polluted as my beloved Gulf of Mexico. So for this story, I will reach back into the wanton days of my yesteryear, before I was corrupted by the vile pollutants of LSD, THC and 86-proof dark liquor. You wouldn’t believe it, but despite my occasional recklessness as a youth, I was a pretty clean-cut character at the age of 17, at least as far as clean-cut characters were considered in my old neighborhood.

Of course, that didn’t mean that I didn’t have my vices. I withstood my ethnic propensity for alcohol until I was 18, and held the Devil’s Weed at arm’s length until at 19, I received a 20-bag in payment for collecting a debt for a “friend” of mine (curiosity ultimately killing the cat, you know). But at the age of 17, my nubile and immature mind was engaged in a quest for the thing that every 17 year old male child yearns to possess in his overzealous grasp…a voluptuous set of pendulous mammary glands, in the biological parlance. In the vernacular of these less rigid times, we would refer to the object of my desire as…bewbs.

You see, I love the feminine figure. Always have, always will. It’s why I love large women, or to use the more Brazzers-centric nomenclature of the current day, BBWs. A few extra pounds tends to fill out and accentuate those beautiful womanly curves that our Maker had the wisdom to bestow on half of our species. It’s a good thing the Big Guy didn’t give them to all of us, elsewise the world would grind to a halt. You folk know I don’t get too preachy, but if that marvelous dichotomy ain’t a case for intelligent design, well, I don’t know what in the hell is.

We menfolk are so enamored with them that if we had sets of our own, we’d never leave the house, never seek the company of others, never look for female companionship. Procreation would cease. Soon, civilization would fall into utter ruin, and our species would follow the long line of previously instinct beasts such as, for example, the fated dodo. This is my personal theory of the origin of civilized society, because it sure as hell wasn’t plentiful food or inventive agricultural advances that brought men in from the wilderness and settled us into the tranquil domesticated beasts we’ve become today. . Wasn’t even any of that Annunaki business the people are so fond of discussing these days. Believe what you will, but it is my firm belief that the creative force behind the organization of all we know had a catalyst, and that catalyst was knockers.

(In the interest of foundational knowledge and the illumination of my fellow man, and woman, as it were, I wanted to take this time to provide a brief thesaurus of terms that may come up during this extended discourse on the finer points of the feminine figure. After all, words misunderstood are words lost, and if you have learned anything about me low these many months, it’s that your narrator is not one to lose words. I also find it quite humorous that while the English language only has one word for concepts like “hero” or life,” we in our wisdom have devised a wealth of terms for describing this seemingly-all-important aspect of the female form. Shows we have our priorities in line, no?

So here, for your personal enrichment and growth, I have provided a brief compilation of synonyms for the mammary glands that may come up in the course of relating this particular story. A virtual “titsaurus,” if you will. Here goes: tittays, titties, boobs, bewbs, knockers, ta-tas, sweater puppets, sweater puppies, bulldogs-fightin-in-a-pillowcase (use your imagination…this one was uttered by a fellow deviant in the general direction of a well-endowed young lady jogging in a t-shirt along Biloxi’s Beach Boulevard), jigglies, jugs, juggies, chesticles, breasticles (why do I want to add “handkerchief, watch” to that one?...that there is Catholic humor I reckon, you kneelers and wine-sippers will catch my drift there), hooters, ha-has, ho-hos, noo-noos, star-gazers, shirt-fillers, cream puffs, baby feeders, milkbags, walleyes, headlights, bressesses, and bobots (alternately bobobots). The diversity of the English language is a beautiful thing, no?)

Now this final term, bobots, probably bears a little further explanation, as I wouldn’t want you folk flingin’ around terminology without fully understanding the delicate meanings that are implied by the former. Bobots is a code word devised by one of the most well-respected connoisseurs of tittays with which I’ve had the pleasure of consulting, a man who goes by the mysterious alias Baby D. A master of description in his own right, Baby D once used the term bobots in my presence, to my utter confusion.

Let me provide you with the context. At a bbq festival in which we were competing, Baby D single-finger-pointed (beer in hand) at a particularly large-chested middle-aged woman in a tank top who was sampling some of my prize-winnin’ ‘cue. “Booooy, looka there at THEM bobots.” Seeing that he’d lost me, he cast the illuminating lantern of knowledge into my life, declaring the following: “Aw man, you don’t know what bobots are? That’s code for ‘big ole big ole titties.’” (Of course, then, bobobots are the term in the superlative, “big ole big ole big ole titties.”)

We men are swine, no? On behalf of manhood, I take the opportunity to offer my sincere apology for our decidedly base, Cro-Magnon, animalistic ways. We do not deserve your love and attention, and it’s a wonder any of us actually trick any of you into ever coupling with us, in either the physical or emotional sense. I am disgusted…but thankful.

Regardless, consider yourself educated and prepared for anything I may later say regarding the subject. Also, consider yourself warned. Now, back to our story…

So, like every 17-year-old hetero man-child, I was infatuated with the jigglies. Loved ‘em. Still do. Every time I get the chance as one of the fortunate fellers with easy access to the aforementioned, I giggle a little. I become Rosie O’Donnell in an éclair factory. Just manic and obsessed in the presence of breasticles. It’s silly, but alas, it is true.

I was so driven by my love for shirt-blimps (guess I forgot to add that one earlier, my apologies) that it was one of my primary considerations when choosing a girl for proper courtship. At that age, my list of priorities regarding desirable traits in a female pretty much looked like this:

1.       Big bresses

2.       Large bresses

3.       Jiggly bresses

4.       Thick

5.       Alive

6.       In possession of a face

7.       Bresses

Talk about The Sevenfold Path of Enlightenment, no? Now I know this sheer lack of emotional depth and maturity evidenced by my superficial criteria is appalling in and of itself, and such is my Hoodoo for you fine people. I have layers of Hoodoo, you see. Some allegorical-type Hoodoo shit, like Moby Cotdang Dick or something. I didn’t come here to lie and impress you with tales of heroism and ribaldry: no, I came to offer up some embarrassment to the football gods, and this is but a sampling of what is to come.

Back to high school. I had the fortune to convince a well-endowed young woman to keep my company from time to time. She was an Aub (and by the way, F AU), but I was able to overlook even that fatal flaw because she was packin’ a double-D battery of flesh-howitzers (missed that one too) beneath her blouse on the regular. I could think of nothing but fondling them, and to use another familiar term of the day, “motor-boating” them, while watching her across the room as my Geometry teacher droned on about “angle-addition-postulates” and “hypotenuses” of various degrees (that’s a little holla for you mathletes out there…didn’t know ya boy OWB had it in him, did ya?)

At any rate, I’m going to call this young lady by the respectful alias Jiggly. And no, that’s not an homage to some ill-conceived Bennifer-vehicle, some trite J-Lo and Affleck D-list movie (and btw, Affleck is NOT Batman…eff that, I’m bitter…sue me.) It is a mere descriptor for that young woman’s feature which was most important to me at the time, and it seems fitting to this day.

So Jiggly was a little younger than me, old enough that I probably would have gotten a stern talking-to for exploiting the pleasures that her inexperienced body had to offer. She was 15, I was 17. Not a violation of any statute (at least not in Alabama), but enough that I may have been asked to explain myself if there was an inkling of impropriety to the outside world.

But boys will be boys (and sometimes, 15 year old girls will be boys, at least when it comes to making out), and as we became more, shall we say, familiar, things began to heat up. Once, on a bench outside the gym, after a sweaty afternoon of band practice, she let me cup those voluptuous bosoms of hers (beneath her shirt of course…she was, after all, a lady.) Once I had that little sampling, it was like I had been stricken with the dreaded malady known only as “tittie fever,” a condition indicated when one’s mind becomes completely consumed with the pursuit of and gratification derived from those beautiful and coveted mammary glands.

Being a bit of a minor genius, I had devised a mechanism by which we could enjoy the respective playgrounds of our bodies without alerting parental (and more importantly, penal) authorities. You see, I didn’t have a car of my own at the age of 17, but I did have access to my mother’s sole source of transportation and the life-blood of her (read our) livelihood, a 1985 Chevy Nova. Now this version was nothing like that workhorse of GM’s 1970s product line-up…no sir, it was a far cry. This was basically a Toyota Corolla with Chevy logos on it, a joint operation between the two motor companies that marked the death (or maybe hibernation) of American muscle (coincidentally, this is also where I believe American industry died…but alas, this is no history lesson. At least not THAT kind of history lesson.)

So I would borrow the car from time to time. As Jiggly and I become more “familiar,” I was scheming ways to borrow the Nova damn near every night. You see, the car was the chariot to my dreams. With the car, I didn’t have to wait for my mama, or Jiggly’s grandmama, to leave long enough for us to accomplish our carnal mission at one home or the other. As small as it was, the car was a rolling boudoir: all one needed was a dark corner of a parking lot in which to ply ones wares (if you know what I mean.)

My destination of choice was my old elementary school, Forest Hill, just across the Bloody 98 from my old neighborhood. This was a special place for me, and marked the location of several seminal points involving females. Had my first kiss at age five (with a girl who went on to graduate from Alabama) beneath a slanted pine tree on the playground, obscured by a thicket of red-berried yaupon. It’s where my wife and I went on our first date: we strolled to the school with a bottle of wine and a blanket, laid beneath the stars getting to know one another for the first time in person. And of course, it was the site of many nights of dalliance in the Nova with one girl or another.

I’d nestle back in between a few buildings where I had a hawk-eye view of everything going and coming. You see, Forest Hill had a long, winding driveway that came down from Highway 98, so if someone turned into the drive, I’d know it well in advance. The one obvious drawback was that there was only one way in…and one way out (“see, here he goes with that foreshadowing business again,” you must be thinking.)

One summer night, Jiggly and I had taken our traditional spot and, to use the terminology of fire fighters, we were “fully involved.” The darkness and isolated nature of my selected locale offered the full range of possibilities for this sort of exploit, as no one could see, say, for example, whether the young lady in the passenger seat had removed her blouse.

It was a particularly warm night, and the windows were fogged as we became more engaged. I cracked the window, but more ventilation was needed, so I rolled it down further (this was in the days when the Nova still had windows that would roll down, for those who read last week’s Hoodoo offering.) Thank God, as that (and some Nicholas Cage-Paul Walker style vehicular shenanigans) proved to be my saving grace.

Now, I know you all have engaged in the reckless passion of youth. You may even remember that carnal tunnel vision one develops when involved in such acts of lustfulness. For example, even in my elder years, I can’t tell you how many times Mrs. OWB and I have engaged in activities of an amorous nature, only to find one child or another standing in the door waiting to tell us about “the spider that ran under the bed” or “the man behind my curtain with a machete” or some other ridiculous shit. One just don’t notice details when all that blood rushes away from one’s brain and into more bulbous and swollen vicinities.

Such was the case in this episode. While I was doing my best Evinrude impersonation betwixt those fine milk-melons (there’s another one I forgot, duly noted), I had failed to see the headlights turning from the highway and onto the long drive leading down the gulch to the schoolhouse. Now, let me push the pause button for a minute and provide yet more important background information. My father, estranged at the time and to this day, is an asshole. Wait, that’s not the point. What I meant to say was that he was, and possibly still is, involved in the policing of the public school system. In less contentious days, he would carry me and B-Rad out on patrols to “check the schools,” an activity which basically meant he would ride from school property to school property, shining a white-hot Brinkman spotlight at the buildings to make sure no ne-er-do-wells were desecrating them there institutions of, err, lower learning (I guess).

On several occasions, he had spotted interlopers either vandalizing or breaking into school facilities, and he would call down the thunder. He had a team of folks working with him as the years went by and the system developed its very own police force of sorts. Needless to say, I was well aware of these patrols.

And yet, I had not taken them into account while in pursuit of those tender bobots, because of the aforementioned causative blood-rushing-to-the-nether-regions issue. Now let me also explain that the driveway to this particular school was horrible, pocked asphalt and red clay filled with islands of crushed limestone that audibly popped as one drove over them. As the young lady and I continued to wrap into one another’s corporeal desires, I heard that familiar popping sound of tires on limestone though the still-rolled-down window.

I startled. Removed my face from between those nipple-hangers and sat up bolt-straight. There were no headlights (well, other than the aforementioned feminine variety), but I could see the dim amber of the running lights as a vehicle made its way down the drive…the one and only way in and out of my honey-hole.

I knew what was coming next, and thrust Jiggly’s head into my lap as I covered over her beneath the horizon of the dash so as not to be seen. I thought maybe he’d see no one was in the car and leave it be. Sure enough, the one-million-candlepower-laser-ray of that spotlight lit up the Nova like a tractor beam from an overhead UFO.

“What the…?” she whispered.

“School security, maybe he will pass, just stay down.”

I gave it a minute, and sure enough, the light diminished. “Damn,” I thought. “That was close.”

We both sat up, only Jiggly was sporting one, maybe two fewer pieces of apparel than she had been wearing at the beginning of the night. She was still topless, no time to suit up. I could make out the silhouette of a truck emblazoned with the reflective logo of the school system about 100 yards away, and I could tell the door was open. Then, about fifty feet in front of the truck, I saw the dimmer beam of a hand-held flashlight held by the hand of what was undoubtedly one of my estranged father’s cohorts.

“SHIT!” I exclaimed. I had to think fast. Stakes were too high. I had a topless girl, who was younger than me, in the front seat of my mama’s Nova, and I was about to be captured by one of my cotdang father’s compadres (most of whom had known me since I was a child).  I cranked the Nova, and the man with the flashlight stopped dead in his tracks. I gunned the engine: I, the Duke boy to this sumbitch’s Roscoe P. Coltrane. Or maybe he was Enos. But I digress.

My mind went into super-computer mode, adeptly calculating the statistical probabilities of escaping and the geometrical opportunities provided by the narrow safe passage and my adversary’s close proximity. I had about a five foot flat ledge between the open door of his truck and the edge of a bluff that fell down about 40 feet to the school’s play yard. No margin for error at all. I knew my only hope was to, like Luke Skywalker, drop that damn X-Wing of a Nova down into that slightest of passages, put up the targeting device and let the Force be my guide through the narrowest of escape routes.

The feller must have assumed I was about to get rowdy, as he double-timed it back towards his truck. But the die had been cast, fate was sealed. At the same moment, I flipped on the brights of the Nova so as to blind the security guard to my identity, and I gunned the engine and sped towards the gap. Jiggly was screaming in my ear, using colorful terms which assailed my delicate sensibilities and fragile ego.

As I sped, wide-ass-open, towards that gap, the guard dove head first into the truck’s bench seat like a two-bit movie stunt man. I sped through that gap and let go my proton torpedo as I passed: a half-full Mountain Dew bottle of stale piss that I used as a make-shift lavatory during these prolonged carnal endeavors. It sailed like a Tomahawk cruise missile towards the truck, landing with a thud in the bed. Jiggly had a death grip on my arm like a dang ole rabid Skunk Ape. I figured if we got out of this alive, surely I’d need a prosthetic something-or-other that was yet to be determined.

I cleared the back of his truck, but was not out of the woods. After all, I had to drive the length of a covered walkway before turning hairpin-style in the opposite direction and pointing my craft back down the escape route. Surely, surely this guard was trained in vehicular maneuvers and would be able to flank me and block my escape if I faltered. I saw the covered walkway, and reckoned the only certain avenue was to quickly power-slide (using the ole parking-brake trick Crazy Jim from the neighborhood had bestowed on me during my first solo flight in the car) and square up to the very-close-together posts that held up the walkway’s cover. Then, I could try to shoot through the narrow gap between without hitting anything. Must have been less than six inches of clearance on either side of the car.

Like dang ole Richard Petty, I executed the turn flawlessly, slangin’ crushed limestone everywhere in a plinking rain of stones that fell against the aluminum posts. I downshifted, slammed through the gap, cleared it and sped off.

Jiggly had been on the point, peeking out the back to detect any possible pursuit. Seeing none, she beat the holy hell out of me as I melted into a surrounding neighborhood where I knew I could cat-and-mouse even the best pursuer. She was not happy, whining some drivel (at a very high volume) about “almost getting her arrested,“ and “what would her grandmama do if she found out what we were doing?”

As-if. What an absolute lack of appreciation for my exploits. She should have been more than impressed by my manly display of driving skills. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she didn’t want to find another dark spot afterwards to continue that which we had started before all of the excitement. Trust me, I suggested it. Unsuccessfully, I may add. Women, amirite?

So though I dodged that bullet, I was ultimately confronted with a far more debilitating issue months later when Jiggly’s overbearing Winston County-bred, puritanical grandmother caught us in her living room after midnight one evening, fully engorged and tingling, as my good friend Dana Carvey would say. That instance was the death knell of this particular relationship, but it was a learning experience to say the least.

What was learned, you may ask? That the tittays are one of the most powerful forces in the universe. They draw you in like a Death Star tractor beam, leaving sighted men blind and smart men dub-struck. To quote my brother and fellow Poet Laureate Rev. Dr. Al Green would tell us (Quoting The Book of Bressesses, Chapter three, verse two), they are definitely “…somethin’ that can make you do wrong, make you do right…..hhhaaaAAAAYYY!”

But alas, such is life. Win some, lose some. She was an Aub anyway, even if she did have that fine, fine pair of blouse-trophies (add that one to the thesaurus) swinging from her ample bosom. DAYUM…gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it today. Hoo-Lawd, I do enjoy some bressesses.

Anyway, CALL DOWN YON HOODOO HELLFIRE on these infidel orange-clad reptilians. Bring your best folks, we’re gonna need it.

Skin the Gators, boys. Roll Tide.