Your Weekly Hoodoo Thread: Washington edition

Ah, my friends, we have made it! We have traversed the holiday social calendar, we’ve regaled and celebrated our way through the birthday of the little baby Jesus in the manger, we’ve come to this decisive moment in Crimson Tide football history. Finally after a month long lay-off, our beloved Crimson Tide will once again take the field. Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Our men in crimson have earned themselves the right, nay, the privilege, of competing in their third consecutive College Football Playoffs, and of that fact we should all be proud as the Crimson Tide faithful, assembled. I’m not sure why our hopes and dreams hang on the doings of college age young men and their curmudgeonly head coach, but I’ll be damned if I’m not as excited as a virgin on prom night about the prospect of Alabama getting a return trip to the National Championship Game. 

This run we’ve enjoyed under Saban is unprecedented, and as I worked through my weekly pieces leading up to the game, it dawned on me just how fortunate we faithful are in regard to our sporting lives. Alabama has had nine consecutive 10-win seasons, four of which ended in national championships. If the Tide pulls it out this season, that will make five nattys. Five. Reflect on that for a moment if you will…in the dark days of the Mikes, did any of us ever imagine such a reality? I certainly did not, as I thought the days of Bryant were but a shadow on the program, and that Bama wouldn’t be fortunate enough to find the second coming of the Bear. 

We are truly lucky, fans of crimson giants who walk the football landscape and conquer all comers. Heady times, indeed, friends…enjoy them while you can.

Now as you know, in this here space each week of the season, I jot down some foolishness or other, some narrative of wanton youth or ribaldry soured by the biting pinch of authority. After all, Football Loki, our beloved patron, demands a sacrifice, and so a sacrifice we must offer. 

But in this week, I must admit to you, my faithful friends and readers, that I must take a slightly more somber tone. Not that there won’t be humor…as an officially licensed and certified Hoodoo Operator, I am contractually bound to root out the humor and folly in all things no matter how morose. But in this week, at this particular moment, my heart is heavy, friends. I cannot muster tales of ribaldry, I cannot speak in bawdy tones of mistresses deflowered or narcotics freely consumed.

No, a tragedy has stricken the OWB clan in this otherwise-joyous time of frolic and celebration. And I would be remiss if I didn’t take liberty to speak about it here with you, my friends and readers.

Now as loyal readers lo these many years, you fine folk have heard me describe various members of my family, both the loved and the outcast, the wise and the foolhardy. For you see, in my clan (as in many Southern families…you people know that of which I speak), things are, well…complicated. Long ago, when my mother and father split whilst your narrator was but a boy of five, it drove a deep wedge between family members, a schism that only grew wide ‘neath the ever-pounding hammer of time.

I became, through an unfortunate set of circumstances, estranged from my father over the years. In fact, until recently, I had not spoken with him in nearly 20 years. Our relationship, never very fruitful, withered and died on the vine without so much as the quenching relief of a single shed tear from either of us. He was arrogant and unremorseful about the way he had abandoned us, refused to admit any fault in the way things turned out. I, being a younger man full of piss and vinegar, refused to acquiesce without a patent apology and admission of guilt, which is something his pride would never let him muster. 

Though that relationship had long soured, I was still a member of his extended family, and I spent a great deal of time with his parents, brothers, and sisters. My grandmother’s house was like many old-school Catholic households in Mobile’s Cottage Hill neighborhood. With a large brood, there was a passel of young-uns in and out at any given time, a veritable hive of activity most days. There was always an opportunity to visit with one’s uncles, aunts, or cousins while taking in a hot meal, something my grandmother seemingly always had on the stove top. She was a fantastic cook, and her oyster stew is something one cannot find the likes of in any restaurant, even in a seafaring city like Mobile. (For you inland folk, oyster stew is a rich delicacy that must be hand made in well-worn steel pots and injected with a healthy helping of equal parts love and attention.)

Throughout college, I worked near to their house, and had taken on the project of mentoring my younger cousin Bockle, who was himself fatherless and cast out on the sea of manhood, rudderless. Seeing a little of myself in him, I decided I could mentor him, help him find his way, contribute those manly tidbits to his upbringing that would serve him well as he grew into fruition. So each day, after work, I’d meet him at my grandparents’ house and we’d go running, then eat dinner with my grandmother and grandfather.

Now my grandfather, we’ll call him Bernard (pronounced in the Irish tongue as Burn-urd, not that high-fallutin’ Burn-Ard you hear from more Frenchified folk), was one of my favorite people on Earth, and I cherished the time I spent with him and my cousin around the circular dinner table in my grandmother’s kitchen. A WWII veteran who wore his pants up high-waisted and who cussed like the sailor he was (he was a Navy man), Bernard was the terror of neighborhood children who dared cross his lawn or sneak a satsuma from his abundant citrus orchard behind the “old house” as they called it (a one-room affair that served as his and my grandmother’s first home after marriage). He was a gravelly, blue-ink tattoo- marked, leather-skinned badass despite his 5’8” stature, a fireplug of a man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and could tear apart a motor and put it back together in a day flat. Despite his outward demeanor, he was a jovial fellow who wouldn’t even ask neighbors if they needed their yards cut, but would just swing his riding mower over the property line and take care of the job once done with his own plot. 

Now Bernard was a mechanic by trade, a craft he had learned as a member of the Navy deployed on the legendary USS Lexington aircraft carrier in the Pacific theater of World War II. On the ship, he tended to the beasts of the seafaring air combat, namely F4U Corsairs and F6F Hellcats, keeping them in top condition and performing his role as a critical cog in America’s war fighting machine.

He was on the Lady Lex during one of her sinkings. According to his recounting, as he ambled to his battle station on the third level of the superstructure, a Japanese torpedo struck true…the concussion flung him three stories to the main deck, where he landed squarely upon his knees (that injury would be mended some 50 years later with a knee replacement, but he lived with the damage for a half-century without uttering a grumble about it.) Despite that, he fought on in vain before he and his shipmates were rescued as the old lady listed on the high seas.

Later in life, he took great pride in having fought at the pivotal battle of the Pacific Theater, specifically Iwo Jima. He witnessed with his own stone-hued eyes the legendary flag-raising on Mount Suribachi from a landing craft as it muddled towards shore through the turgid water, red with the blood of so many young men unfortunate enough to find their eternal sleep just shy of those volcanic shores. He told me how the iconic photo was a bit of a PR piece, claiming that the first group of men to raise the flag atop the mountain were obliterated by the splash of Japanese artillery shells before a photo could be taken. The group that ended up in the legendary pic, Ira Hayes and that bunch, came after that original team met their Maker on the crest of that volcanic crag.

Though he never spoke publicly to others about the horrors he witnessed there on the shores of that speck of Japanese territory, he would confide small bits of the narrative in rare moments, such as over a pile of jointly-raked leaves, or the recently dissembled brake array of his pick-up truck.

“I hope your generation never knows the things I’ve seen,” he would tell me. “I was your age when I first saw a man blowed apart with a hand grenade. Damn Tojos would surrender with grenades hidden under their arms, pins pulled. When the GIs would go to frisk them, they’d let those grenades fall, saw ‘em kill ‘bout near a whole squad that way one time.”

He'd talk about the tenacity of the Japanese soldiers, about how they would refuse surrender, would hole themselves in Suribachi’s lava-tube caves and fire upon anyone who entered. The practical “American solution,” he would say, was to hose the caves out with flame-throwers, with the terrible screams of burning life echoing off the stone walls. He told me once he could still hear those sounds, slow-burning echoes of those men in the throes of a death horrific, as if it were yesterday.

Being a student of history, I’d sometimes ask him about his experiences in the war that saved humanity. During one such occasion, he told me of a Japanese kamikaze who approached the Lex’s starboard side, humming in low just a few feet below sea level on a suicide run to penetrate the carrier’s aircraft storage deck. Bernard and his counterparts turned the anti-aircraft guns on him (he was a mechanic, but in the heat of battle, everyone had a battle station on the ship, because everyone was vested in that ship’s survival). One of the gunners’ aim was true, and the low-flying Zero peeled down flat onto the surface of the sea a few hundred yards from the ship. Like a flat piece of slate skipped over a calm pond, that aircraft slid over the surface of the water, gliding up to the steel hull beneath Bernard and his fellow gunners. Expecting a surrender, they were instead confronted by “a Jap pilot as mad as a hornet,” who jumped from the cockpit onto the wing, snatched his pistol from its holster, and began firing up at the Americans above.

“We just turned those big guns on him at near point-blank range, cut that ole boy to shreds, nothin’ but pieces that the sharks lit into…” He laughed a nervous laugh, a laugh that evolved into something else when the tears welled up blue and heavy in his gray eyes like glaze. I never asked Bernard to talk to me about the war again, but rather would just listen and take mental notes when he brought it up.

Bernard taught me a lot about what it was to be a man in the absence of his son. You see, not only had my father abandoned me as a son, but he had largely abandoned his father as a dad. He only called on his father when he needed something: an oil change, a cabinet built, a pipe disjointed and unclogged. Otherwise, my father didn’t have time for the old man. It is the way my father chose to live his life, and it's a lifestyle from which I believe he has repented as the gravity of his own mortality sinks in, with cancer crawling insidiously through his body.

Bernard and I, we were just what the other needed. In the mutual void created by the same person, we built a bridge between each other that was wide enough to span the chasm created by my father’s inability to live up to his responsibilities as a father and son. 

In the time we spent together, I learned my ridiculous work ethic from that old man, in part, because he set that example. He’d never ask me to do something he wouldn’t do himself. I can remember in the wake of one hurricane or another, Bernard asked me to come help him rake his yard. I obliged, as he had fed me enough meals in my time on this earth that I had to do something to level that tab. But when I arrived, it wasn’t his yard that needed raking. It was the yard of an old friend, a widow who lived down across Azalea Road from St. Luke’s. She wasn’t any older than him, but without a husband or sons in the area, she had a mess on her hands that she’d never be able to clean. My grandfather promised her that he and his grandsons would get her place straightened up, free of charge. She insisted on paying me for my trouble, but he wouldn’t have it. 

“Boy’s gotta learn the value of hard work, and takin’ care of his elders,” he said. I remember standing by in semi-disgust, as being a child of the ghetto, I was loathe to ever refuse a dollar that was duly earned.

“I sure could have used that money,” I said to him later as we worked. “I got stuff to pay for.”

“You’ll find some other way to get that money, you’re smart. The reward you get for helping folks out is paid in Heaven, don’t worry,” he said. 

Before you go thinking he was saintly and as pure as the driven snow, I’ll tell you that minutes later, he raked up under an azalea thatch full of yella jackets, and the cascades of “gawd dammits,” “sumbitches,” and “sheeyuts” poured forth like cool water bubbling up out of an Artesian spring. That lady got a cussword education as my grandfather slapped and swatted around in her yard. 

I remember as a younger man, the worst whuppin’ I ever received came off of his belt. You see, I’ve always been the family sheepdog. As the eldest grandchild, I was duly appointed as caretaker, overwatcher, and tattler-in-chief for the collected group of my cousins and my brother, as I was deemed “responsible” and “muh-toor.” The older folks would leave us by the pool so long as I was there to keep everyone in line. The little ones were allowed to play in the acres-deep backyard out of sight of the house if I was back there with them. Hell, I was no older than 10, but they trusted me the way a shepherd trusts his sheepdog.

Well, on one occasion, I took advantage of my power. I had wanted to play the Atari in the house, but my cousins Bockle and Linny wanted to play outside. Being partial to her only granddaughter and youngest (at the time) grandchild, my grandmother commanded me to go outside and watch them.

“But I was just gonna…”

“It don’t matter, I’m standin’ in here cookin’ dinner for you, least you can do is watch your cousins for a while,” said my grandmother. Guilt: the broadsword of the Southern grandmother.

I shuffled outside as my cousins jumped on the tire swing.

“SWING US, OWB, SWING US!”

Ugggh. This was getting worse by the moment. As I started pushing them, I could feel the Dark Side welling up in me. I started swinging them harder, and harder, and harder.

“AHHH, TOO HIGH, TOO HIGH!”

I laughed maniacally. They screamed. Teach them to make me come outside. I continued to push them higher and higher while they caterwauled, until…one of the chains inexplicably snapped, dumping my cousins to the ground from the peak of the pendulum arc.

The screaming that ensued would curdle the iciest of blood. Immediately, my grandmother burst from the house.

“WHAT IN THE WORLD?...”

Linny spoke before I could leverage a word in.

“HE PUSHED US TOO HARD AND MADE IT BREAK!”

“Dangit, Linny…so it’s like that?” I thought. Straight up under the bus.

I started to offer my rebuttal, but felt the sting of flat leather across my hindparts unexpectedly. Dazed, I turned to find Bernard winding up for another lashing with that black leather strap of a belt, lighting into me with ferocity while hollering, “GAWD DAMMIT OWB, YOU’RE SMARTER THAN THAT!”

Now, I have lived a solid 42 years, and I can tell you, as a young boy there are few things more embarrassing than one’s grandfather whuppin’ that ass right in front of one’s cousins and every set of eyes in the neighborhood. My face was as red as my behind by the time it was over. 

Afterwards, he told me he had been in his shop the whole time (where he spent most of his time) and had heard the escalation but figured I was responsible enough to stop short of getting anyone hurt. He was disappointed in me, and truthfully, that hurt a hell of a lot worse that the belt-whuppin’ (which itself was quite painful).

Pain. That’s another chapter I could write pertaining to my grandfather, as I’ve never seen a man so resistant to the tug of hurt than Bernard. In my whole life, I only ever heard him shout out in pain a single time, after his knee replacement surgery, as the physical therapist worked to keep scar tissue from setting up in the joint. That fact is even more amazing when one considers that, as a man who in retirement worked with his hands eight to 10 hours per day in his shop, he was constantly banging, slashing, crushing, tripping. 

I remember once, he decided that he was going to begin making toys for his grandchildren in his woodshop. He loved woodworking, his second hobby behind tending his citrus trees. He made templates that resembled a classic WWII-era fighter, the P-51…he freehand drew the stencils and cut them out to spec for assembly and painting on his own little assembly line. I had dropped by for a visit and decided I would lend him a hand. He was running the table saw, and chatting with me casually about the Dolphins, his favorite professional team. A good many of our conversations (when we weren’t talking about Bama) revolved around the Dolphins, Dan Marino, Don Shula, Bob Baumhauer. From the way my grandfather talked about Shula, you’d have thought they were close friends.

“That Don, he is a man of his word, I tell you what. If he says it’s so, you can believe it’s so! Ain’t a better coach, neither, I remember back in ’71 when….”

As he talked, I noticed from my vantage point that he was shaving awfully close to his fingers. But being a good acolyte, I assumed he knew what he was doing, as he’d earned the benefit of wisdom from all his years working with wood. Hell, he’d forgotten more about runnin’ a table saw than I knew.

It was at that moment that a spurt of crimson sprayed across the white plane of plywood. Stunned, it took a moment for him to cut off the saw, but he never yelped out or cried. His only response to SPLITTING HIS THUMB DOWN TO THE KNUCKLE WITH THE TABLE SAW, was as follows:

“Well, gawd dammit, now I’ma have to go to the damn emergency room. Sheeyut.” Just matter of fact. Untucked his ever-tucked white tee, wrapped the bottom of it around his thumb, and ambled up into the house to get my grandmother to drive him to the hospital down the road. 

I, on the other hand, was totally unsettled by the mangled thumb, split like an overcooked sausage at the end of his hand. I wasn’t a squeamish kid usually, but I’ll be damned if the spurtin’ blood didn’t get the better of me that day. I felt my vision slide, my knees got weak, and next thing I knew, my grandmother was standing over me, dabbin’ my forehead with a wet washcloth.

“OWB, OWB, wake up, we gotta get your grandpa to the hospital.” 

Apparently, I had fainted, which of course delayed departure for the emergency room. I expected Bernard to be aggravated to the point of hollerin’. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in the open car door, just a’chucklin’ at me as I sat up. 

“Boy, you fainted over a lil’ blood,” he said. His chuckle became a laugh that persisted throughout the ride to the hospital. After arriving in the emergency room, he told everyone the same joke after showing his wound to onlookers.

“I’m the one split his finger open, and this one over here is the one that fainted, how you like ‘at?” Then he’d laugh. 

No, that wasn’t embarrassing…not embarrassing at all. 

All of these recollections I store in the treasure chest of memory (even the shameful ones), but ultimately, it is Bernard’s love of all things Alabama that shaped my lifelong affinity for the Crimson Tide. He loved Coach Bryant, and it is through his stories about the Alabama teams before my time that contributed to my knowledge of Tide lore. As I grew up, I spent many Saturdays with Bernard, either watching the games or listening to the radio broadcast with him. I’ve watched or listened to more Bama games with him than any other person other than my mother. He’d crack open one of his Miller beers as the game began, and we needed nothing fancier for game day treats than saltine crackers and cheese.  

He was one of the primary drivers of my fervent fandom, as he not only instilled a love of Alabama in my young heart, but he taught me how to be a fan. If Bernard was a fan of something, he was a fan for life. He never bought a vehicle that wasn’t a Ford, because that’s what he liked. He always wore the same style of slate blue work trousers, because that’s what he liked. He didn’t care that people would tell him his brisket was too tough, because that’s the way he liked it. 

With Alabama, he lived through the highs and lows of the last half-century, celebrating the victories, and maintaining decorum in defeat. In victory or defeat, he was ever loyal to Bama, and his fandom and enthusiasm for the season never waned, even in his advanced years. When we’d lose, he was gracious but analytical, pointing to technical errors or low morale in explaining away the loss. When Alabama won, he’d never rub it in with his Auburn friends (of which he had a very few), but he was always confident in the Tide’s ability to win any game.

I remember well the lead-up to the ’92 Championship Game. I honestly believe that Bernard and I were the only two people in Mobile who thought that Alabama would prevail…and I had my moments of doubt after watching Miami march through their schedule, a juggernaut that appeared unstoppable. Alabama was tough and rugged, and that defense was the stuff of quarterback nightmares. Still, many people doubted the Tide had the offense to overcome the Gino Toretta fireworks show that had torched Hurricane opponents throughout the season. But Bernard never wavered in his faith in the Crimson Tide. After hearing scuttlebutt about how Rohan Marley had taunted big ole Rosie Patterson the night before the game, he confided in me that he had no doubt.

“Mark my words, Alabama is gonna kick their smart-aleck asses. Those punks have a reckonin’ comin’, and Alabama is gonna give it to ‘em.”

We didn’t watch that game together, for whatever reason. I watched it at home with my mama, with whom I’ve watched many momentous events in Crimson Tide history over the years, that national championship game being only one of them. But that didn’t mean my grandfather and I didn’t celebrate together. When Rosie Patterson absolutely destroyed Marley with a brutal block to spring Derrick Lassic to the edge, my phone rang almost immediately.

“Did ya see that,” said the voice on the other end. “I told you they done pissed ole Rosie off, that bastard is gonna feel that tomorrow, ain’t he!” Bernard cackled before saying he’d talk to me later and hanging up.

Later on, in that ephemeral moment…the play that wasn’t the play, when George Teague chased down Lamar Thomas and relieved the Miami receiver of the ball, it was my turn to ring the phone.

“DID YOU SEE THAT! Teague ran him down!”

“Sure did, I told you boy, I told you. These Miami punks don’t know what hit ‘em. Roll Tide!”

Good times…I can remember it like it only just happened. 

He loved the Crimson Tide, and his home was a shrine to Alabama’s favorite sons. I can remember watching many a game with him during the glory years of the Stallings tenure, during which he’d tell me how he had always hoped Bebes would return to Bama after Coach Bryant passed. I remember the time I brought my Aubie girlfriend over to watch the Iron Bowl with him. This was a tragic error in judgment, as usually a gracious host, he scowled and growled at her every time Auburn did anything positive (or when Freddie Kitchens did something negative). Together, we suffered through the DuBose era, and talked many times about how Alabama was just one coach away from returning to dominance in the early 2000s.

This is illustrative of the influence this silly game played on a grassy grid with a sack made of hog flesh has on our culture. It is a critical part of our lifeline, of our collective memories of time passed by. Sure, it’s just a game, in one reality. But it’s also something more than that. Here in Alabama, the home of the greatest people on the face of God’s green earth, it is a binder, a cable of common experience interwoven throughout our lives, concurrently and individually. We all share these same collective experiences…these events that transpire between young men on the football field belong to us all and hold shared meaning for those who follow our beloved Crimson Tide. 

But they also have individual meaning significant of time shared with loved ones, conversations enjoyed with friends, moments of jubilation in which we celebrated, bouncing like spun tops while singing the Rammer Jammer and grinning like Chezzie cats. Alabama football is not the canvas of my life per se, but rather it’s one of the many acrylics with which I’ve shaped the colors and contours of the life I’ve lived with those I love. 

While we all share these moments in Tide history in a communal context, so too are there special meanings and memories attached to them. It is the latter (in part) that I’ve recounted to you today in this Hoodoo space usually reserved for frivolity and fun. But today I had a different story to tell, a narrative that I believe many of us who were born in this Great State share. We all have our stories, and what I have relayed here is but one of many.

The reason for this particular writing at this particular time is that Bernard went home to his reward in the early morning hours of December 25^th, on the day celebrating the birth of his Savior, just a week shy of the day his beloved Crimson Tide will take the field in pursuit of another national championship. He had a special love for defensive football, and I have no doubt that this Alabama team was one of his favorites because of their hard-nosed, relentless style of physical play. He won’t get to see them dominate Washington, at least not on this plane. But he did get to witness Alabama’s return to its rightful place at the top of college football, and as an unwavering supporter of the Tide, it’s fitting that the last teams of his lifetime were some of the best teams he ever watched play the game.

I’m thankful for that, to be quite honest. After all, it’s just a game. But it’s something bigger than that to me. Alabama football is the bridge between generations, between races, between the rich and the poor. It is the tie that binds us here in the Great State, whether we are at home wedged in between the Mighty Tennessee River and the Gulf of Mexico, or elsewhere beyond her borders as a member of the Alabama diaspora. It is a thread woven through the tapestry of our individual and collective lives, a kind of shared timeline, and I’m damn proud that God thought enough of me to make me an Alabama fan. Thank you, Jesus.

As I look on to the horizon, I am hopeful that the boys from Alabama have it within them to finish what they started, to drive the final nail in a project they began erecting way back in September. I know my grandfather Bernard is confident they’ll win, as he always was. But in the event that confidence proves unfounded, he’ll also forgive them if they don’t, so great was his love for the Crimson Tide.

Thanks for indulging me, my friends, as I aired out this less-than-humorous chapter of OWB’s ever-twisting narrative in this here Hoodoo ledger. I appreciate your patience, and am glad we too are joined by this crimson tether that links us. 

Now, the time for mourning is over…the time for kicking ass has arrived. To quote the 18^th century Reconstructionist scholar Greg “The Fightin’ Ginger” McElroy, “let’s go be champions, boys.”

Let’s send Bernard out on a win. 

And Roll Tide, old man, I still love you.

Your Weekly Hoodoo Thread: SEC Championship edition

Here we are, right smack-dab on the precipice of greatness once again. As loyal Hoodoo’ers, I don’t have to impart upon you people just how important the events that will unfold tomorrow night are to our beloved Crimson Tide and our hopes for the fifth national title of the Nick Saban era of Alabama football.

Sure, as some idiot reporter intimated to Our Dark Lord this past week, Alabama could likely lose to Florida and still get into the College Football Playoffs. But this Alabama team ain’t the losin’ type. No sir, they are on the brink of doing what only one other Saban-coached championship team has done before…win a national championship following an undefeated season. That right there is ’92 type of elite, and appropriately enough, the Bama defense of 2016 may go down in history as a peer of Gene Stallings’ ridiculous 1992 defense.

Truth be told, I was hoping for another Bama-Florida match-up in the high stakes SEC Championship Game this season. At the beginning of the year, I predicted that Florida would be the last man standing in the East to get to the SECCG, and as high as those odds appeared at times this season, the Gators made it. There’s just something about seeing those crimson jerseys juxtaposed against that Gator orange and blue that makes your narrator nostalgic for the days of his youth, when the two teams were regular combatants for SEC supremacy. 

In the first ever match-up for all the marbles, Stallings’ gritty Tide team gutted out a win over Steve Spurrier’s seemingly unbeatable Florida Gators. If memory serves, it was an Antonio Langham interception that sealed the deal, as the unbreakable Bama defense became the trademark of that team.

Flash-forward to the current era. Nick Saban has put together a string of dominance that will likely go unmatched in modern sports by the time it’s all said and done. Alabama simply couldn’t be more dominant, as is evidence by the hot coals of hatred that are heaped constantly on the heads of Tide players, coaches, and fans by the media and members of rival fan bases nationwide. 

Coach Jim McElwain has done a fine job at Florida of helping the Gators rise back to the top of the perpetually downtrodden SEC East, but his Gators remain a work in progress. Apparently, Coach Mac needs a Hoodoo battalion of his own after a second straight year of debilitating, excoriating injuries have shredded his roster, forcing him to play the last half of his schedule with a patchwork amalgam of second- and third-stringers and a healthy complement of freshmen.

Be that as it may, we know the Hoodoo winds of whim are fickle, as is the favor of our feared patron Football Loki. Quite simply, Loki must eat, and his hunger for our shame is ravenous. We’ve done an adequate job of appeasing him this season evidently, as his patronage has pushed our boys forth to great heights. But we must soldier on, as the stakes get increasingly higher from this game through the last game, which we hope will be the National Championship Game. Loki needs more Hoodoo, and it is more Hoodoo that we shall provide. 

So I implore you, do not hang on to that cherished Hoodoo recounting for a playoff game or natty. For surely, surely, in the month between now and the first round of the College Football Playoffs, you can find some way to further corrupt your reputation or tarnish your eternal soul in order to meet future Hoodoo needs. Now is the moment to act, and act we must!

This is a tale I spin for you from the yarn of my college years, a narrative rife with shame and a call from moral grace. You see, back in those days, your narrator was a studious sort, an English major who was just as happy with his nose in some William Faulkner work as he was chasing tail on the campus of his small Catholic institution of higher learning. I tried to live according to the code that had been instilled in me by my single mother and the assortment of role players she assembled to bring me and my brother B-Rad from boys to me. I was taught to respect everyone, to try to live in peace with my fellow man, and to always view my actions through the lens of a Christian perspective. But despite this proper home-trainin’ (as was the case in so much of the literature I avidly consumed), I found within myself a duality, a breaking schism of the good from some darker undercurrent of my personality.

Though I was generally a good kid and leader amongst my peers, I had dabbled in tomfoolery as a high school student, collecting for a local pot dealer who was slight of frame and soft of speech. Because of his usually laid-back demeanor, he was willing to front his herb to people in his circle (“to front” means to loan drugs to others in good faith, for those of you unfamiliar with narco-slang), and as a result, because of his relative kindness, the said same took advantage and skated on their respective debts. After a casual conversation with this weed-slangin’ chillster in which he expressed a need to recoup his friendly investments, we brokered terms of a contractor-client relationship in which he would keep me in some spending money in return for my brawn and willingness to enforce the terms of his oustanding debts. In other words, he'd tell me who needed smashin’, and I’d go smash ‘em for McDonald’s money. Simple economics…see a need and fill it.

The problem was, I probably would have done it for free, so much did I enjoy the feeling of faces compressing beneath my knuckles. Imposing my physical will on others was empowering though brutal, and served a sort of therapy for me as I worked through the angst of my teenage years after having been largely abandoned by my father and stricken with relative poverty. The rush was addictive, especially when one could watch the blood drain from the faces of those who knew why you were there, and what would follow if they couldn’t produce the required funds. 

In pursuit of my line of side work, I developed an affinity for body blows, which when landed on the rib cage in the vicinity of the liver, made a most glorious thud-crunch sound generated by the blunt trauma to the hollow thoracic cavity combined with the crunching of rib bones beneath the force of a well-thrown, quickly-cranked right hook. I wasn’t big on blood, and generally would only let loose on someone’s face when absolutely necessary. Sometimes it was appropriate in the course of business to open up an eyebrow to make a visual statement to others, or crack a jaw to send someone careening rubber-kneed to the ground where he would remain until jostling into consciousness while I cleaned out his wallet or snatched the dope-equivalent value of possessions from his car or backpack. I didn’t steal, but rather took what was owed, a purveyor of narco-karma who balanced the scales and kept the underground economy in flow. It was an art, one I enjoyed immensely even though everything I had learned from my moral teachers had taught me that a man should take no pleasure in hurting others.

When I went to college, I decided to grow up, to leave that part of my life behind, to be the better man my family expected me to be. I wanted to focus on my academics and stay away from the crowd that had become a part of my previous life. It wasn’t that I was super-impressionable to the influence of others, but more the fact that most people who knew me, folks I called friends, knew what I was about. So whenever the opportunity presented itself, and even when it didn’t, they would create situations that would end in blood being spilled for some unfortunate soul at the end of my fists. Every time I went out with those folks, they’d get me into a fight. As much as I enjoyed fisticuffs, it was tiresome. Sometimes ya boy just wanted to relax and chill.  

B-Rad was the worst. That boy would run his mouth all reckless like, talmbout what would happen if some ne’er-do-well or other ever tangled with his big brother. His incessant chest-poking kept me in action, even with people I had never even met. B-Rad would run that mouth, then after building up the pressure, he would introduce the said victim to me, at which point they’d decide to underestimate the bookish guy with glasses and skater hair. Words would be said, hands would be raised, and before you knew it, folks would be laid out, furniture would be broken, blood would be splattered over eggshell walls like a cotdang Jackson Pollack work…and B-Rad would be standin’ over the unfortunate soul, goin’ on ‘bout some “YOU GOT KNOCKED THE FK OUT.”

Needless to say, I couldn’t avoid my family members, but I cut away a large portion of non-blood relations who were responsible for instigating past beat downs. When I’d go out drinkin’ in college, I’d generally go with my classmates, friends who were from a different world, who had never even seen a real fight, let alone been one of the combatants. There were no fights, there was no real drama. I enjoyed the easy-going, stress-free nature of these outings…nothing like the dog-fightin’ ring my buddies always wanted to create for their entertainment that always involved me and some other poor soul. 

But like a reformed Sith who evermore feels the tug of the Dark Side upon his soul, I still had a hunger, a bloodlust, that I felt the need to chase. My reformed, clean-cut life simply couldn’t fulfill that need, and I could only run from it for so long. I missed fighting, the exhilaration of pounding someone into submission, the adrenaline rush spurred by our built-in human fight-or-flight response. That’s how I got involved in boxing, as I sought out a safe way to put my talents to use and to continue to be able to hit people in their soft spots in a more legalized setting.

I kept this boxing something of a secret from most of the people around me. For one, Momz could never know. No sir, that right there was what we call a “non-starter.” She wouldn’t have let it happen, and would have used every guilt fulcrum in her arsenal to get me to stop. I couldn’t let B-Rad know, because that would have defeated the purpose…he’d be a ringside takin’ bets and shit and spurrin’ others to take me on. For a similar reason, I didn’t want many friends to know, as I figured they’d then want to carry me around as a bodyguard, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid. Finally, my goodie-two-shoes friends at school definitely couldn’t know, as they’d never understand and think me thuggish. I had a reputation to maintain, after all.

I became pretty skilled as a boxer, actually pushed to a 13-0 amateur record before moving into the more lucrative bare-knuckled boxing that occurs in back rooms at bars and dives across the Gulf Coast. The latter is generally not advertised (and is technically illegal), and if it is, it’s generally called something like a “Tough Man Competition.” They were loosely-regulated affairs, usually conducted in a tournament format. You never knew who you’d be fighting very far in advance, and you were liable to run up against any type of person in that dimly lit ring.

Ah, but enough backstory. On to our tale…

So I’ve established with you fine folks that I enjoyed fighting, and was quite good at it despite my academic inclinations. That said, I also sought to move away from it, to court the better, more refined angels of my nature as a rising academician and respected member of society. But as with any Dark Side practitioner, it is difficult to circumscribe and constrain such indulgences of the black arts without slipping into their heavy spell, and hand-to-hand combat was certainly one of those practices. Darkness can be all consuming, can become an obsession, if you will. Though I tried to rebuff my urges for battle, tried to keep them in the somewhat-structured confines of boxing or ring-fighting, my desire for primal fisticuffs grew exponentially the more I indulged in it.

This time also paralleled the age at which I became fully-vested as an alcoholic-in-training, an apprenticeship I took quite seriously as I slogged my way through every variety of hard liquor and beer one can find on the Alabama Gulf Coast. I’d replaced that one dark part of my person with a possibly more destructive one fueled by grain-liquor and sour mash. I’d drink at home, I’d drink at clubs, I drink between home and the club. It didn’t matter where the party was, I was down. It was my one remaining vice (at the moment at least…before I went back to the sweet leaf). 

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one’s point of view), I had a posse of folks who were always more than willing to indulge in this debauchery alongside of me. Of course, B-Rad was down for whatever. That sumbitch would drink enough Southpaw to float JFK’s PT-109. And then there was my buddy Mook and his girl J-Thin, constant companions on my journey into the alcoholic heart of darkness. Mook was from a white-bread background, but I’ll be damned if that feller wasn’t constantly trying to drown some fires in his own soul with all of the drinking he’d do. One night, we jointly began a liter of Bacardi Limon, taking alternating shots. A mere 15 minutes later, the bottle was empty, and we were locked and loaded. The things that transpired were…let’s just call them “less than legal.” Hoodoo for another time…

I also had another buddy, an owlish wallflower through much of high school who became a deranged maniac after returning from Marine Corps boot…let’s call him Flow (not flow, like water flows, but Flow, as in FL+ the word ow.) He wouldn’t have done anything more mischievous in high school than steal the stapler off the desk of a particularly irritating substitute teacher we had following the death of our civics teacher senior year. But the Corps…boy, it did something to that joker, sent him straight over into the “Unhinged” column with a vengeance. 

He had taken up drankin’ as most Devil Dogs are prone to do in times of peace, but that wasn’t all. He became a fiend for fights and women who would lust after women who were out of his league from across the bar for hours before finally garnering the courage tp make withering, unwanted advances to them (which were universally rebuffed…homeboy looked like a jarheaded version of the Tootsie Pop Owl). He was generally a willing partner in anything that involved drinkin’, the potential for female companionship (or more often, bird-dogging), and loud music, especially if the emphasis was on “scopin’ out the trim,” as this poet of Alpine Hills would put it.

One afternoon, with evil on our minds, we posse’d up at Mook’s house, which was just up the hill from the University of South Alabama, which is also adjacent to one of Mobile’s few affluent neighborhoods, specifically Spring Hill (which these days fancies itself even more tony than ever, as denizens of this neighbourhood have taken to calling themselves a “village,” as in “The Village of Spring Hill.” Pretentious much?) 

We had started this particular party on this particular day at a particularly early time (11 a.m. to be exact). The deal was that Mook needed help moving something heavy (he always needed help moving something heavy), so he bribed us to help him and J-Thin with promises of free drinks. When we got there, homeboy pointed us towards a suitcase of Icehouse in the refrigerator, which Flow, B-Rad and I considered an affront to the original offer of drinks and assault on our collective manhood. First of all, a suitcase of beer is enough to get a puppy drunk, but not three strappin’ beer-drankers and hell-raisers. Secondly, we took it to mean that some actual liquor would be involved, so we pressed the issue.

“Well, y’all, I don’t have anything like that but about half a pint of Montezuma Gold.”

Not naw, but hell naw. Hell to the mfkn naw, know what I’m sayin’? If you’ve ever had the misfortune of letting that travesty to the noble glory that is good tequila pass your lips, then you know what I’m talkin’ about. That cactus-infused swill water would turn the belly of an iron-gulleted boar hog, so nasty is its taste. Once, I was tricked into doing a shot of that shit, and I literally projectile-vomited it the second it hit my tongue…didn’t even swallow it, just puked it right back on out of my mouth in an oral “NOPE.” It tastes of burnt hair, with notes of kerosene and plasma (don’t ask me how I know that.)

“Dude, you said there would be dranks, so you need to come up with some dranks.” The natives, and by natives I meant the two hood rats and the Marine, were getting restless. That’s when good ole J-Thin spoke up.

“Hey, isn’t it happy hour up at Solomon’s? Half-priced Long Islands?”

This girl, an aspiring med student, was in this particular moment, a straight up Einstein-level genius (jee-nee-yuss.) Solomon’s was an alcoholic and narcotic landmark that had catered to all the needs of Mobile’s college scene in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Mobilians of that era surely know it, as the garish yellow and red metal warehouse-style building was little more than a lunch counter up front and an expansive bar and pool hall in the rear. In the good ole days, one could order fabulous steamed sandwiches, or if the day’s events skewered towards the debaucherous, the best pitcher of Long Island Ice Tea this side of the Mason-Dixon line.

When confronted with the suggestion, I was all “YASSSS!” But there was a caveat…as Solomon’s and I had a bit of a history. You see, I had been asked to leave the premises not once…not twice…but a record 11 times. Generally, the cause of expulsion was some brand of physical violence, whether waged against some person or piece of furniture or décor. But I was a changed man, a kinder, gentler sort, and would certainly avoid such malevolent behaviour as an avowed renaissance man of letters.

“Only thing is, OWB, you gotta promise not to get in a fight.” J-Thin was the scary type, not much for bloodshed and watching dudes beat themselves to a pulp. 

“Aw, now, you know that’s all behind me. I’m just a good ole boy now, love Jesus and all that. No fightin’ out of me…no sir.” 

I could tell by the look on her face she thought I was being sarcastic.

“Really though, I won’t. I’m in chill mode, for realz.”

“Okay…let’s go get drinky, I love Long Islands!”

Now normally, Long Islands weren’t my kind of thing. Too much going on in that glass, just always seemed to send me on a trip, a journey of a negative nature, you see. I always used to say that a pitcher of Long Islands should come with a handcuff key and bail money, as that sumbitch would undoubtedly rile me up and get me involved in some kind of physical tomfoolery before a given night was over. It was like a Jekyl and Hyde formula for me, converting me from the White Knight English major into Darth-fking-Vader on mushrooms. It was like a demonstration of the yin and yang poured into a tall Tom Collins glass, a serum that allowed the darkness inside me to emerge and conquer. Not the best combination for one wishing to remain placid and calm, as I’d previously taken and oath to that effect. However, I trusted my will to persevere and do the right thing. 

On this particular day, I had convinced myself that no, Long Island Ice Tea was a perfectly reasonable choice of libation, especially if I was drinkin’ it by the pitcher. Nothing could go wrong there, seemed like a good plan. My compadres offered their consent as well.

“Yeah dude, it’s early, you won’t get drunk if you start drinkin’ this early,” came the sage wisdom of B-Rad. “We’ll be good.”

“And, we’ll play some pool, so that will keep you focused, you can concentrate and shit,” offered Mook.

I was down. Figured it be good to go ahead and pre-party though, so we slugged through that suitcase and once the ole taste buds were good and numb, we slurped down the Montezuma (a feat which I to this day feel is single-handedly responsible for a raging case of IBS I contracted at the time.)

We piled into Flow’s Jetta and scooted down the hill. We didn’t even make it to the targeted dive bar before the shit popped off. We were sittin’ at a light at University and Old Shell, waiting to turn, when I hear the chainsaw rip of my brother’s voice.

“WHAT THE FK ARE YOU LOOKIN’ AT?”

I turned my attention to the newish Tahoe next to us. In it were a couple of SpringHillians who looked as though they had borrowed daddy’s truck to go out and tool around on a Saturday afternoon. Apparently this googly-eyed sumbitch in the back seat who bore all the traits of Old Mobile blue-blood inbreeding had committed the sin of not averting his eyes at B-Rad, which drew the stern rebuke. However, the fella in the front seat made a cardinal error in practice, as he flipped B-Rad off in response.

“I SAID, WHAT THE FK ARE YOU LOOKIN AT MFFKR? YOU WANT SOME?”

Well, that was that. Before I knew it, B-Rad was out of the car, beating on the window of the Tahoe. Of course, he was my brother, so I had to get out too and back his play. I tried to open the driver’s door of the SUV, but the terrified driver repeatedly hit the lock button, yelling through the window at me “We don’t want any trouble! We don’t want any trouble!” A second later, the Tahoe crew was gone, speeding off through the still-red light after kickin’ gravel, with Flow hollering for B-Rad and I to get back in the car. 

We did so (because he asked politely), and now that we were riled up, we wanted to pour some of that sweet tea nectar down our pie holes. Once inside the smokey, grimy, puke-stank environment that was Solomon’s, we found a table and made ourselves at home. Mook showed up moments later with two pitchers of tea. Couldn’t beat it really, $7 bucks a pitcher…we were going to be there for a while.

Now let me set the scene a bit for you fine folks, if I may. Inside the back end of this joint was a literal melting pot of Mobilianism, south Alabama’s own version of the Mos Eisley cantina. The patrons of that establishment at any given time represented a cross-section of society in the M-O-B. You had Fratboy Front-Bar, where backwards-hat-wearing, Croakies-around-the-neck-sporting fratsters guzzled draft beer and played songs like “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Brickhouse” on the jukebox at all hours of the day. There was the Cowboy Corner, where interlopers from Mobile’s rural western outskirts made their way “to town” from Wilmer to drink well whiskey (Old Granddad or Evan Williams) and flaunt their large dinner-platter buckles and leather belts embossed with phrases like “Country Boy Can Survive” or “Alabama Man – Roll Tide.” There were black folks who had rolled over a few blocks from the Mobile Terrace neighborhood (where the streets didn't have names, but rather were assigned only numbers...pro tip: if you ever find yourself in an area where the street names are all numbers and you're not in New York City, RUN, RUN AWAY NOW!) They'd drink gin in the corner, puff on Black and Milds and play Al Green and Rick James songs while singin' along or slow-jam dancing with their lady-friends.

There were the dopesters, the burnouts, the tweakers who called Solomon’s a home away from home because it was open at all hours of the night and was a notorious smorgasbord where an addict could find whatever poison would kill his or her urges. Then you had the Springhillites who would meander over from the east to indulge their wild sides, living vicariously through those they considered lower than them on the social totem pole in Mobile’s post-antebellum caste system. For them, it was a precursor to reality television, where they could see things they never encountered on their side of he tracks. It was social voyeurism in its purest form. They spent money on the more fetching of the common girls in the bar, “slumming it” to boost their egos and possibly score easy lovin’ from the impressionable cigarette Cinderellas who hoped some moneyed Prince Charming would give them a better life than the one they were destined to live.

There were girls…girls of all sorts. College girls who wanted to shoot pool and drink beer. Redneck women who were there to raise hell with their male counterparts while swiggin’ Bourbon sours and gringo margaritas. Alt narcolette girls who hung in the shadows, dark circles corralling their eyes, indicative of some level of highness or another on a sliding scale depending on the hour.

It was one of Mobile’s premier venues for people watching, and there was a draw for all of these groups, whether they were looking for steamed deli fare, Long Island Ice Tea, loud live music, a dance floor, or pool tables. The observant patron could gather a lifetime’s worth of personalities in a few sittings, as I was apt to do as an aspiring author and student of human behavior.

  

But back to our tale. My compadres and I got on the teas, and we got on them hard. After four pitchers collectively, J-Thin proposed a game of pool to avoid the intoxicated boredom that often led my group to start shit. We played a couple racks and continued on those teas, eschewing the sage alcoholic advice to always consume plenty of water, and to never drink hard liquor without eating first. Before long, we were loud and rowdy, poppin’ quarters in the juke box (you young people know what a juke box it? Something like a big iPod that you drop quarters in while it plays music…), dancin’, and actin’ a straight-fool. I started feeling the hallucinogenic effects that LIIT typically had on me…walls were swayin’, people were becoming blurs, lights pierced like lasers into my eye holes. But it wasn’t bad, and I hadn’t been provoked, so it appeared I would keep my promise to remain docile. Yay me.

Fortunately on this day that was rapidly turning to night, working the door was one of our dogs, a big dude named Glen who we knew from the hood, used to buy pills off of me from time to time when they were “in season.” Glen wouldn’t bother us so long as we didn’t hurt anybody, so we were in for the long haul. We could raise hell and be loud and enjoy ourselves, let our freak flags fly. Tea was flowin’ like a mountain spring.

Fast-forward another couple of pitchers, another couple of racks of pool, and we were pretty well loaded. Flow and I, who were always on the hunt for some female attention, had previously spotted a fetching pair of young ladies (at least through the tea-goggles, they appeared fetching) shooting pool a table over from us, sippin’ on their fruity drinks and Bud Lights, leaning over the table provocatively and smiling to let us know that maybe there was some interest there. One of them was wearin’ boots, best I could tell…other one had on some kind of fringed leather jacket, some kinda Choctaw-chic or something. I later discovered that both were notorious skeezers who were regular prowlers of the Soloman’s savanna, but with the effects of the teas distorting my vision, I felt like they were prime suspects for a little sweet-lovin’.

That said, being raised to respect women by my mother, I’d never have intruded upon their quiet night out. But they seemed to be casually inviting us, and the vibe was good, so Flow and I were planning our vector of attack.

As we did, we noticed two cracker sumbitches making their way over to the young ladies in question. One was a redneck Super Mario lookin’ mffkr: short, greasy brown hair tucked up under an Auburn cap, sumbitch had the fashion sense of a cotdang color-blind hermit crab. His runnin’ buddy (or wingman or whatever you kids call him these days) was even more sartorially-challenged: a pencil-thin, wraithly with a weasely mustasche and rust-patina’d ancient Wranglers beneath a flannel shirt and bolo tie with a turquoise skull-and-crossbones in the center. Ever listen to much David Allen Coe…particularly the song “Green Teeth?” Well, this sumbitch was the spittin’ image of the so-named. 

I could tell by the body language of the girls that they were most definitely not feelin’ these fellas, but as my mama would expect, I let them sort out their own affairs. Woman doesn’t always need a knight in shining armor to ride in and save the day….gotta leave the latitude for them to handle those issues themselves. It’s empowering and shit.

Time went by, and the dipshit duo seemingly failed to receive the message the girls were sending. In fact, they had injected themselves into the girls’ game of pool, picking up sticks and trying to skeev up behind these chicks to help them with “their form.”

“Look at these mffkrs,” Flow said through gritted teeth. “What the fk? I want to mash on those mffkrs, ugly-ass hillbilly bastards.” 

I was trying my best to keep the inner demon in me, the one who loves the body blows, in check. Flow’s diatribe wasn’t helping much, but I was determined that I would not act a complete and utter damn fool on that day. The Sith Lord within had to find his chill and slow his role. After all, I had promised to behave, and owed it to myself to retain my gentility. Such debauchery was unbecoming an English major, after all.

“I’m gonna stab ‘em,” said Flow. “I got my Ka-Bar in the car. Seriously, won’t anybody miss them…just two quick shanks between the vertebra, won’t feel a thing.” The Marine Corps, ladies and gentlemen. Turned a Chihuahua into a cotdang Cane Corso.

At about this time, one of the girls crept up to the bar to reload their pitcher. While she was waiting for the bartender to pour her refill, she leaned over to me and spoke in a hushed-yet-husky tone with heavy liquor-scented breath.

“Hey, would you guys do us a favor? These assholes won’t leave us alone. We told them our boyfriends were coming to meet us, thinking they’d leave. But they didn’t. Keep pushin’ up on us, tryin’ to grab on our asses. So you fellas mind bein’ our boyfriends for the night? May be somethin’ in it for ya if you do…”

Alrightalrightalright…now this had become interesting…interesting, indeed. 

“Why, yes ma’am, we’d love to join you,” I said. “Flow, please help this young lady with her pitcher, we will be playing the role of their dates for the foreseeable future.”

We followed this girl, who we call Melanda, back to her table. Her suitors had adjourned to the restroom, likely to do another bump of country coke, otherwise known as meth. Melanda introduced us to her mate Sassy, and we were all fast friends. I put a fresh rack on the table and we picked up sticks. We played, and they talked and giggled and touched us on our arms and did everything women generally do to show you that they have some sort of interest. We had every reason to believe that things were going places, and that by night’s end, we’d be totin’ these girls to some dark spot or other.

Ten minutes must have passed, and things were going well. We had paired off, Melanda and I taking on Flow and Sassy in a game of billiards. We smoked ‘em, as that damn Melanda could shoot pool like Minnesota Fats…had some thick forearms on her, which I attributed to that resonate power she was puttin’ into those strokes of hers. She wasn’t wholly unattractive (in my stupor, she looked somewhat nice), but there was something peculiar about her gait (a little hitch when she prowled around the table), something different about her curves somewhere around the hips. But like I said, I was drunk, so what the fk did I care. Not to mention, she was alredy getting fresh with me, as my grandma-ma would say, swatting me on the ass with a “You go boy!” after I sunk a particularly difficult bank shot on the 8-ball to clinch a game.  

Then, Mario and Green Teeth came back into the hall. You should have seen the look on those fellers faces when they came out of the restroom…it was glorious. Mario, he was the most pissed…I thought it was probably because that arrogant little woodchuck-lookin’ mffkr thought he had a chance. Ole Green Teeth just looked dejected, as he’d probably been down a similar road many times in his life, and expected no better for himself any-damn-way. Mario approached Melanda, who was apparently his favorite.

“Heeey, who are these sumbitches, why you talkin’ to them?”

“I told you we were meeting our new boyfriends, and you didn’t want to hear it,” Melanda retorted.

“Boyfriends my ass, I seen these assholes over there playin’ pool all night, get over here bitch.”

By this time, B-Rad’s belligerence sensor must have been firin’ off, because he eased up behind Mario.

“Boy, you don’t need to talk to the lady like that, best just get on your way…”

I’ll say this about Mario…I don’t know if he was Super or not, but he sure as hell musta thought he was (methamphetamine is a hell of a drug). Dude chest-bumped B-Rad despite giving up probably seven inches in height to my brother. Wasn’t really a chest bump…more like a tiny-chest-to-solar-plexus bump.

B-Rad stiff-armed him back joltingly.

“Boy, you don’t want this.”

Melanda stepped between them, seemingly overjoyed by the scene she was causing. "Boys, boys, boys, you don't have to fight over lil' ole meeee..."

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see ole Green Teeth, that creepy sumbitch, sneakin’ up behind B-Rad with a pool cue. Following my instinct, I started to cut him off, and he reared back to pop B-Rad just as I rounded the corner of the table between the two of us. Dammit, I had tried to keep my promise and do the right thing, but I’d be damned if it wasn’t about to go down.

I didn’t hesitate as I landed a vicious body blow on ole Green Teeth that damn near broke him in half. I heard that snap-crackle-pop and knew I sank that hook true, felt his ribs give under my fist. He folded up like a cheap lawn chair, went straight to the ground and stayed there. It was on. B-Rad and I had one rule when we went out: if he hit someone, I was supposed to hit everyone else, and vice-versa. That way, we covered all the bases (that's some tactical shit right there.)

B-Rad dropped a forearm shiver on Mario, then scooped him up and chucked him a good six feet onto a table seated by several frat boys, who watched in horror as their pitchers spilled forth their sweet syrupy contents all over their cargo shorts, Confederate flag t-shirts, and sockless deck shoes.

“You owe us a pitch…!” Sumbitch didn’t even get a word out before Flow went Private Pyle on their asses, throwing brachial stuns and cuttin’ a swath through Fratboy Front-Bar. Before we knew it, this had evolved into a full-scale Blues Brothers-style brawl: people laid out, glasses flyin’, pool sticks splinterin’, bouncers hollerin’…and me and B-Rad were in the middle of it still slingin’ fists. 

Didn’t know what the hell had happened to Mook and J-Thin, but apparently they wisely abandoned ship when the shit went down. Mook wasn’t much good in a fight anyway, just be a liability is all.

My bouncer buddy Glen waded through the crowd and talked right into my ear…”YOU NEED TO GO…COPS COMING…BACK DOOR.”

That was all I needed to hear. I wasn’t going to jail for no tiny crackers nor their attempted courtees. I was out like the trash on a Thursday, B-Rad and Flow hot behind me. Police were already in the front parking lot, so we slogged through the ditch and snarled through the thick pine stand criss-crossed with dirt bike trails that stood behind Mook’s house at the time. Somewhere en route, probably while fording the half-full ditch, I lost a shoe… and didn’t even realize it until a good bit later. Left Flow’s car in the Solomon’s parking lot for the time, knowing we could reclaim it once the smoke cleared.

After killing a few hours and sobering up somewhat, we walked back down the hill to get Flow’s Jetta (which was a lot of fun with a single shoe). The Solomon’s parking lot was empty save for a few rides, and I happened to see Glen standing off in the parking lot a piece with the rear door propped open, dragging on a square. I knew he wouldn’t hold my previous tomfoolery against me, so I gave him a holla.

“So what happened after we left?”

Glen chuckled. 

“You boys got plaaaaayed,” Glen relayed. “Those girls used yo big dumb asses to clear the countertop.” 

“Do what?”

“Yuuuup, those weren’t some random dudes that were hittin’ on them, they was their old men. Police told me that one girl said the Mario lookin’ mofo was her boyfriend…she caught wind he was steppin’ out on her so she decided to get bring him out and his ass whupped for him, payback you know. Figured you big ole strappin’ boys would take care of it if she played the damsel-in-distress and suckered you jackasses in. Like I said…you got played like yo name was Fisher Price or Mattel, boy.” 

Well…dayum. That thought had never crossed my mind. Touche, redneck woman, touche.

"Well, wish I would have at least gotten those digits after all of that...may have been worth it," I said.

“Dude, what? I didn't know you were into that kinda shit."

That was a puzzling response that required further clarification.

"What do you mean? You know I like drakin' beer and taggin' does, dontcha?"

Realization washed over his face, followed by a Chessie-cat grin.

"Oh this is good. This is toooo good. You mean you didn't know...you didn't know?" He bellowed the way only a feller of rotund form can. I, by this point, was getting quite nervous regarding the oming revelation. "Neither one of them was girls…they are, how do you put it, female impersonators…they come in all the time startin' shit, the tall one breaks a glass every-damn-time they come in here. I thought you knew, figured maybe all that college had made you open-minded or some shit.”

My mind began to assemble calculations and images as soon as he uttered those words as I mentally raced back through the events of the evening, a slideshow of clues that alone, were insignificant, but when assembled together in a collage of deception revealed the true nature of what had occurred…the hitched gait, the straightness of the figure, the husky tone of the voice…could it be? Could it really be? Had I really been so skunked that my radar had been totally disabled? Surely, I had misunderstood Glen, I thought, but somewhere inside, I knew what he had said rang true. I had to have confirmation nonetheless. Flow beat me to it.

“Say what?”

“Yeah, both of ‘em were cross-dressers. That’s the best part, ain’t it? You got played by a couple of shemales! Dude, I can’t wait to tell everybody, this is the best thing ever.” Glen dropped his cigarette butt and smashed it out in a small storm of cinders, cackling like a jackal, which is unbecoming for a man of his girth. “Oh, by the way, owner says you can’t come back, if he sees you again he’s callin’ the po-po on the spot, sorry bro.”

Crestfallen, we got into Flow's car. He had barely closed the door when he "went there."

"Dude, what the fk? How did this happen? I thought they were girls...thought we were gonna... Does this make me gay now...am I gay? How am I gonna 'splain this to my parents?"

"Man, I don't even know. Them Long Islands be lettin' you know, boy."

"We can't tell nobody about this. Nobody, you hear me?"

Agreed. I'd catch up with Glen later and limit that damage, because his big ass was scared of me and better not say a damn word. If anybody else brought it up, I'd just go to the trusty body blow and end that shit, nip it in the bud as Pulitzer Prize winning sonnet writer Barney Fife once put it.

As a result of these unfortunate consequences, I have permanently sworn off of Long Island Ice Tea. Like forever. Haven't had one since that day, don't plan on drinking one anytime soon. Like I said before, that shit should come with bail money, and apparently, an Adam's apple detector. 

So in the aftermath, I was full of shame. I lost my shoe. I was permanently banned from Solomon’s. I broke my word and back-slid into my violent ways. In addition to falling back into drunken barbarism, I had been manipulated into such dastardly behavior by a man masquerading as a redneck bar strumpet. And I didn’t even know any better. Least I didn’t sleep with her. Or him. Or whatever, fk it all.

Football Loki, hear my cries. Let us emerge healthy and emboldened as we begin our march to number 17. Satisfy your hunger on this humble offering, and let my shame slake your ever-growing thirst. Roll Tide.