TALES FROM THE EDGE OF THE EARTH: A CHICKEN TALE

By Grant McGee

Johnny was one of the service advisors at the car dealership where I worked.

Johnny grew up in the Florida panhandle on the coast of The Gulf of Mexico, had his family there, made his home there.  Johnny had been a bar bouncer, sheriff’s deputy and an ace car mechanic.  He got tired of running his own shop and decided to work at the dealership.

Johnny spent a lot of time dodging the eyes of the service manager, spending a lot of time in back with the mechanics, shooting the breeze with customers because he knew a lot of people who came in and generally trying not to do anything close to work.

“I’ve got a chicken story for ya,” Johnny said one slow Friday afternoon.

I had been at the dealership for a few weeks, I guess I had earned credit with Johnny as someone he could shoot the breeze with.

“This was right after I was out of high school,” Johnny went on.  “The old man said I couldn’t live in the house anymore so me and three other guys went in on a double-wide mobile home down near Perdido Key.  That was before all the condos came in and shit.  We could rent this double-wide and all the rats and squirrels we could eat for $250 a month.

“Anyway, one of the guys rode a motorcycle everywhere and was always collecting chickens.  He’d come riding up from work on his scoot holding a sack and he’d open it up and out popped a chicken.

"Soon we had this whole flock of chickens running around our double-wide.  We didn’t get any eggs, there was chickenshit everywhere, but it was our place.

“One day,” Johnny continued, “We were sitting around.  Our motorcycle/chicken buddy was at work and another one of the guys gets the idea to have a chicken dinner.  ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘It’s just one chicken, he ain’t gonna miss it, how many are out there, a dozen?’”

“So,” said Johnny, “We got to chasing these chickens all over the yard and it didn’t do no good, there wasn’t any catching them.  They were dodging us, diving under the double-wide, running into the woods, stuff like that.

“Then I remembered, ‘Hey guys, I’ve got a blow gun,’ I said.  So I went and got my blow gun and started blowing blow darts at this one rooster.  Pretty soon he’s got like five of these darts in him and he drops.

“We all walked over and stood around the rooster and another guy says, ‘Well, what do we do now?’ And I say, ‘Well I reckon we chop his head off.’  So one of the other guys goes and gets a hatchet and chops that ol’ rooster’s head plumb off.

“So then I told the guys we had to pluck the feathers so I reach for the chicken and that sumbitch just stands right up with no head and takes off.  Freaked us out.  Here’s this headless chicken running around our yard.  We’re yellin’ and hootin’ and hollerin’ and soon this headless chicken just runs out into the road and gets hit by a car, big cloud of feathers everywhere.

“We ate at Burger King that night,” said Johnny.

About then another customer pulled int the drive and I had to go welcome them to the dealership.

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TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST: A TALE OF TWO HATS

By Grant McGee

I was at my day job at the car dealership, shuttling cars around the lot from the service entrance back to where they get worked on.

I opened the door to this one car and there was the hat.

Best way I can describe this hat to you is I wouldn’t wear it.  Well I might wear it if I was drunk.  I’d call it the kind of hat a sportin’ man would wear.  This hat was gray, kind of checkered with a short brim.  It was a woman who drove the car to the dealership.  I don’t know if it was her hat or someone else’s.

I’m glad I saw the hat though because it gave me a laugh.

The hat took me back to 1992 when I lived in Roswell, New Mexico.

I had a grand time living in Roswell.  I played the Country Music on an AM station that could be heard as far north as I-40 and sometimes even Albuquerque to as far south as Presidio, Texas.  If you’re not familiar with The Great American Southwest, well, let me tell you that’s a pretty big chunk of real estate.

I had good friends in Roswell too.  Two of my best friends were my buddies C.B. and Kent.  I called Kent “The Bard of the Pecos,” he was educated, witty, knowledgeable and very much like a brother to me.  Kent went “On to Glory” two years ago.  C.B. left Roswell a few years ago and lives up in Colorado.

I was always telling Kent he needed to write down his stories.  He grew up in rural eastern New Mexico and was as real as real can get when it came to being real.  He called it straight all the time.

Like the time he held down a day job at a library.  He was the only man on the staff and he didn’t get along well with the head librarian.  He told me she would frequently chastise him for little things.  This got on his nerves.

One day the head librarian was particularly cranky and hassled him because he hadn’t arranged the books perfectly in this one section of the library.

“You have a problem with that, hunh?” Kent asked her.

“Yes I do,” she replied.

“I suppose this means that there’s no chance of you and me having chandelier-swinging sex later on then, is there,” he said, looking her straight in the eye.

Kent said he could see the librarian turn red.  Then she turned around to her assistant.

“Have I told you about the new knitting book we just received,” she said to the other woman.

Then there was the time Kent sent me an email about the Cowboy Music and Cowboy Poetry craze of the late 1990’s.  He opened the note with a reference to Cowboy singer Red Stegall…

“Red Steagall is better than I remember him being. I have a Red Steagall record album somewhere and if I remember right, it's just beer-drinking shit, nothing great. Prop me up against the jukebox kind of stuff.

You know, I was raised in cowboy country, grew up on a ranch, worked with cowboys, around cowboys and for cowboys the better part of ten years. Two old cowboys named Mutt and Shorty.

I never heard either one of those guys read poetry, wax eloquent about poetry or even know what poetry was. So cowboy poetry for me kind of rings untrue.

I can just not see Mutt sitting around writing or reading poetry about “The Last Roundup” or Old Blue or the family spread.  More believable would be about the town whore, Onybelle that Mutt dallied

with about twice a week for 20 or more years. Onybelle was the ugliest, smelliest, foulest women in The Territory.  Mutt always came back to the ranch smelling of f*(&#! $%^^y.

Or maybe them talking about that rancher’s daughter who was the reason the rancher killed a man in town.

The man drove the school bus and the rancher’s daughter was the last person on the run. Well, guess what? They made a stop for "oil checks" before they got to the ranch house. When the rancher found out the kid was having a tryst with his daughter, he walked up to him on the town square in Portales and said, "I'm going to kill you, you sonofabitch." He pulled out a .45 and shot him dead. Spent five years in the state pen for the deed.

Now, I can imagine Shorty or Mutt talking about that, but not about "great trail rides I have known."

Cowboy poetry is for cityslickers. Or cowboy wannabees. Oh well, it makes good stories, I guess.”

So one evening we were hanging out at C.B.’s house having some refreshing adult libations and shooting the breeze.  We like to do that, the three of us while we listened to Bluegrass music.  Shoot, a few years in the future we got together and produced a weekly bluegrass show that was heard on over a dozen radio stations in three states, but that’s another story.

C.B. was sporting a new hat he’d bought at The Big Store in town.

“You like my new hat?” C.B. asked us.

The hat was green checkered, had a small feather coming out of the hat band and had a short brim.

“Well,” I said.  “It’s kind of a sportin’ man’s hat.”

“Did you buy two of them?” asked Kent very matter-of-factly.

“Two?  Why would I buy two?” asked C.B.

“One to shit in and the other to cover it up with,” said Kent.

Seeing that hat in the car made me remember my old friend.

And I sure miss him.

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APPALACHIAN TALES: OUT MY GRANDMA’S WINDOW

Actual factual pic of the kitchen at my grandma's house, and there's the kitchen window...

By Grant McGee

 

The Lady of the House is enjoying the window in her kitchen.  It’s right over the room’s double sink.  She didn’t have that in our old house but she does now.  She can see people walking down the street, cars going too fast, the squirrels playing in the giant oak across the road or cardinals flitting about in the bushes just under her gaze.

One morning I walked into the kitchen to find The Lady of the House looking out her window.

“I love my kitchen window,” she said.

“My grandma liked her kitchen window too,” I said.

That’s where my grandma would be every morning.  She’d stand at her double sink, cup of coffee in one hand and a piece of peanut butter toast in the other.  She’d dip her toast in her coffee and have a bite while she gazed out her kitchen window to start her day. 

Blue jays were the birds that hung around the bushes outside my grandma’s kitchen window.  She’d see a strange face walk down the street and loudly proclaim, “Now I wonder who THAT is and what they’re doing in this neighborhood.”

One summer morning I walked in the kitchen because I heard her laughing so hard she seemed to be choking.  She was pointing at the window.

“Look,” she said coughing and laughing.

I had a gander out the window to see an itty-bitty boy, he couldn’t have been more than 5 years old, he had his wickerbill out, was doing a kind of jumping dance and was peeing all over the telephone pole across the street in total glee.

Grandma saw a murder while looking out her kitchen window.

It was while I was away at college so I wasn’t there, but she told me all about it.

“I saw Mrs. Johnson kill Mr. Johnson a couple of weeks ago,” she said very matter of factly as she sat in her easy chair, smoke wafting up from her filterless Raleigh cigarette.

I turned and looked at my grandma.

The Johnsons lived two houses down from my grandma.  I didn’t know much about them except they had some little kids, he sold insurance and had an office on one of the town’s main streets and his bride was from South Korea.

I was too young to understand that there was trouble brewing at the Johnson house.  I could remember on some late nights I would hear a woman’s voice in the dark crying, “Help, help.”  It came from the direction of the Johnson house.

No, I didn’t know what kind of problems the Johnson’s had but it all came to a head one early fall morning.

“I was standing at my window like I always do,” said my grandma, “When I heard something like a firecracker.  Then I saw Mr.  Johnson.  He was running from the front of his house, running across the street.  He had a briefcase but he dropped it and put his hands behind his head and was running and then I saw Mrs. Johnson running right behind him.

“I heard another firecracker sound and another and I realized she had a pistol in her hand.  She was chasing Mr. Johnson and was shooting him in the head.

“He made it across the street then fell down.  Then Mrs. Johnson went and stood over him and fired three more shots at him while he laid there.  He was sure-enough dead, and she didn’t have anymore bullets but she stood over him and just pulled that trigger over and over and over again. 

“Then Mr. Stimpson over there across the street came out of his house and slowly walks over to Mrs. Johnson real slow, walks right up to her and puts his hand easy on that hand she was holding the pistol in and takes it from her then she just falls down in a heap on the sidewalk.

“The rescue squad came, the police, it was something, boy.”

My grandma saw it all looking out her kitchen window.

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THE HOTEL CHILD: A SIX PACK FOR THE 5TH GRADERS

By Grant McGee

My dad was a hotel manager.  I always thought he was The World’s Greatest Hotel Manager, but that’s probably because he was my dad.

When I was a kid we used to live in the hotels he managed.  We lived in places like New York City and Buffalo, New York and Honolulu, Hawai’I and Baltimore and my dad’s hometown of Roanoke, Virginia.

The neat thing about living in Roanoke was that was where his parents, my grandparents lived.  The big ol’ hotel he managed was smack dab downtown but my grandparents place was out on the edge of the city near a big, wide-open field that had a great view of the Blue Ridge Mountains that surrounded the city.

Out at my grandparent’s place is where I made all my friends.  There was Catfish and Dick and Lewis and Kevin.  Whenever I was in the neighborhood we always spent our time running through yards playing army and doing stuff boys did in the mid-twentieth century.

From time to time the guys would come visit at my home in the big hotel downtown.  We spent our time swimming in the big pool or running up and down the hotel stairwells playing James Bond because in big buildings you played James Bond and out in suburbia you played army because in the mid-twentieth century we hadn’t heard of urban warfare because the twenty-first century hadn’t come yet and The Vietnam War was on TV and James Bond was in the movies.

After one fun day at the hotel, me and Dick and Lewis and Catfish were at the family apartment watching the black-and-white TV.  My dad was working and my mom was out somewhere.

“Hey,” said Lewis.  “You get room service don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “That’s how we get dinner or lunch unless mom fixes something.”

“Can you order beer?” asked Lewis.

Everyone stopped watching cartoons and turned and looked at me with wide-eyed anticipation.

I sat on the sofa dumbfounded.  I’d never thought of that before.  COULD I order beer from room service?

In all my 11 year old, 5^th grade wisdom I thought, “Why not?”

“Maybe,” I said.  So I picked up the phone and dialed the number for room service.

“Ask for Budweiser,” said Catfish.

“Hello,” I said, lowering my voice so I thought I sounded like my dad, “This is the McGee residence, would you please send up a six-pack of Budweiser?”

“Yes sir,” said the voice on the other end.

“Thank you,” I said in my deep voice.

I hung up.

Lewis jumped up.

“We’re gonna get beer!” he yelled.

“Wow,” said Dick, “That’s so cool, just call and ask for beer and they send it up.”

Minutes later there was a knocking at the door of the apartment.  I opened it up and in walks a waiter holding a tray atop which there is a six-pack of Budweiser glistening in its coldness.

I had gone to my desk and scooped up all my change to give him a tip that probably consisted of 83 cents or something like that.

And he was gone.

And the cold beer remained.

“Wow,” said Catfish, “Beer!”  He was the first to grab one, then Dick, then Lewis.

“Aren’t you gonna have one?” asked Lewis.

“Naw,” I said.  “I don’t like how it tastes.”

“More for us,” said Dick.

So there we were hanging around on a Saturday morning at the big hotel downtown drinking beer and watching “The Jetsons” on the black and white TV.

When someone came in the front door.

“What are you boys doing?” A voice called through the apartment.

It was my mom.

Everyone scrambled to hide their beers.

I stuck the remaining cold ones out the window on a ledge. 

Mom came in the living room and surveyed all of us watching TV.

“You know,” she said, “I just know you four have been up to something but I don’t know what it is.”

I just smiled at mom and said, “Watching TV and drinking beer.”

Catfish turned to me with wide eyes.

“Ha ha, very funny, young man,” said mom as she went into the kitchen.

The rest of the morning passed and soon all the guys were on their way back home around lunch time.

Somewhere later in the afternoon while I was in my room playing with my train set my mom walked in.

“I have some questions for you, young man,” she said.

I turned and looked up at her.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Why is there beer in the kitty litter box?”

“There’s beer in the kitty litter box?”

We had a cat named Tiger, an indoor cat.

“I couldn’t figure out why he was walking through the apartment howling,” said mom.  “So I went to his kitty litter box and all of his litter is wet, and smells like beer.”

I sat there for a moment.

“Um,” I said, “I ordered some beer from room service and we drank it and when we heard you come in everyone was supposed to hide what they had and I guess someone poured theirs in Tiger’s box.”

Mom stood there for a minute.

“We just won’t tell your father,” said Mom.  With that she turned and left me alone with my train set.

“There’s three more cans out the living room window on the ledge,” I called out.

                                                                

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