SMOKING CRACK AND HAVING YOUR TOILET GET BUSTED

Hey y’all. Gimme a second to catch my breath…. I just come back from the Home Despot. I had to run up there and buy a new toilet. And then I had to drag it into the trailer all by myself. Momma wouldn’t help me none, says she too old and week to be draggin’ around no toilet….. Well, what are we talkin’ about today… oh yeah, the Sheriff. To tell ya the truth, I ain’t got much use for them fellas, no how. Not since they drug my daddy off to the workhouse back in 19 and…. Hold on… I gotta ask momma when that was…. 51. It was 19 and 51 they sent him to prison cuzza that still explosion…. Y’all remember that. Blew up the garage, sent flamin’ moonshine everywhere… burnt down our house and the neighbor’s house and then the grass fire got over near the propane tank the diner uses, and well that went up and blew out the wall of the diner and the 400 frozen muskrats that was in the freezer waitin’ for the annual muskrat dinner thawed real fast…..made a terrible stink in the middle of town for a few days…so the upshot of it all was that everybody in town was real mad at daddy, bein’ as he had the only still in town, and folks knew the 58th annual muskrat dinner was a goner. So daddy lit out for down below and hid for a couple days, but by and by the sheriff found him down were we live now and carried him on up to Princess Anne to stand trial. And he was convicted. But momma says it weren’t a fair trial ‘cause everyone on the jury lived in our town, and like I say, pretty much everyone was mad at him about not havin’ no ‘shine and no muskrat dinner that winter. Momma says they was able to get a few muskrats caught for the dinner, but it weren’t no where near enough, and they had to supplement with ‘possum and coon… and it wasn’t the same.
And when daddy came home from the workhouse, he wasn’t really the same neither. He stayed a around for a little bit and after while he moved on down to Northampton County and we lost track of him for a long time, until two years ago when they sent word to his family that he died… He’s buried in the Baptist Cemetery down there…. Anyway, that’s why I ain’t got no use for the sheriff or any other of them po-lice….Now I know Chuck Martin… I sell him some hardwood lumber once in while. He’s a pretty fair woodworker. … But I don’t know nothin’ about that Haslam fella. I think he’s probably one of them foreigners from the other side of the bay, and ya can’t trust them.
Well, I gotta get to work fixin’ this toilet before momma comes back. She says she ain’t hangin’ her butt off’n no board out back of the trailer while me and Alvin—you remember Alvin, he’s my older brother – scrap over who payin’ for the new toilet. … I think he should pay for it since he shot it. But him and momma think I should because I got him so riled up. … But I was just havin’ some fun with him.
See, he was too drunk to drive all the way home last night and he had to stop here because he run his truck into a ditch and we couldn’t pull it out ‘til today. So this morning, I was watchin’ the TV and Alvin was sleepin’ on the sofa. Now, you know Alvin’s a big boy and sometimes his pants don’t fit him just right… so I’m lookin’ at the TV and Momma wakes up and wants her beer, but it weren’t in the icebox. She thought I took it and cusses me. Well, I didn’t take and told her that. Then she looks over at Alvin sleeping on the sofa with most of his hairy butt hangin’ out of his pants. She gets this look on her face like she’s just tasted some turtle meat gone past its prime. She points at him and says “say no to crack.” That just tickled us both and we started laughin, but tryin’ to keep quiet ‘cause we didn’t want to wake up Alvin… He can be right cranky when he’s woke up from a drunk sleep. And I asked Momma if she ever tried any of that crack stuff and she said she didn’t rightly know but that one time after the war, Daddy took her to this roadhouse to hear some colored man singin’ blues music, and two women gave her some cocaine to sniff. But she said she didn’t recall that it really did anything to her. She asked me if I ever done any of that and I told her I hadn’t but wondered what it was like. She laughed and waved toward Alvin’s butt, “Ya wanna try smoking crack, there it is, boy. Go to it.”
Well, I don’t know what come over me, but I tore a piece of newspaper off, rolled it up like a rat tail and eased into the crack of Alvin’s butt. Then I lit it. At first, it burned real slow and I thought it was gonna go out. But then it started goin’ and Momma backed into the kitchen. After it smoldered for a little bit, it caught and then we saw the hair on Alvin’s lower back go up real fast, kinda like gunpowder. And before ya knowed it, his butt hair went too. . That‘s when Alvin woke up and commenced to jumpin’ around and gruntin’ like a bronco. All’s I remember after that was Momma in the kitchen laughin’ so hard she couldn’t hardly get no breath, and Alvin bein’ real mad. He punched me on the eye and I fell backwards into the TV, and it fell over. I tried to explain to Alvin we was just havin’ some fun, but he was real mad, like I said, and grabbed up the 20-guage that was leanin’ against the wall next to the sofa. and let go a shot that went through the wall and hit the toilet. Well, it broke and spilled water everywhere. And after Alvin come to his senses and sees he wasn’t hurt none, we all go into an argument about who should clean up the mess and buy a new toilet. It was two against one and I lost. Momma made me spend all the money I was savin’ up to get a new tattoo on a toilet instead. But later on, she felt sorry for me and said she’s give me the money for my tattoo, because she thinks I learned my lesson about not smokin’ crack.