God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (4 page)

4

My Hors Are Moning

 
I
t may be true—and we certainly believe that it is—that everything in the world happens or does not happen as a result of blow jobs, given or withheld. But there is something else at work here, too, at the very core of it all—an unseen but nonetheless irresistible force of nature that controls virtually everything, at least on this planet, and thanks to NASA, somewhat beyond. I am speaking of hormones. Hormones—specifically
our
s—
are the boss of everything. Somebody somewhere gets pissed off and launches something that incinerates somebody else somewhere else, but why is he being such a butthead? Because he didn’t get the blow job he felt entitled to, or worse, because somebody else got the blow job he felt he was entitled to. But why did he not get his rightful blow job? My bet is on hormones.

We all like to think that all our actions and reactions are totally rational and appropriate to each and every situation. In fact, we bear hot resentment toward any male-type who presumes to diagnose our slight hormonal trough or surge. And if we do happen to be in a hormone-induced state, nothing makes us madder than to have a man suggest it. We can say that about ourselves if we feel like it, but woe be unto the man who tries to blame our reaction to his bad behavior on a little estrogen, plus or minus. The words “towering rage” were first used to describe just such a situation, I believe. My daddy’s favorite Biblical threat toward one’s enemies was “Let us cut off his head and make of his house a dunghill.” Sounds good to me, and after all, it is in the Bible.

Witness these hormonal events: A woman, who shall remain nameless, calls her sister and makes the report that, not only does she not love her husband, she no longer even likes him. “Yesterday I was looking out the window and he was walking across the yard, when all of a sudden—he fell in a hole! One second he was there, the next he just dropped out of sight! I started laughing and I could not stop!” She laughed so hard, she fell down and just lay there, in a heap, cackling and whooping till the tears ran down her face and she had big black puddles of melted mascara all over her cheeks. Presently she heaved herself up by the window ledge and peered out. By this time, he was dragging himself out of the hole and she realized he had hurt himself in some manner. “I started laughing all over again! I never laughed so hard in all my life. I thought to myself, ‘Just stay in that hole, you old fart!’ and I laughed some more!” Eventually she calmed herself down, and he managed to haul his carcass in from the yard. She glanced up as he entered, and he said to her, “You will never believe what just happened to me.” She, with a completely straight face, replied, “Oh? What was that?” Read on.

Wannabe Gayle Christopher and her former husband (not John, who is perfect—that other one she ran off) were tussling around, play-fighting, and he accidentally hurt her. She advised him of this and he had the nerve to laugh at her and tease her, calling her a “whiney baby.” Gayle looked at him through eyelids squinted in menacing rage and spoke through clenched teeth (never a good omen), saying, “I will get you back, you sumbitch.” And he actually laughed at her again! Talk about asking for it. “So,” she tells me in only slightly suppressed glee, “I waited till he went to sleep and I got one of his mother’s big old heavy silver spoons, and you know how you would pull a spoon back to flip something off of it? I pulled that sucker back as hard as I could and I popped him with it right between the eyes! He thought he’d been shot!” Miss Gayle was on the floor by the bed, laughing, fit to kill.

These were local events. From the wire services, we see a national trend. A seventy-year-old man was beaten to death with a shoe—by a woman—as he lay on the sofa. I called one of the Queens, Tammy, and inquired whether or not she was a suspect in the “Fatal Shoe Beating,” since I knew she’d been enjoying very little domestic bliss lately. We agreed that you’d have to be pretty pissed off at somebody to beat them to death with a shoe. The wire service did not give us nearly all the details we craved: like what kind of shoe was it and how many times did she whack him with it? We figured it must have occurred in some strict-gun-control state. Poor woman couldn’t get a handgun and had to use footwear to finish him off. Just points to the never-failing resourcefulness of women, though, not to mention their long-suffering natures. I mean, how many times do you reckon she had told him to get up off that couch? I’m quite certain she was just pushed beyond human limitations of tolerance and had no choice. That will no doubt be her defense. The hormone defense probably doesn’t stand up in court. And you know she hated to ruin that shoe, too, bless her heart.

“Bless her/his heart” is a remarkable Southern device that enables us to say the very worst things possible about another human being while, at the same time, distancing ourselves from the meanness and leaving the hearer with a final note of our own sweetness. Another example: He is just a worthless, deadbeat, lying, cheating sack’o’shit, and he’s going bald, too, bless his heart. Heart-blessing has another very useful function, according to exhaustive, not to mention exhausting, research conducted by our buddy Jeanne Adams. Jeanne swears it can be used as a universal response to anything a guy is whining about in which you are totally disinterested—if you are, in fact, even listening to him whine about it. Whenever he pauses for your sympathetic response, just lean in toward him, pat his arm a little bit, sort of frown in a concerned way, and say, “Bless your heart,” and like magic, it’s all better. Jeanne claims a 100 percent success rate with this technique, and we recommend it to you without question.

Men are not the only species to be endangered by our hormones; sometimes the tricky buggers can make us turn on our own kind. Two women were in line at the express checkout register at the grocery store. The second-in-line noticed that the first-in-line had more than fifteen items! And so she did the only thing she could do, what we’ve all been dying to do but were either just too chickenshit or our hormones were in balance that day. After getting her own fewer-than-fifteen items checked out, she followed the cheater out into the parking lot—and cut off her nose!

Ah, hormones. We think these brief histories—which, by the way, are surely portents of things to come as the Boomers reach menopause en masse—provide some pretty compelling evidence supporting the theory that our hormones rule world events. But it doesn’t stop with the events alone. The underlying implications are far more ominous. If you are a man reading this, you are probably standing there, perhaps scratching some body part, looking perplexed. If, on the other hand, you are a woman reading this, and laughing so hard you have to sit down, then every other woman in the place is demanding to know just what is so damned funny. See, it’s not only that women are doing these unbelievable things in the first place—although that is strange enough—but our reactions to this, this carnage, have all been the same—uncontrollable laughing. Guffawing. Moosing. Snorting. Shrieking. Hee-hawing. At the pain and misfortune of others.

Committing these atrocities is not ladylike. Laughing at these atrocities is unconscionable for women. Ladies, I hate to tell you this, but here’s what happens when our hormones get out of whack: We turn into guys. Our actions and reactions are no longer those of the kindler, gentler sex. I can see what’s coming now—it will be all over the news—multiple deaths on college campuses from
sorority
hazings, and the pinning ceremonies will reveal the Big Sisters jamming the actual pins into the actual breasts of the young pledges, laughing drunkenly as the blood and tears flow freely.

Ronnie Bagwell is a compounding pharmacist in Jackson who doesn’t just fill prescriptions; he actually makes magic potions—custom-blended hormones—for practically every woman I know. He has devoted so much of his young life to our hormones that we (or more precisely, I) have dubbed him the Hormone King. Half the people who go to him now don’t even remember his real name—he has become the Hormone King. He knows everything there is to know, so far, about our hormones, and we love him for this because, otherwise, I am quite sure that a whole bunch of us would be in the penitentiary by now, and countless newspaper headlines would begin with the words, “Among the injured were . . .”

Ronnie’s got some great hormone war stories, too. One woman came to him after her hysterectomy and told him she was going to try his hormone concoction, and it was her second-to-last choice. He naturally wanted to know what the last choice was. Her answer: a divorce attorney. At least it wasn’t the gun show. Ronnie says a bunch of his patients come in with their husbands. Can you even imagine such a thing? Ronnie says this is always fun because the woman will say that her symptoms are under control, while the husband says everything is as bad as it can possibly be. Luckily, Ronnie is also well-trained in first aid.

I despise chain letters, and the advent of e-mail has greatly increased the number of them circulating, I am sorry to say. However, I did get one I found highly entertaining. It instructed the recipient to send the letter to five other women and then to sack up your husband and send him to the woman whose name was at the top of the list and add your name to the bottom. By the time your name moved up to the top, you would have received 15,625 men, and one of them was bound to be better than the one you already have. It said that one woman (supposedly known to the sender) had already received 184 men, four of whom were worth keeping. Another success story cited: “An unmarried Jewish woman living with her widowed mother was able to choose between an orthodontist and a successful gynecologist—you can be lucky, too!” The admonition about dire consequences to chain-breakers was not the usual death-and-poverty prediction; the threat was that you might get your own husband back again.

I am telling you for true, if the estrogen supply ever dries up, it’s going to be a tight fight with a short stick. Armageddon? HA! We’ll see your Armageddon and raise you twenty!

5

A Pot to Priss In

 
T
here may be a certain degree of prissiness associated with being a Queen. I heard from a cutie pie in Tampa who said at the first sign of a chill in the air, she had worn her full-length mink coat to a Buccaneers game and everybody acted as if she was “Miss Priss Pot.” I loved that. I hadn’t heard “Miss Priss Pot” in probably forty years. It had been a favorite childhood taunt, before anybody learned to say “Miss Bitchcuntwhorefromhell,” which definitely has a ring to it, but we are not as likely to wax nostalgic over it down the road. We certainly don’t see this prissiness as a character flaw, at least as it applies to us. Our brand of prissy bespeaks a healthy sense of self-indulgence and is always accompanied by a sense of humor and a sense of compassion for those who, through no fault of their own, are not us. Lord knows, they would be if they could (just as we all know that every woman in that Tampa Bay stadium would have been wearing a full-length mink coat if she had one), and that alone is enough to melt our hearts toward them.

But anyway, about this prissy business—we just think that, as with most everything, there is a way to do it and also a way to completely screw it up. For instance, a former Queen, Tammy, moved far away and commenced having babies. At first she would make the trip back here for parade day, but it became unmanageable, so she abdicated. We didn’t mind too much, because she was so much better looking than the rest of us. It was kind of a relief, took the pressure off somewhat, if you know what I mean. Before moving away, she had worked and slaved and generally endured hardships and deprivation—even having to do her own nails sometimes—while her husband was in medical school. However, once he got out and launched himself into doctoring full time for full money, she sat down and hasn’t gotten up since except to do her makeup and such. Which is, of course, as it should be. Even we had to laugh, though, when she moved into her new house, which is on an island in a river and has a pool and every possible amenity befitting a Queen. We were teasing her about the magnificence of her new digs. Her response, by way of just putting it all in perspective for us lesser mortals and trying to make us feel better about our own comparatively sorry lots in life, was this: “Oh, no, y’all just don’t know. When I’m lying out by the pool and those planes fly over, shoot, I can’t sleep!”

One time, one of the regular good-looking Tammys and I went to a party where there were a whole pack of models. We took one look at them and immediately gravitated toward each other and into the next room, where there were only regular good-looking women like ourselves. The truth is that, up close and in person, they weren’t any better looking than we were. They had some very odd makeup techniques going, and we needed to discuss them and suppress our resulting guffaws. Some had those brown stripes painted down either side of their noses—you know, how the magazine articles always tell you to do, to camouflage your big nose? Well, it may look fine in a photo, but somebody needs to tell these women not to go out on the street wearing that stuff on their noses: They look like badgers.

What really set us off, though, was their lipstick. How many of you out there still think it goes on your mouth? No wonder you ain’t in the movies. Yeah, us too. Anyway, we were just mesmerized by their mouths. See, we were from the old school, like you, where you put lipstick on your mouth the same way you color in a coloring book: You make every effort to stay inside the lines. Imagine our chagrin to learn that in model world anything on your face from underneath your nose to your chin is considered to be mouth and is eligible to have lipstick applied to it. Liberally. If your lips are on the thin side—hey! no problem—just take a lip pencil and draw on some new lips, any shape and size that suits your fancy, and paint them in with gobs of lipstick. It looks hilarious when they talk because only the genuine lip parts actually move: The dummy lips just sit there, gleaming but not moving. We could hardly take our eyes off of them, but then we had to leave the room so we could laugh. And redo our own lipstick, naturally. Then we were really laughing, but at least we looked like we fit in, and did we not!

Sometimes prissy goes bad on you. Overheard at a restaurant, albeit not a fine one: Middle-sized child had been talking, and overbearing grandmother had been interrupting regularly, with manners instructions and other things not at all pertinent to the child’s subject of conversation. Granny clearly wasn’t listening to him at all, so focused on her own nagging she was, until two words left his mouth upon which she pounced—if a fat old lady with a dour disposition can be said to pounce or even envisioned pouncing—like a swift duck on a dawdling June bug. “Willie Steve”—we do love double names down here—“how many times do I have to tell you, there ain’t no such words as
maters
and
taters!
It is toe-maters and poe-taters! You just sound like such a ignerint hick sometimes, I swannee.” Yes, doesn’t he, though? For those of you who are not blessed with Southern birth, there is a faction of folk down here who are so adamant against any word that might possibly be construed as cursing that they won’t even say “I swear.” This is, after all, the much-touted Bible Belt. But, as we all know, occasions arise all day every day that make it not only highly desirable to cuss but indeed next to impossible not to, and so they have come up with substitutes, fake cussin’s, like this one, “I swannee.” We have also heard “shoot a monkey,” “goldang it,” “fudge,” and, of course, “heckfire.” Somehow, I think, if God does really have an opinion on all this (and if He does, I think He’s just not got His priorities straight), He would care more about the spirit behind the words than the actual words themselves, and I just bet He knows the difference. But I have heard some of these folks so riled up that—shoot a monkey!—if they had the power to consign me to eternal heckfire, goldang it, they would, I swannee.

Our main most Spud Stud, Malcolm White, founder of Mal’s St. Paddy’s Parade, has been struck down once again with a genius idea. You will kick yourself when you hear it—how could none of us have thought of it before? Well, he’s thought of it, and you can take advantage of it. You can buy, thanks to Malcolm, an actual Bible Belt suitable for wearing to church or honky-tonks or anywhere else! Go to
www.biblebelts.net
and goon these things. You’ve just
got
to have one, I swannee.

One of the Queens, Tammy, said she knew a sour old prissy woman once who loved to preach table manners to everybody else in the world. One of her favorite maxims was “Mah grandmutha on my mutha’s si-i-i-ide always to-o-o-old me-e-e that wun shud nevah eet anything in its enti-i-i-irety.” How silly is that? What is the point of deliberately leaving something on your plate—even if you are starving slap to death and want to eat the painted flowers off the dish—to be polite? If you are not hungry, fine. If the food is rotten and you simply can’t choke down another bite of it, fine. But for appearance’s sake? Tammy had been to a hoity-toity fashion show where this woman had been the commentator. The remark that sent Tammy flying from the room was uttered to describe what we used to call a “housedress,” which we all thought had mercifully evolved out of existence: “This is just the thing to pop on when your yard man comes to the door.” But to get the full effect, you should hear it said like this: “Thiiis is juuuuust th’ thiiiing to pawp ah-own whin yoah yaaaaaahd ma-un cuuums to th’ do-ah.”

This same woman was known for planting cookies behind doors to see if the maids were on their toes. When I heard this initially, I took it to mean she was hiding the cookies to keep the maids from eating them—a greedy, stingy sort of act. But no, she was hiding just a single cookie to see if the maids were doing their job properly, checking every nook and cranny for possible dirt. Of course, what she didn’t know is the maids told everybody in town she was crazy and did weird stuff with food. They were always finding cookies stashed in strange places and they didn’t dare move them, thinking the woman must be going back later to hide behind the door and furtively eat cookies, careful to pick up and consume every crumb off the floor. And, of course, everybody believes the maids. Tee-hee.

I am certain I would be utterly devoted to anybody who came in and did anything around the house for me. I would want to be their best friend, and they surely would be mine. I don’t have a lot of experience in the area of domestic assistance or assistants, but I have witnessed some wonderful relationships in the homes of others. A good friend of Tammy’s lives in the Mississippi Delta. Tammy got Betty talking one day on the subject of child care, and Betty told the story of how she was raised by a murderess. It seems that Betty’s mother, Miss Idelle, had had in her employ one Miss Eddie Lee for as long as anybody could remember. One day, in a less-than-blissful moment of domesticity in Eddie Lee’s own home, well, Eddie Lee’s boyfriend somehow ended up dead, and Eddie Lee ended up in Parchman Penitentiary.

This was a tragedy for Eddie Lee, of course, who was actually incarcerated, but imagine the despair, too, of Miss Idelle—that big house and all those children and no Eddie Lee to actually take care of everything. Now, Miss Idelle was no one to trifle with, and she took it just as long as she could. Then she just got in her car and drove up to Parchman, marched herself right in there, and demanded that they give her Eddie Lee. “You turn her loose right now, you hear me? Eddie Lee didn’t mean to kill that man; she just wanted to give him a good whop upside the head, and Lord knows, he needed it! She never even saw that nail in the two-by-four! It was a pure acci-dent! You give her to me right now!” And they did. That was a long time ago, and she was in a family full of judges and assorted politicians, and it
was
the Mississippi Delta, where things are, they say, different. But that’s how Betty ended up being raised by a murderess—and she turned out just fine, thank you very much.

Yes, compassion exists even among the prissy. One of my favorite examples of this happened for years in the little town of Canton, Mississippi, which is about twenty miles north of my home in Jackson. There was an old woman who lived out from town in a run-down house without electricity. This didn’t seem to bother her; she managed to cook and to keep herself and her multitude of cats warm with the fireplace. She had access to utilities but chose not to avail herself of them, never missing them until she got a certain present. See, she was reputed to have the ability to charm warts off and perform other small, handy spells, and from time to time, the townspeople paid her visits. One time, in return for her service, somebody made her a gift of a very fine electric skillet, which she was quite taken with but could not use. It seemed like a great deal of trouble to get electricity and change the way she’d always lived just so she could use that very fine skillet. But, dang it, the thing was worthless without the juice.

She was undaunted by this little detail, however. Soon a regular occurrence in the best neighborhoods in town was this: Mrs. Jones is in her kitchen making breakfast. Mr. Jones is sitting at the table in the breakfast room, reading the paper, waiting to be fed. He smells the heavenly scent of frying pork products but doesn’t see any. He does see an old woman in his garage, however, and asks Mrs. Jones who that might be. She replies without even looking up, “Oh, that’s just the Cat Woman; she’s cooking her bacon.” Every day or so, whenever she woke up feeling like a little bacon and eggs, the Cat Woman would simply walk into town, carrying her very fine skillet and a basket of food, pop into any one of the garages on the prissiest street in town, plug in, and happily fire up that very fine skillet. It became an accepted morning ritual in the neighborhood, and folks would get their feelings hurt if she didn’t get around to their house in a timely fashion. I don’t know, but I think this kind of thing may not happen anywhere but small Southern towns in the homes of those “prissy” Southern women I am so proud to know.