I used to know a girl, and it was a hubba hubba and ding dang ding. I said “Baby, you got everything.” A week later, it was a hubba hubba and ding ding dong; baby, it sure didn’t last too long.
From Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits
I won’t linger on the internet romance I told you about last week. Tom Waits covered it pretty well in the epigraph above.
It went about like I expected it would, to be honest, beginning with pubescent exhilaration and ending with senescent resignation and a text. Not from her. The text was a reminder to get my prescriptions filled at Publix.
I guess I was always meant to be a solo act like Evel Knievel. So, go ahead and heap all your gloom, despair, and agony upon me.
You can all take out your tiny violins as I wallow in self-pity.
Observe as I dress in black and shades of grey.
I shall not smile, nor will I laugh.
The sun shall find no ingress to my world. Charcoal drapes will cover the windows in my home, and the windows in my car will be coated in window tint so opaque that I will surely get pulled over if I drive on the interstate in Greene County.
Cry me a river, right!
Complain, complain, complain.
Just the other day, my son was complaining because we didn’t have any hot dog buns.
“Use a piece of loaf bread,” I suggested, pointing at a plastic bag containing some of that five-grain Italian bread Publix sells. “Wrap a slice around the weeny and some onions, add a squirt of mustard, and you’re all set.”
To my son, this was an act of self-abasement so extreme it would reduce him to the level of the Dalits, the so-called Untouchables, who were completely excluded from India’s Hindu caste system and regarded as only fit for scavenging and waste disposal.
Now, I’ve scavenged for food once or twice, and I once had a job that required me to push a dumpster out to the street in front of the hotel where I worked, but I never felt excluded from the caste system southerners recognize. I just lived at the bottom of it.
My mother used loaf bread all the time in place of hot dog buns when I was a child, and these were hot dogs made primarily from the meat of decomposing skunks, warthogs, and such like.
Talk about processed meat! You might occasionally find a porcupine quill or some rat teeth in a hot dog in those days, or so I tell my son.
Which brings to mind a film I saw at the drive-in with my father called “Prime Cut.”
The movie involves a Kansas City slaughterhouse run by a ruthless character named Mary Ann – played by Gene Hackman – and the mob enforcer (Lee Marvin) sent to straighten him out. During the course of the film, one character is shoved into a meat grinder and turned into a package of hot dogs. His name was Murphy, and I still think of Murphy whenever I eat a hot dog.
At other times, my mother made more meager meals.
I remember her sliding a plate in front of me with nothing on it but a slice of toasted bread with Brunswick stew poured over it.
If I complained, I got a lecture about the Donner-Reed party and the 40 pioneers who starved while on their way to either the Oregon Territory or California. People head in the other direction now because Oregon and California are now full of homeless, starving people.
I can’t help but wonder if the actress Donna Reed, who played Mary in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” knew about the Donner-Reed party disaster when MGM changed her name from Donna Belle Mullenger during World War II because of anti-German sentiment at the time.
“A studio publicist hung that name on me, and I never did like it,” Reed once said, according to her Wikipedia page. “I hear ‘Donna Reed’ and I think of a tall, chic, austere blonde that isn’t me. ‘Donna Reed’ – it has a cold forbidding sound.”
Later she played Donna Stone in the Donna Reed Show.
While I would have no objection to a tall, chic, austere blonde, I don’t suppose there will be a Donna in my future.
Selah.