“I could be a standup comic provided I had a bunch of
hecklers in the audience every night to feed me material and for me to make fun
of,” J W told me and my friend Jimmy Stevens. “I’d be better’n that Leno guy.”
Jumbo, as Jimmy liked to be called, had lived in Florida for
20 years. He was Canadian, but had had no problem adopting the Florida cracker
attitude about gun control—no control in other words. Although,
cracker is derogatory in much of the country, for Jumbo and in most of rural
Florida, it was a source of pride. J W was from South Carolina. He was a real estate
developer. Jumbo had a construction company called Big Sky Construction.
Mostly, he did remodels.
“You know. I always wanted to be that guy; you know; that guy
dressed like a bad clown that sits on the bench in a dunk tank on the midway at
fairs and calls all the people walking by names so they’ll want to buy three
throws with a baseball. You know, he makes ‘m mad, and they spend five bucks to
try to hit the target and dunk his ass in the water—you know, that guy. I could
do that job standing on my head.”
We were sitting at Jumbo’s kitchen table. I had a bottle of ice
cold Budweiser sweating and making a puddle on the table in front of me, and Jumbo
had a big glass of iced sweet tea with a big sprig of mint sticking out and
hanging over the side. J W had a beer like me. Jumbo had a raggedy towel laid
out on the table and had all the parts of his favorite pistol spread out on it.
The smell of gun oil was heavy in the air.
“Standing on your head in a dunk tank and screaming names at
people would be a perfect job for you.” J W said.
“Hey, fatty, put that turkey leg you’re gnawing on down.” Jumbo
laughed. “You know, I could win a prize for being the rudest, most obnoxious
guy ever to sit in a dunk tank and get baseballs thrown at him. I would love
that job. I would be better than the guy at the State Fair last year who got
fired and his dunk tank shut down there was so many complaints about how rude
he was. I’d be better than him—a lot better.”
“You’d be real good at it for sure,” I said. My wife would
have said no woman would chose to set down her tray of food at the table with
us because of the ‘Ewww’ factor. She told me to look up it up if I wanted to
know what she meant. It meant to excite nausea or loathing in; sicken. To offend the
taste or moral sense of; repel. Disgusting, Profound aversion or repugnance excited by something
offensive. Us, in other words.
“Ewww,” I said to Jumbo. We all laughed. Jumbo thought I’d used
the pronoun you.
“Hey, double ugly. Yeah, yewww. Where’d you get that stupid
hat and your ugly wife?” Jumbo laughed. “All day long I could antagonize the
poor losers and their used up wives and slow kids. It would be a lot of fun. You
know, I bet I’d make a fortune.”
“Yeah, you’d be perfect, but it might not turn out to be as
much fun as you think it would,” J W said. “You’d sure be irritating though. Plenty
of people would spend money on baseballs to dunk your ass. I bet your skinny
ass would be wet from the time you opened up until the midway shut down for the
night.”
“Only problem is there’s a lot of people in the world don’t
know how to take a joke,” Jumbo said. “Especially fat women, or even skinny
ones, but I bet their fat, dumb ass husbands would want to throw baseballs and
dunk me.”
“Here in Florida and in South Carolina where I’m from, they
might decide to throw something else,” J W said. “Probably in Minnesota too.”
“I just might have to defend myself,” Jumbo grinned. He had
his pistol back together, he spun the cylinder, and sited down the barrel out
the window toward a bunch of turkey buzzards roosting in a tree in his back
yard.
“KaPow!” He laughed and took a big slug of his iced tea.
J W formed a pistol with his hand and sighted down his
forefinger out the window at the birds.
“Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!” He said. His imaginary pistol kicked
up each time he picked off one of the Buzzards. “A man has an obligation to
defend himself.”
“Ewww,” I laughed and drank down a third of my beer.
