He Did Get Around

                                     He Did Get Around

                                       By Bob White

Not sure there is ever anything funny about going to a funeral, but seeing as how it’s old Burby’s funeral, might change all that. This thought keeps poking at my brain like a rubber-nosed woodpecker in the petrified forest as I”m driving into the old town in what old Burby would call “a damn half lectric Tye Oter” and say “they killed all doze people at Pearl Harbor and…here we are giving back all deez jobs and money” and then he’d shake his big ol balloon head and say “damn Chop Suey Heads.” The man was a piece of work, a WWll veteran of the Pacific, a funny guy, and a good friend to my dad, and my Pop Pop’s very dearest and closest friend.

And ain’t it a hoot, that even at Ol Burby’s funeral, Pop Pop is still a bit  legendary in this little town.  People are remembering and joking about him still. I mean part of the reason I moved away young was so I didn’t have to be as funny as Pop Pop. Wasn’t gonna happen, between the stuff he did and the stories of things he allegedly did made him a serious hard act to follow in a small town like this. I’d say Pop Pop a was a long, tall, potato white, pencil shaped, kind of buck toothed, bald man of not great looks, but he always bragged of winning second place in a beauty contest playing Monopoly . But Pop Pop was happy, how he put it, happier than a hummingbird on vacation in a butterfly garden and he wanted everyone else to be happy too. He often said I was very lucky I looked like Mama. He told me the craziness and antics were how he kept his Faith. But we all thought he kept people laughing to hide his drinking.  

Wow, a cop behind me or I would really like to kind of scrunch up in the seat and scratch this mosquito bite all up in butt crack. Those little bastards always bite where it’s freaking hard to scratch. Flipping bird just shit on my windshield; got to be Ol Burby, he would laugh at bird shit on a car and say “good thing dogs don’t fly.”

Crazy stuff from the car radio guy talking about discovery of an existing parallel universe where everything happens in complete reverse and I’m seeing me sitting on my porch with a buzz like higher than ice prices in a disaster area, and a chicken walks by and turns into an egg I’d be like wow this is too cool.

Laughing and thinking about it like hmm, am I paying for this research? I mean we could really research this universe a little. Like I was just sitting in a burger joint parking lot and saw a fight between a “work for food”sigm guy and some dude trying to give him a sack of food instead of money. I guess while the chickens turn into eggs, homeless and desperate people blow up from over eating and I’m like screw research but I love research, so I’m turning off the radio.

Thinking how I used to love to read but it’s like for a while everything I read about was bad for you. Articles I read here and there, the more things there were that were bad for you, butter, alcohol, eggs, salt, milk, having pets, not having pets, too much of this , too little of that, freaking everything except oatmeal and black pepper. And I gave up oatmeal because the Oat Man looked like Barbara Bush. But it was scary, so, I gave up reading. Now I’m gonna give up radio, well maybe not. Folks always told me I had the perfect face for radio, so I guess I better stay in tune.

But yeah, a hard act to follow, Dad drank himself to death trying to be the sequel to the legend. Dad would drink kind of like any beer he encountered as thirstily as most beer drinkers would their first one, on a hot ass day after work. His favorite tee shirt depicted a happy looking sort labeled “Instant Asshole, just add alcohol.” And his go to line was that he refused to drink unless he was with somebody or by himself, but it took him away young,

But pondering over all these Louie tales that created and kept Pop Pop the legend he was, I would be remiss to not share my favorite and this one came right from the source, the mouth of the horse.

It was around the time of the Great Depression Pop Pop and some old guy , they called Lunch, he hustled with, were driving up to Philly and buying apples every couple of weeks and coming back down here and selling the all over the county to all the little stores. Man there was no Wally Mart but if they threw you out of a plane anywhere, in the entire chicken manure stained county, you could walk or crawl to a little store. Well it seems as though one week, when they got back from Philly someone had out hustled them, beat them home from Philly, and beat them to every one of them little stores. So Pop Pop said they was right bummed out, and his hustling partner that day was whining and told Pop Pop; here’s a little e bit of change go in that store and get us some sharp cheese and ginger snaps. Well, when Louie came out of the store he was just a laughing. He got into Lunch’s truck with a bag of apples, no cheese, no cookies, and gave Lunch back his coins. Lunch snapped at him and called him crazy, Louie told him “If somebody don’t start buying apples, we’ll never get rid of the dang things.”

Now the other parts of the legend are sort of alleged, unconfirmed, changed over time, repeated by many people, and some anecdotes were kind of like, I sure hope they are not true, I laugh to myself.

One time he worked behind the bar at a small l lounge luncheonette, grill, freaking dive really, known as Mr SEAS. Old Man Caruthers that owned it said he was coming up short in the till and suspected Louie of taking money and it got ugly. So when Caruthers confronted him and said he had been coming up short in the till about sixty bucks every week and that he thought Lou was taking it. Louie told Caruthers. “You’re not short in your till. When I started you said you’d give me sixty dollars a week and I said okay, and I’ll take sixty dollars a week and we shook hands. So your till is not off a bit.” But legend also has it that was Pop Pops last day as a bar keeper for Mr. Caruthers.

But you know with a guy like my Pop Pop who just lived to enjoy life and have fun, no matter who paid, sometimes it is hard to tell the big lies from the little lies and sure as crap cant be sure about the truth. But most folks loved him just like Ol Burby did, so he couldn’t have been so bad.

So when folks would talk to me about the stories and which ones were true and asked things like “ Did your PopPop really do that, I would like shake my head, chuckle and think of Dad drinking like that trying to emulate old Pop Pop.

Then I laugh and think about that one thing he really didn’t do because he always said having me as a grandson was his greatest feat. But and gladly he never knew, some years back, Mama told me about a really intense affair she had for several years with an older man. It was pretty serious but he was a lot older and that man was my real father. She told me she said, in case I needed to know for like medical reasons, like for some of the research crap you read about or hear about on the radio. Or maybe so I wouldn’t drink myself to death trying fill the voids in the legend Dad couldn’t prove. But that man she said was my father.

Ol Burby did get around.

The End