Yet another razor hooey story.....

[Ray]

The Movement.....

There once was a man of the bantu race who suddenly grabbed his head in both his hands and swooned and fell into the communal cooking fire of his neighborhood in the greater tribal village. If he were alive today and a victim of western medicine then he would most certainly would be diagnosed an epileptic, and.....as they say, "we have a pill for that !" But they took him, writhing with intense, throbbing migraine pain to the local witchdoctor who diagnosed him with an evil spirit.

A tribal palaver was convened and two factions evolved. One opinion said that he must be dealt with according to the tradition that held that the infirm or afflicted or insane must be eliminated. Taken into the bush without the camp and run through with with an assegai or ferried over to the middle island burial ground and eyes put-out and left at the mercy of exposure and nighttime predators were the age-old suggested remedies. The other faction, which actually prevailed, fearing the wrath of the englisher colonial representative, suggested they take up a collection (actually loot the victim's wealthy cache of salt, brass rods & pachyderm teeth) to pay for the witchdoctor's expensive cure.

So the victim's predominant wives offered goats and fowl for the sacrifice, four dead teeth of good girth/length/weight, a standard sack of salt, and a much smaller sack of ivory pearls (from the dental nerves). The cure was to include wrapping brass wire tightly around the poor sufferer's head, so they (the wives) contributed the brass rods needed for that as well.

The witchdoctor set the sacrificial livestock aside for a future, personal barbecue citing such rites were secret and then set about, with the skilled assistance of the village coppersmith, to fashion an essentially non-removable, tight fitting cap of wound brass wire. The process was egregiously tortuous to the patient no doubt and at somepoint near the completion of the surgery, the victim broke free from his physician and fled the witchdoctor's hut into the desolate bush beyond the village proper.

The victim blindly ran and ran and stumbled and collided with thorns and boles and fell into pits and bogs and rills and creeks and rivers. He narrowly and miraculously dodged leopards and cape dogs and hyenas and poacher's snares and striking vipers and yawning hippopotami and snapping crocodiles. Ultimately, he collapsed on the stoep of the headquarters hut of a low-church episcopalian missionary aid station where he received lifesaving care and the offending metallic skullcap was removed. In fullness of time he recovered and thrived, taking the cachetism and sacred rites before eventually becoming an essential member of the native staff. But the indelicate truth of his recovery was the administering of the cathartic castor oil and the subsequent violent, backfiring purging.

Fast forward in time to the near present and 5,939 miles westward......

One morning Razor Hooey awoke feeling puny. There was ringing in his ears along with pulsing throbs that matched his racing heart not to mention the cotton in his mouth and oniony bile on his breath. In the bathroom mirror, his normally deep ebony brite sheen looked the ashy green/grey of a mixed liquor hangover which was impossible as he had been teetotally abstemious for several years now. When the car horn sounded out front signalling Junior Lawton and his eight block carpool ride from peppertown to the city barn he stumbled about on unsteady trotters. Razor felt a much dreaded recurrence of a migraine spell coming on.

The tasks and duties both at the city barn and out and about in the field were mercifully light that day. Somehow Razor survived until the whistle blew then the three further hours yet for the prayer meeting at the 'episcopal african fire baptized chapel' to commence. There the high priestess/prophetess/queen mother, instead of tried and true genuine Christian ceremonies, performed certain ancient occultic rites from west africa by way of the west indies on to new orleans then back east to draper st. in the peppertown of patona city.

A game stag fowl of 'dunghill' quality with a dubious pedigree and altogether unfit for the cockpit was sacrificed. The mistress of ceremonies then prognosed the sufferer with brain fever caused by whitey's systemic racism and pronounced that what Razor needed was serious external cranial pressure exerted to counteract the internal pressure. In just over an hour and a half, the wizardess and her two cosmetologist acolytes had rendered Razor's '70s era voluminous afro into a most uncomfortable series of parallel cornrows.

Along about the time of Razor's migraine infirmity..... or actually just somewhat previous, 'the powers' of patona city, aspired to the much coveted 'city' certification/credentials. You see, despite the pretentious suffix, patona city was just a town and they severely lacked the requirements of cityhood. I'm not saying that they actually had to jump through figurative hoops of fire or symbolically crawl naked across hypothetical broken glass but there were conditions that had to be met. Firstly, they fell far short of the 3,500 living souls needed. So the city (town) fathers initiated an annexation campaign/pitch and conjouled the rural residents of unincorporated caloma just north of the town limits up in neighboring echota county to sign on.

Now these agrarian calomaites knew and accepted that their property taxes would rise somewhat but they were wholly unprepared for the municipal residential statutes forbidding livestock grazing, coon hunting and cockfighting. Something of a small scale civil war ensued along the lines of the, then on the telly, wounded knee south dakota. The patona city town burghers reluctantly relented with a result of the zoning of the nee caloma cum northern patona city being corrected from 'residential' to 'agricultural', thus reallowing horses and cows and goats..... not to mention hounds chasing raccoons and bouts & derbies of organized rooster sparring.

With new citizens to pad the population cipher, the burghers furtherly prevaricated (outright lied) and attested under oath to the full 3,500 head count. The first hurdle to cityhood was met

Secondly, they had to create a civil service billet of 'sales tax revenuer' and hire same.

Thirdly, the patona city constabulary, previously deemed provincial and reserve have to be acadamied and examined to the minimum standards and certified by the state.

They already had one charles brown who was something of what is despairingly refered to as a roaming, wandering lawman. Fired for misconduct on thursday, hired across state by the next tuesday, he had a far less than stellar reputation.

Then one graveyard shift he came in unscheduled, ostensibly to catch up on paperwork but in reality to have his way with a libidinous female inmate. As it turned out, she actually had her way with him in an awkward convulated contortional position, resulting in officer brown suffering a rare and extreme hernial rupture that was afterwards deemed uncorrectable by surgery. Now charles had to take small and purposeful steps to keep essential lower alimentary tubing from painfully dropping down into less than essential but important nonetheless reproductive equipment. This injury deemed him physically wholly incapable of academy l.e.o. certification. Just stepping wrong off of a street curb could land him in the hospital much less jumping fences in pursuit of perpetrators.

Which brings us back to the second requirement.... sales tax revenuer. Charles Brown would never again walk a beat for fear of his guts drooping down into his nuts but he could sit a desk and push a pencil.

That only left requirement number four or so they thought.....Now they needed to create and fill the position with the lofty title of 'animal control officer'.....just a dog catcher in any other wordage. Old Pop Waites, recently retired on social security from the local cordage mill had nothing better to do and did indeed get on nicely with fido(s).

So with.....

3,500 folk.
one sales tax revenuer.
a half-dozen of eventually certifiable coppers.
and one dog catcher.....

Patona City thought that they 'had all their ducks in a row' and were 'in like flynn/flint' re. city bonifides if you'll pardon the hokey idiomatic adages but it followed that they actually lacked one unexpected but essential necessity. That was, at least one 24 hour convenience store.

Enter stage right one character name of buddy tailor. Now tailor was one of those mysterious, suspicious fellows that suddenly appear from nowhere and invest in and buy-up derelict housing and businesses in a small town. Nobody had ever before heard of him and he had no provenance for his hundreds of thousands of dollars. 'Dixie Mafia' ? No one knew for sure and everyone was afraid to ask.

One of the vacant business properties he bought was anderson's oil, a long bankrupt franchisee of the equally long defunct muscadine petrol corporation. With the idea of reopening the place for the convenience of a formerly economically depressed but resurging section of town, he remodeled the building and refurbished the petrol tanks and replaced the obsolete pumps with a plan of 0700 to 2300 operating hours. He was just about to celebrate inauguralzation/grand opening when the town's need for the presence of a 24 hour 'stop and rob' arose. The rest is history. The place was an instant hit.

The clincher and deciding factor for its popularity was the mere 48 square feet area purposefully dedicated to boiled goobers, hot nachos y queso, buttered popcorn and hot dogs. Now previously, since the suspicious early morning conflagration and explosion that had razed grantham's dairy cup, there had been no venue in patona city to purchase prepared hot dogs.

Now, anytime of day or night you go into tailor's craving a hot dog and open bun warmer drawer and fetch one of same then lift the lid of the clear glass hot bath and choose and fish-out a weiner with provided tongs. Apply condiments/toppings of choice and pay the cashier/clerk $1 for dog plus condiment(s) or a $1.25 for dog plus condiment(s) and topping(s).

Keep in mind these weiners we're describing were the old fashioned generic red ones. Once they were initially boiled then languished in the hot bath, the water therein turned a hue of primarily pink but with swirling tones of cinnibar red and vermilion orange minorly variegated with ugly striations of greys/greens. It seems the residual chlorine disinfectant in the potable water reacted with the potassium nitrate in the weiners and made a nigh-on toxic soup. Even though this liquid is highly antimicrobial, the so-called meat resting therein will eventually spoil if left in there long enough.

So not long after the novelty and popularity of tailor's 24 hour/48 sq. ft. alcove of boiled goobers and hot nachos y queso and buttered popcorn and hotdogs had waned somewhat, me and Razor went in there for tiffin/elevenses.

Mind, this is the feeling poorly Razor with the throbbing grey cells betwixt his temples plumb back to his occipital lobe and down to his medulla oblongata. Also mind, his scalp and underlying muscles and tissues have been tortuously stretched and compressed and twisted in the well meaning cosmetologenic conversion from lofty afro to cornrowed doo. At his best, even when feeling hale and carefree, Razor takes umbrage at whitey.....any whitey telling him what or what not to do.

Ask the former local lawmen james dudley and doorknob gitty about the time, wayback, when they tried to take the pet bunny away from a much younger and inebriated Razor. Gitty had to eat through a straw for about ten weeks and the thrice bitten dudley nearly died of sepsis despite promptly getting a heavy dose of antibiotics and a 'bluegum' strength tetanus booster.

So, as I was pumping queso onto my hot nachos, I warned Razor that those weiners, one of which he was fishing about for with the tongs, looked old and unhealthy (puffy swollen greenie weinies). In his head splitting condition, to spite my condescending temeritous honkiness, he built not one but two dogs with the noxious, potentially pathogenic weiners. He wolfed them down with no more than three bites each in a juvenile display of defiance. Then he used the aluminum popcorn scoop as a ladle and drew and drank down about a pint of the nasty liquor from the weiner bath.

By the time I had payed for my soda and nachos and bag of popcorn, I found an ill-looking, moaning/groaning Razor in the truck. We sallied forth to the spot where we had originally intended to masticate the gedunk. I finished my nachos and began driving back towards the city barn, eating popcorn along the way.

Without warning and to no one visible in this dimension of space and time, Razor groaned feebly, "father abraham and brother moses, takes me to my's peoples" in the ubiquitous coloured lingo of the deep south. To me, he said.....nay, ordered, "doc. hamilton's on the double !" in an oddly refined voice that was almost elegant and reminiscent of the dramatic narrations of roscoe brown or paul winfield on the telly. He was holding his right side and gibbering to himself something about having a heart attack. His complexion varied from almost his normal glossy dark brown to the indescribable yucky hues of the f!esh inside of a sardine tin.

So I whipped utilities truck #9 (sewerage dept.) about and journeyed him towards the basement door of the govt. doctor's (racially integrated) clinic.

I guess I crossed the "southern" tracks near the three-way "Y" intersection of krag st. & southern ave. & mcghee st. too abruptly when he ordered me, this time in a not so elegant voice, to pull over...... He frantically fetched a roll of potty paper from behind the truck seat and a plastic bucket from the truck bed and down the ditch bank he waddled into the concealment of the culvert of the driveway entrance at the timber company pulpwood yard.

I found a better, straighter place to park without hindering the other motorists and waited and waited and waited for Razor to emerge from the culvert. I even left the scene in answer to a call of a service line stoppage some 10 blocks distant. I knew just where the property line located clean-out was located and, with a corkscrew auger on the end of a length of spring rod, I quickly snatched a veritable mare's tail of privet hedge roots. Advising the customer to test flush, I was soon back over on krag in time to see Razor emerging from the storm drain culvert.

He was steady on his feet and had resumed his normal glossy complexion of somewhere betwixt a licorice jelly bean and the contents of a tin of roofing pitch. When he advised that the trip to the doctor was no longer necessary, I asked about the bucket. He shook his head saying, "trust me! you'se don't ever want that bucket back ! "

[JBowen]

JBowen

[Ray]

The Trance.....

Nearly four decades later I was on a road trip with the "colonel", a brother-in-law. The colonel actually never was a "colonel". When he was a captain he got passed-over for promotion to major enough times to be mustered out of billy bob's (numero 42) scouts. He rolled his captaincy directly into the mississippi national guard and eventually attained the rank of major and ultimately retired as a lieutenant colonel hence the appellation of "colonel".

I was driving with the colonel riding shotgun. I had just fetched him from the hattiesburg airport and we were heading northeastward. The colonel was droning on and on about finding himself on the wrong side of the wire in berlin during a cold war secret mission for uncle ronnie. The white lines became blurry and I guess I had some sort of mild seizure of some kind and lost some four and a half hours of time. All I remember of the trip was seeing the alabama state line then I grew sleepy. The ba-bump, ba-bumps of the highway's expansion joints and the wa-wah, wa-wahs of the colonel's nasally narrative droning must have hypnotized me somewhat. I vaguely remember seeing tuscaloosa and then birmingham on the giant green interstate signs then the next thing I knew it was booger dark and the colonel was having one his infamous hysterical hissies..... "do you know where we are ?" he demanded.

In a ditch on the side of the road was my first thoughts due to the extreme listing of my pickup and the most uncomfortable sensation of being lynched by my own seatbelt. Low and behold, I had steered us into a ditch right in front of the patona city limits sign at its' southwestern border.

My door was wedged shut but I was able to extricate my fatass through the window. The colonel is (was, r.i.p.) svelte and agile and he had no trouble climbing out of his side of the truck. The first thing I did after uttering a sincere prayer of thanks was to empty an uncomfortably full bladder. Mind you, the colonel was talking the whole time and I got the misty recollection(s) that he had been talking nonstop for nigh-on four hundred miles. Anyways, he felt the urge to do a sympathetic wiz himself and for the forty-five seconds it took him to do it, was the only silence so far during the whole trip.

We both had our cellphones but alas, patona city was/is just inside the bermuda triangle of dead airwaves caused by what passes for mountains in this neck of the woods. So we hooved it up south main to its' intersection to smythe ave. where tailor's 24 hr. "stop & rob" was located. "Was" was the operative word as there was no longer any convenience store there. It is now a used car lot and despite the late hour, there were lights and signs of human activity showing through the unshuttered windows of what used to be patona city's first 24-hour convenience store. Inside we found a husky couple of dames who were actually a "couple" in the social domestic use of the word.

Like I mentioned earlier, it was booger dark by the time we walked the mile, give or take. Of course the colonel talked the whole time of his various heroic deeds whilst serving four different presidents. I would estimate it was just about 1830 hrs. when we knocked and entered the offices of "spike's quality used cars" where we were introduced to spike and butch. Both were on the stoutish side with many thousands of $ worth of ink(s) and piercings. I had to suppress a sarcastic smile when the thought of them (butch & spike) putting the whoop on the old colonel. I imagined that the "ladies" could make quick work of stomping him into an ichorous puddle despite his reputed martial arts skills.

I was still suppressing that smile when either spike or butch was informing us of just when and how the former convenience store had became their office. It seems that buddy tailor was now famous and headed the corporation that owned hundreds of street corner convenience stores and scores of interstate exit(s) truck stops. I briefly and succinctly related the above story re. razor hooey and the former convenience store and the spoiled weinies and they politely laughed saying that they did indeed remember the primitive snack bar. One of them, either spike or butch called us a wrecker to right my pickup onto the horizontal with our profound thanks.

On the walk back down south main to the truck's resting place, the colonel gave a lecture on helicopter rappelling lines and the advantages of synthetics versus long obsolete jute, manila and horsehair. In the end he opined that it did not matter so long as you were wearing adequate gloves. A half-hour later with my wallet $220 lighter we were headed back the way we had come the 45 and 60 miles respectively to our homes that we had overshot whilst I had been d.w.d. (driving while dreaming).

At some point the colonel's incessant droning changed themes to hypnosis and his adamant opinion that he had never and could not be hypnotized citing his own superior intellect being proof against subliminal suggestion(s). At the end of that stretch of highway where it intersected the interstate we stopped for petrol. My truck's 300 mile tank was long empty and the 200 mile reserve tank was nearly running on fumes. The colonel went inside the store while I was pumping fuel and strangely did not return in a timely fashion as was his custom.

This particular truck stop had a snack bar not unlike the one described in the above tale but was twice and again larger. There were hot dogs of course but instead of the hot water bath there was a roller griddle behind glass. Over and over and around and around those mystery tubular meats rolled and sizzled and it was here where I found the colonel.

He was standing in an odd for him hunched posture quite contrary to his normal upright military bearing. His hands were rigid and hanging strangely at his side as he peered through the roller grille glass. His lower jaw was slack and he was making bizarre groaning sounds and slobbering down his shirt front. I called his name and shook him by the shoulder to no avail.

We must have attracted the attention on one of the store clerks as she left her post and approached us. I was garnering my thoughts on just how to explain the situation when she said,

"Thought so ! Yet another case of mesmerism. Third or fourth time this week." She explained while returning to her post and fetching something from behind the counter. It was a hand-held airhorn from which she gave a short "honk" which instantly brought a much confused colonel back to our dimension of space and time. The clerk went on to explain that focusing on the rotating sausages and wieners can cause the susceptible to fall into a time-losing trance and pick pocketing by thieving standerbys were common.

I bought a box of buttered popcorn and a drink before leading a trembling and disoriented colonel back to the truck. The next half-hour to drop the colonel and his luggage at his home was the first quiet, conversation free time since leaving hattiesburg that forenoon.

Moral of the story ? Punchline ? Pithy literary finis hook ? Sorry to disappoint. O'Henry I ain't !