Lizard Tales (6 page)

[Yes]

W
hen I was in my teenage years my dad lost his job, so we didn’t have enough money to have anything but a bad time. All my friends were always bragging about the cool pets they had: pit-bull dogs, registered Rottweilers, high-dollar horses. So I generally would drag anything home that I could tie a rope around to see what kind of pet it would make. Now, Pops would always tell me when I dragged something up that, if you can’t race it or take it to bed, don’t bring it home. But I always did suffer from selective hearing.

I was over at my buddy’s house one day, sitting on the porch—hanging out, bored as a hooker at a funeral—when I happened to look over in the six-foot pine trees that surrounded his backyard. Well, right there, hanging out like Big Juicy in a two-piece, was a raccoon. Bo, I thought, now that would be the dog that treed the possum as far as making me have the coolest pet. So I started trying to convince my buddy to help me. Now, I love my friend ’bout as much as fat ticks love lazy dogs, but sometimes he’s as dumb as a cat trying to look pretty at a dog show, and he don’t remember plans very well either. Still, I had this all tied up. I would grab a pair of his dad’s welding gloves and he would grab a big ol’ quilt, and we would surround this critter like he was Custer’s horse. I would grab the raccoon and throw him in the blanket, and all my buddy had to do was cover him up.

Well, he wasn’t none too convinced that this was a well-thought-out plan, because he was the one that would end up holding the ’coon. But I was the only one tall enough to reach that critter in the top of the tree. So we grabbed our gear and headed over.

Now, the whole time this ol’ ’coon had been eyeing us. He looked as confused as a cow on Astroturf and I could tell he was getting a bit antsy. He started turning circles in the top of that little tree. But I knew that when I went for him, he had to be facing away from me so I could toss him directly toward the quilt.

My buddy was standing there with the quilt just below eye level, and he was trying to back out. “Ronnie,” he said, “this is gonna go over like a turd in a punch bowl.” But I convinced him that we could really land some girls that were hot enough to run a buzzard off a gut barrel at lunchtime if we had a pet ’coon. So I started easing up with all the grace of a blind elephant in a china shop, and that ’coon started making a fuss. I told my buddy to whistle to distract it while I made my move.

Truthfully, I didn’t realize how fast ’coons were. Just before I reached him, he set sail. Problem was, he could also jump farther than we had figured. Once that ol’ ’coon took off, he was in line to land right on top of my buddy’s head. But instead of just simply raising the blanket up and letting the ’coon land in our perfectly devised trap, my buddy threw the quilt on the ground and turned around to run. We had made this ’coon pretty damn mad. So about the time he broke for the tree line through these small pines, whether it was coincidence or just plain meanness I don’t know, that ’coon was dead on my buddy’s heels. He was on him harder than a twelve-peckered billy goat in mating season, and I couldn’t catch neither one of them.

My buddy’s running, branches were smacking him in the face, he’s screaming for me, the ’coon’s on his heels hissing like a three-tongued snake, and there I was in tow trying to save my buddy from a ten-pound critter.

After about a thirty-second dash, the ’coon scaled another small tree. My friend’s heart was beating faster than that of a Russian racehorse at the Kentucky Derby with a glue truck behind him. He was cussing and screaming at me, telling me how he was almost killed by a raccoon, and I was trying to convince him to run and grab the quilt ’cause we now had a second chance to capture this rascal.

Well you would have thought I had left his sister at the bowling alley on a Friday night. I saw his eyes light up and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t go along this time. He rolled right up on me and I thought he was getting ready to try and lay me out with a haymaker; but instead, he just stood there for about ten seconds, breathing hard, blood pouring from all the scratches on his face, his arms tore all to pieces from the branches. The ’coon was still screeching at us and I was still wanting to grab him. Just then, in a very sincere voice, my buddy said what probably turned out to be some of the best advice anyone could live by. “Ronnie,” he said, “I’d fight hell and half of Georgia by your side, and would paddle the life boat if life’s creek ever rose on ya. But brother, you want that ’coon, you’re gonna have to catch him yourself, ’cause I ain’t never gonna try to corner nuthin’ meaner than me again.” With that, he left me and that ’coon in the woods alone.

After thinking about the situation and looking up at that ’coon staring down on me, madder than a bobcat tied up in a piss fire, I decided that maybe a pet turtle would be just as cool. So I ran after my buddy, hoping I could talk him into going to the pond.

I
grew up on a street in Lizard Lick that everybody called Jackass Road. I’m still not exactly sure why it’s called that. We never had much money growing up and there wasn’t much of anything to do. We were so poor that if we found a quarter, we’d cut it up and divide it into four pieces between us. But there was a junkyard across the street from my parents’ house, and Jason and I were always sneaking over there to steal parts off cars to sell. We eventually discovered that in all these old cars were a bunch of
Playboy
magazines. All these old men had dirty magazines in these old cars, so sometimes we’d spend hours over there. We knew we could sell them at school. Like I said, we were so poor our front door was our back one too, and we were definitely early age entrepreneurs.

Jason was always building stuff, so he started making a weekly trip over to the junkyard. He would come back with tire irons, window cranks, and radios—basically whatever he could get out of there. He probably started going over there when he was ten years old, and by the time he was seventeen, we had our own little auto-parts salvage out back. Our backyard looked like Sanford and Son. He decided he was going to build his own car. He was handier than a bear cub playing with itself with mittens on.

On Jason’s seventeenth birthday, I told Momma I wanted to throw him a surprise birthday party. I wanted to do something really special for Jason because I love my brother like
Peter loves the Lord. I wanted to do something really cool for him. I told my parents to go out to dinner that night, and I called up all of our buddies. We probably had about ten or twelve guys coming over, and I went out and bought beer and liquor for us. Once the party started cranking, my buddies were more messed up than Lindsay Lohan at a pharmaceutical convention.

What Jason didn’t know was that I’d hired him a stripper for the party. It was a big deal because we didn’t have much money. When we went to town, the first thing we said was, “We don’t want to pay the light bill.” It took us forever to pool enough money to pay for a stripper. We probably collected bottles on the side of the road for a month. It was a really big deal. During the two weeks prior to the party, when Jason would wander over to the junkyard, I took Polaroid pictures of him when he wasn’t looking.

On the night of the party, I had the stripper meet me up the road. She was hotter than a gasoline cat walking through hell with a kerosene tail. She was dressed as a police officer and looked tighter than two coats of paint. I handed her the photos of Jason in the junkyard and told her the whole story.

She came to the house a few minutes later and pounded on the front door. It was like,
Bam! Bam! Bam!
We opened the door and she yelled out: “Is Jason Shirley here? Is Jason Chad Shirley here?” We were like, “Yeah, he’s right there.” By that time, Jason was more screwed up than a steel-toed flip-flop. He was looking at her and thinking, “What in the world have I done?” He was more confused than an Amish electrician. She told him, “You’re under arrest for breaking and entering and larceny.” She started showing him the pictures from the junkyard, and he started sweating and shaking his head. We were all sitting there trying to play
it cool and acting all serious. We thought we were slicker than a BP oil spill.

Jason stood up from the couch, and she swung him around and slapped the handcuffs on him. When she slapped the cuffs on him, she was supposed to start dancing. But Jason was more upset than a two-dollar hooker on dollar day. He was upset because he knew Momma and Pops were going to kill him for getting arrested. All of a sudden, Jason yelled, “Heck, no I ain’t!” He took off toward the bathroom and dove through a closed window like a seal. He looked like Flipper swimming away from Shamu. He went through that window faster than a cheetah on Amtrak, and it took three or four of us to pull him back into the house.

We were like, “Come on, dude, just play it cool. Calm down and we’ll get you out of this.” But you’ve got to keep in mind that Jason is slicker than a greased pig turned politician. He was like, “OK, y’all. I’m cool.” The stripper put her arm around him and started walking him outside. The next thing you know, Jason is gone. He disappeared like a fart in a tornado or new rims at a Puff Daddy concert. It was pitch dark and he ran off into the woods. Now, keep in mind that there weren’t any lights outside my parents’ house. It was so dark that when we grew up, we were doing homework by the fireplace. We couldn’t find him.

It was pitch-black, Jason was stoned drunk, and he still had the handcuffs on. We kept yelling to Jason that she was a stripper, but he didn’t believe us because she wouldn’t strip outside. She was worried we were filming her or something. We kept yelling, “Jason! She’s a stripper!” And then you’d hear a voice from the woods: “No, she ain’t no stripper. Y’all are lying. Y’all set me up!” He was
more confused than a blind man at a silent movie. It took us about an hour to get him out of the woods.