A Guest Blog From RudyTheJack

Twice a day, I get my meds. The people giving it to me slather the little pill in peanut butter. I like Jif, but I’ll take any kind they got. During the last few months since this has been going on, I have become a PB connoisseur. And as such, I can tell you that connoisseur is French for a dog that knows his peanut butter. I looked it up. Unfortunately I looked it up on the day Wikipedia was shut down, but still, I found enough to back up my point. That point being: dogs are smarter than you think and even the French can see it.

Let’s be honest, you could probably hide the taste of anything in a dollop of peanut butter – pills, seeds, sparkplugs, an entire cat, you name it, peanut butter fools your tongue every time. Works better than bacon and isn’t so greasy. PB breath beats dog breath, right? That’s what I’m saying here.

While we’re talking about dogs and breath, I’d like to get something else off my tongue. Just because us dogs eat our own poop – or any poop for that matter – it doesn’t mean we have no taste, just the opposite. It means we have such refined taste that we can tell what a stranger ate a week ago. Bobby Flay couldn’t do that. But his dog could. Maybe his dog should be on Iron Chef. I think we know what the secret ingredient would be.

And don’t get me started on that tired old “licking our butts and drinking out of the toilet” argument. Been there, licked that. Doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve seen people lick stranger things than dog butts. Ever seen Fear Factor? Ever seen Andrew Zimmern on Bizarre Foods? Are we smelling each other yet?

I see carrots, beets, radishes and lettuce as evil food. So don’t hand me that. I’m not biting. Wrap that stuff in peanut butter, though, and boom, down the gullet, pronto. And toss in a broccoli spout.

Dog and peanut butter can solve a lot of household problems. Got a stain on the carpet? You don’t need that Oxy-something stuff they’re always advertising on TV. Smear a little PB on it and your dog will take that stain out in about 15 hard licks. Just make sure you pull your hound off the stain before he eats it right down to the sub-floor.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is this:

Okay, I can’t remember what I was saying because they just opened the jar of peanut butter over there and my concentration went to mush. Geez. Besides, who listens to a Jack Russell? Hmm, I guess if you’re still reading, you do.

“John?”

“No, it’s Pearl.”

“Pearl? Why do you sound like a man?”

“That was Earl. He’s on here too.”

“Hey y’all.”

“Earl, how’s that gout?”

“How many people are on this thing?”

“Gout’s doing great, but I’m not doing so good.”

“I need to use the line, please.”

“Who were you calling?”

“I wasn’t calling you. I need to call my grandson.”

“He still in Tuscaloosa trying to get above his raisings?”

My grandmother had a party line. Some called it a multiparty line or shared service line. Basically several customers were on one phone line. In a cell phone world, few people today have ever experienced such a thing or participated in the total confusion and wicked gossip it can cause. In other words it was awesome. There were no secrets on the party line.

“Pour the neck out of that RC and fill it up with Early Times,” said a man who sounded like Percy Walker, but who had likely never read anything stronger than the instructions on a snuff can.

About eight people were on my grandmother’s line. If you picked up the phone while two of them were talking, you had to wait until they finished. Or yell at them to finish. Or, better yet, just listen and try not to let them hear you laughing. What I heard was better than television. There were divorces in the making, Bible thumpers, and insane babble, cheating preachers, cooking advice or detailed descriptions on the location of a rabid dog. To hear old people talk, we had a lot of rabid dogs loose down in Lower Alabama at the time. Yet I never saw but one, and he was freshly shot by a man who some people said stole cars, but I never believed it. Sometimes the conversation on the party line would be about me.

An old woman complained about how long my hair was, and how fast I drove my old 1962 Galaxie 500 that had belonged to my grandfather, and how it was a shame that a heathen like me was driving my grandpaw’s car “straight to hell,” and on the way I was probably making multiple stops at liquor stores and “beer-and-a-beating-for-a-dollar” joints with “them nasty neon signs advertising sin and inebriation to the wicked.” I actually heard those last words exactly as I typed them. You tend to remember things like that when you are bored and live out in the back forty with pigs and chickens and enough ammo to shoot everything you have ever seen in your life.

Things said on that line defied the laws of Southern hospitality. Face to face, folks were genteel, but if they stayed too long on the line, words became heated.

“Lilly, don’t make me come down there and snatch that phone off your ear.”

“You think I caint hear you listening to us?”

“I heard what you said about me last night and I’m here to tell you that if I hear it again on here, I’m going to tell everybody about you and that preacher.”

After that exchange, I heard the preacher cussing a man who ran through his wife’s clothesline on a tractor.

“”Your wife was on the tractor too!” yelled the man in guilty defense.

This type of entertainment went on day and night. It was better than movies at the Martin Theater and cost nothing but a skinny phone bill, which my grandmother paid.

One day the phone company came out and gave everyone their own private line. It broke my heart. A few years later I asked a woman at the A&P about how she liked her private line.

“Them changing that thing was the worst day of my life,” she opined. “I had to start going to church to hear gossip that good.”

{NOTE: The pic up there is my grandmother’s old phone. It is in my house now, and still works perfectly minus the drama coming through the receiver.}

The old black leather aviator-style jacket is scratched and scraped by 30 years of life, each mark a memory etched in a long dead cow’s hide. I think it was given to me for Christmas, but by who escapes me. Most likely it was either my in-laws or my wife. It was so long ago I cannot remember. It was not my parents, I know. We were Naugahyde people.

In 1982, I survived a run-in with a concrete highway barrier on a frozen bridge in Texas back when my hair was brown and the black leather was new. The coat sustained no injuries. The same could not be said of my Buick Regal.

I nearly drowned in the early 1990’s, wearing it after our canoe sank in a Potomac River whirlpool above Great Falls, riding the rocks and rapids down into hypothermia. The incident required a gutting of the jacket lining. The tailor, stupidly, did not put my old familiar pocket back inside. It still bothers me.

In 1994, I wore it while jumping from a second floor window behind the Lowes Santa Monica during the big LA earthquake as the building heaved and leaned and rocked back and forth. Sliding down a palm tree – the ragged trunk scratching the front of the jacket and me – I wandered in the pre-dawn cool beside Douglas Fairbanks’s and Mary Pickford’s old beach house, waiting for a tsunami that never came.

I was wearing it on a Boeing 747 flight when the engines began to die one-by-one, requiring an emergency landing in Denver. I also wore it during a zero-gravity drop in a 757 over the Gulf of Mexico. Similar feeling, same coat.

This will be a tough reckoning, but that black leather jacket has gone through three children, nine jobs, seven moves, 58 cities, five funerals, one heart attack, three automobile accidents, an altercation with a cop, a near arrest, months of hospital visits, 60+ TV productions, more than a million miles of driving, three million miles of flying, probably 500 miles of walking, 350 hotels, at least 500 restaurants, and more meetings than I care to remember. The happiest days of my life, along with the saddest, have happened in that leather. I even played HORSE with Michael Jordan wearing it. That thing knows me better than anyone except my wife, and perhaps even better, now that I think about it.

When you start breaking your life down into things you have done while wearing a particular garment, it quickly turns pathetic. Few people own something wearable that long. Guys understand this. Women do not. But there it is, still doing its job. And I respect it for that. The weight of life riding inside that coat makes it feel heavy at times. Yet I’m wearing it right now as I type this. It’s chilly in here. If I tried to estimate how many stories I have written or told while it was on my back or hanging on a chair behind me, I could not finish the list.

Never did I think I would ever have such a relationship with a dead cow. And I imagine one day, just like that cow, I’ll die in it, as it should be.

I have a strange job. I roam around businesses and look for ways to solve problems. In that roaming, now and then, I meet some interesting people. I met one last week at a pharmacy.

I was looking around the store at items aimed at senior citizens, hearing aids, adult diapers, blood pressure monitors and such. An old man, probably about 70 years old and thin as a sapling limb, stood near the pharmacy desk waiting for his prescription. As I examined the hearing aid batteries, he turned and asked in a low voice, “Can you hear me?”

I nodded and assured him that I could, even though I do have hearing loss from gunshots and excessive music in the 1970’s. I personally blame Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, but that is another story.

He stared at me and then hearing aid batteries.

“Do you have hearing aids?” he asked.

A quick glance at the flesh-colored plastic devices riding in his large ears told me he knew what he was talking about. I said no.

“So why are you looking for hearing aid batteries?” he asked. “Your mom or dad need them? Granny still kicking?”

“No, actually I am just looking,” I said, not wanting to get into why I was really there.

“Planning for the future then? A little PMA,” he said, smiling and tapping his hearing aids with withered, gnarled fingers. “Personalized mobile amplification.”

“My mom used to wear them,” I said. “She always had trouble with them.”

“They suck,” he said, frowning and shaking his head back and forth in wobbly disgust. “I used to be able to hear a gnat fart. Now I can’t even hear myself fart.”

A woman walking by looked at him sharply.

“Don’t worry ma’am,” he said reassuringly while wafting the air around his wrinkled old khakis. “I didn’t crop dust the area. You’re safe.”

She then looked at me as if he were my father and transferred her disgust in my direction before quickly walking away. The old man smiled.

“I have cancer,” he said matter-of-factly with no more emotion than if he had said he had a cold. “It’s been trying to kill me for several years now. Got my wife and one of my kids. Me and the dog are fighting it. He’s my accomplice. Jerry the Cancer fighter, that’s what I call him.”

“Why did you name him Jerry?” I asked.

“My brother was named Gerald,” he said. “We called him Jerry. Cancer got him too. So I named my dog Jerry in his honor. The dog is nicer, though. Jerry, my brother, was a rough cob.”

The pharmacist called his name and he signed and showed several cards in his wallet and walked back over to the adult diapers where I was standing.

“These suck too,” he said holding up a bag of meds. “Generally, just getting old sucks. But cancer sucks the worst. You ever had cancer? Anybody in your family?”

I said yes. He looked at the adult diapers on a row behind me with a profound crease in his multi-creased brow.

“The ones for kids work the best, you know” he said, nodding toward the diapers. “Now that the cancer had carved me down to the size of a little boy again, those are the ones I get.”

He grabbed a package of Pampers.

“They’re still a little tight, but duct tape helps loosen the fit,” he said.

As if a bell had gone off in his head, he turned and limped away.

“See you on the other side.” His old hand waved the bag of meds.

As I was leaving, I saw he was also buying a 12-pack of cheap beer and a bottle of wine.

“Little party tonight at the clubhouse,” he said looking over at me as I walked out the door.

It was unseasonably warm for January last week so I rolled the windows down and checked my cell for messages before heading back to the office. A few cars over I heard the distinct thud, thud, thud of John Bonham pounding out “When The Levy Breaks.” The old man glided by, windows down on his old Pontiac, dipping his head and mouthing the lyrics of Robert Plant as he drove away.

It is wise before you start tossing stuff in any old pot to consider your options. Any investigation into the fine art if cast iron cookery will point you in the direction of Le Creuset’s $375 sacrebleu’d 101-year-warrantied French beauty. If you bought the first one in 1925 it would still be under warranty – until 2025. That is quite a serious piece of culinary cultural relevance right there.

I do not own a Le Creuset cast iron enameled Dutch oven. Mine cost only $48 and came through Amazon from a company called Lodge, an old-school cast iron manufacturer in Pittsburg, Tennessee. It has a lifetime warranty, beating the 101-year Le Creuset warranty, neither of which I would ever collect on no matter when I bought it. My grandmother left me a Lodge cast iron frying pan from the early 1900’s and my mother left one purchased in the 1940’s, most likely. I can attest to the ability of a Lodge to both sustain and possibly kill members of my family with equal proficiency depending on what’s cooking and how much fat is involved.

A Dutch oven recipe is ridiculously simple: Pour a cup of white wine over some raw chicken. Cheap wine is good. Cheap chicken is scary. So plurge on the chicken.

Chop up a handful of carrots and celery and a lemon or orange, your choice, and snug them all up beside the bird in a suitcase-packing arrangement. Thinly slice 4 garlic cloves and lay them on top with several sprigs of rosemary and thyme and couple of leaves of sage about the size of your ear. Salt and pepper to taste. I put in a little sugar just to make it a bit less healthy. If you are feeling adventurous, pour in some beer too. Why not? Put the heavy top on the thing and cook at 400º for about two and a half or three hours. That’s it.

During cooking, your house will smell better than your grandmother’s kitchen ever did. Open a window and neighbors and dogs and cats will be attracted. Since it is about 65º in January, I cracked the window and a cat is looking at me right now. Small children down the street will cry for their mamas, it smells so good. There is only one catch to this recipe: not many leftovers. It is simply that hard to stop eating it. And if any are left, it is wrong to not give some away.

Do beef brisket or pork loins or short ribs in one of these things and you will feel like Iron Chef Michael Symon in a full sweat. No matter what you cook, the results are always the same. It’s like a sad movie, you know up front it is going to be a tearjerker, and yet you still cry at the end.

My wife just walked by and read that and said my analogy makes no sense whatsoever, but I am still under the influence of the Dutch oven chicken so that is my excuse. I may cry right now, in fact – there is nothing left.

Perhaps rednecks are changing. Even though they have always had less than normal proclivities – usually involving beer, fire and some type of explosive or gun or a combination of all three – they used to be somewhat civil and mannered, at least when sober. It was not a political leaning like it is now. It was not a religious statement like it is now. It did not even require camo or a truck. Okay, maybe it did require a truck, but a beat up El Camino would do just as well. Come to think of it, you might need some camo too. You did not, however, need everything you own covered in camo. I know a lot of rednecks and not one got married wearing a camo tuxedo. Not one has a camo recliner or camo couch or camo countertops in the kitchen. It definitely required dogs, probably trailers, a love of anything fried, a lot of denim and a pack of Redman or Skoal. Recently, however, I am finding redneck behavior rude and embarrassing. Perhaps you always found it rude and embarrassing. If you are one of those people, I hate to tell you it has gotten worse.

Recently I took my daughter – she was a wheelchair, sadly – to Bass Pro Shops for an outing after a couple of horrid months in the hospital. I love to go to Bass Pro Shops. For me, going there is a bit like walking through my childhood without the fire ants. It was just before Christmas and the place was packed. I did not expect people to move out of our way just because we had a wheelchair, but I also did not expect 350 pound men dressed like they had just fallen out of a deer stand to push us out of the way so they could jump in front of us to get into the elevator with friends who were loudly bitching about Obama taking their jobs.

A bit later, a woman sporting an impressive mullet nudged us out of her way as she was in a hurry to get to the fudge display in the little fake general store, leaving us in her stale tobacco-tinged wake, but not before glaring at my daughter as if being in a wheelchair was an impediment to her fudge-tracking fervor.

“Watch out.” She grumbled in a drawl that took five syllables before trailing off into a sound that may have either been a burp or a nasally snort.

“Excuse me,” I said, sarcastically. “You better hurry. They only have 40 pounds left.”

She gave me the Elvis lip curl, which all Southerners know can either be arrogance, disgust or gas.

So when did rednecks become so un-mannered? Manners used to be the one thing for which a redneck could be counted on. Holding open a door and saying “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and letting women go first. Real rednecks had old school politeness. I am not talking about those Deliverance types. They were just crazy peckerwoods. Rednecks were a brand, a cultural lifestyle, a food group. Rednecks took pride in being down to earth. Not once did I notice basic Southern hospitality during our wheelchair visit. If this is what it has come to, I am ashamed I was once a redneck. I renounce the art form. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be this.

It seems we need to get rid of this new fangled, angry, Fox News, fudge-aholic rudeneck and start teaching some proper redneck manners to these people. Here are six basic rules of redneckry:

1. Respect your elders, even if those elders drive slow, in the wrong lane and park crooked in handicapped spaces.

2. People in wheelchairs are usually there for a reason. Cut them a little slack.

3. Do not curse, burp or fart loudly, especially all at the same time.

4. Wait your turn, even if fudge, beer or camo’d thongs are on sale.

5. Do not have a Bible verse on a bumper sticker next to a pair of red, rubber bull balls hanging from your trailer hitch.

6. Stop using God as an excuse to hate people who are not like you. Remember, you will never find a velvet painting of Jesus wearing a camo robe.

After having typed that last one, I found this on the Internet:

I think I may need a few more rules.

In Rudy’s mind Fire Trucking Santa is not here to bring tiding of good cheer, but to torture him. As sirens echo off houses, Rudy emits sounds so doggishly deafening and bizarre, it is as if reindeer are goring him or elves are beating him with north poles. The embarrassing display of yapping teeth and tonsils is not lost on Loud Santa, waving nervously at us as he passes. After that, I told my wife that Rudy was probably not on the ‘good boy’ list this year.

Last night was Christmas Eve. Rudy stood on the deck next to our tree looking up into the cold night with strange anticipation. Eight o’clock. Nothing. Ten o’clock. Zip. Midnight. Nada.

Santa never came. Rudy ambled through the door and sat dejectedly in the kitchen. I tried explaining to him the mechanics of the good list/bad list. No matter, he was inconsolable. I went into how Santa was an eternally generous character, but that he is not stupid enough to slide down a chimney into the waiting embrace of a freaked out Jack Russell. Rudy was over it and went to bed.

When we woke up this morning, there was a small Milk Bone lying next to the tree out there in the embrace of a crisp December morning frost. Rudy eyed it through the window, grunting with joy.

I smiled telling everyone that perhaps Santa had honored his yearly contract, even barking dogs. Then my son said, “I put that out there for Rudy last night.” Santa stiffed him.

Rudy whiffed it down and was gone into the trees to chase squirrels before you could say bah humbug. I am pretty sure this is why you do not see Santa at Pet Smart.

Excuse me for a second. (mumbling in background)

Okay, I am feeling a little bad about the harsh words I just wrote up there. I just walked into the kitchen to get a cup of juice and my wife read that paragraph and said I was being just plain mean. I told her the hospital serves food like that to encourage people to lose weight. She did not buy it. She is sticking to me being mean as her verdict. She is looking at me right now with her “you’re mean” snarl. I've seen that look represent several other emotions over the years.

I told her I was going to say something good about it. She just walked away. To make good on my promise, here you go.

One day a week at the hospital is fried chicken day. You can tell even before you get to the cafeteria. You can smell it. Or at least if you are from south of Maryland you can. That aroma gets people worked up. Few things besides barbecue smell as good as fried chicken. It kills the hospital smell faster than you can say, "That pill cost what?" A huge crowd waits in line, hoping the thighs are not all that is left. The hospital’s fried chicken is not bad at all. See honey. I'm being nice. It just goes to show that it is hard to screw up fried chicken, even if you can screw up mashed potatoes.

It does beg the question: why is a hospital serving fried anything? The answer is pretty simple to me. They need customers; not just the cafeteria, the actual hospital. Eat enough fried chicken and you will be staring at a hospital bill one day, guaranteed. Or, perhaps you will never see the bill. Your survivors will.

I stood outside the cafeteria watching people roaming with plates of fried chicken wondering how long it would be before they are patients.

Then I got in line.

Hey, I’m from Alabama. You do not turn down fried chicken, even at the hospital.

Rudy, our Jack Russell, has taken to acting like a cat. I never thought I would type those words.

He drapes his carcass on the backs of recliners and chairs and the couch for no good reason, as if anything else he does has a reason. Rudy is not a good cat imitator. Look at his face up there. You can tell his heart is just not in this thing. Yet he does it every day.

For nine years, he has chased cats and barked at them and run over at least one, hitting the scrapper like Brian Urlacher. Yet every time I turn around there is Rudy on the top of my old red recliner, almost purring.

Knowing Rudy’s personality and proclivities and snarly disposition towards any other animal with four legs, this strikes me as behavior three levels above odd, even for a dog who believes he can fly, climb trees, and make phone calls. Even the word 'cat' disturbs him. I once wrote C A T on a piece of paper and put it on the ground next to his water bowl and he growled at it for five minutes. I am not saying Rudy can read, but to punctuate his displeasure, he heisted a leg to it. Later, as a test, I wrote dog on a piece of paper and he walked over, sniffed it, then sat on it. 

You hear me, Rudy? I am talking about you over here. Guess it is hard to hear much of anything when you’re all catted-up and licking your paws like Garfield on Valium.

“Could be he is just getting old.” says my wife.

Not likely. I found him practicing a meow the other day in front of the mirror. I swear. That is what it sounded like, a pathetic little lip-synced meeeeowww.

Rudy is smarter than a Congressman and twice as devious. He is trying to gain the cat’s trust. He has some plan in mind, I am sure. Since the cat looks in the window at least once a day, if not to torture Rudy, at least to flaunt his roaming-the-neighborhood freedom. Dogs have leash laws. Cats? Zip. They have full run of place. This injustice has always bothered Rudy.

Rudy is pretty sure the cat will buy this new act. In the past all the cat sees is Rudy’s tonsils flailing as Purina breath slams against the glass door. Now, what the cat sees is Rudy, leisurely perched on the back of a chair, bored and calm – like a cat. It is pathetic.

Right now, the cat is out there looking confused. Perhaps it is cynicism? Could be trust, but I doubt it. False hope is a sad thing to see, and it is hard to tell whose hope will be false first, Rudy or the cat. In the meantime, Rudy is snoring on the chair, with one eye open, waiting, grunting a wannabe purr under his breath: “Here, kitty, kitty.”

The tree was a Charlie Brown job leaning achingly to the west, limbs all knobby like an old man bowling. It was hardly the kind of tree that deserved decorating. As I passed, I noticed he was struggling a little to reach the higher limbs so I drove down to the intersection, pulled a uie and went back, pulling up in front of his house. I could tell it sort of scared him from his defensive motion, as if he thought I might be there to rob him of his festive LED’s. I have done a few things I am not proud of, but stealing Christmas lights from an old man decorating a tree in his front yard is not one of them.

The dog, a brown female mixture of at least three breeds I recognized, positioned herself between the man and me. She did not bark, her ears up, her tail straight, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked friendly, just weary, not unlike the old man, not unlike me on this particular day.

“Hi there,” I said in a way that I hoped would diffuse the oddness of my actions. “I know this is going to sound strange, but I’ve seen you do this for about three years and since these were the first LED lights I had ever seen back then, and you are still putting them on this tree –”

I could tell he was getting nervous that my introduction was taking so long.

“I kind of thought you looked like you could use some help,” I said quickly to get it out.

He stared at me like I was from the tax assessor’s office. “I ain't following?” he said.

Awkwardness filled the space between him, the dog and me.

“Sir, a lot of people have been mighty kind to me and my family in the last month or so,” I said, thinking about the last six weeks of sitting in a chair, staring at monitors and tubes and wires connected to the fragile girl struggling to breathe under the sheets, wondering what would happen in the next hour that would change my life forever. I pinched the thought from my mind. He did not even know me. To him, I was the strangest stranger in the world.

“People have shown us more care and love than I ever figured I was owed. Saw you here, the lights, the tree, and thought I would pay it forward.”

From the confused look on his face I could tell he had not seen the movie. I tried to make my offer clearer.

“If you need some help putting these lights up, I’d be happy to give you a hand,” I said, feeling like I should have just kept going, admiring his scraggly, blue LED-lighted tree from afar.

Reluctance or reservation or just plain old remembering ran across his face. He looked at me. He looked at the tree. He looked down at his hands holding the strand and he nodded slowly. I took a step forward. He shook his head, squeezing a tiny branch between his calloused fingers.

“No. I appreciate you stopping by to help me, I really do,” he said. “But this is a little job I do by myself. My grandson and I planted this tree. It ain’t much, as you can see. Thought Irene was going to take it down. It’s still here, though.”

He paused, looking down at the dog.

“And as long as it’s here and I’m here, I’m going to keep putting these blue lights on it.” He smiled, draping some over a limb.

“He's been gone a year now. Would have been seven."

The words caught in his throat. I looked toward my car. I should never have stopped. It was more than I wanted to know. And yet saying the words out loud seemed to brace him.

"He liked these better than the red ones. ‘Blue Christmas’ he called them.”

It seemed like the old man was going to say something else, but he did not. He was finished talking. It was getting dark. A November breeze rustled the tree. The smell of a distant fireplace made the jostling lights seem even more like Christmas. I did not ask any more details. He did not offer. His details were probably not too different than mine.

Driving away, I thought about my little girl many years ago, her face illuminated by Christmas lights, her big buck-tooth grin pushing her cheeks into squinty eyes looking into the sky wondering if Santa was up there somewhere, heading this way, bringing something good.