Not long ago I wrote a story called “A Tide box full of perch” which was a retelling of an altercation that I believed could only happen in Texas because where else would you find a family of professional wrestlers whose mother beat the crap out of somebody with a detergent box full of fish?
(And if you’re from Arkansas or Mississippi and just put your hand up, put it back down because you’re screwing up my Only-In-Texas theory.)
As we’ve all been told on numerous occasions “everything’s bigger in Texas” even the stories, although a number of severely-disappointed Texan women might want to dispute that claim and file a class action suit for “sexual bait-and-switch” which is probably an entirely different column so let’s move on from what happens in Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex bedrooms when those “All Hat, No Cattle” Texas Romeos drop their Levis and some disappointed Texan woman says:
“Wait, is that it?”
Anyway…
“A Tide box full of perch” – a story about my Conservative Texan friend Bill – had a lot of readers and the only recent story that had more readers was “The Odd Couple” which was about our Cat-Marries-Dog friendship so apparently people like reading about Bill and Texas and who am I to argue? (They made three Godfathers so if you don’t like this third story, it’s clearly Francis Ford Coppola’s fault for setting a bad example.)
A brief dissertation on the brilliance of Jeff MacNelly
People throw the word “genius” around way too often and it probably ought to be reserved for people who build working time machines or space rockets that go to Mars or figure out peanut butter tastes great with chocolate and I’m not sure anyone involved in the Drawing Funny Pictures Business qualifies.
Neverthess…
Jeff MacNelly would hang out with us and then draw amazing pictures of our moronic activities and do it from memory and get all the details right and the drawing at the top of this thing is an amazingly accurate rendition of the Pleasure Barge (more to come on that subject) and what follows is Jeff’s idea of what a Pissed Off Professional Wrestler’s Mother About to Kick Ass With A Tide Box Full of Perch would look like:
And don’t miss the bunny slippers.
These sketches are just part of what Jeff drew during the 1984 GOP convention and then ran in The Chicago Tribune and after that he’d give them to us like they were nothing and to him maybe they were because he could create them at the drop of a paintbrush, but as Bill recently said it was like hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci and then having him ask: “So you want a sketch of a helicopter?”
Moving on…
https://www.c-span.org/video/?103331-1/editorial-cartoons
Bill recently reminded me that the C-SPAN video link posted above still exists and it’s also from the 1984 Republican Convention which was held in a Suburb of Hades or at least felt like it because it was 111 in Dallas that week and to show us they could air condition the entire country of Guatemala if they put their mind to it, the people who ran the convention had the thermostat set to about 51 degrees, so you’d see people walking toward the convention hall looking like they were just finishing up the last half-mile of the Bataan Death March, but carrying sweaters because when they got inside the hall and the temperature dropped 60 degrees, you could see your breath while simultaneously losing the feeling in your fingertips.
OK, so me and Bill and Jeff were all in Dallas for the convention and Bill was our host and decided to buy us these stupid hats with ridiculously long bills which we wore out to dinner and you might think “you guys look like idiots” but as they say in the Ginsu knives commercials:
“Wait, there’s more.”
The Chickenmobile
Bill had also rented a limo to take us to dinner and he was really showing off the Best of Texas because he rented a Buddy Chicken Chickenmobile.
Buddy had a chicken restaurant and used the Chickenmobiles (there were two of them) to advertise that fact and we’ll get to them in a minute, but now seems like a good time to mention that Mickey Mantle also owned a Dallas-based chicken restaurant and the slogan was:
“To get a better piece of chicken, you’d have to be a rooster.”
A motto I can imagine took some explaining when some nine-year-old asked his parents why they were laughing.
Also, Bill and Mickey once met in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant when Bill rear-ended Mickey’s van, which had a big number 7 on the back and it fell off and landed on Bill’s hood. Mickey got out and Bill thought, “Oh shit, I’m about to fight Mickey Mantle” which let’s face it, would be awesome as long as you weren’t Bill, but Bill was smart enough to apologize and say it was all his fault and Mickey took a look at the damage and apparently there wasn’t all that much because The Mick said, fuck it, don’t worry about it.
See?
You start telling Texas stories and it’s like explaining the plot line to Star Wars.
You have to explain that all this flying around in space to different planets happened a “long, long time ago” which means it happened way back in the past and also means we must have really fucked up at some point and had to start all over again because we still don’t have those personal space cars the Jetsons promised us, although we do have microwaves and treadmills and robots to do the vacuuming so you gotta give the Jetsons credit because they did a much better job of predicting the future than every president we’ve had so far.
As I was not saying…
Buddy Chicken’s Chickenmobiles were a white Cadillac (the Henmobile) and a black Buick Electra (the Roostermobile) and both had a giant fiberglass chicken tail attached to the trunk and a giant fiberglass chicken head attached to the roof and our Henmobile Cadillac was painted red, white and blue, but the best part was the chicken-head eyes lit up, so when you were driving down the street at night it looked a demon-possessed chicken with a Cadillac body and if Stephen King steals that idea me and Bill definitely want royalties.
Jerry Falwell sidebar
OK, just remembered that during the convention me and Bill had to pick up Jeff at his hotel and Bill was driving a 1955 Willys jeep with a 289-cubic inch V8 Mustang engine crammed under the hood and Bill was “restoring” it (if by “restoring it” you mean sticking way too much engine into way too little jeep) and it was painted primer gray and from the sound of it, Bill’s restoration had not yet reached the “installing-mufflers” stage, so when we pulled up to Jeff’s hotel and he was standing outside, under the hotel portico, talking to Jerry Fucking Falwell, Bill thought it was funny to run up on the sidewalk, make them jump out of the way, park right next to them and rev the engine so goddamn loud they couldn’t hear each other and the only reason Bill thought that sophomoric stunt was funny is because it was.
As Dave Barry once said of the “sophomoric humor” putdown which people with a 2 x 4 up their ass like to trot out whenever you say something funny they didn’t think of:
“I remember laughing pretty hard as a sophomore.”
Bill also laid about 50 feet of rubber pulling out and left Jerry Falwell wondering what kind of low-class morons Jeff MacNelly was hanging around with and if Jerry had seen what we did next, he would have gotten a real good clue.
So how about we finally get to this goddamn Pleasure Barge?
As you might have guessed it was a fun-filled week full of Texas-related activities (I missed the trip to the Sportatorium to see semi-professional wrestling) and to make up for it Bill said he was going to take us out for a spin on his “Pleasure Barge.”
The Pleasure Barge turned out to be a floating platform kept in its floating state by huge chunks of Styrofoam strapped to the bottom and as you can see from the illustration at the top of this post, it had a waist-high chain link fence with a gate on the front and a corrugated tin roof and free-standing outhouse in one corner.
So Jeff and I are already laughing our asses off when Bill pushed us free from the dock and warns us to hold on to something because he’s about to “open her up.”
So we brace ourselves because maybe he’s got another 289 V8 Mustang engine down there among the Styrofoam blocks, but it’s actually a no-horsepower engine that may have come straight off a Singer sewing machine and while the engine was smoking and making enough noise for an F-16 aircraft carrier takeoff, we were going about two miles an hour and when I looked back, there were chunks of Styrofoam in our wake which seemed like a bad sign for a floating outhouse whose only buoyancy was provided by the Styrofoam we seemed to be rapidly losing.
I asked Bill about it and he said:
“Yeah, I got me a family a nutria that burrowed into the Styrofoam and live there.”
This is a nutria and if the words “giant swimming rat” come to mind, your mind is still working:
The highlight of the Pleasure Barge Cruise was Bill aiming for a dead “bodark” tree sticking up of the water and if you’re asking “What the hell’s a “bodark” tree?” it’s how Texans mispronounce “bois d’arc” which is French for “wood of the bow” a reference to Osage Indians making bows from those trees and I’d have more to say about Texans mispronouncing words, but I live in Missouri which has a city spelled “Versailles” after the city in France, but we pronounce “Ver-sayles” after several centuries of inbreeding.
As we were approaching the bodark tree at top speed (now maybe two-and-a-half miles an hour) just about the time Jeff and I became concerned and looked back at Bill (we were sitting in lawn chairs up front, enjoying the view and I’m firmly convinced Leonardo DiCaprio stole his “King of the World” scene from us) we realized Bill had jumped overboard as a joke and we were on a floating outhouse aimed at a dead tree with no captain at the wheel.
(See? These Titanic coincidences are eerie.)
The collision tossed me and Jeff out of our lawn chairs and we rolled across the Astro-turf covered deck and I can only guess what the Family of Nutria living below decks were thinking, but my guess is:
“Just what the hell are those idiots doing upstairs?”
Anyway…
All those Texas hijinks were brought back when I watched the C-SPAN video 37 years later because we were still drunk when we sat down for this interview which explains host Brian Lamb commenting on how “relaxed” we are and Jeff’s reference to a “ridiculous” boat and mine to a typical Bill DeOre docking maneuver , but does not explain the batshit crazy people who called in with a “question” that actually turned out to be a “speech.”
The video’s an hour long and I wouldn’t recommend watching all of it unless you like seeing Bill with hair and me before I reached puberty and my voice changed, but one of the main reasons I started writing was to preserve stories like “The Pleasure Barge” and “A Tide box full of perch” and “The Odd Couple” because if you don’t write this stuff down it dies when you do and you should probably write your own stories down and the first step is having good material so I’d highly recommend a trip to Texas.
And if you’re looking for a place to stay, somewhere there’s a Family of Nutria renting out the room upstairs.
I've led a very boring life.