Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Amanda and Gertie

Rule #1: Getting a tattoo of someone else's name is, in general, not a good idea.

Rule #2: Getting a tattoo anywhere above the shoulders is, in general, not a good idea.

So I was leaving work yesterday and there's this guy walking towards me. Late teens, early twenties, totally white yet sporting the hip-hop apparel and lots of fake gold jewelry. Very sad. Sadder still was when he turned to get in his broke-down old car parked at the curb and I saw the name "Amanda" tattooed on the side of his neck in flowing script.

I'm sure he and Amanda will be together forever, though, because how could a girl let a catch like this guy slip away? So the tattoo was probably a good idea.




I went to junior high with a girl we'll call Gertie. Gertie was unfortunate for two reasons:

1. For reasons that were never clear, Gertie's mom was absent. Dead? Run off? In jail? No one was clear on that. What was clear was that Gertie's mom was gone and she was very sensitive about that.

2. The finest put-down we had at our disposal at the time was "your momma." Seriously. At St. Michael's School in West Memphis, Arkansas in the early eighties saying "your momma" to someone was the ultimate in disrespect.

So, knowing Gertie had a weak spot, many of my classmates took great delight in saying "your momma" to her, which always - Always! - resulted in a Donald Duck-like fit with her yelling things along the line of "don't you ever talk about my momma!" Every time, she would throw this fit.

Kids can be cruel, yes. But kids also get bored, and if you knew two words would set a teenage girl into a fifteen minute fury? You'd probably say them too.

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