03/15/99
German Engineering

So Sonya attempted work this morning, but her boss (Kathy, whom we love dearly) sent her to the doctor.

"Everyone in the building can hear you coughing," she told Sonya, handing her her coat, "they keep asking if I'm making you stay."

So the Wife went to the doctor, and the doctor told her she had bronchitis. The doctor gave Sonya some drugs and orders not to go to work tomorrow. Cool, huh? Free day! Free day!

And it's supposed to be beautiful tomorrow, too, all sunny and warm. I can just see Sonya now, pressing her forehead against the glass in the restaurant on top ofthe U.P. building and taking in batting practice at Tim McCarver Stadium. If there's a float out there she can get on and sing I know she will.




My mom called after work this evening, asking if I could come over and put a new battery in her Benz. I told her no problem.

I go to West Memphis, and I get the battery wires off the terminals, no problem. Then I grab hold of the handle on the battery and get ready to lift it out.

It wouldn't budge.

So I poked, and I prodded, and I yanked, and I got down on the concrete and wormed my way under the car, looking for some sort of latch or bolt or something. I knew it was attached to the car somehow, but I'll be damned if I could figure out how.

"I don't mind calling Ditmar at home," my mom said. Ditmar is my mom's mechanic and the caretaker of all manner of European rolling iron in West Memphis.

"And he'll tell you to leave it alone," I countered.

My mom went to the phone. Calling a mechanic? At night? At home? Glenda ain't scared of nothing.

Later, I pieced together their conversation. It went something like this:

Glenda: Ditmar, my son is trying to replace the battery in my car, but it seems to be locked in there pretty good.

Ditmar: Vhat?

Glenda: The battery. How do you get it out?

Ditmar: It is bolted in.

Glenda: Where are the bolts?

Ditmar: You need special tools. I send someone out tomorrow to change it.

Those crafty Germans! I guess they don't think their precious Mercedes is the kind of machine any Joe Sixpack should be able to work on when he's got a spare minute. My mechanic-like aspirations crashed and burned right there. I hung out for a while, visiting with Glenda and my grandmother. Then I went to Wal Mart.

You know, West Memphis is something of a punchline around these parts, right up there with Frayser, another working-class neighborhood that gets a hard time. Sonya, who used to work in West Memphis, can go toe-to-toe with anyone who makes fun of the town, siting facts and figures about why West Memphis isn't so bad. She never does that, of course. Now she works in Memphis. Piss on that little town!

Still, West Memphis is home, and I suppose I'll always have a soft spot for it. Driving through my mom's neighborhood at night on my way to Wal Mart was pleasantly nostalgic. James even used to have a truck like mine, so the deja vu was running fast and thick.

An amusing moment at Wal Mart: I was looking for a card for Sonya, her being ill and all. On the card aisle with me was a big, blubbery broad-as-hell teenage boy and his Pentecostal girlfriend.

[Y'all are familiar with Pentecostal girls, right? Long, never-been-cut hair, denim skirts, no make-up, a look of confused frustration locked on their faces. The male of the species has never been observed in the wild.]

Anyway, the Pentecostal girl was wearing the big boy's letter jacket. On the back, it said, in appropriately swoopy-swirly Go Team script:

Hicks

"Well put," I murmured aloud to myself. I was amused, at any rate.

And don't they have some sort of law about how old you have to be to get nonstandard piercings? I saw three kids at Wal Mart tonight, each under eighteen, each with a stud through their lower lips. What's up with that? Is it just a West Memphis thing? This may be one of those mysteries you never understand.

[Sidebar: Sonya has found a documentary about having a penis. True story! It's quite distracting. It's an America Undercover documentary, which you all know I love.]




Here's a story from Mardi Gras:

It was Monday night, and we were all down on St. Charles at the Orpheus parade. A group of girls, rattling away in rapid-fire Spanish, was standing to our right. Sonya dubbed them "The Spanish Fly Honeys."

On the drive down, Will Smith's latest tune, Miami, had come on the radio. When the girl says

"Bienvenido a Miami"

I said

"Yo quiero Taco Bell Miami"

Now we were in the street, fighting after beads, the Spanish Fly Honeys dominating the attention of every male float rider. Whenever anyone in our party would run into another we'd look at the Honeys, roll our eyes, and say

"Yo quiero Taco Bell Miami."

It was fun at the time, anyway. Try it next time you hear the song. It'll tickle the hell out of you.





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