like long titles. My first book was Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You, written sometime around the end of World War I. I chose that title in honor of a girl in my school, Kathy Sue Loudermilk, who had large breasts in the fourth grade—by the time she graduated from high school, they had retired her pink sweater.
Then I got musical with Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey?, which was a reference to my crack correspondent Billy Bob Bailey of Ft. Deposit, Alabama, whose dog Rooster once bit Alabama Governor George Wallace at a barbecue/fundraiser in Sylacage, Alabama. Rooster was sick for a week.
Then, another musical allusion, Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else but Me. That book included a piece on how I had sold grits trees to Yankees for great profit.
The others:
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat: again from a piece of music, the brilliant country legend “She Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat.”
If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About a Quart Low: My stepbrother, Ludlow Porch, himself an accomplished author (It’s Not So Neat to See Your Feet) gave me that one and charged me only fifty dollars for it.
Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself: from Mark Twain’s line “All great men are dying and I don’t feel so good myself.”
Shoot Low, Boys—They’re Ridin’ Shetland Ponies. I was sitting with a friend of mine, Ronnie Jenkins, at Lucille’s, a beer joint in Grantville, Georgia. Ronnie and I were both eighteen, but Lucille didn’t care how old you were. As long as you had thirty-five cents, she’d serve you a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
Ronnie and I had had several Pabst Blue Ribbon beers, and he suddenly said, “Shoot low, boys, they’re ridin’ Shetland ponies.”
I never did know why Ronnie suddenly said that, but it caught me as hilarious and I said to him, “One day, I’m going to write a book and name it what you just said.”
After the book was published, several people said the correct phrase is actually “Shoot low, Sheriff, they’re ridin’ Shetlands,” and it is from an old western movie. I don’t know if that is true or not, and I don’t care. The book sold a lot of copies, and I bought some great stuff with the royalties.
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun: That’s from a Roger Miller song, “Dang Me.” I think the publisher had to pay somebody in order to use that title.
When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care?: I made that up by myself one night at Creekside Cafe in Atlanta, when I checked my watch and determined my date had been in the rest room for nearly half an hour. What do they do in there?
Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters Got Eyes. A singer friend of mine, Pat Horine, said that one night when we were laughing about song titles such as, “My Wife Just Ran Off with My Best Friend, and I Miss Him” and “You’re the Reason Our Children Are Ugly.”
As far as Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night is concerned, I made that one up by myself, too. It came to me at four in the morning after I had eaten three chili dogs from Atlanta’s world-famous Varsity Drive-In restaurant, where they serve the best chili dawgs on earth. The Varsity’s secret, I think, is that their buns are always fresh and soft and they mix mustard into their chili.
What I was doing up at four in the morning after eating the three Varsity chili dawgs was looking for my jar of Maalox.
A little about the new book:
This is going to be an easy book for you to read because it is a collection of my works and there is no plot, so you don’t have to start at the front and work your way to the back if you don’t want to.
You can start at the back and work forward, or you can simply open the book in the middle and go whichever way it suits you to go.
You don’t have to fold down the ear of one of the pages to keep up with your place while you’re reading my book, either, because it really doesn’t matter where your place is.
This would be a good book to put into your guest bathroom. I figure the average person can read somewhere between three to four pieces out of this book while he or she is sitting on the john in your guest bathroom. That is, unless he or she has been eating Varsity chili dawgs, which would provide the guest the time and opportunity to read perhaps an entire chapter, or two, depending on whether or not the guest also had onions.
Here are some other titles I suggested for this book that my editor turned down:
The Adventures of Johnny Condomseed
Hold Her, Newt, She’s Headin’ for the Briar Patch
Satanic Nurses
Tammy Faye Bakker Is Uglier than a Bowling Shoe
Chili Dawgs Always Make Me Vomit
I have an excellent editor, his name is Peter, and maybe if I mention his name in this introduction, he’ll offer me a fat new contract for my next book, which may or may not be a novel entitled Good God, Harvey! They’ve Stolen Your Ass!
Yeah, I do write books because you get money for it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it. Instead, I would get myself a job in a convenience store in Florida and steal lottery tickets.
As many of you know, however, I donated a great deal of the money I have made from writing books toward my little brother Joey’s operation.
I can now report that Joey had his operation. A sex-change operation. He is now Joanne, and he is a cocktail waitress and plays golf from the ladies’ tees.
I have two reasons for wanting this book to be successful.
One is, I want to buy a pair of white Gucci loafers. I’ve never owned a pair of white Gucci loafers, and I don’t know anybody else who has. I think a pair of white Gucci loafers would look great on me after a game of golf as I sipped a cocktail in the Men’s Grill at my golf club or at a Julio Iglesias concert.
(I once got kicked out of an Iglesias concert at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta for singing along with him on “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” If I’d been wearing white Gucci loafers, they probably would have figured I was the Italian version of Willie Nelson and allowed me to stay at the concert.)
I also hope the success of this book might awaken the Pulitzer Prize committee to the fact I’ve been writing a newspaper column for twelve long years and I still don’t have my Pulitzer.
It’s not the money I want from a Pulitzer Prize. You don’t get much more than a thousand. It’s the pride and the prestige involved, and the fact that if I win a Pulitzer, even when my syndicate calls and says, “Your columns have been a little stale lately,” they’ll have to say, “Your Pulitzer Prize-winning columns have been a little stale lately.”
I don’t know why I can’t win a Pulitzer, too. I try just as hard as the next columnist, and during my career I have broken much new ground, what with my exposes of salad bars (they put these little tomatoes way in the back where you can’t reach them so they don’t have to buy any new little tomatoes), buttermilk (It comes from cows that eat dirt. That’s why it tastes so bad), Muammar Qaddafi (he’s the same person as baseball pitcher Jacquin Andujar), the Greyhound Bus Company (they pay people to sit next to you and cough), oxygen masks that are supposed to fall down over your seat in airplanes in the unlikely event of cabin depressurization (they don’t actually exist), Meryl Streep (she’s ugly and I don’t care how good she can act), buttered popcorn at movie theaters (It’s a ripoff. The only popcorn that gets any butter on it is right at the top), the fact that The Accidental Tourist was an awful movie (William Hurt played a piece of Velveeta cheese), members of the National Rifle Association (if they can’t find anything else to shoot, they shoot their trucks), and I was the first person to interview God. He said to tell Jimmy Swaggart he was fired.
I’m not certain how many more years I can keep