got back to telling the story, not talking until he heard my fingers clickety-clacking, him wanting it all written down for posterity.
“I got out like Crocodile Dundee and caught the fucker by the tail,” he said. “I pulled and pulled. It was mad and gave me the evil red eye. I finally pulled it out from under her car and held it up like I was one of them big-fish-catching fellers. You know, you see them all pumped up and grinning on them piers? I held that killer turtle and them children scattered through the hills screaming and crying. That woman looked at me with pure lust in her eyes.
“‘Listen up,’ I told her. ‘This here’s a mud turtle, a snapping turtle, and if they bite you they won’t let go until it thunders or until you beat on your grandma’s washpan.’”
He also told them that such turtles were delicious and packed with seven different and succulent kinds of meat.
“It may look like only one creature,” he said, still holding the 80-pounder by the spiny tail, “but it has all them varieties of meat on it. They got a bit of turkey, chicken, beef, lamb, fish…everything you’d want all under one shell. You just gotta make sure it don’t get your meat ’for you get his.”
Brewster said his good-byes, tried to get the woman’s phone number, to no avail, and hoisted the seething and hissing turtle in the back of his truck, toting it home, where he immediately placed it in a huge garbage can and fed it canned salmon and rice.
“I’d go out and talk to it now and then,” he said. “I could tell it was listening, too, ’cause it’d look at me with those soulful eyes, them ancient eyes that have seen millions of years on this here Earth. It would open its mouth trying to talk, but I told it, ‘Shhhh. You ain’t gotta say nothing. Not unless you a damn woman.’”
The next day, after a twelve-pack and Cheetos, he called a bunch of his friends, who came by to see his new plaything and pose for photographs. “I used to catch all kinds of turtles when I was younger,” he said, tossing the snapper a few Cheetos. “We’d write our names on their backs with fingernail polish. Thata way we could find the same turtles every year and see how much they’d grown.”
On day two of his snapping turtle’s captivity, the merriment went flat and the newness sank like a day-old balloon. With the turtle still in the trash can and sending him menacing glances, Brewster reckoned he’d best set it free. He called a few friends over again to take final photos of their last days as a team—him and Snapper. As he lifted the minibeast from the trash can and was grinning for the camera, the aggressive reptile did the unthinkable.
“I was holding it up by the tail and it whipped around its head, bigger than a fist and, quicker than a flash of lightning, it opened its giant jaws and grabbed hold of me right in the crotch,” Brewster said, then started laughing. “I hollered like a man on fire, but it wouldn’t let go. I beat on its back and it would just clamp down harder. It was hanging there and I was looking for anything to hit it with. It had me crushed in its jaws and I knew I’d never get to pole dance in Jamaica again if I didn’t act fast. I poured my beer all over it and it finally took a few swigs and let go, then tore off through the woods like a jackrabbit. It ran just like a tipsy baby dinosaur.”
While Brewster says he’s a little sore and won’t be chasing women for a couple of weeks, he’s thankful he was wearing jeans. “I was wearing my 501 Levi’s and the only thing that saved my…er…stallion was my zipper. I wouldn’t have had nothing left of my Caped Crusader. It’d be in some incinerator and I’d have a wooden dick or one of those prosthetic metal claw dicks, if anything at all. Thank God for that zipper. I’m fixin’ to call the Levi’s company and ask if I can do a commercial for them jeans like Crocodile Dundee did for all them cars and whatnot.”
I thought about this carefully.
“You know, while you’re at it, you should also call the Budweiser people and see if you wouldn’t make a perfect Super Bowl commercial with your beers and riding your stallion up to a drive-thru window. You could have a Bud in one hand and a Big Mac in the other.”
He got all excited and I hung up and wondered if I should tell his turtle story or not. A few years later, we moved off the mountain and I haven’t seen him since.
People tell me he’s still kicking, drinking, waiting on spring and home-grown tomatoes, and some girl to come along and admire his chivalry—be it on horseback or hauling mauling reptiles.
Wherever he is or whatever he’s doing, I’m certain there’s an interesting story waiting to emerge. All it will take is a case of cheap beer and a lady’s smile.
Give Me a Tag and I’ll Give You My Uterus
I f someone gave me a choice of a trip to the DMV or the gynecologist—boy, what a toss-up.
At the DMV, also known as the Department of Motor Vehicles, or, in my mind, the Den of Madness and Venom, the poor and underpaid workers don’t give out tags and other legal must-haves unless you have more documents than can be stashed in a four-drawer filing cabinet.
Used to be a driver’s license and insurance card would do it. Now, you best come in with a steamer trunk full of everything from proof of life to promises of organ donation.
I stood in line for an hour, my hands shaking and feet perspiring, knowing it would take me three to four trips to get legal on the roads, and this was just my first try. I thought about how much less nervous I was hours earlier, seeing a brand-new gynecologist whose nurse gave me a paper gown made out of that cheap toweling—probably Marcal or Scott—and ask me to “strip down to skin and grin.” At least, I thought, she has a sense of humor.
Maybe the doctor would, too.
Seemed like I was waiting an hour in that scritchety-scratchey giant picnic napkin that covers nothing like the linen gowns they give pregnant women. You remember those beautiful pink robelike garments those with fetuses are given before the doctor examines their hooches?
Well, for a regular-old puss peep, you aren’t going to get the linen treatment. You get the paper napkin, and thus I lay there naked and rustling in that paper towel for at least thirty minutes, sweating, and thinking, I’ll bet my freshly washed region has suddenly begun to lose its freshness. Even though on gyno days, I spend the morning cleaning my body cavities as if I was walking naked through a high-powered car wash or that within an hour I’d be in a car wreck and the ER staff would first remove my undies.
This insecurity about our private bidness, the things “down there,” is due to all those sick TV commercials that make women feel like their va-gee-gees are festering crotch mackerels. I’m sure some men turn gay when they are around 12 and the commercials come on TV about feminine odors and sprays. I say if you smell that bad, get thee to the Squeal & Wheel Car Wash down on Tunnel Road and don’t bring the car.
On gyno days, I always choose underwear that are A-grade, but not thongs—except for that oft-mentioned nightmarish occasion when I had no choice but to wear one during my daughter’s birth, which my mother has yet to forget or forgive.
Never wear Cor D-grade lingerie to the gyno because, chances are, when you wad up your clothes and place them on the chair, they’ll fall to the ground and the nurse will tell everyone in the office how hideous they were. Same goes for bras. It’s best to wear a good one, not the kind I have where the underwires poke through the material.
A crazy nurse friend of mine told me, “We don’t want the women to think we’re staring at their Coochie Snorchers so we kind of gaze around the room and often our eyes fall on their undergarments wadded up in a chair or on the floor. It’s flat-out scary what some of them dare to wear. Nasty, girl. Pure-T nasty.”
I knew this was what happened in some doctors’ offices, so that is why one should always go for broke and wear the good stuff on Pap smear, Anal Jab, Drape-’n-Scrape days.
When this brand-new doctor finally came in to examine me, he didn’t even bother to start off with a warm-up question…such as, “Nice weather we’re