Butt-washing Funny

  ***

  The best way to keep from being superstitious is to carry a mustard seed in your right rear pocket.

  Igod Emo

  (A story about a great storyteller)

  In our young boys’ eyes, Igod Emo was an icon. He represented the food for our imaginations and the respect for our dreams. He told us stories, which gave us reason to be the mischief making boys we were. Igod taught us it was okay to get into trouble once and a while, “Moreover, a boy worth his salt is supposed to,” Igod said, “lessen you wanna be called a sissies.”

  Of course, he also represented everything our parents were against. From homework not completed to schoolhouse mischief, our parents warned us, if we did not mend our ways someday our reward would be to grow up and be just like Igod. Of course, we saw no downside to that, but we dared not express such to our parents.

  Igod's name was seldom spoken in our homes other than in jest. We did not understand the concept, but it was common knowledge associating with Igod would not have been tolerated. So, of course, most young boys sought out Igod whenever the chance was presented.

  Igod was a noticeable character. A squinty-eyed man with several yellow tobacco-stained fingers as well as the few teeth he had; explained by the constant hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. In the summer months, and during most of the winter months, Igod reeked of tobacco and sweat. Igod could never be accused of wearing out his clothes by over washing.

  Liquor breath was more of now than the morning after variety. Igod always had a bottle stashed here and there but I can say with all honesty, I never saw Igod take a drink. That is not to say he didn’t.

  Lean to the point of being frail, and with stooped posture; he appeared to be much shorter than he was. I can still see the tongue of his belt, so oversized he had to tuck it in, twice. Igod was not toothless, but a point could be made his back teeth were very lonely. He, as well as his clothes, was in a constant need of soap and water. Forever in the need of a haircut and shave, by design or otherwise, he presented himself as a bum.

  Only once do I remember Igod with a fresh haircut. One of his aunts or cousins or some kinfolk or the other had passed away. At the funeral home I saw Igod in an old hand-me-down brown suit and white shirt. He even wore a tie; someone had tied for him no doubt. Some member of the family had given him a hair trim. It grew out in a few weeks, but for a while you had to look twice to tell if it was him. But, I guess you could say he was just as ugly with the trim as without it.

  Igod was employed as the town custodian. In the eyes of a small boy, he was always doing neat stuff. He maintained the town’s water system, including the water tower; which proudly displayed in large bold letters the town’s name. Igod had painted the name. He misspelled it the first time but put it right after a few weeks of town folks’ complaints.

  He was required to unplug storm drains following heavy rains. He flushed out the fire hydrants in the summer time. He mowed the empty town lots, the schoolyard, and under the water tower. Once, the town had decided to put up street signs, Igod believed he should have done it. But, with his misspelling error on the water tower, the town folks felt better of it and hired a general contractor. Igod pouted, but soon got over it.

  Igod was also a gravedigger. Early on he dug graves by hand. Grave digging was hard work but Igod was not a stranger to hard work. Later, he used a motorized backhoe the town had purchased. The backhoe was constantly in need of repair. The town claimed Igod was too hard on it and didn’t do the proper maintenance required. I knew better. The backhoe was a piece of junk when they bought it. Rather than listen to the complaints, Igod went back to digging by hand. Igod Emo may have very well been the last hand-gravedigger in the entire state, maybe in the whole country.

  During the snowy winter months, Igod hand-shoveled the town streets. A few local farmers would help with this task, using tractors equipped with homemade plows. Heavy snows were rare in our town, but when they happened most would pitch in and plow alleys, streets, and sidewalks.

  Igod got into trouble one winter with the snow plowing. The town had purchased a well-used five-ton truck for custodian work. During an unusual heavy snowfall, Igod reasoned he could keep the streets open if he tied a big board to the front of town’s old truck and plow away all night. For the most part it worked well. But where it didn’t work well, it worked badly. Igod found to move the heavy wet snow he had to really go along at a pretty good clip or the light rear end of the truck would cause him to lose all traction. So, he loaded it up with about two ton of rocks. That did the trick. The old truck moved right along and plowed away just about everything he put in front of it, including the downtown fire hydrant.

  Now the town’s old water tower kept a hefty pressure on those fire mains, enough to tip the old truck over on its side. Not only did Igod damage the truck, the fountain of water was not a real good idea since the temperature was in the low twenties. To worsen matters, the shut off valve on the water tower was frozen in place. By the time Igod managed to get the valve closed, it did not matter much as the tower was empty.

  Igod’s main daily chore was the town’s water supply. He maintained the pumps and added the chemicals required to treat the water. He dug up and repaired broken water mains. Most of the time he wore rubber boots, drove around in the old truck, and smoked.

  The town had two workshops; one at the water pumping station, and one at the water tower. These workshops were four miles apart. Igod spent a great deal of his day driving between a repair job and the two workshops. The man could not remember which tools were at which location. Often as not, the wrench he was driving around looking for was on the truck he was driving around.

  The fire hydrants had a special wrench for the flushing operation. It was a two-ended wrench, one end fit the cap, and the other fit the valve. One wrench was kept on the voluntary fire truck, a modified military jeep with a water tank trailer hitched behind, the other in Igod's possession. The one on the fire truck was painted bright red; Igod's was a rusty, pitted, bent tool. Several times each year the two wrenches would end up swapped. When the volunteer fire fighters would meet to clean up the fire truck the swap would be discovered. Igod would swear he had no knowledge how that came to be. The city didn’t think much of Igod's denial.

  But, Igod was being truthful. We boys would swap out the tools and sit back waiting for the fun.

  The next time Igod was caught with the red wrench he was in the fire station with the tool in his hand. He swore he was only returning the wrench to retrieve his, said somehow the red wrench had ended up on his truck.

  The volunteer fireman didn’t see it that way. To make sure Igod didn’t mistakenly take the red wrench again they locked up the red wrench in the tool box on the fire truck.

  The volunteer fire chief at the time, said, “Locking up the wrench was not acceptable because if the key holder failed to answer the call the wrench could become a real worrisome issue.”

  The call was the three sirens mounted on towers around town. They would sound to call in the firemen when a fire was reported. They also sounded when bad weather approached the town. Often firemen would show up in full gear to learn a storm was coming. Realizing their work would be interrupted by the storm anyway, it became a good time to break out the cards and sip on cold drinks.

  The wrench swapping word got out at the barbershop. Snickers erupted when someone said in this town a man best keep an eye on his tools less Igod would be swapping out with you.

  Old lady Eisenhower had the last word on the subject, at the post office she said, “I'm keeping an eye on my under drawers just in case.”

  Jiggs Ray said, “Wasn’t that Igod had the lack of common sense it was more a case of being born with uncommon sense. The man ate, drank, and smoked all at the same time. I saw him choke one time and smoke and coffee came out his nose. One time he threw a hammer at a nut he couldn’t get loose. The damn hammer bounced off the nut, hit the ceiling, and came down on I
god's head. The dang fool looked around trying to see who had hit him. The other person there was me. And, he reckoned I'd done it.

  “For several weeks after I'd walk up behind him and yell, DUCK!

  “He did too, and every dang time he said he knew it was me what cold-cocked him. Some say that hammer caused ear-reverse-able damage. Igod had ear-reverse-able damage long before that hammer hit him.”

  Igod's most striking attribute was the hand-rolled cigarettes seemingly always dangling from a corner of his mouth. It took a great deal of talent, or magic, for those hand-rolled cigarette’s ashes to achieve the lengths they often did. He smoked the cigarette until the ash met the lip, yet the ashes never fell free. I swear to you the man could come in out of a rainstorm and the ash would be two inches long and hanging in there.

  We small boys vowed someday we would be capable of producing our own ash surpassing Igod's. For a boy of ten, this produced some unique problems. The art of hand-rolling a fag‑we called cigarettes fags‑was not a genetically acquired talent.

  The preferred fixings for the fag were a can of Prince Albert pipe tobacco, a pack of Zigzag papers, and a certain quantity of spit. Most boys had little trouble with the spit but the other fixings were a bit harder to come by.

  The secret of the fag was getting the right amount of tobacco on the paper. This took a great deal of trial and error. Once the correct amount of tobacco was applied, then the correct amount of spit came into play. Too little spit, the whole affair fill apart in your hands. Too much spit, the thing would tear apart as you watch the tobacco fall down your front.

  It took me two years before I rolled a fag that worked. By the time I was successful store-bought Viceroys, one of the first filtered cigarette brands, could be bought for eight cents a pack. Put a dime in a machine, and there was two-cent change under the wrapper on the pack. That was less than one-half cent each. This was before the government taxed our vices to hell and gone.

  Hand-rolled suddenly cost more than store-bought. In my teens, hand-rolled faded into history and with it was lost an odor that had filled many a young boy’s nostrils passing through puberty.

  Igod had a talent for storytelling. He told stories of hunting and fishing. He told stories of mushroom hunting and Halloween. He told stories of bigger and better. His stories were of a time and place when the mischief of boys was not only expected it was accepted. But he told stories he knew were stories and all listening knew they were stories.

  The lengths of Igod's stories were directly proportional to how long he could keep a captive audience. Mostly, he told his stories to us boys and a few of the town’s characters. Once in a great while, a farmer or two would stop by long enough to hear Igod out, but farmers seldom had time for such. Bad weather, Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas day were the only things that kept a farmer from his work.

  Igod never finished a full year of formal schooling. He was raised in a time and place when boys were needed at home to work for family survival. In Igod's time, a man was not looked down on for not finishing primary school. Later in his life, he was subjected to the ridicule of the local teenagers because of his seemingly lack of intelligence. In reality, they were the ignorant ones. Lack of formal education does not denote lack of intelligence. Igod always pretended this ridiculing did not bother him, but we knew it did.

  In Igod's time, life was work; pleasure was something you found along the way. Igod's world was one of no television, no books, no motion pictures, and none of those other mind-altering concepts molding pure thoughts. The radio was in use and of course the newspaper. An occasional politician would pass through and offer a speech. Other than these small intrusions, the simple real human ideas remained whole and unspoiled. Igod's stories came from this untainted mind and were pure and humorous.

  T-maters

  Igod received his nickname from the speech crutch he constantly used. He was really saying, my God, but it came out as Igod. He used this crutch so often it took a great deal of concentration to understand him. He used the crutch like so many today use the crutch, “you know.” Igod was not capable of saying over four or five words without using the crutch.

  If I were to write these stories in the dialog of Igod Emo, in short order the reader would become bored with the whole thing. To preserve the speech of Igod Emo, I have decided to write one typical story, as he would have told it.

  Igod would wait for a gathering at the barbershop, the hardware store, or maybe the post office, and at the right moment, he would begin: