CRAZY FUCKERS I KNEW

There was Reinaldo who always used to sneak into the bedroom and try on a pair of Bill’s mom’s crotchless panties. She moved out years before, but she still kept a pair of crotchless panties around. Bill used to get pissed and tell him to take off his mom’s crotchless panties.

 

There was the foreign exchange student Tiertha Timsina who arrived in Crapalachia knowing only two words of English. Tiertha had to get married before he turned 18 or he would be sentenced by the wise men in his village to marry a tree. Lee told him, “I know if I had to marry a tree—I’d sure as hell put a lot of knot holes in it if you know what I mean. I’d fuck the hell out of that tree.”

Tiertha and Bill bonded because they were both mountain boys. They talked about Sewell Mountain and the Himalayas and the elevations of the mountains of their birth.

We talked about the town of Lewisburg in the eastern end of the county and how we hated all the hippies who lived there who talked constantly about black bears and healing massage.

There was Six Toed Russell who snuck into bars and bet drunk lumberjacks. “Hey, I bet I have six toes on both feet.”

The rednecks didn’t believe and just said, “Whatever. The fuck you do.” So Russell popped off his shoes and there they were. There were two feet. And there were, count them—1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, 12 motherfucking toes wiggling around in all their glory. Russell was always good at math.

 

And then there was Naked Joe. Naked Joe used to run into people’s yards and rip bushes out of the ground. “Fucking bush, I hate you.”

One time an old lady said she was going to call the law. He better quit tearing up her shrubs.

“The law,” Joe said. “Well you better tell your bush to quit talking so much shit.”

But then that evening we sat in Bill’s room playing Madden. Joe came into the room real quiet and then disappeared into the bathroom. A few minutes later he came into the room and stood behind us.

“Who’s winning?” he said. He put his hands on his hips and said, “Man this game is getting good.”

I felt something brushing against my back. I felt something sitting on my shoulder. I turned around and shrieked because right there was Naked Joe’s dick sticking in my face.

 

I always wondered why people called him Naked Joe and now I knew.

 

Then there was Bill in the middle of it all. He stood around during our backyard wrestling bouts. He pointed to the mountains around us. He pointed to Beelick Knob and said, “That’s Beelick Knob. Guess what its elevation is?”

Then he told us the story about the Greenbrier Ghost.

Then he pointed to another—“That’s Shafers Crossing. Guess what its elevation is?”

But no one listened.

Then he pointed to another mountain and we didn’t care again. Only Tiertha listened. He dreamed of his home in the Himalayas. But we didn’t, even though Bill was telling us about where we were from.

 

He was telling us about our mountains.

Then Lee Brown stopped by.