4th
A 12-Year-Old Weiner
Two nights ago, my friend Roxanne and I met for dinner at The Lockview (try the grilled cheese) and walked around the Rib, White and Blue food festival. Which is essentially a circus of competing fat vats lined up on Main Street, bookended by carnival rides. I’m still feeling as homesick as was at the end of May, so I was pretty excited about this, although not enough to make room for ribs. We did have a funnel cake, though.
More memorable were our two rides on The Scrambler, or a scrambler, as it should be called, since there’s one at every event like this and they’re all called The Scrambler like it’s 1950 and it’s everyone’s first rodeo. We paid ten dollars for two rides each, which yielded twenty tickets. That’s right. An exchange of five pieces of token currency for every ride.
We were the only people on board until just before takeoff, when a little boy ran up to the operator, pressed five tickets into his hand and clamored into our car. We struck up a conversation, and I asked him how fast the ride would go, would I be frightened, etc. He was missing some front teeth and told me in the typical eight-year-old lisp that ITSTARTSOUTSLOWBUTTHENITSPEEDSUPANDYOU’RELIKEWOOOOAAAAHANDIT’SPRETTY CRAAAAAZY
Which is pretty much how he said everything, including the following, which he screamed at the peak of the ride’s delerium:
- GIMMIE MY DOG FOOOOOOOOOOD!
- I WANT A GOLDEN RETRIEVER TO EEAAAT MEEEEEEEEE!
- I’M MADE COMPLETELY OF NONSENSE!
He disembarked after that, muttering something about the train ride next door. I couldn’t understand why he would want to ride the train, a relatively tame machine that puttered around an oval track like Santa’s elf-operated express at Chapel Hill Mall. But he took off, leaving me and Roxanne alone. With the ride operator.
The ride operator had just stepped off the set of some low-rent comedy that takes shallow potshots at hillbillies and stereotypes of the poor and uneducated of Appalachia. His four front teeth stained a peanut butter brown, his Dodge jacket gray with dust along its winkles, his greasy, shoulder-length hair flipped over its collar, he was a poster child for trailer trash. I hoped, for his sake, that his look might be incongruent with his charming personality until he started talking to us.
He was securing the door on our car when he stopped to check the text messages on his phone and starting guffawing pretty hard. We were the only people on the ride; he was momentarily freed of the constraints of working around children and seemed eager to let us in on the humor.
“Y’all like jokes?”
We flashed each other a quick glance, then I smiled at him. “Sure, hell yeah.”
“Alraght.” I seem to remember him checking over each shoulder, leaning in and lowering his voice, but my memory is unreliable and, in retrospect, that kind of discretion doesn’t really match up with what he said next. “You know how Michael Jackson died?”
“…nope…”
“He ate a 12-year-old weiner! Gaaawww! Huyuk-yuuk-cafaw!”
“Oooohhh man,” I said, smiling politely, fanning myself and praying to the lord baby Jesus for respite from the devil’s humor, “I WONDERED if that was gonna be a little kid joke.”
“Alraght, alraght,” he said, “Here, you lake this one? You know Farrah Faawsit dahd?”
“Uhh… yeah!”
“Alraght, well wut’d she ask for in heaven?”
Because everyone gets a wish.
After Roxanne gave him the necessary prompt, he said, “To save all the children… so God killed Michael Jackson!”
My face was sore from patronizing laughter. I was already strapped into the devil’s crazy machine with this clown at the helm. As I saw it, I needed him more than he needed me, and given that we were alone on the ride, I didn’t want to be guilty of offending his pure, salt-of-the-earth humor with my socialist, latte-sipping elitism.
He shrugged. “Ah mean, those are jest the ones that’r gittin’ texted aroun.’”
I nodded. “Sure, sure.” Big smile. I thought we were done.
“Alraght, one more.” And to be fair, I should say I don’t remember this one as well but I’m pretty sure it went like this: “I hear they’re killin’ off all the retards soon.”
We didn’t know how to answer this one. It lacked the last two jokes’ obvious knock-knock roles.
“So git outta here, and don’t ferget yer crayons!”
He through his head back and let fly with a howl of wicked laughter, threw the lever and we spun off into the magic of summer nights.
