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HUB KNOWS THE WAY |
To this day, I can't see a green tongue without thinking 'bout Hub. And people wonder now and then when I chuckle and say, "I knoooooooooooooow the way!" To get the full effect, you have to drag the word out. In fact, to get the full effect, you need to hear Hub tell a story and then you'll understand. Nobody can tell a story like Hub. For one thing, Hub has a slight stutter unless he's drunk so he won't tell a story or the Head Joke until he's had a few. He drinks vodka out of a Scotch bottle when there's a party. He claims there aren't as many Scotch drinkers as vodka drinkers, so people are less likely to borrow your liquor. Before I tell you about Hub, I want to make one thing clear. I can't talk about Hub without including parts where we drove home drunk so if you're gonna get all bent out of shape, this is a good stopping point for you. Heck, if we'd been sober, there wouldn't be a story to tell. But these things happened back in the days when it wasn't exactly helpful to get a DUI, but people didn't treat you like a leper when you did. I don't have a problem with all these groups trying to get drunks off the road, cause, Lord knows, there are plenty of times when I was lucky to get home and should have been stopped. But you've got to take things in context and in the context of the time I knew Hub, driving home after a night out on the town was not a big deal. Kinda like burning trash and destroying the ozone -- we used to do it and we've discovered the errors of our ways and don't do it any more. When I married Mickey, I didn't know Hub went along with the deal, but it didn't turn out so bad cause he'd always bring his own liquor. He brought shrimp and hot sauce one time too and we had boiled shrimp without any sauce. Oh, he brought all the fixin's for good cocktail sauce to dip the shrimp in. Problem was, they didn't have his usual brand of Louisiana hot sauce so he poured a whole bottle of Tabasco in, thinking it was the same. It wasn't. We used two giant bottles of ketchup to try to calm that puppy down, but that was a fire that simply couldn't be put out. As newlyweds, Mickey and I moved into his mother's cabin on a lake out in the country which was a wonderful place for parties or to just sit back, have a beer and tell liquor lies. In a small town, if you're not born there, the next best thing is marryin' somebody who was, but it still takes a while for the women to remember you're there, especially if none of your husband's closest friends are married. So the first people I got to know were the ones that didn't have a family to go home to and Hub was the leader of the pack. He'd show up at the cabin just any o'l time, maybe with another guy in tow from the airport, but mostly alone. I remember the first party I went to in this small town. Since I didn't know anybody much, I mainly sat around and listened. I'd never heard such a bed of vicious gossip in my life. Those women were telling sorry tales about all kinds of folk and I was shocked. On our way home, I started asking Mickey about all the goings-on I'd heard about. He said he'd never heard any of the stories I told and he didn't know the people involved. I didn't think I wanted to know any of those women any better. I changed my mind when I found out later that they'd been talking about soap operas the entire night. Until I got better adjusted to small town life, I figured I was better off hanging out with the guys and I was fine with that until I had kids and decided it was time to get normal. I don't know how Hub got his name. If I ever asked, I've forgotten. I supposed it was better than being called Little Ralph which was his other option. Hub was your classic single man -- a big disappointment to his mama. He lived in a run-down shack out by Coot's Lake but he justified that by occasionally finding money hidden around in rafters and holes in the wall where the former owner had put it before he drowned in the lake. The only piece of furniture I remember for certain was a TV and I only remember that cause he'd memorize my TV Guide every week so he'd know the schedule. He worked on airplanes for a time and then moved on to motorcycles and he reached his highest ambition in life when he got his own shop. He never got married which is why he disappointed his mama because he was an only child. She was the town piano teacher and I'm sure she wanted a passle of grandkids and it was a shame he never gave her any. She was also one of the better cooks in town and Hub would drop by to see her most lunchtimes. When I knew him best, his girlfriend was under age and couldn't get into clubs so she got left out of most of the fun and it was just the three of us who had the adventures. Yes, Hon, if you've been wondering about it all these years, it was just the three of us. Oh, once in a while Country Lee or Johnny Mann might ride with us, but usually we met up with them there. If you've been wondering if you made the right decision to marry somebody else and have a family, I think you did. I think Hub'd be the first in line to say that he was sorry husband material. A great guy, a wonderful friend, but a lousy husband. But I don't remember him carrying on any when we went out without you. Unless that wasn't you that went to Mississippi with us. If that wasn't you, then I'm wrong. Usually when we went to Uncle Sam's, Hub and I would hang out together in the big room and Mickey would stay in the back while Hawkins held court. Hawkins was a celebrity in his own mind. He had been a professional ballplayer of some kind and did some announcing on TV once in a while, I think, so he considered himself a star. To me, Steve McQueen was a star but the guys were properly impressed. They paid him his due respect by sitting around listening to his liquor lies about his glory days in the back restaurant at Uncle Sam's. One night he had picked up the tab for our dinner and I felt obligated to waste my night-on-the-town by sitting there paying attention to him when I really wanted to be out in the front room dancing. I didn't let that mistake happen again and had told Mickey not to let him pay for our dinner again or I was going to be rude and go dancing anyway. I guess we knew him through Country Lee. Country Lee knew lots of famous folk due to being a character in his own right. He had been redshirted by the Georgia Bulldogs and that entitled him to a bit of local small-town fame, but he got his name when his friend Lewis Grizzard wrote about him in his newspaper column and called him that. It just kinda stuck. I think Lee met Grizzard and Hawkins in college and that's how they connected up. People Up North go to Harvard or Yale to make social connections; down South, you play football for Georgia and you're set for life on the social scale. Country Lee was another one who never married and ate at his mama's every day at lunch. He didn't live in a shack like Hub, though. He lived in a barn which was a considerable step up because he had room for a pool table in his living room.. I might have liked Hawkins a bit more if he'd ever remembered me. I guess he was used to people who played musical wives because for the ten years I was married, every time we would run into him, I would be introduced to him and he'd tell me he was glad to meet me like it was the very first time. I wrote him off pretty good when he told me he was glad to meet me a week after coming to a cook-out at the cabin. I just couldn't get past that enough to like him even though Gloria, who he also met on a regular basis, told me he did the same thing to her. To my way of thinking, it just made him a man too wrapped up in himself to pay attention. Uncle Sam's was the first club of its kind in Atlanta. It had been a huge two-story warehouse and they made it one story with a high ceiling, ran long bars down the two longest walls, put in some strobe lights, cranked in some loud music and called it a nightclub. It was tremendously successful with the Buckhead crowd for a while. Then, in the manner of all clubs, it changed hands and became a gay bar later on. Mickey stopped by there for a drink some years later but didn't stay to finish his beer. We must have had a knack for turning places gay cause some time later, Mickey took his mama to the Fox Theater to see Liberace under the stars and wanted to take her to a really nice breakfast afterward. He went to one of our old hangouts for after-we-shut-the-clubs-down breakfast. He went in first so she wouldn't have to climb the fire-escape stairs if they weren't in business and told the maitre 'd he was just seeing if they were still open before he brought his mama up. Luckily, the maitre 'd subtly mentioned to him that if he hadn't been there in a while, the business had changed somewhat and gone gay. Mickey watched a couple kissing in the little bar and said, "Well, maybe I should find another place to take my mother," and the maitre 'd agreed that it might be a change of pace for her were she to come in. I have to admit that I'd have loved to've been a fly on that wall. I love her to death but she's led a sheltered life and I don't think 40 years of playing the organ down at the First Baptist Church would have prepared her for that The restaurant in the back of Uncle Sam's had good steaks and big round tables that would seat a crowd. Hawkins would claim a table for the entire evening and Hub and I would leave Mickey in there paying homage and go party in the big room. That way, we'd have a chair to sit when we wanted to cause I don't remember any chairs in the club itself, so we'd wander back and forth between the two rooms. It was Hub's fault. I like to blame things on Hub and he takes it pretty well. Now, Hub was mainly a beer or vodka drinker if he was paying so I think the bartender poured somebody a wrong drink and gave it to Hub. He stood there sipping it and liked pretty good, so he got me one. A while later, he looked in the mirror behind the bar and saw he had a green tongue. Creme de menthe is a sipping drink, mainly because it's too sweet to drink down fast and it's green. Pour it over some ice and it's like sucking a mint. Boy, Hub got excited and decided it was going to be a good night cause who wouldn't dance with a green tongue. We stood there awhile sticking our tongues out at the mirror. Then we showed 'em off to the bartender and everybody standing around us. We had to share our discovery so we headed on back to the back room and went around sticking our tongues out at the whole table there. They were not properly impressed and we were interrupting an important Hawkins story, so Hub and I went back to the main dance room. I found out later how Hub got all those girls to dance with his green tongue. On the way home, he said he'd told them all he had the freshest breath in town and I guess that was a line none of them had heard before cause he danced his head off that night. You have to be careful when a drunk tells you he knows a shortcut. He may know it but he can't find it. We were leaving Uncle Sam's and heading home one night when Hub yelled from the backseat, "No, no, no, turn here, it's a shortcut." Mickey expressed some doubt and Hub sang out, "Trust me. I knoooooooooooow the way," so Mickey made that turn. We went down a long residential boulevard that ended at a five-way stop. We came to a halt and Mickey asked which way. We should have known we were in trouble when Hub leaned up against the frontseat and took a right long look at the four options. Finally, he pointed at one of them and we made the turn. We wandered darkened residential streets at 3:00 in the morning for a while until we ended up at the same five-way stop. We had made a complete circle and ended up coming down to the same stopsign on the same road we had been on the first time and none of us could remember which road we had taken on that first visit. So Mickey stops again and says, "Okay, Hub, which way now?" This time Hub took longer to answer and Mickey started to take off when Hub yelled, "No, no, no. I knooooooooooow the way. Go that way." I know it sounds like I'm making this up but you've got to remember that we'd had a few, so we weren't too upset when we rode around another 20 minutes to end up at the same five-way stop, coming from the same direction. Hub was quick to point out the correct turn this time and he wanted us to try left. Mickey headed straight saying over his shoulder, "Yeah, Hub knooooooooooows the way." But Hub learned a valuable lesson that night. You don't drink creme de menth and then ride a merry-go-round cause all those circles got to him on the way home and we had to stop a while for him. But we finally made it home before the sun came up. We had been invited to a party one time in a strange town and Hub was calling for directions. When the host asked him where he was, he looked around him and said, "I'm at the corner of Beer and Wine." It took a while to find out which liquor store signs he thought were streetsigns and get him on to the party. So the night leaving Uncle Sam's was our second time to let Hub lead the way. We gave him three strikes and then he was out. The third strike came in Birmingham, Alabama. It wasn't really Hub's fault but he was in the car so we blamed him. Mickey had spent a year or so flunking out of the University of Mississipi so, naturally, he was the biggest Ole Miss fan in the state of Georgia. When The University of Georgia Bulldogs were set to play the Ole Miss Rebels in Jackson, Mississippi, we called a road trip. Nowadays, I understand there's a by-pass around Birmingham but back then, you had to follow the highway right through downtown. In typical Southern tradition, the roadsigns will get you where you want to go if you already know where you're going but they're not much good if you're new to town. It took us two hours to get to Birmingham and we had made some progress on the cooler by the time we hit town. We pulled into a filling station to ask directions. The man there was very clear. "You see that second light there. You go down to that light and you take a right. You don't take a left. You take a right." Mickey pulled out of the filling station, went down to the second light there and took a left. It took us a few minutes to decide we were lost and we got our first hint when we realized we were in the Projects. It was a hot summer evening and the sun was about to set -- not the greatest time to get lost in the Projects in downtown Birmingham. We rode down a residential street. There were people escaping the unairconditioned apartments by sitting on their stoops with a fan turned on 'em. Kids were riding bikes and playing ball and older folks were standing around on the side walk chatting. They all turned to look at us as we passed and Mickey had an audience, so he went into his imitation of having an attack of the jerks. There we were, the center of attention driving down a quiet family-oriented neighborhood with our driver having spasms at the steering wheel. I thought it served him right that it was a dead-end street and he had to turn around and drive past them a second time. He blushes easily, especially when he's had a beer, and his face was beet red when we drove back up that street. It didn't last long. We wandered around a while and ended up back at the same filling station where we'd stopped before. Mickey pulled in and asked the same attendant the same question 'bout how to get to Jackson. The attendant never flinched for a second and said, "You see that second light there. You go down to that light and you take a right. You don't take a left. You take a right." We pulled out and Mickey looks over his shoulder at Hub and says, "I knooooooooooow the way."
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