You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning

by Celia Rivenbark

I repeat: Average heterosexual men don’t father children by artificially inseminating women friends old enough to be their mamas. (See Jackson, comma Michael.)

  Another writer said: “You’re not stupid [Hey! A kind word at last!] but you are definitely a jerk [OK, never mind]. And, by the way, I was just watching a tribute to the late Tim Russert and you are no Tim Russert.”

  Well, no. At least we could agree on that much. Now, if only I could get rid of these stabbing pains in my assular region.

  And then there was this day-brightener: “You are a horrible person to bash such a positive Christian role model for our kids today as Mr. Clay Aiken. Shame on you! Please write me back so I can understand why you don’t pick on the really negative actors, musicians, and politicians that are ruining our children today.”

  Oh, but I do! Where were you, letter writer, when I said that we needed Posh and Becks living in America almost as much as a supper of warm beer and tongue casserole. Thanks ever so, mother country. (Although, to be fair, big sloppy smooches for sending us The Office.)

  I pick on plenty of doltish celebs, although I don’t think they have the capacity to “ruin our children.” I prefer to leave that to the parents themselves, instead of the funny-looking little people living inside the TV box.

  To be fair, David Beckham, who seems like an amiable enough chap, didn’t ruin our children but rather inspired an entire generation of polite young Indian girls to want to “bend it,” whatever the hell that means. So, yes! I try to pick on others as often as possible and am more than a little hurt that you haven’t even noticed.

  One of my absolute favorite letters came from a woman who suggested that I do a little more research before I imply that Clay Aiken was anything less than an ice-road trucker.

  “Do you even know that the people who work with him think he’s courteous and kind to everyone? You might want to check with the employees at the Schubert Theater to find out what kind of a person he is.”

  For the record, I am sure that Clay Aiken is absolutely, hands-down the most macho person ever to play Sir Robin, the waifish tights-wearin’ antihero in Spamalot. No question.

  So Clay’s come out now, bless God, and we can all get back to our lives. Well, not quite all of us.

  Now some of his most devoted fans are turning on him for misleading them, lying to them and, hey, as it turns out, when he was singing all those love songs, it didn’t necessarily mean that he was singing personally and privately to them or their woefully obese daughters. Hey, sorry if the truth hurts but I believe we’ve all established that I’m (a) not nice (b) not Tim Russert, and (C) on parole.

  One former Claymate posted her final message on his fan site with this gem: “I will never be able to listen to him sing, ‘O Holy Night,’ knowing he desires unholy nights.”

  I imagine a certain voodoo priestess is out there somewhere sticking pins in a handmade doll with red-straw hair and an impish face, possibly from her prison cell. “You (stab!) said you’d (stab!) wait for me (stab!).”

  What the Claymates didn’t get was that I like Clay Aiken. I’m thrilled that he came out so his baby boy could be raised by a daddy living his authentic life instead of sneaking around the way poor, dead Rock Hudson (and so many more) had to do back in the day.

  Face it, Clay Nation, this is progress. Now close your eyes and think of England when Clay sings. I promise he sounds just as good as he used to back when he was a heterosexual.

  13

  What? Your Preacher Doesn’t Stand on a Bucket?

  Growing up in a tiny town in rural southeastern North Carolina had its own brand of excitement.

  For instance, I went to school side by side with royalty, sharing study hall with the reigning North Carolina pork queen, who even had a pig nose though, mercifully, it wasn’t quite as obvious as Christina Ricci’s in Penelope.

  Duplin County, North Carolina, had miles of chicken houses, turkey farms, and hog “parlors,” a funny word that always made me picture enormous pink-eyed sows lolling about on velvet-covered Duncan Phyfe sofas and watching their offspring tousling playfully on an Oriental rug.

  Hogs seemed to invite euphemisms. Hog waste was disposed of in a “lagoon,” which conjured up images of a young Brooke Shields and her tow-headed young lover cavorting in crystal waters. “Lagoon” sounded ever so much more exotic. There were lots of hog lagoons in Duplin County because, at one time, we were the nation’s number-one pork-producing county. I’ll never forget the horror of discovering that a pond admired from a distance was in fact a hog lagoon. Sadly, this was confirmed only after we got the johnboat safely off its trailer and into the water. This was one of those embarrassing “sure is peaceful out here, can’t believe nobody else has found this pond” kind of moments that turns into, “Oh, hell, this is a hog lagoon!”, realizing that we wouldn’t be catching any crappie that day but could perhaps catch plenty of crap. Oh, the shame of having to motor that little boat back out of the river of shit and onto the trailer and hope to God nobody saw us.

  Rural counties in the South are full of characters, and we had more than our share in Duplin County, which was home of the world’s largest frying pan in addition to the pig queen with the snout nose. The frying pan was so big that when the Lions Club fired it up with a bunch of tobacco barn burners, they used pitchforks to turn the whole chickens as they bubbled and browned.

  If you got sick, you went to a doctor who thought that daylight savings time was from the devil and so you always knew to go one hour later for your appointment. Occasionally, a Yankee who had been transferred to Duplin County to work at the Butterball turkey plant would show up for his appointment at the time he was given, but other than that, everybody pretty much played by the rules.

  For a time, we had a lot of tent revivals, and that’s when the true eccentrics crawled out of their falling-down antebellum homes and made their way to the tent pitched in the vacant lot beside the Branch Banking & Trust Building to stand and sway beside the trailer-home crowd.

  One day, the Reverend Jim Whittington (“I pronounce it ton because my name carries a lot of weight with God!”) came to call and drew quite a crowd because he, unlike most of the ragtag evangelists who passed through town in one shiny, sweat-soaked suit after another, was on channel nine every Sunday morning, screaming of salvation and healing and speaking in tongues.

  One of the wealthier women in town showed up in her almost-new Jaguar to present the Reverend Whittington with a wad of cash to buy a prayer cloth, which he anointed on the spot by pressing the cloth to his huge lumpy forehead and going “hominahominahomina” over it. She watched him with such rapture, I’ll never forget it, seeing a great healer in this slick creep whose knees sank softly into the tent’s sawdust floor, one eye open to watch as crumpled fives and tens found their way into an aquarium at the makeshift altar where he prayed.

  Proper church folks were, naturally, offended at the huge crowds these opportunistic leeches tended to draw. Me? I couldn’t get enough of them. I’ve always been fascinated by religious freakiness.

  The freakiest of all in our town was a middle-aged black woman with a lopsided wig who walked along the highway smack through the middle of town wearing at least four coats in the summertime and trailing an assortment of foster children behind her, each more pitiful than the one before. “Sister Admira” was crazier’n a sprayed roach. On odd days, she’d position herself in front of the Ben Franklin to scream “words what have come to me straight from the Almighty Jehovah himself” from the top of an overturned scrub bucket. Usually it boiled down to how we were all going to hell. After a few months of this, some asshole gave her a megaphone and she didn’t mind using it.

  “Sin brought ’em into this world,” she’d shriek into the megaphone, her wig jerking from its sideways perch like it had a rat running around underneath, as she pointed at her sad-eyed charges one by one. “And only God can take ’em out!”

  Fortunately, Child Protective Services took ’em all out after some
kind Christian finally reported that Sister Admira’s young charges were traipsing around behind her all week long instead of going to school. She eventually went to the “crazy hospital” an hour away where someone said she was still preaching from the top of a scrub bucket, her new congregation calmly ignoring her while they watched Good Times on the overhead TV.

  It occurred to me only a little while ago that people who don’t grow up in small towns might not have close encounters of the kind we had with Sister Admira.

  With Sister gone to the nuthouse and a general feeling that it was a bad idea to allow any more TV preachers into town to fleece the locals, all we had left besides mainstream Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches was a sweet-faced woman who called herself reverend and decorated cakes at the Piggly Wiggly for free.

  Although Reverend Brenda had never technically had any formal religious or cake-decorating training, she was filled with the spirit and chose to share it, not from a scrub bucket rimmed by a half-dozen shoeless retarded children, but by witnessing through cake and coffee.

  Reverend Brenda was available at a moment’s notice to “cast out demons” or to create a masterpiece in buttercream fondant for your bridal shower. If these two needs converged, well that was all the better.

  My first personal encounter with Reverend Brenda came when I went to pick up my friend Darinda to go to the football game at Legion Stadium one cold October night and discovered that Darinda’s mama had called over Reverend Brenda to cast out an alcoholic demon from her husband.

  “Daddy’s drinkin’ again,” Darinda whispered to me as she fumbled into her navy peacoat. “Mama says that only God and Reverend Brenda can help him now.”

  I knew from gossip that Reverend Brenda was a frequent visitor at the hospital twenty miles away and had even managed to bribe a “clergy” parking sticker from one of the ward clerks so she could park right beside the doctors and other important people. She considered it her Christian duty to check on the lost sheep at the hospital, although usually the rooms were crowded enough.

  In the South, families set siege when a relative is hospitalized. My friend Pam says she can turn hospital chairs into a bed, locate the extra linens, find the ice, and memorize the daily cafeteria specials in under five minutes. Reverend Brenda could do all of that and transform a cooler into an ottoman/kneeling bench.

  “Looks like it was an emergency visit,” I said, noting that Reverend Brenda was pressing both her hands on the top of Darinda’s daddy’s head and moaning something suspiciously close to “hominahominahomina.”

  “Yeah, you noticed, huh?”

  It was hard to miss the fact that Darinda’s daddy was sitting bolt upright in his scratchy plaid recliner wearing nothing but his huge, puffy white boxer shorts. He was an exceedingly large man covered with moles and it is a sight that I won’t forget as long as I live—Reverend Brenda’s hands, green icing still under the nails from a Halloween party cake, pressed to Darinda’s daddy’s temples while he leaned forward like he was getting a pressure check at the eye doctor.

  I had the feeling that Darinda’s mama had given her husband an “old tomato”: Either let Reverend Brenda lay healing hands on his fevered alcoholic brain or she’d be leaving him and taking Darinda and her little brother with her.

  Reverend Brenda didn’t seem to mind that we had intruded on her healing and demon-casting-out service. As we got ready to leave, she even broke away from her tongue-speaking long enough to cheerily tell us that we both looked “cuter’n a sack full of puppies,” adding, “y’all girls have fun at the ball game and don’t fornicate under the bleachers ’cause you know a man won’t marry a woman with the dirty leg.”

  “Didn’t plan on it,” I said under my breath while being vaguely creeped out at the notion of the “dirty leg.” I was almost positive that phrase was nowhere to be found in the King James version of the Bible.

  “We might smoke some weed, though,” said Darinda, mostly under her breath.

  We giggled at this and ran out the door, hoping that Reverend Brenda hadn’t heard that last part. She meant well and there was no denying that she was good at her day job, having once created an astonishingly lifelike spun-sugar rendering of the faces of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy Jr. on a vanilla sheet cake for the ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the new town hall.

  She also made a red velvet cake that you’d crawl over twenty miles of broken glass to have the chance to eat. And she was the most cheerful somebody I’d ever met. If you asked Reverend Brenda how she was doing, she’d always smile real big and say, “Honey, if my life gets any better, I’m gonna have to hire somebody to help me enjoy it.”

  Reverend Brenda’s red velvet cake was created as a godly alternative to devil’s food cake, which she refused to make or decorate for obvious reasons. Ditto her feelings about partaking of that famous Southern Christmas delicacy: divinity fudge.

  “There’s nothing Christlike about fudge,” she’d say, refusing to eat it even under the more politically correct name that even the holinesses who didn’t shave their legs and lived on the dirt roads would use: seafoam candy.

  In the rural South, even food had the capacity to offend the Almighty. Some folks I knew wouldn’t eat deviled eggs because of the name, which made them almost but not quite as crazy as Sister Admira in my mind.

  I’ve never met a deviled egg I didn’t love. They’re a pure pleasure and you can dress them up as much or as little as you like. Here’s one of my favorite variations.

  HEAVENLY DEVILED EGGS

  1 dozen hard-cooked eggs

  6 tablespoons mayonnaise (yes, Duke’s again)

  2 teaspoons prepared horseradish

  2 tablespoons sweet pickle juice

  1 teaspoon black pepper

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  Split the eggs lengthwise; remove yolks and mash ’em up with the mayo, horseradish, pickle juice, pepper, and salt. If you want to get fancy, you can blend this together in a food processor ’til creamy, pour it into a cake-decorator bag (or a Ziploc bag with one corner cut) and pipe the filling into the egg-white halves. Garnish with paprika ’cause it just looks more festive.

  CLASSIC RED VELVET CAKE

  In the South, we love our artificial red food coloring and we’re not ashamed to admit it. You won’t care about the health and safety of it once you taste this Southern classic, which is always welcome at wakes and weddings alike.

  2½ cups flour

  ½ cup cocoa powder

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  ½ teaspoon salt

  2 sticks butter, softened

  2 cups sugar

  4 eggs

  8 ounces sour cream

  ½ cup milk

  1 (1-ounce) bottle red food coloring

  2 teaspoons vanilla extract

  Cream cheese frosting (recipe follows)

  Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside. Beat butter and sugar in large bowl with electric mixer for 6 minutes or until fluffy-looking. Add eggs in, one at a time. Add sour cream, milk, red food coloring, and vanilla. Gradually beat in the flour mixture until blended. If you overdo it, your cake won’t be as moist and soft, so just don’t.

  Pour batter into two greased and floured 9-inch cake pans and bake for about 35 minutes at 350 degrees. (Use a cake tester to make sure it’s done.) Cool the layers on a wire rack and frost with classic cream cheese frosting made by mixing together these ingredients ’til fluffy:

  8 ounces cream cheese, softened

  ½ stick butter, softened

  2 teaspoons vanilla extract

  4 cups confectioner’s sugar

  This recipe makes enough to frost one fabulous cake. When you get really expert at red velvet cake, you might want to try your hand at making one in the shape of an armadillo like they did for the groom’s cake in Steel Magnolias.

  14

  Chances of Getting in the Hall of Fame? Very Rare

  Duh-hubby looked at me with lo
ving eyes as he gently held out my coat and waited for me to slip into it.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m taking you to the Outback,” he said.

  While more monied folks might think this meant that he was spontaneously whisking his bride of nearly twenty years away on an Australian adventure, I knew better.

  We are attentive Kmart shoppers, after all. People in our income bracket don’t just jump on a plane and fly eighteen hours on a romantic whim. He meant the Outback Steakhouse, which was fine with me. I’m a big enough redneck to believe that going to Epcot is almost as good as crossing the pond. It-lee and a whole bunch of other countries and you never even have to leave Orlando! Suh-weet!

  The truth was, I knew why Duh had selected Outback, but he felt the need to explain anyway.

  “The winner of the Duplin County Hall of Fame always gets the award at a fancy steak dinner,” he said. Did his voice just catch a bit? He cleared his throat and continued.

  “And, although they didn’t pick you again this year, I just want you to know that you’ll always be in my hall of fame.”

  “Honey, that’s real sweet,” I said. And it was. It was almost enough to make me forgive him for nominating me for ten years in a row in the first place.

  “Ridiculous!” I had huffed a decade ago. “Why, there are many more deserving natives than I. This will just be embarrassing!”

  Even as I was saying it, though, I figured I might have a smallish shot at it. But that last flicker of hope had been snuffed out seven years earlier when I heard a rumor that they might give the award to a native whose “fame” had apparently included working on a movie one time as a stand-in for Henry Winkler.

  “Heeeeeyyyyy.”

  I knew that the trip to Outback was because the rejection letter had arrived the day before. For the tenth year in a row, I wasn’t a winner. Which made me a loser. Again.