If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground
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If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground
Lewis Grizzard
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2012 by Dedra Grizzard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-273-3
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-120-9
LCCN: 2012014679
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
Other books by Lewis Grizzard:
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You (1979)
Glory! Glory! Georgia's 1980 Championship Season (1981)
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat (1982)
If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About A Quart Low (1983)
Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree With Anyone Else But Me (1984)
Elvis is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself (1984)
Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey? (1985)
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun (1986)
Shoot Low Boys - They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (1986)
When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care? (1987)
Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny - You Know Them Taters Got Eyes (1988)
Lewis Grizzard’s Advice to the Newly Wed (1989)
Lewis Grizzard on Fear of Flying (1989)
Does a Wild Bear Chip in the Woods? (1990)
Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night (1990)
Don’t Forget to Call Your Momma; I Wish I Could Call Mine (1991)
You Can’t Put No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll (1991)
I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 and Other Nekkid Truths (1992)
I Took a Lickin’and Kept on Tickin’ and Now I Believe in Miracles (1993)
The Last Bus to Albuquerque (posthumous) (1994)
It Wasn’t Always Easy but I Sure Had Fun (posthumous) (1994)
Grizzardisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Lewis Grizzard (1995)
Southern by the Grace of God - Lewis Grizzard on the South (1996)
TO BISHER,
WHO KNEW WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT
AFTER ALL
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
About the Author
Chapter 1
BEFORE I BECAME a newspaper columnist, which is the job I currently am holding down and will continue to hold as long as I don’t get fired, don’t say to hell with all of it and open a liquor store, and don’t die, I was a newspaperman. Newspaper columnists aren’t really newspapermen, or newspaperwomenpersons, as one might think.
Columnists don’t have anything to do with the editing of the paper, the way a paper looks, or how the news is displayed. Unless we start stinking it up for a long period of time, we also never get punished; no one ever makes us columnists go out in the cold at four in the morning to deliver the thing to the readers’ doorsteps.
I don’t think people who deliver the paper get enough credit, quite frankly. I don’t care how good the paper is, if the man or woman who is responsible for having it on your lawn—come rain, sleet, snow, or hangover—falters, what difference does it make if four gorillas and an orangutan produce the paper?
(Of course, four gorillas and an orangutan could put out a better newspaper than the ones some people try to shove down the readers’ throats. Most gorillas and orangutans I know at least aren’t pinko, left-wing communist bed-wetters, which a lot of newspaper people are.)
Newspaper columnists aren’t reporters, either. We can simply make things up if we want to. I, for instance, make stuff up all the time. I once made up an interview I had with God. God said, “Tell Jimmy Swaggart he’s fired.” If I actually had interviewed God, I’m convinced that’s one of the things He would have said, along with, “Boy, was the ayatollah surprised when we met him at the Pearly Gates with a bazooka.”
I even quoted my dog once. I wrote, “My dog drinks out of the toilet. One day, I said to my dog, ‘Why do you go to the toilet on my living room rug?’ And my dog said, ‘Well, you go in my water bowl.’ “
A reporter couldn’t have quoted my dog because my dog can’t talk. He can barely bark anymore after he ate a wasp’s nest one day. You get a couple hundred wasp stings on your vocal chords, and you’ll have trouble barking, too. Now, my dog barks in a whisper. He goes, “WHOOF.”
I knew a guy who had a dog who actually could talk, however. (Now you have to guess if I’m making this up or not. Being a columnist is great fun.)
He took his dog into a bar one day and said to the bartender, “For a free drink, my dog will talk to you.”
It had been a long day, so the bartender said, “What the hell. You got your free drink, now let me hear the dog talk.”
The guy says, “Okay, ask him who was the greatest home-run hitter of all time.”
The bartender asks the dog, “Okay, dog, who was the greatest home-run hitter of all time?” and the dog responds, “Roof.”
So that riles the bartender and he throws the guy and the dog out the door of the bar. The guy and the dog roll out onto the sidewalk and land in the street.
The dog gets up, licks a few asphalt burns, and says to his master, “I still say it was Roof. Hank Aaron had more at bats.”
Other things I made up and printed in my column:
* The Beatles caused the Vietnam War.
* Jerry Falwell runs rabbits.
* Bugs Bunny is gay.
* Nobody actually lives in North Dakota.
* Muamar Qaddafi and former major-league baseball pitcher Joaquim Andujar are the same person.
* Eating liver causes shortness of breath, zits, flatfeet, anxiety, and prolonged menstrual periods.
* Richard Nixon was born wearing a suit.
* In a fit of rage, Buffalo Bob once whittled Howdy Doody into a likeness of Pinocchio and bit off his nose.
* Elvis actually is dead. Of course, nobody really believed that. I had a letter from a woman in Topeka who said Elvis had appeared at her Tupperware party disguised as a plastic egg carton.
“We weren’t really sure it was Him,” she wrote, “until he recited the entire dialogue from his movie Viva Las Vegas. We all got nekkid and danced around him while he sang ‘Down in the Ghetto.’ It was a religious experience.”
Newspaper reporters, of course, occasionally do make things up, but not all the time. Only in emergencies. Which is why there was that story about the Exxon oil spill in Alaska. It was a slow news day, and an editor in Fairbanks said to his environmental reporter, “We don’t have a thing other than another Eskimo eaten by a walrus. Why don’t you make up a story about an Exxon oil tanker spilling a couple of billions of gallons of oil in Prince Rupert Sound?”
The reporter said, “Give me thirty minutes,” and came back with a story about a drunken tanker captain who put some dingbat at the wheel, who promptly runs into a reef and spills a bunch of oil, which kills a bunch of fish and birds.
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The editor and reporter didn’t think the story would make it out of Alaska, but suddenly it went worldwide, and it took the entire news staff all night to fill up Prince Rupert Sound with No. 2 ink to make the story look as if it actually happened.
Watergate never really happened either; Woodward and Bernstein and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee made the whole thing up as a joke on Richard Nixon on his birthday.
Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee got soused one night at the Sans Souci, and Bradlee said, “Hey, you wanna get one on Nixon?”
Bradlee was Woodward and Bernstein’s boss. What were they going to say, “Forget it, Jason, let’s have another drink”?
Of course not. That’s another thing about reporters: If your editor makes a suggestion, you follow it as gospel.
“So,” Bernstein said (Woodward was too drunk to comment), “what did you have in mind?”
“Let’s make up a story about Nixon being involved in some sort of cover-up,” said Bradley, just before he screamed at the waitress, Nora Ephron, “Hey, bitch. Who do you have to know to get a drink around here, Linda Lovelace?”
Bernstein, who also needed another drink, said to waitress Ephron, “Right, what’s the holdup here?”
And waitress Ephron replied, “One day, you’ll be sorry you talked that way to me,” and dumped a Perrier she was taking to John Tower right on Bernstein’s crotch.
Just then, Jack Nicholson walked in with Rob Lowe. The plot thickens.
Anyway, so Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein concoct this story about a third-rate burglary at National Democratic Headquarters and, as happened in Alaska later, things got out of hand. Bernstein, at least, got punished. He wound up marrying Nora Ephron, who later divorced him, and then later still wrote all about their marriage and divorce, which wound up as a movie called Heartburn, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Even Nicholson couldn’t save that dog. The worst two movies in the past five years? I mean, besides all those movies like Friday the 13th ad nauseam, where nobody in the cast is over seventeen except Freddie. They are 1. The Accidental Tourist and 2. Heartburn. Amadeus is third, incidentally, followed closely by The Last Temptation of Christ.
And speaking of Rob Lowe, he just goes to show you how even the best reporters often miss a great story.
The Democrats held their 1988 national convention in Atlanta, where I live. The editors at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, where I work, got very excited about the convention coming to town and spent about half the Vietnam War debt covering it. (Notice, I didn’t use the normal cliché, “the French War debt.” That’s because I’ve never forgiven the French for not letting us fly over their airspace when we wanted to bomb Qaddafi/Andujar or for how they treated President Bush’s entourage when he went over to help them celebrate the bicentennial of Bastille Day. Imagine not giving all four thousand members of the entourage VIP treatment.)
I wasn’t all that excited about the convention coming to Atlanta myself. Bring a World Series to Atlanta, now you’ve got a story. Having a World Series in Atlanta would be sort of like holding the Winter Olympics in Miami. Both would be Man-Bites-Dog stories of the highest order.
The problem with spending all that money and effort covering the convention was that everybody knew what was going to happen before it happened. Let’s say the entire country already knew San Francisco was going to beat Denver in the Super Bowl. How many reporters would show up for the game?
Everybody knew Dukakis was going to get the nomination. Everybody knew Jesse Jackson would make speeches that sounded great unless you actually listened to what he was saying. And that is exactly what happened. But with hundreds of newspeople in town, nobody got the big story. The Rob Lowe story.
It’s too much fun not to do over again.
Rob Lowe is the actor. Actually, I think I should make that “actor.” The kid looks good, which I assume is how he got into the movies. As an actor, he couldn’t carry Bill Frawley’s derby hat.
For some reason I am yet to determine, Rob Lowe came to the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. Maybe he had a thing for Kitty Dukakis.
See what you can get away with if you’re a columnist?
I write, “Maybe he had a thing for Kitty Dukakis,” and you read it and tell somebody, “You know what Lewis Grizzard wrote in his latest book?”
And they say, “You mean the one called If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground, that costs $17.95 and everybody in the country should go out and buy immediately?”
And you say, “That’s the one. He wrote, ‘Maybe Rob Lowe had a thing for Kitty Dukakis’!”
Your friend tells the story a couple of more times, and one day you pick up USA Today and there’s a story saying, “ROB LOWE DENIES HAVING KINKY SEX WITH KITTY DUKAKIS IN DEMOCRATIC LOVE NEST.” Rumormongering is another fun thing about being a columnist.
But back to the convention. Rob Lowe shows up with a guy who was referred to as a “traveling companion.” They hit an Atlanta joint called Club Rio across the street from the convention site. There they meet these two girls, and Rob and his pal take them back to their hotel suite and set up a video camera. They invite the two girls to perform a little lesbian thing and they record the performance, quite a smashing one (a lot better than Amadeus) according to those who later saw the videotape.
What transpired afterward was the big news. One of the girls on the tape was only sixteen. A minor. Only six years out of the fifth grade. She later allegedly tried to blackmail Rob Lowe because if she goes to the cops, Rob gets hit with all sorts of nasty things such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, making child pornography, and having sex in the Bible Belt.
Then, the sixteen-year-old’s mom sees the tape, and she sues Rob Lowe. At this writing, nothing involving the incident has been settled, but do you see what I mean? How does Rob Lowe getting a sixteen-year-old and her buddy to get naked and do it to one another on a video camera in a hotel room compare with Lloyd Bentsen’s acceptance speech as far as reader interest goes? No comparison. Rob and the lesbian stuff wins hands down over Lloyd and his recommendations for the economy. But Lloyd was front-page news.
It took six months for the Rob Lowe story to break.
I realize at this point that I have strayed far off the original path I had intended for this, the opening chapter, but I wanted to throw in some stuff about celebrities and sex to get you this far.
My theory is that if somebody goes into a bookstore and starts browsing through a book, whether or not they buy it probably depends on how they enjoy the first few pages. You can’t stand around in a bookstore and read an entire book and then put it back on the shelf, thereby actually stealing the book, unless, of course, it is very short, which is why most writers make their books so long. Tolstoy, for instance, was so concerned about somebody doing that to War and Peace that he wrote one of the longest books in the history of books.
So I’m going for the sensational and the prurient early, figuring the browser might say, “Hey, this is pretty exciting stuff. I’d better buy this book so I don’t miss what else is in it.”
I’m not saying there isn’t going to be any more juicy information here. (I’ll make up some if I have to—remember, I’m a columnist.) But now let us go ahead with the book’s main thesis.
This is going to be about newspapers, because since I was eight I’ve been in love with them, and because people have the damnedest ideas about newspapers and a great deal of fascination with them, as well.
How could you be literate and not be fascinated with newspapers? Every day of most people’s lives, a newspaper sneaks in there at some point. They are delivered right to our homes, just like pizza, only pizza is more expensive. There’s another connection, too: Newspapers and pizza can both give you heartburn.
I love newspapers because they are a constant in my life. No matter what happened to me the night before, I know there will be a newspaper on my lawn the next morning. It’s my littl
e friend.
I get up. I put on the coffee. I go outside and get my little friend. Then, I read it and drink my coffee.
Everybody has a different method of reading their newspaper, I suppose. Mine is another constant in my life. I always read the paper—any paper—the same way: I glance at the front page first. If no war has been declared, no tidal wave is expected to hit my neighborhood, and no announcement that cigarettes really don’t cause cancer, or other such astounding news, I then go directly to the sports section.
I read everything in the sports section that isn’t about hockey, soccer, and hunting. I’ve said for years, if the deer had guns, too, then, and only then, would hunting really be a sport.
I go back to the front page after I finish reading sports. I read very few news stories with foreign datelines because I basically don’t care about what’s going on in South Yemen. I should, but I don’t. I think I’m a fairly normal reader, and the fairly normal reader usually wants to read about what’s going on in his or her hometown. No matter how the jet airplane has shrunk the world, it’s still difficult for somebody in Meridian, Miss., or Minot, N.D., to care what’s doing four or five thousand miles away in some place covered with sand, unless they know somebody there.
I quote a colleague of mine who, during a discussion concerning what emphasis should be put on international stories, said, “I don’t give a damn what happened last night in Outer Mongolia. I just want to know who cut who down at Slick’s Lounge.”
People were always getting cut (southern for “knifed”) at Slick’s in Atlanta. And shot, too. Two guys got into an argument about who was the better wrestler, Vern Gange or Argentina Rocca, and one guy pulled a gun and shot at the other guy. He missed and hit an innocent bystander in the knee, instead.
I happened to know the emergency room doctor that treated the victim.
When he asked the patient what happened, the patient replied, “Man, I was just sittin’ there drinkin’ a Schlitz and some fool shot my ass in the knee.”