“I ran into a door,” I said.
“You sure it’s not a zit?” she asked.
“Positive.”
Zit denials are hard to pull off. Later in life, one of my wives, in her thirties, got a zit. She denied it, of course. It was a zit and she knew it and I knew she knew it. But still she insisted it wasn’t. Me, too. I spent my entire date with Miss Chest O’Plenty (there was a stripper named that once) denying I had a zit, but what finally did me in was running into a friend who asked, “How’s your zit?”
I was dead.
“Okay,” I said to my date, “it is a zit, but it’s the first one I’ve had since my junior year in high school.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“I was afraid if you found out, you wouldn’t like me,” I answered.
“Just because you happen to have a zit on the end of your nose doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or I wouldn’t like you,” she said, quite sincerely.
“Does that mean I can still fondle your breasts?” I asked.
Her fist caught me squarely on the my nose zit. When it stopped hurting and I could open my eyes again, my date had returned to her dorm. Unfortunately, she had taken her breasts with her.
The fact I couldn’t have a car gave me serious problems. I had to walk everywhere I went, and I had to go to a lot of places.
Here was my schedule:
5:00 AM.: The alarm goes off. My Reed Hall roommate screams at me from the top bunk, “Why don’t you switch to animal husbandry? The chickens aren’t even up at this hour!”
5:15 A.M.: My roommate threatens to kill me. I have hit the snooze button, and the alarm is back on.
5:30 A.M.: Shower. (Do you know how eerie it is to be in a giant shower stall big enough for a hundred guys to use when all of those guys are asleep? At least there’s nobody’s hair on the soap yet.)
5:45 A.M.: Dress. “Cut off that light,” says my roommate, who is thinking of transferring to the University of Arizona.
6:00 A.M.: Walk a mile to the Banner-Herald.
10:30 A.M.: Walk back another mile to the campus.
11:00–3 P.M.: Walk all over the damn campus, which has large hills, to classes.
3:00–3:45 P.M.: Walk to the opposite end of the campus from the Banner-Herald office to cover Georgia football practice.
5:30 to 5:35 P.M.: Interview head football-coach Vince Dooley, who doesn’t like being asked stupid questions such as, “Well, Coach, who looked good in practice today?” by some seventeen-year-old.
5:35–6:00 P.M.: Type my story on Georgia football practice for the Atlanta Times: “Georgia Head Coach Vince Dooley said today that nobody looked good in practice and he was sick and tired of my stupid questions.”
7:10–8:00 P.M.: Hoof it another mile back to town to file my story to the Times at Western Union.
8–8:30 P.M.: Stop by the Varsity resturant on the way back to the dorm and eat all the grease $1.50 will buy.
8:30–9:15 P.M.: Walk back to the dorm.
9:15–9:20 P.M.: Study, then fall asleep.
5:00 A.M.: The alarm goes off again.
My roommate made plans to purchase a firearm, and I gradually began to hate this schedule. There was one instance where I thought about giving up journalism, becoming an archeology major, and calling my mother to ask for money for a shovel.
It was raining when I stepped out of Reed Hall at dawn, on my way to the Banner-Herald. I was sleepy. I was wet. I thought, Why am I torturing myself like this?
I stopped. I looked back at the dorm. Turn back, or go ahead? The rain had soaked me down to my underdrawers. Nothing like wet underdrawers to sap one’s ambition.
But I went ahead. Underdrawers dry out, and I was convinced all this would pay off later. When I arrived at the Banner-Herald, I took a good stiff sniff of glue and told myself I had made the right decision.
It got easier. I went to see the assistant dean of men and told him my schedule and begged him to waive the no-car-for-freshman rule in my case, because if he didn’t, I’d be in a wheelchair by quarter’s end, having walked myself into paralysis.
He was a kind man. He said I could have a car if I didn’t lend it to any other freshman, if I never allowed any other freshman in it, and if I promised not to set foot in Wyoming until I was at least thirty-five.
I agreed to all this, and my stepfather, who was selling cars at the time, let me have the 1958 blue-and-white Pontiac he had bought from the dealership where he worked.
I suddenly became the most popular person in the entire freshman class at the University of Georgia. Complete strangers came from two dorms away to ask to borrow my car, and you can, in fact, get fifteen college freshmen in a 1958 Pontiac. I proved it on many occasions.
Luckily, I never got caught bending any of the dean of men’s rules. Since I have always enjoyed an occasional walk on the wild side, I even went to Wyoming for the first time when I was thirty.
The car made it easier. I vowed to avoid walking as much as possible for the rest of my life, which is one thing that hurt me in the three marriages I would have. Wives have this thing about walking, as in, “Honey, why don’t we take a walk?” Whenever one of my wives would say that to me, I would run and get under the bed in the fetal position.
When countless marriage counselors asked me, “Lewis, why won’t you take a walk with [either No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3]?” I would reply, “Have you ever covered a college football practice?”
When they would reply, “No,” I would say, “I rest my case,” and No. 1 or No. 2 or No. 3 would start crying. That’s one of the reasons I could never stay married.
And speaking of life with disruptions. The Atlanta Times went out of business during winter quarter of my freshman year. They still owe me ninety dollars for the Georgia basketball games I covered. The Atlanta Times never had a chance against the Journal and Constitution.
It had never occurred to me before that newspapers could go broke and close down. I thought they were eternal, like savings-and-loans.
I took the closing of the Times hard. It wasn’t simply the matter of the ninety dollars. I was making a couple hundred a month by then with my new business, Lewis’s Friendly Freshman Rent-a-Car Service. But I had seen my own byline in that newspaper, a big-town daily. (I was using “Lewis Grizzard, Jr.,” at this point, Lewis Grizzard, Sr., owed a lot of people a lot of money.) I was never even inside the Times’s newsroom, but I knew it must have been a fine place, a noisy and busy place where the teletype machines raced, phones rang, and glue pots got turned over.
I had never thought of newspapers in a business sense. It never occurred to me they had to make money to survive. It had never occurred to me one paper could snuff the life out of another.
The primary function of a newspaper was to print the news and raise hell, I thought. But I learned the truth. The primary purpose of a newspaper was to make money and stay in business. How many daily newspapers were there in New York twenty-five years ago? Seven, eight, nine? Now, there are only four and one of them, the Daily News, is fighting for its life.
Chicago is down to two newspapers. The Herald Examiner folded in Los Angeles. Competing newspaper towns continue to dwindle in number.
I suppose if I owned a newspaper and had to concern myself with the business end of the business, I might feel differently. But all I have ever done is work for a newspaper, and when I happened to be in an area where there was competition, it made it better.
Twenty-five years later, I still insist the most fun I ever had working came as a result of some crazy people who had the idea to start a competing morning newspaper in Athens, Georgia, of all things and of all places.
I’ve said it a thousand times in my life: “If I could go back, I’d go back to Athens and do it all over again.”
“The People Paper “ It had one helluva run, and thank God and Gutenberg, I was a part of it.
But more about that in a little while.
Chapter 7
I’VE NEV
ER BEEN very good with machinery. And machinery, in my mind, at least, is just about anything you can’t eat, wear, or read. I am the man, I think, who inspired Brother Dave Gardner, the late Deep South comedian and philosopher, to quote a mother speaking to her son and saying, “James Lewis, get away from that wheelbarrow! You know you don’t know nuthin’ about machinery!”
Wheelbarrows confuse me, too. Do you pull or push the thing? And shovels and rakes and hoes and post-hole diggers and sling blades. Forget it. In fact, one of the primary reasons I’ve never committed any crime to speak of is I am actually afraid of sling blades, which is what prisoners use to cut back the grass on state and county roads.
A sling blade is this thing with a wooden handle and a sharp, rectangular blade on the end of it. The idea is to sling the blade down onto the grass. If you are still confused, recall that in the marvelous movie Cool-Hand Luke (Paul Newman, George Kennedy, and Strother Martin as the warden), the prisoners often were taken out on state and county roads to cut the grass with sling blades.
What always frightened me about sling blades was the idea I might sling the blade down at the grass and hit my leg, ankle, or foot instead, thus causing myself great pain. It could happen. I’m so bad with machinery I can’t tell you how many times I have nearly cut my throat while shaving with one of those disposable razors.
All a disposable razor is, is a sling blade for whiskers. Once I was late for a party I was giving downstairs in my house, and in my rush to finish shaving I cut a place just above my Adam’s apple. The blood ran down my neck and onto my chest. I tried everything to make it stop bleeding. I applied direct pressure to the wound, something I learned about in the Boy Scouts. That didn’t help. I tried washing the wound with cold water, something I didn’t learn about in the Boy Scouts, but it seemed to be a good idea at the time. That didn’t help.
So I tried an ancient form of trying to make shaving wounds quit bleeding. I tore off a small piece of toilet paper and stuck it on the place on my Adam’s apple. Gross. The little piece of toilet paper instantly became saturated with blood, and when I removed it from the wound, the blood gushed faster than it had been gushing before. That’s when the doorbell started to ring, indicating my guests had begun arriving.
Then, I thought, Band-Aid! I found a box of Band-Aids in a drawer beneath my sink, where I also keep other items to be used in emergencies, such as condoms and peanuts. (You never know when you will be practicing safe sex and an elephant will walk into the room. What you do is give the elephant some peanuts to keep him busy until you’re through.)
The problem, however, was I couldn’t get the top off the Band-Aid case, and now blood was running down my chest into my abdominal area.
The instructions on the Band-Aid case said that in order to get the lid off I had to press down on the edges with my thumbs. But that didn’t work, so I went to the drawer where I keep my burglary tools, found a crowbar, and beat the case open.
Another problem with Band-Aids is that damn little string. You’re supposed to pull that little red string and the outer cover of the Band-Aid will come off, but that never works for me. Either I pull the string the wrong way, or it detaches from the Band-Aid altogether and I have to remove the outer covering by hand and the part of the Band-Aid with the sticky stuff on the bottom gets folded and then it won’t stick on wherever it is you’re trying to apply the Band-Aid to.
I went through three or four Band-Aids before I was able to remove the outer covering successfully. My next problem was this: The basic flaw in Band-Aids is they don’t stick well to a place that isn’t flat.
Try to get a Band-Aid to stick on a knuckle, for instance. The knuckles are raised above the skin, and if you try to put a Band-Aid there, it will stick at first, but as soon as you move the hand where the injured knuckle is, the Band-Aid will come loose.
Same with the Adam’s apple. I put the Band-Aid on my Adam’s apple, but as soon as I said, “That ought to do it” and my Adam’s apple moved, the Band-Aid came loose.
What I did next was curse the Band-Aid. All those who are machinery-impaired like myself know that when all else fails, curse at whatever it is that is giving you a problem. (Paul Newman again. In the movie Blaze, he couldn’t get his lawnmower to crank, so he cursed it. Then he went one step further. He went and got his shotgun and shot the lawnmower.)
I also knew a guy who got fed up with a car that would take thirty minutes to crank every time he tried to crank it. He got tired of all that and began cursing his car. Thirty minutes later, when the car finally cranked, he drove it to the nearest railroad crossing, shut off the engine, got out of the car and left it on the tracks so a train would hit it.
When he heard a train coming, he said to his car, “Good-bye, you suhbitch.”
The engineer of the train, however, saw the car on the tracks soon enough, and was able to stop the train before any collision could take place. The engineer got out of the train and asked the man, “Is that your car?”
The man said yes.
“Well, get the damn thing off the tracks,” said the engineer.
The man, realizing he might be guilty of some sort of Interstate Commerce Commission violation, got back into his car and attempted to crank it.
It wouldn’t crank, of course.
The engineer, becoming ever more impatient, finally said, “Push that damn thing off the tracks. I’ve got a schedule to keep.”
So the man put his car in “drive,” got behind it, and pushed it off the tracks. Unfortunately, the road went downhill on the other side of the tracks, and the car began to roll, picking up speed. The man chased his car and attempted to get inside and put on the brakes, but it was too late. His car rolled into a Dunkin’ Donuts place, knocking out the window front and coming to rest in the glazed and powdered section of the doughnut rack behind the counter.
The man wound up having to pay two thousand dollars in damages, not to mention paying for a tow truck to come pull his car out of the doughnuts. It wouldn’t crank, naturally, when he tried to back it out of the Dunkin’ Donuts.
What the man did to his car next was set it afire in his backyard. Noxious fumes covered the entire neighborhood, and somebody called the fire department, who came and put out the fire. The man was charged with burning without a permit, and now he had this half-burned piece of machinery in his backyard.
What he finally did was call the towing company again, and they charged him seventy-four dollars to tow the car over to a junk dealer who said he’d give the man ten dollars for the car.
“I’ll take it,” said the man.
“This is the last time you’ll embarrass me,” the man said to his car.
He called a taxi to take him home. On the way, the taxi got hit from behind and the man suffered whiplash. He sued the driver of the other car, but when he told Judge Wapner his side of the story, Judge Wapner said, “I had a car like that once, too. What I did was roll it off a pier, which is what you should have done. I rule in favor of the defendant.”
And I’m still bleeding. All my guests had arrived by now, and were complaining about the meatballs. “Damn things are probably made of soybeans,” I heard one of my guests say.
How I eventually got my Adam’s apple to stop bleeding is I prayed. I once saw faith healer Ernest Ainsley pray and a little girl that had one leg that was shorter than the other, suddenly had legs of the same length, and she jumped up and did the Jerk, right on the stage.
I said, “God, if you will make my Adam’s apple stop bleeding, I’ll never try to save a few bucks by serving meatballs made out of soybeans to my guests again.”
The bleeding stopped. A miracle. My guests at least liked the bean dip I had sitting next to the bowl of Fritos.
So how did an individual who has also had trouble with which of the knobs is for cold and which is for hot on unfamiliar sinks, hasn’t mastered a Mr. Coffee machine or a plastic ice tray that doesn’t have a handle, wind up driving a forklift in the summer of 1965?
It was Ronnie Jenkins’s fault. When spring quarter ended at Georgia, I no longer had a job with the Banner-Herald. Wade didn’t need me because school was out and all that was left to cover in Athens was boys’ baseball, an occasional swim meet, and the Saturday night auto races at Athens Speedway. The Atlanta Times had gone out of business, and football season didn’t start for three more months.
I decided to go back home for the summer. Ronnie had quit his job at the bank in Atlanta by then, and had also moved back home. He got a job in the accounting department at a Newnan plant that made plastic tabletops. Ronnie said, “I can get you a summer job at the plastic plant.”
I had some experience in accounting myself, thanks to my career in the loan-payment department the summer before. And the company put out a newsletter. Perhaps I could edit and write that? Or how about public relations?
Ronnie, who got to wear a tie to work and sit in an air-conditioned office, got me a job driving a forklift for minimum wage, $1.25 an hour.
The first forklift I ever saw, I was driving. A forklift is this vehicle that has two forks in front of it. There’s a handle near where the driver sits that makes the forks go up and down.
The idea is that things that needed to be lifted, moved to another place and then lowered onto that place sat on wooden platforms called “skids.” Each skid had two openings. You drove up to the skid, lowered the forks into the openings, then raised the skid and whatever was resting on them.
I likely was one of the few employees out in the plant with a high school education. I am certain I was the only one with any college experience.
In fact, I was so much smarter than everybody else, they finally had to paint a little sign next to my lowering and lifting lever so I wouldn’t forget which way to push it for up and down.
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 13
