Lizard Tales (16 page)

We were in Momma’s driveway after an intense training session and we got into arguing over squatting techniques. Now, I’m not one who thinks he’s always right; it’s just that I’m never wrong! So the discussion got heated. Being of a somewhat more peaceful nature, Amy decided she was just going to leave and cool off. But when she told me that, I told her she’d rather slide down a mountain of razor blades naked into a pool of rubbing alcohol than to try to leave. Her ears started turning red and I could tell she was hotter than a baby’s bottom after a spanking. She stomped over to her F-150 and fired that jewel up. I was
standing about ten feet in front of the truck, thinking,
She won’t run over me
.

That’s when she leaned out the window and yelled, “Ronnie, you’ve got to the count of five to move.” Then she started: “One, two …” and before she said “three” I was tearing my shirt off, telling her she knew better.

At that point, I don’t know if it was the headlights coming on or the sound of the tires squealing that shocked me the most, but it was obvious my scaring tactics went over like a Little Person at a high-jump competition. Next thing I know, I was sprawled across the hood and she was flying down the driveway. I started begging her to stop. Then I knew I was in more trouble than a blind rat at the Cheesecake Factory, ’cause I saw her smile, hit the gas, and hook that truck hard right.

Then I knew exactly how Superman felt: it ain’t the flying across the field that bothers you, it’s the landing that’ll cause you to kiss your grits. I looked up and there was Amy heading out of sight. I sprinted over to my Dodge truck and set after her like a duck chasing a June bug.

Amy didn’t know this town too well, but I knew she was heading to the light by the Bojangles on the highway. I also knew she’d turn right and make her way back toward Wake Forest. So I took a dirt road, cut through at the Bojangles, and came the wrong way back down the highway. When I saw her turning toward me I dropped it down a gear and hit her head-on. By this time I was madder than Janet Reno’s blind date. I ran to her window, which was down about six inches, grabbed it, and shattered it into a thousand pieces. Then I leaned in, put her truck in park, and yanked out her keys. I started screaming, “You’d rather catch a Nolan Ryan fastball with your teeth than just drive
off and leave me like that! Now I got your keys and you ain’t going nowhere!”

You’d think by now she’d be just a tad intimidated; but she was cooler than a Colorado collie in an Arctic ice storm. A few guys from Bojangles came running over, and I figured it was a good night to be heroic, so I turned my attention on them. Just as we were about to break out like inmates with a soap set of the guard’s keys, I heard someone yelling. There was Amy, who, during the commotion, had gotten out of her truck and eased over to mine. I’d left my keys in the ignition when I jumped out, so Amy just backed my truck up, dropped that mug in drive, and was heading straight toward me! By the look on her face I could tell she was madder than a mule munchin’ on bumblebees.

As I dove for my life, I’ll never forget her yelling, “If you’re gonna be stupid, you’d better be tough!” I lay there in the dirt and watched as she and my truck drifted off into the darkness.

It took two weeks, twenty dozen roses, and about twelve poems to get her back—and a whole lot more before she told me what she had done with my truck. But I learned a great lesson that night: there are two theories about arguing with a woman … and neither one of them works.

[Advice]

B
ack in the day, when I had to haul a repo on a rollback flatbed, I found that taking the car was tougher than wrestling a tennis ball from an alligator. I could locate the collateral easy enough, but that was just the first step. Getting it hooked, loaded, and then driving away without losing a tooth was sometimes harder than Chinese arithmetic.

Then things were always made more difficult because my first agent, Brooks, had the tact of a Sherman tank in a china shop and must have learned to whisper at a sawmill—so we never had the advantage of stealth. Not to mention: we both had perfect twenty-five-year-old beer bellies, so it wasn’t like we could hide very well.

One day our lien holder called and informed us that he had an unusually hard repo for us. The car was a Caddy with rims and the debtor was crazier than a hippie at a hula-hoop convention and meaner than a pack of wild dogs on a three-legged cat. Apparently, he had hired a repo agent before us and the car’s debtor had beaten the brakes off of him. (And it didn’t help at all that he was so little he’d have to run around twice just to make a shadow.) Well, me and Brooks figured this would be a good measuring stick for our talents, and it might even get us noticed by a few other lien holders (which would mean more business for us)—so we went for it.

Since this guy was well aware his Caddy was up for repo, we figured the best way to slap this bull was from the
front. We were actually more excited than a Thanksgiving turkey in the yard the day after Christmas. So we loaded up in that old rollback and headed out like a herd of turtles.

Now, this debtor lived down a dirt path off a side road, and when you got to the end, his house was on the right and there was a neighbor’s house just across the yard on the left. We knew that, heading down this path, they’d see us coming a mile away. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather have the fleas of a thousand camels in my crotch with my arms too short to scratch than to get spotted coming into a repo before I could get some chains on the unit. But in this case, we had to do the best we could do and let the rough end drag. Worst-case scenario, I figured, wasn’t nuthin’ a shot and a shotgun couldn’t take care of.

Well, we rounded the corner and there was our Caddy. But I saw every light in the house coming on. I jumped out of the truck and, quicker than a fat rat on a Cheeto, I was under that car laying the J hooks on the axle. I crawled back out and started yelling at Brooks to tighten the cables. But as I spun around, I realized I was right about one thing: it definitely wasn’t nuthin’ a shot and shotgun couldn’t handle! Problem was, I was on the business end of that shotgun and the guy holding it had crazy in his eyes.

“Mister,” he said to me, “you’re only alive because it’s a sin to kill you. But out here, we don’t worry about no laws. So you can either drop and run or you can stay and get dropped.”

It didn’t take me but a second to realize that I was ready to disappear like a set of twenty-four-inch gold rims at a Jay-Z concert. But since I had already hooked that Caddy, I figured I’d rather pound salt up my tail with a steel brush than to let that car go.

I looked him right in the eye. “Mister, before I can leave, I gotta get to my truck to loosen the winch and get these chains off.” He agreed to let me get back in my truck, which was all the lead I needed to try and make an escape.

Now, this ol’ boy might have been tough and crazy, but I quickly realized that he was also as dumb as mud on a wood fence. So I yelled to Brooks, who looked as confused as a pawless dog trying to bury a bone in an ice-covered river; I told him to climb in the car. The second his feet hit the floor, I sailed into that driver’s seat faster than a jaguar on go juice and slapped that jewel into drive. I started dragging that Caddy down the driveway—with that man in tow—Brooks cheering me on like we was about to score the winning touchdown at the homecoming game, and me smiling like a catfish swimming upstream from the herd.

Dust was flying and the Caddy was bouncing around like a hobbyhorse at a birthday party. Suddenly, I saw lights coming toward us down the driveway. Seems his neighbor was coming home and we were hanging out there like a buzzard sitting on a gun barrel. At that point, I knew I’d rather skinny-dip in a pool full of armpits than to get back out and deal with this debtor—especially now that he had backup. But I was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. With nothing else left to do, I got out to face the music.

Well, like I said, the only thing we had going for us was the fact that this guy didn’t have both oars in the water. If stupid could fly, he would have been a jumbo jet! But he was still holding all the cards—in the form of a 12-gauge persuasion tool! I crawled out with my tail tucked between my legs and just started unhooking the Caddy from the rollback. The neighbor had chimed in by this time, and
it was really obvious that I was the bear caught with his hand in the hive.

But there’s always more than one way to skin a catfish on a Friday night. And since this guy’s neighbor was on the same intellectual level as he and Brooks were, I was in the perfect position. I looked over at Brooks and gave him a wink. Though sometimes he’s as slow as a bucket of spit and half as useful, I knew that he was aware I was about to do something far less than stupid.

I’ve learned a cat will always blink when you hit it over the head with a sledgehammer. So I quietly said, “Sir, I’m really sorry we tried to pull a fast one over on you. If you’ll give us the keys, we’ll put your Caddy back in the spot where we found it and you won’t never see us again.”

Well, you could have buttered my butt and called me a biscuit when I saw him hand Brooks the keys—against the ranting of his neighbor. Brooks eased in and fired that Caddy up. I unhooked the chains and he eased the car back to the parking spot.

Then Brooks got out and handed the guy the keys! He was living proof that evolution can go backwards! Here I thought we were on the same page—but I guess Brooks was reading a different book. We got in the truck and, as the neighbor pulled his car around to let us drive by, I jumped on Brooks like a fly on a dead bull.

“Bo! What were you thinking? You had the keys! I bet your momma used to get drunk just so she could breast feed you and the buzz never left!”

Brooks never said a word. For the next ten minutes he let me ride him like a broken stallion, and I was getting hotter than a nine-inch rear end at the drag strip with no grease. Finally, we pulled into a store down the road a ways and I screamed, “I oughtta make you get your own ride home!
That repo was gonna put us on the map Bubba, and you blew it!”

He just started grinning like a mule in a watermelon patch and said, “I won’t have to walk.” Then he held up the ignition key for that Caddy. In all the turmoil, Brooks had slipped the key off before handing that ring back to the owner. “I couldn’t drive off while the neighbor still had the driveway blocked, so I figured I’d think this one out, and I took the key. See, you’re wrong sometimes, Ronnie. I do have moments where you don’t need to water me.”

I couldn’t even talk, due to my ears connecting at the corner of my jaws. I spun that truck around faster than a frog on a fly in a maggot farm, and we headed back toward that Caddy. We parked about half a mile out and snuck down through the woods to the back of the house. Now it was time for some old-fashioned “Roncon”—the Lizard Lick version of recon. So we eased around the back of that place, trying to be slicker than a harpooned hippo in a banana tree, and saw that the Caddy was still sitting there, prettier than a Polish sausage at a pig roast. The lights and TV were on in the front room and the debtor was sitting in his recliner.

I told Brooks to ease over to the car, and when he got in it, to hit me on the two-way walkie and I’d bang the back door so the guy inside would run to the back of the house while Brooks fired that baby up. He had a straight getaway down the driveway, so it seemed like a perfect plan with everything in our favor: we had keys, we had the element of surprise, and we knew the layout of the land.

So Brooks eased around to the Caddy, and I went to the back door. Of course, we made more noise than a blind elephant in a china shop, so it was no surprise when I got into position that the back porch light came on and I was
face-to-face with the business end of that double-barreled shotgun … again. I heard that walkie crack and Brooks said, “I’m in! I’m in!”

Before that man could spin Abe Lincoln’s head around at a penny toss, Brooks fired that Caddy up. That ol’ guy broke to the front of the house like Carl Lewis out of a cannon and forgot all about me. I heard Brooks mat the pedal and I could see a rooster tail of dirt all the way from the backyard. I knew we had just licked this repo—but I wasn’t gonna sit around and gloat, ’cause I didn’t want to meet the inner workings of those gun barrels.