SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #4
BATFISH
ALBERT LEA
Artimus sat at the bar looking like he had tried to swallow a cockroach and it was stuck in his throat.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“What’s the matter?” he exploded. “You sit here telling me a fucking story like that and then have the nuts to ask me what the matter is? Jesus Christ! I cannot fucking believe that you’re an escaped mental patient on top of all the other shit you’re on the run from.”
“Well, in a way I am and in a way I’m not.” I replied.
“What the hell is that suppose to mean?”
“I’m not crazy. I think. But I did escape.”
He shook his head in disgust and just stared at me. A couple of college babes on spring break had wandered in off of the beach and had sat down at the bar, so I made myself scarce for a second to take their order.
They both wanted a drink called a “Smelly Beaver” that was all the rage this year.
When I came back to Artimus’s side of the bar he appeared to have gotten his second wind.
“Both of those bimbos have decent racks.” He paused. “Hey! You never told me you were from Minnesota. All this time you’re from Minnesota and you never tell me? Shit man, I’m from right next door in the Dakotas. Do you realize how fucking homesick I get? And you don’t have the common decency to at least tell me you’re from the same neck of the woods so we could bullshit about it.”
The mental patient issue seemingly having dropped from his mind.
That was another thing about Artimus. Very short attention span.
“Hey man, what town in Minnesota? I use to run a lot of dope through this shithole called Albert Lea.”
That “shithole” was my hometown. Albert Lea was named after some civil war colonel who got smoked at a big battle. Its biggest accomplishment is that it’s the hometown of Eddie Cochran, the 1950’s rock and roll star, who was killed at a very young age over in England. Car wreck or something. Summertime Blues.
Marion Ross from the show Happy Days supposedly is from there, too. She was Richie Cunningham’s Mom. But who gives a crap about that?
There had also been an incredibly cool murder in Albert Lea when I was growing up. But no one talks about it now. A local minister had been carrying on a torrid homosexual affair with a younger member of his parish. For reasons unknown, the young man had stabbed the minister about a million times and had dragged the body all over the county for a couple of days. He was the subject of a massive manhunt that the area has never seen the likes of since.
During that time my mother’s favorite way to keep me in her sight was to remind me that this maniac was on the loose. And to just think of horrors he would inflict on my young body once he caught me. Further evidence of her terrific parenting skills.
No wonder I had horrible nightmares all through my childhood. I still think that that murder would make a great John Waters film. Would really have put the town on the map.
Albert Lea has always had its own distinct smell. There was a packing plant in Albert Lea and the air always smelled like someone was taking a shit and smoking a White Owl cigar at the same time. You’ll never forget that smell once it hits the nostrils.
When I was a kid, the biggest thing going on was “dragging Broadway.” Just driving up and down the main drag of the town.
Well, not the biggest thing. The biggest thing was drinking and just like you said, Arty. Drugs If drinking was numero uno, then drugs were numero dos.
Albert Lea sits right at the intersection of Interstate highways 35 and 90 so it’s a natural location for drug trafficking. A lot of biker gangs hung around and meth was popular in old A. L. long before it became trendy but pot was king.
Albert Lea was where I acquired my taste for marijuana. I think you remember your first joint just like you remember your first piece of ass. I sure do. It was a massive red, white, and blue number and we smoked it right next to Billy Hawk’s garage. It was like smoking rubber.
Albert Lea was not exactly what you would call a racial friendly town either. Hispanics were tolerated because it was felt that they were good for the local economy. In other words they would take the jobs that no one else would take. But if you were black, beware. You better be out of town by sundown!
There had been at one time in the city’s history, a local chapter of the KKK, its offices located above the Woolworth’s store.
I feel truly fortunate to have had the chance to grow up in my formative years in an area filled with such culture, along with such kind and caring people.
Neither of my parents was from Albert Lea originally. My Dad was born just up the road in Faribault, Minnesota. His parents had both been employed at the state hospital there as ward attendants.
My grandfather was a mean son of a bitch. Strong as a rhino on steroids and he could back it up. For fun, he liked to go in the local taverns and beat the shit out of the first person who looked at him wrong. For money, he could knock out a horse with one punch. My grandmother weighed over three hundred pounds. All I remember about her is that she had tits the size of basketballs.
My mother was born in Plainfield, Wisconsin. The home of Ed Gein, the first famous serial killer. She actually had known him personally.
It was really her claim to fame, due to the fact that my grandmother was one of the bodies that Ed had dug up. My grandfather was a rambling, gambling man who one evening stepped out for a smoke and never came back.
My Dad was a Hoover vacuum cleaner/bible salesman, which was the first job(s) that he grabbed after he got out of the service after the big one, WWII. My Mom was a beautician who ran her own shop out of the basement of our house.
Dear father was offered Albert Lea as his territory shortly after they were married and they had lived in A. L. ever since.
The family house smelled like permanents, gin, and dog shit. They had three kids. In order of birth it was my sister, Lucy (named after Lucille Ball), my brother, Luther (named after Martin Luther, the religious guy, not the great guy), and me. Plus, our family dog, Skippy, a rat terrier.
Now that’s a whole different story. Skippy is my entire reason for believing in reincarnation. He had the unbelievable habit of roaming the neighborhood and either taking a crap or pissing on whatever he set his little brain to. If someone had just washed their car, Skippy would come over and take a leak on his clean tires. If someone had just rubbed mink oil on their prized leather golf bag and had left it in the sun to dry. Skippy would piss on it. He even walked into a neighbor’s house one time and took a leak on the family’s floor length curtains, which had just been bought that day. But his crowning achievement in life was for some reason he liked to back his little hairless asshole up to the windows of the neighbor’s basements and shit on the glass so that it stuck.
That little dude was doing some serious payback for being fucked over in an earlier life. Maybe he just liked the feel of cool glass on his bunghole. I don’t know. But I do know one thing. More than once I heard a scream of anguish or rage and would see Skippy running for life and some neighbor chasing him down.
He would eventually be bestowed the nickname of “Squirty” by the neighborhood. Skippy/Squirty died of a heart attack and I know that the only people in town who grieved for him were our immediate family, minus my Dad.
Dear old Dad wasn’t the kind of guy who would get all emotional over a dead dog. Dad had four passions in life: Selling suckers and Bibles, God, the Minnesota Twins, and Buckhorn beer. Not necessarily in that order.
During the baseball season, he and my mother would sit on the back porch and easily kill damn near a case of beer every night while listening to the Twins lose another game on a tiny transistor radio.
Both my parents are what you today would call functioning alcoholics. They could kill the better side of a case of brew along with a couple of shots of cheap bourbon and still pretty much carry on a normal
conversation.
Not that there hadn’t been a few slip ups. Dad once was burning trash while pie eyed and accidentally threw a box full of hairspray cans in the fire causing a fucking nuclear blast.
He was lucky that he wasn’t killed. The lid off that burn can blew 500 feet in the air and landed on a neighbor’s kid riding his bike down the street.
My mother and her sister once got so trashed on an August evening that they put sheets over their heads and went trick or treating in the neighborhood. My aunt was so bombed that she fell off a set of steps and cracked her head open.
It was all a thrill a minute for them, although my mother had lost a few customers when she took to having a few morning bracers before she gave some old broads their Lady Clairol dye
jobs.
In those days drunks were funny. Remember Otis on The Andy Griffith Show staggering around?
My poor sister reacted to these shenanigans by hiding in her room, reading movie magazines, practicing her cheers for cheerleading squad, and dreaming of the days to come when she would move to Minneapolis and lead a life of glamour. Her goal in life was to marry someone with money and drive a Buick.
My brother reacted with underage drinking, fast cars, felony theft, and assault of school teachers and anyone else who told him different. His goal in life was to be a bad ass or a prison snitch.
I just looked toward getting a meaningless high school diploma and leaving town. Hopefully, I would get laid at some point in that time frame. At that point in my life, that was all that mattered.
In then end we all got what we wanted, in a strange way that is.
Dad’s mind got so pickled on cheap Minnesota draft beer that he and God often sat talking to each other on the back porch. Remember that in the years to come the Twins would win two World Series titles. Maybe my Dad had something to do with that.
My mother had to close down her beauty shop after she really got tanked one morning on beer and tomato juice and wound up passing out in the middle of the floor while she was giving some old biddy a makeover. She then had plenty of time in her day to sit around and agree with whatever nonsense came out of my father’s cakehole.
My sister married a high school athletic star. They moved to Minneapolis where he had a full ride at the University of Minnesota. There he majored in football, pot smoking, and having lots of sex with both women and men, while she stayed at home and had his kids.
But it was my brother who really brought pride to the family name. He was sent to the state reform school at Red Wing, where he ran into a stainless steel shank in the shower room on his first day, when he refused to be the new shower boy toy.
The night before they took him away he had confessed to me that he had been laying the pork to two of the women who came to my mother’s beauty parlor. They were both in their late sixties! He should have been imprisoned for that alone.
He did leave me his titty magazine collection. There must have been two hundred dirty books and magazines hidden in my parent’s attic. They were under my mother’s wedding dress in a trunk.
And me? Early in my senior year I had smoked two huge joints of Colombian Gold and had gone to see the Navy flick The Last Detail.
That was all the convincing I had needed to go join the Navy.
By the way, I got finally got laid before I left. It just wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.
