The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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son, you look exactly like a duck to me, Blam.” And then of course the dumb muthafukka’s family gets the bill. That’s another joke.
Anyway, McKinney loves the you-know-what outta Mad’s poems. Personally, I think poetry is fulla shit—but, I don’t think McKinney is, so if she likes Mad’s poems, then I know there’s something to the sumbiches, because, as I have indicated, McKinney ain’t just any lillo gal—or wuddn, when she was a gal—plus, she lived a long time up the country in New York City at a place called The Barbizon, whatever the fuk that was.
Even though I never saw much need of travelin’ anyplace, I do think it’s good for some people. And I have to admit, I did ’sperience some things when I went down to the GuffaMexico to visit Mad on that datgum island that I wouldna come up on no where else: like water you can’t see across, jellyfish, and stingarees. I would say pelicans, too, but we got them muthafukkas hanging out around the catfish ponds here in the county, along with the gotdam water turkeys.[5] Although, as somebody pointed out, our pelicans up here is white, and down there they’s a good many brown ones. But as far as I’m concerned a fukkin pelican is a pelican; I don’t give a shit what race he is.
Speakin’ of that, I know there’s a lot of people that call me a racist. Fukkum. I ain’t. I’m just a sumbich that uses the kind of words people don’t like to hear because the words ain’t long and wiggly they way they want em to be. I mean, I don’t have anything especially against most Pekkawoods, Niggas, Greasers, Chinamens, Jews, A-rabs, Eye-fukkin-talians, and them gotdam Cath’lics, nor boy nor girl Queers, neither. Anybody that knows me, knows me damn well and maybe better than I know myself. Yet I do admit I have said some hard things about Planters and Bankers. But, them, and all the rest of those sumbiches I just mentioned—every fukkin one of em—I reckon they can take care of themse’vs without frettin’ over the likes of me. And if they can’t . . . then can’t nothin’ in this world ever help em.
Okra Winfrey
Take a pound and a half of fresh—or frozen—okra, whole or cut-up, along with lots of white and/or yellow onions and canned whole tomatoes, which you can mush up as you go along. Add some chopped, tender, white celery shoots from the inside of the stalk, but th’ow away the leaves.
Dump it all into a big-ass skillet with a little olive oil—not too much because there’s gon’ be a lot of juice from the stuff you’ve already th’owed in there—then cook it for a good while, stirring it around every now and then. Add a lot of garlic. Use the powder.
Later, after it cooks down, and when you feel like it, add two pounds of fresh, peeled shrimp, and some nice big scallops. You can use frozen crawfish meat. But be sure the crawdads are Americans and not those gotdam Chinese-ass muthafukkas. You can’t tell what them sumbiches might be! Plus, if you want to, you can use chicken, but I wouldn because it’s too fukkin ordinary, and you’ll want to avoid that.
Mix it all up, and let it simmer on low heat—and even though it duddn take a lot of time to cook shrimp, make sure the shrimp gets down in there and rubs up against the other stuff for at least fifteen minutes, after which, cut the fire down and keep everything simmering, with a top not on all the way (so some of the steam can get out), for a fairly long time, maybe an hour or two—or more—on real low-ass heat. And don’t mess with it.
Then cut off the stove, unload the whole thing on top of some of that unpolished brown rice from Arkansas, and eat it—with, of course, salt and cayenne or, you know, salt and . . . Crystal Pepper Sauce.
[1] A small town in southeast Mississippi, definitely not in the Delta.
[2] In the Upper Delta, during the 1940s and ’50s, people listened late at night to their radios, and heard an announcer from one of Memphis’s principal stations say something like: “And now from the Skyway Ballroom High Atop Hotel Peabody, we bring you Les Brown and his Band of Renown.”
[3] Mad wrote it out on something else first.
[4] This is one of Junior Ray’s greatest fictions. He has never cooked up anything in his life except in his imagination, and the reader is advised to proceed with caution.
[5] Cormorants.
Junior Ray Reflects on the True Nature of Time — He and Voyd Deal with a Nekkid Fat Man — And a Large Snake — Slab Town — Mr. Reitoff
Personal time?! What the fuk do you mean personal time? All time is personal,” I told that dumb muthafukka. Course, he’s my supervisor, and I ought not to talk to him thatta way, but the silly sumbich went to some kind of management school up the country, in Pennsylvania, I think, and it gave him a fukked-up sense of reality. He believes there are several kinds of time: personal time, company time, sick time, and vacation time. Oh, yeah, and down time. What an ass’ole.
Like everybody else that come here with these casinos, he’s a Yankee, and those sumbiches NEVER know what time it is. And yet that’s all they think about. They’re down-to-the-minute kind of people. The trouble is they handle time like it was a handful of chips—stackin’ it up, countin’ it out, and tryin’ to save some. They don’t realize time ain’t in no danger and that it’s them that’s runnin’ out and that they, themse’ves, is only a moment, kind of like a raindrop.
My supervisor’s young, but I don’t think any amount of time, personal or otherwise, is going to improve him. Also, he’s one nem fly fishermen, if you know what I mean. But I don’t hold that against him too much. I don’t give a damn if he cornholes armadillos as long as he lets me take off when I need to, within reason naturally. All in all he’s not a bad guy, just a little silly.
The thing is I’ve got to go over to Sledge. You remember I’ve told you about my girlfriend over there. Anyway, she’s having a big do for her daughters and her grandchildren, and she especially wants me there, so I can talk to her oldest daughter’s middle boy about a career in law enforcement. She says she thinks he’s got what it takes and that he’s a lot like me. I didn’t touch that.
But I will say one thing: Being in law enforcement most of my life taught me a shit pot of a lot about what’s what. I guess I seen just about everything you could think of and then some you couldn, like the man with the snake up his ass.
That situation come about late one summer night out on the Cut-Off[1] when Voyd and me was patrollin’ that part of the county, and we heard there was a party out there. Other’n we just wanted to make sure hadn’t nothin’ got out of hand, we didn’t particularly think much about it because bunches of Meffis folks had parties out there all the fukkin time, and this was long before there was any casinos.
Anyway, just as we topped the levee there at the Tippen place, here come the biggest, fattest sumbich you ever saw, nekkid as a porkchop, his hands clawin’ at the air in front of him, runnin’ up the levee on the road from the other side straight-ass into the headlights of the patrol car. I slammed on the brakes, cause I thought that coksukka was gonna dent up the grill, and I didn’t want no more of that kind of shit to deal with that month. But, he swerved off to his left and come hollerin’ like a muthafukka by Voyd on the passenger side.
“Gotdam,” said Voyd.
“Gotdam,” I said back. “We better turn around and see what the hell’s the matter with that sumbich.”
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