The Dogpatch Pimp
Tags: Writing, Fiction, Drivel, Short Story, Creative Writing

My father; the Dogpatch Pimp. I hadn’t seen him in years. Mainly, because he was an idiot of the first order. A complete caricature of a caricature. He was a raging narcissist and an abomination of fashion and morality. Equal parts street pimp from 1970s television and Dogpatch hillbilly, he was a marriage of the ridiculous with the absurd.

He’s the family member older, more polite societies would have squirrelled away in an attic room. We, however, were forced to live with our “disgrace” in the clear light of day.

From the minute I was old enough to leave home, I’d put as much distance between us, both physical and emotional, as I could, but, somehow, he always resurfaced. An unflushable turd. He’d heard I was in town and called to have me meet him at his favorite watering hole, a hole-in-the-wall bar called The Watering Hole.

I said yes to the meeting because my grandmother had recently croaked and the possibility existed that I’d been mentioned in her will. Grandma was loaded. (She despised the word grandma and insisted on grandmother). It was rumored, grandma had tried, unsuccessfully, to take it all with her. I heard the old man had let her take her rings from her third and seventh marriage to the grave but he made sure the rest of it stayed behind. “Nothing over a carat goes in that hole!” he’d said. There was a lot to divvy up; I think she still had her first dime.

He saw me walk in and gave me a nod. He was standing next to the bar talking to a woman with bulging, almost froglike eyes. She was severely drunk. The old man never set his romantic sights too high so he might maintain his high rate of success in the boudoir. He always looked for stragglers and the infirm the herd had left behind.

Also, she was fairly top-heavy; the old man’s weakness. He’d not be able to keep his hands to himself. He’d fuck it up. He’d lost his edge with age.

Instead of walking over for a proper barfly introduction, I found a stool and sat down. I ordered a beer and noted the time. I watched the clock until there came the sharp crack of a slap. — ker-SMACK! — The sound was so recognizable among bar folk that a hush fell upon the Watering Hole. They looked about to see which one of their comrades had fallen. The silence served to frame a shrill, inebriated slur: “Don’t pinch me, sonuvabitch!” A couple seconds later the old man was sliding onto the stool next to me. He’d fucked it up.

The old man was widely known for his titty-pinching and ass-grabbing. The level of sexual satisfaction one would get copping a feel seemed to me meager, however, he reveled in the wicked acts. In his prime, he was well-practiced and slick about it; a genius of the sexual assault. As far as perverts go, he had the hands of a magician. He could finger-fuck a nun to orgasm without her knowledge. This was, obviously, no longer the case.

During the course of a lifetime, he’d developed a deserved reputation in our neck of the woods as ‘The Dirty Old Man.’ Not ‘a dirty old man’ but ‘The Dirty Old Man’ (one step below ‘Pervert in a Raincoat’). In turn, my brother and I became known/branded as ‘Sons of the Dirty Old Man.’ We were but burnt offerings for his many fetishes and perversions. We were collateral damage.

— ker-SMACK! — What a sound! She must’ve brought that slap up from the south pasture. The right side of old man’s face was glowing red. “She must be a lesbian.” I offered up the excuse so he didn’t have to.

“She should have said so before I bought her the drink.”

“She appears to be a southpaw.”

He waggled his chin from one side to the other to check its operational condition.

The old man was preposterous and puerile in every way. I regarded him as an embarrassment, but he had a much different perspective of himself. He saw himself as a class act. “Stylin’ and profilin’,” he’d often say.

He wore a brown, polyester suit — hung slack on his aging frame — beige alligator shoes, and a porkpie hat with a white silk band. You couldn’t look more like an idiot if you had three tries. He had the brim of the porkpie pushed down in what Goober and Jethro might consider naught-naught spy-style, and, in what seemed like a pornographic afterthought, he had violated it with the tail feather of a pheasant. Profanity begged an audience with the world, and the world acquiesced.

“You deserve such a fine hat,” I said.

He swept a flourish over its vaudeville finery and smiled. “It’s my reward to the ladies.” The hat definitely spoke to the ladies, it just wasn’t saying what he thought it was saying.

“You should get yourself a gold tooth,” I suggested.

His brow slightly bunched while he considered it.

“You can’t help your coonass ways, can you?” I asked. Telling him he looked ridiculous wasn’t enough. He’d brush that off. But, coonass? Coonass cut to the bone.

His lifelong nemesis had been the Lousiana Coonass. An exaggeration of a simple-minded Cajun who had once given him a proper ass-whupping over a parking space. According to the old man, the coonass had cheated during the fight by accessing his retard-strength.

Queensbury Rules: Protect yourself at all times, no hitting below the belt, and no accessing retard-strength.

Nonetheless, from that black-eye on the bayou forward, coonass became the term he applied to all who fell short of his idea of perfection. My brother and I grew up answering to the call of: “Hey, coonass!”

The entirety of the old man’s life had been disrupted by the recurrence of the coonass. His existence had been infested with them. They followed him relentlessly. Especially at work; there was at least one on every job. Sometimes, two. He found a lot of them in traffic.

My father, a designation held in place only by the biological process that finds us all on God’s green earth, was a walking-talking mortification. They say there’s no shame in things outside your own doing, but I disagree. There’s plenty of shame out there.

I’d like to go back in time and punch my grandma square in the teeth. What horrors did she visit on her child to make him so obsessed with tits and ass? She did something to cross his wires. Breastfeed too long? Bathe him well into his teens?

Still, even without grandmother’s meddling he would have turned out fucked up. Though he was reasonably intelligent, he was exceedingly damaged by the fact that he possessed no talent to achieve his dreams. He was eternally plagued with resentment and envy and those around him suffered for it.

You’ve seen him before. He’s your neighbor. The shirtless old man in boxers and flip-flops. The nearly-nude beer-belly who waters his yard with a Pabst in his hand. You’re absolutely convinced he poisoned your cat.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“I have cancer.”

“No, you don’t. You’ve used this lie already.”

“Not on you, I haven’t.” He seemed bewildered that such a technicality could get in the way of his propaganda. He’d become a lonely old man and he was desperate for the family he’d ignored for most of his life. In his despair, he’d begun telling lies about his health.

“Well, I heard about it, so it lost its efficacy. I can't unhear something.”

“Your brother told ya?”

“Yep.”

“One of these days, I will be sick. I’ll be sick and dying.” He lit a cigarette and was immediately seized by a fit of coughing.

I took a drink of beer.

“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” he coughed. Intentional or not, the way he said it sounded like a warning.

“We’re all waiting for the great and terrible day of the Lord.”

“How much do you think a gold tooth costs?” he asked.

“Less than cancer.”