Stinky Mother Fucker: Trauma at Save-A-Lot

To clarify, Stinky Motherfucker will most likely be a multi-post story as our . . . acquaintance has been long and varied. Also, these stories have very little to do with frugality (or my lack thereof), money management, parenting, or anything else vaguely related to this blog. These will just be the tales of a boundary-lacking man who seems to haunt the cheaper grocery stores and most anywhere else I ever thought I may go to shop or wait in peace.

I cannot begin to actually know when I met Stinky Motherfucker or why in the hell he keeps showing up in my world other than the fact that a county of 50,000 people is obviously not large enough to prevent our accidental meetings.

To recount our mutual "friends" or "neighbors" requires some thought as the relationships here often overlap. The earliest I can recall having met Stinky Motherfucker was sometime around 1998. He married or shacked up with (I'm not sure as to which) a woman a couple of years older than me who used to attend the MethodistBaptistGossipist church I once attended as a teenager.

In the early years that I knew her, she was a nice looking young woman; neither being ugly nor beautiful. Rather, she was a country looking sort of girl with nice hair, good teeth, big cheeks, and was well-kept in overall appearance. I think the years of being with Stinky Motherfucker must have taken their toll on her as the last I'd seen her she was missing several teeth, developed a monstrous gunt that lapped to her knees, and could never seem to find clothes that fit outside of knit fabrics. It was a hard downfall and I realized just how far she'd fallen when I once saw her in the Piggly Wiggly wearing a dirt bead necklace. Hereafter, I have always referred to her as Wife Thing.

A dirt bead necklace, for those uninformed, is something a grown woman should never, ever be seen wearing in public. Many children will spend entire days outside and develop one, but a child should not leave the house looking in such a way. A good parent will always wash some of the crud off a child before making an impromptu run into town.

This type of necklace is simply a collection of dirt and sweat that has collected into the crevices of the neck until the gunk takes on the appearance of a dark choker-like necklace. I don't know what happened to Wife Thing, but it must have been some horrible pyschological disturbance to allow one's self to appear in public in such a manner.

So I first met Stinky Motherfucker through Wife Thing. At one point, Stinky Motherfucker worked with my boy heathens' father at a local factory. He was known as Stinky there because it seemed that he was rather stinky.

Sometime later, Stinky Motherfucker, Wife Thing, and their children moved next door to my granparents, Great Daddy and Grand Marie. It seems that Stinky and Wife Thing's personal hygiene extended to their house keeping skills and things were not well in their home. They seemed to distress my grandmother.

I have, over a period of years, run into Stinky Motherfucker at the elementary school, the doctor's office, the circus at the National Guard Armory, grocery stores, and various other places. In all these years, Stinky Motherfucker's appearance has not changed. Whereas Wife Thing was once a woman of some seeming personal self-respect, it seems Stinky Motherfucker was born wearing a Chester the Molester mustache, 1984 tinted metal-framed eyeglasses, a scrawny and greasy ponytail, baseball cap, beer gut, and dirty plaid jacket.

While I try not to spend my life stressing on people's personal appearance because my own seems to at times disturb people - my best friend's father once asking her if I was on drugs and mumbling something about my hair - Stinky Motherfucker's adult rendition of Pigpen is just one more thing to add to the list of personal and social skills he so dearly lacks.

I painfully became aware of Stinky Motherfucker's boundary issues in the produce aisle of the local Save-a-lot one evening in the spring of 2004. It was one of those rare occasions where I had the opportunity to shop without children tagging along to beg and scream for all the brightly colored things within their grubby little reach. Living a baby-filled life for a couple of years by that point, I was pretty  happy about stolen moments of solitude over by the frozen vegetable aisle.

Stinky was walking in as I was walking out and he nodded to me. Not recognizing him, I vaguely nodded in return and moved the largest key on my keyring to sit between my first and second fingers. I did not know him and he has all the appearance of a type of man you should be prepared to stab in the eye with a key while simultaneously kneeing him in the groin. I thought it best to be prepared.

I'd not been in the store long before he came back in and found me perusing shitty heads of lettuce.

"Don't I know you?" he asked.

Looking up to stare at him, I responded that I wasn't too sure about that. Stinky began to repeat his litany of former run-ins, whom he'd married, and the fact that he lived next door to my grandparents. My oft-misfiring synapses connected all the dots and I put my key away.

We talked of normal things for an all-too brief moment. Everything after that I've tried over the past-half decade to erase from my dirtied mind. I've only been partially successful.

Why is it that I always remember the things I want to forget, but forget the things I'd prefer to remember? I wish I'd spent more time discovering my Grandmother's secret. She once forgot an entire husband. I should have paid more attention to her thought processes before she died.

It began with, "Wife Thing left me for some guy from Michigan that she met on the Internet."

By offering my deepest sympathies to Stinky Motherfucker, I apparently gave permission for him to step out of the realm of normal conversation into the depths of the stinkiness of his life. I can't recall the exact conversation, but I remember all to well the main subjects and if I have to spend my life with those images stuck in my head, then so do you.

I can't remember who had the children during all this romantic shuffle, but there was something about a trailer, a leaky pipe, and Wife Thing having s-e-x with Michigan Boy while Stinky Motherfucker was on the phone with her.

He got to the part about how much Wife Thing liked cunnilingus just as a white-haired old codger using his Save-A-Lot buggy as a walker shuffled past us. I briefly wondered if I could be cited for public indecency just by being a non-vocal party to this conversation. Then I wondered why in the hell I was standing over by some shitty lettuce listening to this fucking freak detail the sexual exploits of himself and his Wife Thing.

Maybe I am just too Southern in some ways - I don't know how to cut people off for fear of being rude. And what is it about me that sometimes induces people to tell me the weirdest, freakiest parts of their lives? Do I look as if I could empathize with a man whose wife has run off with another man and then had sex where he could hear? (And why didn't this creepy mother fucker HANG UP THE PHONE?!?) Maybe underneath the shaggy hair and my crazy eyes, there's some sort of secret look that states I Give a Shit.

The truth of the matter is, I think I just love a good train wreck. I couldn't stop myself from listening. Couldn't pick  my head of shriveled lettuce off the shelf and just walk away because this type of freakery can't just happen to anyone on an everday basis. For some horrible, dark reason it was up to me to listen and record Stinky Motherfucker's loss in my own already-addled brain.

Also, on the one hand, I feel rather sad for Stinky Motherfucker, Wife Thing, and their children. How can people manage to walk through life not knowing when to shut the fuck up? Where were their parents when they were supposed to be teaching you about personal space and how to read the body language of others? If there was ever a need for a handy dandy Social Cues Educator, these people are desperately in need on one.

Then when I step back from my socialist bleeding heart and look at the whole picture, that's just one creepy mother fucker and I sure as hell am never going to go hang out at their house no matter how many times he's informed me where they live and entreated me to "stop by and hang out." Especially when I know their family has had a recurring lice issue. Getting lice is one thing, but being known as the family who keeps lice is not something to encourage social visiting outside of the grocery store.

So that's why I don't go in Save-A-Lot anymore. While I can't resist ogling the bizarre, I do try to reduce the opportunities because I am trying to be an upstanding citizen. It helps if I don't actively seek out freakery. The fact that Save-A-Lot has shitty produce has nothing to do with it.

For the record, Stinky Motherfucker and Wife Thing did work out their issues in some sort of way. I don't know how exactly, but I know it did involve keeping Michigan Boy in the house for a while. I don't like to think about anything past that.