Stinky Mother Fucker: Trauma at Wal-Mart

I can't remember exactly when this particular incident happened, but I'm pretty sure it was last spring. I'd run into Stinky Motherfucker enough after the Save-A-Lot incident to know to keep my distance and keep moving as quickly as possible.

Around this time, I had all three children in a drama class through the local Allied Arts. For $10 per child, they received one afternoon of acting instruction per week over a nine week period (it may have actually been twelve weeks, I can't remember) that culminated in a skit performance. My smaller two attended for one hour on Tuesdays, while Tuba Girl recieved an hour and a half of time a week. You can't even begin to beat $10 for something like that. It gave them something interesting to do, allowed them to investigate or develop interests and talents, and made me feel like I was doing something productive at a great price. (This is the frugal/money management part of my blog.)

I usually spent the time Tuba Girl was practicing as a chance to do any quick running while I was still in town. Somewhere between leaving my last class and picking up my children, I'd managed to rip a hole in my jeans.I caught it on a screw or something I suppose. It's hard to say because I'm a very clumsy person and spent a lot of time being referred to as a "bull in a china shop" as a teenager. 

The hole unfortunately, was somewhere just below my ass, right at the top of my thigh. Not huge, but I knew it was there. I didn't have time to go home and change, but thought I was rather in luck. From maneuvering around in front of a bathroom mirror, it didn't seem the hole was showing my ass and I was wearing a large button down shirt that seemed to cover the hole as long as I wasn't too active. I resolved not to shop from the bottom shelves.

On this particular afternoon, I went to Wal-mart to pick up a few groceries and things. I met my old high school Algebra teacher over in the tea and coffee aisle where she turned me onto some superfruityhippiemangopomengranatecolorectalcancerprevention tea or something like that. We talked a few minutes and I made sure to stand and walk away at such an angle that hopefully she couldn't see the hole in my pants should my shirt not actually be covering it at all times.Other than that, I tried to do my shopping as if I were a perfectly normal person doing her grocery shopping in fully functional blue jeans. I'm really glad People of Walmart had not been created at that point.

After picking up the tea on her recommendation, I hoofed over to the breakfast aisle with two small heathens in tow trying to remember what it was I had decided we really needed. The amazing pretty yellow of a box of LARA bars caught my attention and while I was in deep concentration over the ingredients list, some asshole tapped me on the shoulder and said, "HI!"

Seriously. Don't fuck with me while I'm reading a box. I'm trying to figure out what dihidroxyde guano monojedinuclear sulfates are. It takes a lot of work to break down the Latin shit to see if this product is going to kill me immediately or later on down the road. Besides, I'd wasted my socializing time speaking to my 50 year old Algebra teacher who seems to have decided somewhere within the past couple of decades that heavy black eyeliner is becoming.

I frowned up at the interloper. I had on my frowny eyebrows, crazy squint eyes, and pinched lips to let this person know that I did not have time for this banal shit. I expect people to pick up facial cues because I actually don't say a whole lot. If I'm particularly angry, I try to keep my mouth shut because I can be a very mean person when I don't intend to be. It's probably a self defense mechanism. It allows me to continue to mill around in general pop.

So who am I frowning up at other than a smiley faced Stinky Motherfucker. Shit.

"Hi!" I said and went back to staring at my box of LARA bars.

Stinky, it appears, is wearing the exact same shit the last time I ran into him at the parking lot of KAR Elementary. (The parking lot incident happened after the Save-a-lot Turmoil and was the first time I became aware that Stinky Motherfucker has children attending my fucking school. This is my school I've been a parent here for more than ten years. I'm a fourth generation KAR Elementary student. Oh mah god. I have seniority. Leave. Now.) Anyway, so it's worth noting he's wearing the same greasy ponytail, molestor mustache, nasty plaid coat, and whatever the hell else he wears. I imagine he has an entire closet full of pre-greased plaid coats.

I look up from my happy yellow box for a moment and stare at him. Stinky is in the middle of some tale about a water leak under his trailer that the water department refuses to fix because it's on his side of the meter, but that's unfair because it's a water pipe so the water department should see about it. And, if I remember correctly, it ran their bill up so high their water was cut off.

Dude. Just fix the fucking pipe. You need a hacksaw, some pipe, some couplers and a can of that blue shit. If I can do it and not cut off an arm, I'm almost willing to bet Stinky Motherfucker can do it. Pipes aren't always rocket science.

Stinky rambled off about something else while I went back to staring at the ingredients section. And then I realized this mother fucker is never going to shut up. Besides, I have children with me this time and what if he goes off on some random discourse on how he likes to stick his dick in a rusty tailpipe or something else equally mentally disturbing?

Finally, I put the LARA bars back on the shelf because I was tired of looking at the box and I was tired of listening to this son of a bitch. "OK! Well, I have to go pick up Tuba Girl! Gotta go!" And I ran off while Stinky Motherfucker was in the middle of telling me to "come by and see us sometime!"

I grabbed whatever it was I could remember to grab and made my way over to a register. My former Algebra teacher came in right behind me at the checkout and were discussing job opportunities. I was trying to keep everything peppy and whatever hoping maybe I would be able to consider her an "in" if anything came up at the prep military school where she was currently teaching.

We were in the midst of discussing the health benefits of bananas when Stinky Motherfucker walked to the register in front of me. Out of the twenty or thirty frigging registers available, he chose to walk to the one right in front of me.

What the fuck am I? A goddamned magnet? Go away, Stinky! I'm working up a mother fucking job. This is how jobs are made in this town. It's not what you know, it's who you know and I needed my loopy ass teacher to remember that she knew me in a positive manner. Not with some Stinky Motherfucker talking about his ass gasket stretching techniques or whatever weird shit he does with Wife Thing.

I briefly nodded to acknowledge Stinky and then pointedly turned my head back to Algrebra Teacher. That is a direct sign that a person is already engaged in a conversation and you should just go have your goddamned meat roll of ground beef and gross of Mountain Dew scanned and leave me alone.

Except Stinky Motherfucker did not leave me alone. As I was simultaneously passing my grocery bags into the buggy and making my goodbyes to my new best friend, the Algebra teacher who may help me get a job, Stinky slowly backed up.

And suddenly, I felt the odd jab of Stinky skin at the hole of my pants while Stinky Motherfucker leaned over my shoulder and said loudly, "You have a hole in your pants!"

There were so many decisions that had to made in that single frozen moment of time. In nanoseconds, I had to process the fact that Stinky Motherfucker had poked his finger in the hole of my pants and decide what was I going to do. There were questions I had to discuss with myself and there was not enough time between action and appropriate reaction to adequately give them my full attention.

Did I ever want to be allowed back into the Wal-marts? Would they charge me with cruelty to children if I explained why I did it? Did I really want the last impression a potential reference see is that of me flinging an almighty fit and beating the shit out of a Stinky Motherfucker? Oh. What to do? What to do? Why me? Why?

Still attempting to talk to my Algebra teacher, load my buggy, process the situation and keep my cool, I quickly brushed his hand away from my personal being, quietly stated, "I know that" while never turning to look at him. I made my goodbyes to my former teacher and did the double time chunky woman shuffle out of the store.

DMan and Wild Boy obviously weren't picking up that I was ready to leave immediately because they proceeded to attempt a quarter coup over by the claw machine.

When I refused to stop and actually threatened to toss them both in the buggy if they didn't move now, they asked me why they couldn't have a quarter. The best I could work up was a, "We have to get the hell out of Dodge." It's all I could say without transforming into a shrieking wreck of pissed-off shock in the middle of the parking lot.

And that is the kind of mother fucker Stinky Motherfucker is. Not only is he crude enough to loudly note in front of the entire Wal-mart register area that you have a hole in your pants two inches from your ass, he's the kind of mother fucker to quite literally point it out. He's the kind of mother fucker to rip down the mental defense you had going on in terms of how bad things really were back there.

In short, Stinky is one uncouth mother fucker.

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.

Oxycontin mixed with Jack D. Put it in a cup, it looks like ice tea.

Seriously. It's been a bitch of a week. A brief overview for your perusal.

Saturday
Chaperoned a band trip to a competition. I was pleased with how well those little flag brigade girls behaved. When one parent found out I was chaperoning the brigade bus, she patted me on the shoulder and said, "Good luck." That leaves one a little apprehensive about how matters may go.

Maybe the lady was confused because they behaved well. No one was knifed. I never saw any brass knuckles or people bent over mirrors sucking up mysterious powders with a straw. It wasn't anything like the Dangerous Minds idea I had going on.

We finally made it home around 1 A.M.

Sunday
I don't remember much of Sunday very well. It turns out that hanging out in busses until 1 A.M. is not good for me.

Maybe I went over and cleaned my mom's house. Like I said, my people do a lot for me and I try to do for them. I don't think I did very much, though.

Also, an older gentleman  I used to "sit" with last year died. He was 94 years old and he hadn't been doing well for a while. I've never had any really nursing assistant experience, but I was in desperate need of a job since my last employer up and died on me and my gentleman needed someone to heat up his coffee and help him bathe. He was also a special friend to my eight-year-old DMan.

I spent half the day trying to decide whether to tell him then or wait until closer to the funeral because I didn't want him to be upset all week at school. I finally opted to tell him on Sunday  because I didn't want him to find out from someone else or realize that I'd withheld information from him.

DMan experienced a good bit of dying the summer of 2008. Death is not something you ever want your family to experience, but it happens and we have to deal with it the best we can. I lost two uncles (one of them being my employer), a great uncle, a cousin, and a chiropractor. While I didn't take my children to all of the funerals, they did attend a couple of wakes at their request.

DMan was upset about his special friend and it took a good while for him to work through the initial sadness. I emailed his teacher to let her know what was going on with him so he didn't have to try to explain it on Monday.

Monday
My daughter magically developed a staph infection on her leg that required an after work trip to the doctor and antibiotics. This is my second kid this year to develop this shit so I asked the doctor if I was doing something wrong.

I bleach all the sheets, bleach the tub, bleach towels, bandaids and bandaids and bandaids,  think about bleaching out my brains, tell them not to stick their fingers up their nose and flick their boogers, yet I don't seem to have achieved very much. He said there wasn't very much I could do. Basically, he said "shit happens" but put it in nice medical terms. I'm still thinking about giving them a can of clorox wipes to use at school.

All four of us actually went through a round of this about three of four years ago. It started off with Dman who developed some weird, disgusting, greeny black puss thing one summer after being bitten by some kind of insect on a Friday. By Saturday evening, it was really freaking me the hell out because I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Fearing that he'd been bitten some necrotizing mosquito and his leg was going to rot off before Monday, I took him to the emergency room.

The doctors and nurses all agreed it was some sort of spider bite and they'd been seeing a lot of these "spider bites."

Then Tuba Girl was bitten by some flesh eating fucker a couple of months later and the doctor said it was a spider bite.

I spent months beating the hell out of necrotizing spiders. Previously, I was a sort of live and let live chick. Stay out of my line of vision and you were safe. Now I was Arachno Hunter.

Months later, I developed some weird pimple in my nose after a snotty cold. When it started to eat my face, I realized that either these were very tiny, sneaky spiders or there was an entirely different problem at hand.

After having my children treated by one emergency room doctor and a couple of pediatricians, I finally had someone tell me all about cellulitis. It was a wonderfully enlightening experience and I now I want to run around shouting, "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!" So that was Monday.

Tuesday
Tuesday was looking good until the flat tire incident so that put me off. After I changed the tire, I splurged and took the kids to Wendy's. I was damned tired and I can't afford to drink to cover the stress of weeks like this. Besides, it was for a good cause. Sort of. The local area schools routinely partner with restaurants and name it "KAR's Elementary School Night!"

(Okay, well the school is not named KAR Elementary, but the real name is not something I'm going to share with strangers who may turn out to be freakier than the people I know in real life. Besides, I've been a KAR Elementary parent for over ten years so it's my school.)

A share of the proceeds go to whichever school is being sponsored by the restaurant. I was tired. I was starting to get really pissed off about how long this week was shaping up to be and I sure as hell didn't feel like cooking. So I tossed $14 into a vat of greasy fries and called it an evening. The boy heathens also recieved homework passes. It was worth it to me.

Wednesday
Wild Boy had his follow up appointment with his pediatrician at 9AM. Thankfully, it wasn't a long appointment and I had plenty of time to take him to school and get to work on time.


Things were clicking along pretty well so I stopped at the Family Dollar to pick up some toilet paper, tooth brushes,and shit since it was on the way to work. The thing I discovered about that Wal-Mart brand of toilet paper is that one pack only lasts a week. If hadn't bought more on Wednesday, we'd have been wiping our asses with the stray dogs out in the yard.

When I got back in the car, I realized I couldn't find my phone. After a very long and gas-wasting trip around the county to retrace my steps, I was forced to go work phoneless.

I found it later. Apparently I dropped it in my front yard when I was in a hurry and it spent the day being rained upon by the forces of my life. However, much like myself, it came through a little damaged but still serviceable.

Thursday

Picked up some Honeycrisp apples. Honeycrisp apples are the frigging bomb diggity, yo. If you've never had a Honeycrisp apple, then you need to pick one up today. These apples only hit the stores in the fall and then you don't get anymore until the next year.  The name says it all. Honey. Crisp. Apple.

These aren't those mealy mouthed McIntoshes or piss ant little Granny Smiths. These are apples. Real apples. I wish I had a Honeycrisp apple tree. If I rubbed a lamp and a big blue genie popped out and told me I could have anything I wanted, I'd wish for a huge orchard of ever-bearing Honeycrisp apples trees.

Where was I? Oh, my boring blog about my boring week.

Leroy the Lover showed up at work today. Leroy is a fucking 65-year-old nutbag who seems to have taken some sort of "special shine" to me. The last time he was at the library, he left me with a very special religious tract about how there are real angels (good ones and bad ones!) right here on Earth! I wouldn't mind the religious tract so much, but Leroy is a sort of . . . prophet of the Binny Hinn-TBN network type. Also, Leroy just over shares his particular world view. It's a world view deeply in need of Thorazine. I am ever so pleased.

After hearing about Leroy's life for ten minutes or so and catching a definite whiff of the special ass funk/dog shit breath aroma of Sun laundry detergent, I abandoned him to Matt the Library Assistant while I went and alphabetized all the books. Again.

After work, I took my Tuba Girl back to the doctor to check up on her leprosy. Cellulitis. Staph. Whatever. It's all starting to feel the same in terms of UNCLEAN.

I was ever so happy to discover that Stinky Motherfucker takes his children to the same doctor. I do not have time to explain Stinky Motherfucker. To give a brief overview, Stinky Motherfucker is that one damned dude that seems to randomly show up from nowhere and have no fucking concept of boundaries and personal space. One day, I may devote an entire post to Stinky Motherfucker, but not today. I spend a lot of time wondering what I've done in a past life to warrant having this person popping up in all the places I go.

Stinky Motherfucker finally left after hinting at needing a ride home. I'm sorry. Stinky Motherfucker and his strep throat filled children must take the Stinky Motherfucker cab. I do not want to be in the doctor's office next week for strep throat.

Finally, we were the last ones left in the lobby when the nurse noticed us. It turns out no one pulled our file, put us down as having come in, and seemingly lost our initial sign in sheet. There was nothing to indicate we were there other than our very tired presence in the lobby. Yaaaaay.

Tuba Girl is healing nicely. Tuba Girl also needs to come back in Saturday morning for a real check up and the Hep A shot. We're late on that one.

As we didn't leave the doctor's office until 7:30 PM, I did not have time to cook dinner so I picked up sandwich shit for dinner from Wal-Hell since it's right across the ever loving street from the doctor's office and went home.

My cellphone calendar sounded a little reminder around 8 PM. I am due to start my period tomorrow which inevitably explains how the world has ceased to rotate on it's normal axis.

Plans for the Weekend
I will be manning the concession stand at the high school football game until sometime around 11PM tomorrow evening.

Saturday, we will have to pick up the Angel Food by 8:30 AM, bring it home and have Tuba Girl at her doctor's appoint by 10 AM. The children's paternal side of the family has scheduled a family reunion for later in the evening. I still have not gone grocery shopping at all this week. I've been snatching random shit like apples and sandwich ingredients.

Maybe I will go clean my mom's house on Sunday, but this week is seriously starting to get to me and I want sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

On an up note, I will try to remember to post something tomorrow that Mr. J wrote in 1978. Mr. J is the guy who volunteers to keep our library lawn nice and flowery. He also lost both of his legs to undiagnosed diabetes a few years ago. It went undiagnosed because most construction workers don't make a whole lot of money and most construction companies are small affairs that can't afford to offer insurance.There may have been resources to help him, but I'd guess they're hard for a guy from a farm in backwoods Georgia with a limited education to locate.

But you know, Mr. J is like the most awesome damned dude ever. I don't know if he ever gets depressed or wants to tell people to screw off, but that is one guy who really plugs away at making every day count. He's big on being a solid member of his community and wants to serve as inspiration and motivator to the people around him. He rocks.