LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

The other day I was driving around listening to Tom T. Hall’s “Old Dogs and Children and Watermelon Wine” on WEVL while waiting to get a fare. That song always reminds me of going to church with my family when I was a little boy, riding in the car having a good ol’ church family sing-a-long. I’m not sure what watermelon wine is, never had any, never seen any, but my parents probably shouldn’t have let me sing-a-long with that song so much because the word “wine” (watermelon or otherwise) became something I needed to know more about. Old dogs are good, children are good, so watermelon wine must be good, too. That song still gives me the warm fuzzies; when I hear it I envision myself sitting on a porch somewhere enjoying the American landscape hanging out with an old dog and drinking a shitboat of wine.

I’ve got all this going on in my head—a general feeling of wellness and folksy wholesomeness—when I get dispatched to pick up John Q. Douchebag. I always size people up when they’re walking to the car, and this guy did not make a good impression. If you had a bunch of guys come to your house to give you an estimate on some fence work, he would probably be your third or fourth pick.

“We need to pick up this bitch on the way,” he says—no “hello”, no “how ya’ doin’?” I’m immediately thinking, “what an assmunch.” I bait him with some general stuff like, “you must be having a fight or something.” He explains to me that this “bitch” is just a girl he “hooks up with.” He’s married, but his wife is a bitch too and the sex sucks. People like to air their dirty laundry to cab drivers a lot; I don’t think it has so much to do with people looking for conversation as much as they just want to talk, and they want somebody to hear them talk.

“She says she’s pregnant,” he tells me. “I don’t believe in abortion, but in this case it’s the right thing to do." I find that very strange. I’m sure there are plenty of people who preach day and night against abortion, and stand on Union Avenue day and night with signs against abortion who probably wouldn’t support abortion for any reason—least of all when it’s a matter of convenience. But it’s probably not all that uncommon either for anti-abortionists to suddenly change their position when it's their lives in the balance. The gene pool will probably be better off with this guy’s decision.

We arrive to pick up the woman. They talk heatedly outside the cab for a few minutes, and then we leave without her. “What a whore”, he says and I drive him on to his destination. Along the way, he tells me he told her to quit calling him and that he was sorry but he’s married. He says, “Ya know, I’d probably keep fucking with that whore, but she’s got a butterface and fucked up teeth.”

“Well, never look a gift whore in the mouth,” I say. He looks at me, nods, then promptly leaves. That nug flew right over his head like a cropduster spraying his last corn row and heading back to the farm to drink a bucket of watermelon wine.