I have mentioned before that my smart mouth got me into trouble more
than lots. Lots more than lots. I am a joke first and consequence
later kind of guy and if it is funny I have to say it and sometimes
more than once if it gets a laugh. It is well known even in not
joking circles that a persons mother is off limits as a topic but I
didn't really adhere to joking orthodoxy. I was a hip young
iconoclast with a devil may care attitude and some jokes to make and
laughs to get, also – I was a dick. There was one kid who was extra
hairy,extra gangly and extra annoying that overreacted all the time
in a way I found amusing so that just fueled that fire. I had a
friend who would tell a story about this kids mom when they were
playing baseball that was as funny as it was horrifying so even
though it was not my story, I broke the second of the joke ten
commandments and stole his material. The essential part of the story
was that during a baseball game the hairy tall kid's mom would get so
excited cheering that she would run up to the back stop fence and put
her hands through the mesh over her head and start yelling
encouragement. The funny part, which I stole whole cloth from my
friends story, was that she had extra hairy extra sweaty armpits. In
my reenactment I would lumber up to an imaginary fence and throw my
arms up and shake it. I would then describe the horrors of seeing
what looked like a pair of drowned squirrels drip drying from under
her arms. I would often take a few real steps back cowering from the
imaginary hirsute woman covering my eyes and pleading with my
audience to kill it with fire. Now for some unfathomable reason when
they news of my reenactment of my purloined material reached my
acquaintance he somehow took offense and wanted to fight me. As it
happened, I had fought him a couple of times before in backyard
tussles and was not that worried. He made the mistake of every
armature fighter and prophet and put an exact time and date on his
threats. He told many people that he was going to beat me up after
the football game that weekend. One of his friends told me that and I
asked him to ask if it was going to be regular human rules or if we
were going to battle it out monkey style. His friend was obviously
excited to go pour some gas on the fire and said he would ask. I
don't know where we ever landed on primate continuum for rules of
combat because he never sent back a reply. It was just as well
because that Friday night after the football game he was fired up for
some fighting he just couldn't seem to make his way to an appropriate
place for a fight and he eventually headed out of the school grounds
entirely and down to the local grocery store when my friends and I
went to find him. He didn't confront me inside or outside of the
store but he did give me some rather withering poopy looks. After he
decided to discress himself to valor because I wasn't worth it the
whole thing fizzled out. I kept using the story though for at least a
year or two and it generally played very well until it was retired
because I discovered it was not very funny.
