The Myth of Wile E

Jamboree

Unbeknownst to me, the little future stockbroker published a photo of me in the "about town" section of the Internet—which, I gather, has a much wider audience than the local news. In the picture, I'm carrying the limp possum through what looks like a war zone, with a twisted chain-link fence in the foreground and the backhoe driver sobbing into his handkerchief as he looks on in horror. Behind us you can see a chaos of tree stumps and machines and scarred land to the horizon. (Yes, I've seen the picture lots of times by now. For some reason everyone insists on showing it to me on their phones, right before asking to take a picture with me.)

When the picture of the "dead" possum came out, animal lovers were outraged. The possum briefly got as famous as Gladdy when she saved that televangelist guy. (The possum, much like Gladys, was not so happy about her fame, and became something of a Garbo-esque recluse, declining to be photographed.) When the birders and peepers and hammock enthusiasts saw pictures of all the trees cut down, they were outraged. Truffle fans came to tour the scene, and college students came from miles around (not just West-Westfield) to protest the planned shopping mall. All further stump-removing came to a halt. The stubbly valley was filled for days with a strange assortment of people, some camping, some playing guitars, some carrying signs, and some dressing up as comic book superheroes (though I'm not quite sure what that was about).

I guess I got a little bit famous too. Before a crane was able to move the bulldozer off my house, those news crews from Heresburg and Elsedale came back and took footage from every possible angle, including overhead, of the bulldozer lying on top of my house. Helicopters flew over my smooshed house and filmed the entire bulldozer-retrieval ordeal. "Ken" and "Barbie" interviewed me again.

Apparently the news story went all over the place, because later I heard from everybody, including some old school friends and a few distant relatives from Kentucky and Tennessee. Everyone seemed to get a real kick out of the whole thing—everyone except for Mama. She wrote wanting to know, Did I have to go on about trees and toilet-bugs and flying rodents and such on national TV? Did I want people to think her Baby was touched in the head? Did I ever stop to think what people back in the Hollow would say about her, if they heard her Baby lived in a busted trailer like a common hillbilly?

"The Hollow" is where Mama grew up—Hog Lick Hollow, in the eastern coal country of Kentucky. She lived there until Dougie was born and Mama and Daddy ran away to St. Louis in search of better Prospects. (Well, actually, they ran off in the direction of St. Louis. "It's where the truck broke down," Mama always said, when asked how our family ended up outside Hodgenville.)

Mama swore never to go back to Hog Lick Hollow. "Only way I'd ever go back," she used to say (a bit into the Wild Turkey), "is if I was this big-ole star. Then I'd drive a great big-ole pink Cadillac real slow, up-down every street, front-a all the houses. Let everybody say, 'Gol-ly! Ain't that . . . ?' and then I'd just give'm the finger and peel away."

If you asked Mama what Hog Lick Hollow was like, she'd just shake her head and say, "Kind of place where, if there was a wedding, everybody sat on the same side of the church."

Mama wrote a memoir of her life growing up in the Hollow, especially about how she almost became a ballet dancer. It's called A Bucket of Crabs: My True Story (An Autobiographical Memoir). You can get a copy for $37.95 (plus $5.00 if you want it signed) at the reception desk of Mama's dance studio.

Originally Mama tried to get New York publishers interested in her memoir, but would you believe they all said no? Well, Mama wouldn't take no for an answer, so she wrote back demanding to know why. She asked if she was, pray tell, a bit too daring and original for them to understand—pointing out that they would all feel mighty foolish one day and probably lose their jobs of drinking martinis, when her memoir won a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize or maybe even an Oscar for best biopic. Most of the publishers did not write back (Mama said this was because New Yorkers were rude), but a few did. They explained that it was really nothing personal, but as a rule they only published memoirs about public figures. Well, Mama was outraged. She said, "It just goes to show those New Yorkers don't have the good sense God gave a pill bug. If they published my memoir I'd become a public figure, now, wouldn't I? But I guess those Manhattan know-it-alls with their fancy-pants Ivy League degrees never thought of that!" Mama wrote back to them many times expressing this point, but never heard anything further, aside from the occasional cease and desist letter.

Eventually Mama found a pretty big-name publisher after all, called Kinko's. They did a very nice job printing her book, and even gave it a fancy plastic spiral binding which, Mama explained, was a lot more useful than the glue those New York publishers used, which wouldn't even allow a book to open up all the way. It's forty-four pages long (Mama's book is), including eight pages of black and white pictures. Which probably sounds kind of short, but keep in mind those pages are 8½ by 11, not the small ones New York uses. And besides, Mama is not really that old. I'm sure if she was ninety-five, her memoir would be much longer.

Mama ended up with a lot of copies left over (because bookstores are all in cahoots with New York, she explained), so she gave everyone she knew autographed copies of her memoir one year for Christmas. She told us we should carry it with us everywhere, because people would see it and ask what we were reading, and when we raved about it they'd want to know where they could get a copy for themselves (Mama provided us with handy business cards for that occurrence).

Honestly, I did feel a little bad that I didn't carry it around as often as I promised, but my hands were usually full and the truth is, when I did have it, no one ever asked me about it—except Toothless Bob, once. I gave him a copy and he declared it "Okay," but said he'd hoped it was going to be more "how to-y" and less "metaphor-y" with regards to the crab-fishing. So, here is some of it. Not the whole forty-four pages, but just the bit from before I came onto the scene (because you already know that part):