Every now and then I'll be riding down the road late at night,
knock down a couple of BCs and get my
cerebellum kind of thumping and throbbing.
Start thinking of the old days and thinking back to
when I was a little girl growing up in South Carolina
and remembering the stinking smell of gin on Jimmy Joe's breath
the night I became a woman in the back of that Buick.
Sorry.
And every now and then I'll get a little tired of
listening to my 30 Days to a Better You motivational tape
I'll turn on an old truck driving show from
one of those stations out of West Virginia
and they'll be playing an old Conway Twitty
song and it'll remind me of my second wife
and the way she used to whistle the steel
guitar part to Hello Darling through the gap
in her front tooth, bless her heart.
And every now and then when I start to feel
a little bit hungry I'll stop at an all-night
grocery store and hit the Little Debbie's
Snack Cake and Hostess Breakfast Treat display
counter
and that'll kind of remind me of my third wife.
She used to live in a little prefab
mobile home in a town called Chromosome,
North Carolina.
Every now and then when I'd come home from
work late at night all tired and wore out,
she'd be laying there on the purple Naga hot
couch all 375 pounds over with her blonde
dine-out wig sort of stretched off to one side.
I'd come walking in the door and she'd get all excited and say,
Hey!
She'd look at me with a one good eye and take
her false teeth out of the bicentennial ashtray
and put on those white go-go boots from the
big boy shoe store and that purple muumuu
that I bought her from Fredericks of
Hollywood for big gals that you love so much.
She'd kind of look like a genetic mutation off a Tom Chapin
National Geographic special getting ready to go into action.
She'd jump up on top of the stereo and start doing an
interpretive dance to an old Wilson Pickard record jammed up to
78. Then we'd go back to the heart-shaped vibrating waterbed,
the one underneath the black velvet painting of Elvis,
Jesus,
and John Wayne walking together through
eternity watched over by Hank Senior.
And we'd get to rolling and tumbling and having a good time.
And every now and then when things would get real good
I'd sing I Love Something with something like this.
I'd sing.
Roberta, Roberta!
Mama,
please get your big legs off of me.
Sometimes you get a little carried away and I'd have to say,
Roberta, Roberta!
Feels great.
Mama, please,
please get your big legs off of me.
Because when you roll your big legs around me,
help me Jesus,
don't you know it feels so good honey?
But you just won't let me breathe.
Now you can be sweet as a banana moon pie.
Or you can be salty as a souvenir Virginia country ham.
You can
be sweet as a banana sitting on the backseat of my Camaro underneath
the pink and purple dingle balls riding down 95th. Yeehaw,
Miami,
here we come,
moon pie!
Or salty as a souvenir Virginia sitting next to the
bottle rockets at south of the border country ham.
But when
you kiss me with your big luscious greasy lips,
I realize I'm a very naughty,
yes, I deserve a little discipline.
No,
please don't make me wear that nurse's dress again
tonight, grovelly worm of a love slave.
Honey, your big leg in the back.
Ow!
Now
you drink whiskey like it was water.
And you slug down NyQuil like it was a glass of lemonade.
You drink that red gut whiskey like a glass of water.
And you still drink that NyQuil, wake up woman,
cough syrup like a glass of lemonade.
You know,
I regret the day I wrapped my skinny legs
around your fat butt.
Because that was about 375 pounds,
the biggest legging mistake I sure ever made.
And one more thing, honey.
Roberta,
roll over.
Honey,
I can see something down there I want you to see.
Roberta, Roberta, Roberta, wake up.
Come on, honey, roll over.
Because I got something down there.
I got something down there I want you to see.
God,
your white cocoa roots are scuffing
up the lining on the waterbed again.
And you got to get your big,
freaky,
furry,
frantic,
look so fine walking down the street
like two great big watermelons hooked up
in time to the paint shaker of destiny,
playing
the drum break to intergalactic beat in those wet look hot pants,
incoming large unidentified
object on the screen, legs, off of me.
Love
is a beautiful thing.
Roberta, Roberta, Roberta.
Kiss me, baby.