Bubba holds forth

Some smart-aleck put in a letter to the editor the other day that I’d written something he liked and somehow managed to do so without consulting Bubba McCoy.

It reminded me that it had been a while since I talked to the rural rascal and used-car magnate.

“You better talk to me quick,” Bubba said when I called. “To hear my wife and granddaughter tell it, I’m losing my mind fast.”

Senior moments? Bubba would be entitled at 75.

“The women in my life say I ask the same thing over and over sometimes. I said I wouldn’t have to do that if they’d give me the right answer the first time.

“And the big thing is I ran into negative numbers on my account, and the two of ’em came over to the car lot all solemn-like and found a couple of deposit slips I’d filled out and forgotten to take to the bank. So, I made the deposit and got flush. No big deal.

“Anyway, they made me go to the doctor so he could ask me to draw a clock showing 10 minutes of 11. I said, ‘You want that a.m. or p.m.?’ I was making a joke, but I think the guy thought I was more nuts than they even thought. So, I drew the damned thing and said, ‘How’s that?’

“And he said, to the disappointment of him and my loved ones, I guess, that it was perfect.

“Then he asked me who the president was, and I said it was a guy he ought to be asking to draw a clock instead of asking me. He told me I was going to have to give him the name. So, I said, ‘The name is let’s go, Brandon.’

“And that made the missus mad because she’s such a yellow-dog Democrat. And I said, ‘Just calm down. I’m just showing the doctor my mind is sharp enough to make a joke.’”

I told Bubba the real test of whether he had any sense left was whether he intended to vote for that lawbreaker and threat to democracy and national security, by which I meant Donald Trump.

“I’m no crazier than I was when I voted for Trump the last two times,” he said. “This time around I’m sick of all of them.

“And, for that matter, you don’t need to bother asking me about the Hogs. I’ve soured on them because of this NIL money and the player turnover every year. So now we have a basketball team with Mussolini gone and Cappillary coming in, and we’ve got only two or three players because everybody left.

“If I want to watch a local team of one-year guys passing through and having nothing to do with Arkansas, I’ll drive in and watch the Travelers. And I ain’t doing that.”

I told Bubba he was making a lot of sense, but that Mussolini is Musselman and Cappillary is Calipari.

“Whatever,” he said. “You’ve been telling me since we were young that I said stuff wrong.”

Oh, yes. Calling the hometown of the Alabama Crimson Tide “Tulsa Lucas” was classic. It’s Tuscaloosa. “That’s what I said. Tulsa Lucas.” It hit me that Bubba was thinking the town in Alabama was named in honor of an oil town and a motor oil.

Itold Bubba that, surely, we could agree on something—that, in David Pryor, we’d lost a rare, good man in politics.

“Yeah,” Bubba said. “Tell me that story again you told me once about him and the fat woman in the red dress.”

What?

“Now who’s forgetting things?” Bubba said. “You know, something about TV on election night.”

Oh, yeah. Back in the day, KATV was the leader in election-night local live television coverage and was in the vanguard of a technique of plugging an audio device into the unsuspecting ear of a candidate it wanted to interview exclusively, or first.

Pryor had won a big race and come to his boisterous headquarters for a victory speech, and the KATV reporter had slipped this device—an IFB, I believe it was called—into Pryor’s ear as he greeted celebrants and made his way to the stage to claim a big victory.

As Pryor was speaking, a producer back in the studio despaired that a large-framed woman in a red dress had stepped into the station’s camera angle, and loudly demanded—into the IFB he thought was in the ear of his reporter, not Pryor—that somebody should tell that blankety-blank woman to get the blank out of the blanking way.

The person hearing that was Pryor, as he was speaking. Without missing a beat, Pryor said kindly to the woman in red, calling her by name, that he feared she was in someone’s line of sight and that she should move just a little this way or that.

She repositioned happily and he went right back to claiming victory.

“Did that really happen?” Bubba asked.

I told him it was true that I had told it many times.