Key West's Moons

I wrote about how bad our priest sang yesterday and didn’t sleep a wink. I felt guilty. Tonight I went to a volunteer meeting, and afterward one of the moms came up to me and said, “I saw you sitting way across the church on Sunday. Did you see me gasp when the priest started singing?”

“Oh my gosh,” I said, “Can you believe his voice?”

“It’s horrible,” she said. “I gasped out loud, and I know I had a look of horror on my face. Then I saw you across the church and you were laughing and trying to cover it up.”

“His voice is shocking,” I said. We commiserated a few minutes more about the torture of hearing such a well-spoken man sing like a rooster with his leg being gnawed on by an iguana.

I still feel a little guilty talking about him, but on the other hand, this now appears to be common knowledge and therefore is simply an observation and should not carry with it a stigma of guilt. That’s my theory anyway.

Not to change the subject, but I went to an open house yesterday afternoon and met a nice, older lady who has retired to Naples, Florida, just a few miles from Ft. Myers Beach where I spent a summer with two girlfriends when I was 19. My friend Mary and I decided to drive to Key West in her ancient Opal Cadet, which sounds like some whimsical car. We had cool names for cars back then. Austin Healy. GTO’s, Mustang, T-birds. Good, spicy names.

We were driving on a Florida backroad when we came up on a pickup truck carrying three ruffians. They stood up in the truck, which was going pretty slow, and started making obscene gestures. We hung back, but they were going so slow we would have had to stop for them to get out of sight.

They gave each other a look and pretty soon all three of them had dropped their shorts and started mooning us at practically point blank range. We had nowhere else to look! We slowed down almost to a stop, but so did they.

“Get us out of here, Mary,” I screamed.

“I didn’t drive all the way down here to have to stare at three hairy assholes,” Mary said. She downshifted that little Opal into second and started to pass. They sped up. She shifted into third and we started making headway. It was a straight, narrow road and we would have been doomed if someone had been coming in the other lane, but I don’t think Mary would have slowed down. She would have let the oncoming car run off the road. Her face was red and her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She had an East Tennessee anger that was boiling like a teakettle.

I started rocking back and forth to help the car’s momentum, coaxing it to go faster. When we were neck and neck with the driver, he turned and gave us a grin that showed all eleven of his stained yellow teeth. These were the kind of guys who would run you in the ditch and laugh as they deflowered your maidenhood.

“Give it some more gas,” I screamed.

“I’ve got it on the floor,” she yelled. I rocked harder. We finally got far enough ahead that we could pull in front of the truck. Simultaneously we threw our hands out the window and let our fingers do the talking.

They didn’t like that and started gaining on us. I rocked faster. Mary started rocking too. “Come on, baby, come on,” we begged.

The chase only lasted a couple of minutes before the farm boys gave up and went back to their cow pies.

What does this have to do with the singing priest? If you figure it out, let me know.