Bayou Barbecue

                “Sean, that’s a pretty racist-looking coconut.”

                As a person who’s known a lot of interesting people, I have had a lot of strange things said to me over the years. I only just recently started writing them down, so the list isn’t as long as it should be. For the sake of argument but mostly just for fun, I’ll bounce a few of them off of you now.

                This first quote I credit to Kris, who was commenting on a souvenir carved coconut gorilla head I bought in Florida. The coconut, by the way, is in no way racist. The only reason she made this observation was because I recently put a top hat on it that suddenly made it look like it was supposed to be a player in a minstrel show. This was certainly inadvertent on my part and it hadn’t occurred to me that the addition of a hat could make a gorilla look like a man in blackface makeup, but once it was pointed out to me I guess I could see where the observation was in some way valid. Due to a lack of intent on the part of the coconut carver and myself, I didn’t see a need to remedy the situation.

                “I can’t get MARS to talk to the jukebox,” said someone at work. As much as I like the future, everybody here talks like they have some sort of dysphasia. “Might be the skuzzy connection,” he decided.

                MARS, just so you know, is a Medical Archive Server, and the “jukebox” is just a colloquial name for the multiple tape backup device it uses. Scuzzy is just the pronunciation used for the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) cable that connects the two. Sounds simple enough once it’s explained, but if I had been able to listen in on my future life a few years ago I would have thought the whole world had gone crazy because everyone talks like they just suffered a stroke.

               

                “Please move your sweet onions to the bag,” said the register at the self-checkout of the grocery store. It just sounded funny to hear it in such a pleasant artificial voice.

                “Magic changed my life.”  This nugget of wisdom was supplied by my friend Ben, who was referring to his die hard passion for the Magic: The Gathering card game. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. It’s a funny thing to say in any context.

                “Hannah’s sunny side up and I’m over easy,” Alicia told me one morning at the Sugar Shack on Tybee Island. I think she was referring to their breakfast orders.

                “I’m done with fireworks. I don’t want to have a gun put to my head again.”  This contribution also came from Alicia. I’ll explain that one later.

                At DragonCon one year a guy stumbled up to me, slung his arm around my shoulders, and announced in a delightfully Southern drunken drawl:  “I’m immune to fire!”  Then he quickly walked on down the hall and made his exit before I could really put together what had just happened.

                And the whole experience was so brilliantly executed that I thought, at the encouragement of my friends: This is the kind of thing that could really catch on.

                The drunken drive-by, perfectly conceived in the model this guy created, would have to be performed thusly:  You must be alone (and preferably drunk), you have to enter the presence of strangers, remain silent, then drop the payload (any nonsensical declaration will do, but it’d be easier to track the progress of this movement if you just stick with “I’m immune to fire”), then make a quick exit.

                You’d have to have your entrance and exit strategy prepared beforehand, I suppose, because this is a blackout gag. It only works if you can disappear afterwards.

                When I related this story to my buddy Wilson later on, his response was funnier than the story itself: 

                “I’m totally guilty of that shit,” Wilson confessed. “I always think that it’s someone I know, but then it occurs to me when I get no response that this is a total fucking stranger. I’ll make some announcement like, ‘I’ve got a tater tot microphone’ loudly in their ear (and yet I’m leaned in close like I’m gonna whisper). When I get the awkward silence, I find it best to follow up with the coup de grace... grab their nuts and whisper quietly in their ear, ‘whatta ya think about that?’  ZANG!”

                I can think of no one better to spearhead the Weird It Forward movement than my friend Wilson.

                At Tracy’s thirtieth birthday party the kids were all gathering around the bonfire out back (with an alarming lack of supervision), preparing to roast marshmallows. After realizing that the partygoers already gathered there were not inclined to intervene when the kids decided to build up the already blazing fire by throwing leaves on it, I quickly fetched a “real adult” to rein them in and everything turned out okay.

                After it was all over I saw a child not much larger than an infant stumble by brandishing what looked relative to his size to be a spear.

                “Is that a barbeque skewer?” I asked nervously.

                “Yeah,” his father answered grimly. “Probably not the best thing for a one year old.”

                One night the phone rang and woke me up. My buddy Steve was on the line. He asked: “Do you have a garden gnome? Can I borrow it?” This is a pretty typical kind of phone call for me to get.

                But getting back to my original point, the best random weird thing anyone’s ever said to me was said at a backwoods barbeque out in the Georgia swamps. It will more than likely remain at the top of the list for quite some time. Least I hope so.

                “We should probably get the baby off the floor if there’s going to be an alligator in here,” she said matter-of-factly.

                And this story, I think, I’m going to have to relate to you in toto…

                It was Memorial Day weekend 2009, the story taking place the Sunday evening prior to the holiday. I was invited by friends to a barbeque out in the swamps. I was exhausted from my previous exploits throughout the weekend, which had begun on Thursday and did not let up until about 1:00 that afternoon, but I was eager to see my friends because I hadn’t hung out with them in a while and they were profuse in their assurances that this barbeque was not a thing to be missed.

                The place was surprisingly close to Savannah to be considered the boonies, but it was on a strip of road that ran farther than the pavement. There was a string of houses that reminded me of Howard Fenster’s place, then for a stretch the road was swallowed up by the surrounding flora of the swamp.

                It was still daylight, so the passage through this tunnel of moss and ivy was more beautiful than ominous.

                “I love driving through this tunnel at night,” one of them declared. “It’s like something out of a horror movie.”

                Bear in mind any hyperbole I offer to suggest an element of danger in this expedition is done so in the spirit of fun. Despite the singular trappings of the place, we were just going to a barbeque.

                We unloaded a casket-sized cooler of Busch from the back of my friend’s truck and bore it toward the house. There were gun shots coming from somewhere in the woods.

                “Oh yeah,” he told me, probably meaning to put my mind at ease, “there’s a gun range near here too.”

                “I should have brought my gun,” I joked, then wondered:  Should I have brought my gun?

                The house itself was actually a hunting lodge. The interior of it sort of looked like the grampa’s house from Lost Boys and a little like the Warriors’ hangout too. A wooden table ran the length of the room like in a Norseman’s dining hall (and regarded in this fashion by its patrons, I think). There was a pool table on the other side of the room with couches and chairs filling the space between. It was also filled with people and that comforting air of camaraderie you come to expect from gatherings of this kind.

                The walls were adorned with trophies from various kills, mostly deer heads and skulls or just sets of antlers that looked like they’d make a handy weapon in a pinch (not that I contemplated arming myself; the mood was very friendly and relaxed). One of the wooden support posts sported an alligator head with the skinned pelt of it hanging beneath, still intact. This was a portent of things to come.

                In the fashion of Norsemen and Vikings, the table had been laid out with a feast of barbequed ribs, corn still wrapped in the husk and an assortment of equally appetizing selections. We served ourselves and ate meat with our hands, which I think honored the general motif.

                When we finished eating, there was a sudden stir outside the lodge, slowly working its way in. The only piece of it left when it reached us was the single word “alligators”. Being in the swamp it was not unlikely to me that there had been a sighting in the water. Alligators are pretty common in that area. But the skin on the wall reminded me of a story my friends had told about a previous barbeque in this lodge.

                On that occasion the alligator hunters had returned with a fresh catch. Upon securing its mouth shut with duct tape (if you don’t know, you can hold an alligator’s mouth shut with one hand - all the power of their jaws is in closing them, not opening them), they proceeded to release it into the lodge for the remainder of the party. This is the kind of party I usually get invited to, because this is just the type of thing that catches my interest. And the promise of this particular barbeque would not fail to deliver.

                Someone had brought a baby to the party and she was sleeping in her car seat on the floor. One of my friends sighed casually, looking down at the baby.

                “We should probably get the baby off the floor if there’s going to be an alligator in here,” she decided casually. I will always respect her pragmatism in these matters.

                As we walked out of the lodge to the workshop garage the hunters used to clean their kills (does this have a specific name, like meat shack or slaughterhouse or something?), we could see there was a crowd gathered around its entrance.

                Just so you understand, I am not a hunter and have never really been around hunters, so if my conveyance of this story bears a sanguine or horrific pretension, I’ll ask that you forgive that. I’m Southern enough for most things and certainly not soft (in my own estimation), but the only place I’ve ever seen stuff like this was in horror movies, so it puts a spin on my perception of it.

                There was a stench in the air as pungent as a landfill. The soaked-in discarded detritus of past kills had remineralized into the soil, where it was then dredged up by several days of rain, and the smell was as overpowering as it was off-putting. I tied my shoelaces tighter to make sure they couldn’t touch the ground; I didn’t want to drag any of it home with me.

                When we squeezed past the crowd close enough to see what was happening, we could see that they had two six foot gators duct-tape-muzzled and hog-tied on the concrete floor. Everyone was snapping pictures. If you’ve never seen a hog-tied alligator, it’s quite a thing to see.

                It’s also a bit sad. There’s something sacred about great reptiles like alligators and crocodiles because they have survived the test of evolution. They bear the same characteristics as their prehistoric prototypes for one very important reason:  perfection of design. The world adapted to the alligator, not the other way around. So seeing them hog-tied and helpless for the sake of our amusement felt undignified.

                But the indignity would not last long. Finally one of the hunters brought out a pistol - small caliber, maybe a .22 or .25 - and presented it to the crowd.

                “Who wants the honor?”

                “Holy shit,” I whispered. Those of us who were not amused simply watched in awe.

                Typically, there was a guy in the crowd eager to step up and accept the offer. He took the pistol and the hunter showed him exactly where to put it, with the muzzle nestled near the base of the gator’s skull. I guess that’s the sweet spot. They look so indestructible in the wild, but one shot was all it took. The second gator barely even reacted, but followed shortly after. Despite my ambivalence on the matter, it still seemed appropriate that someone witness this with a proper sense of respect.

                Before this starts sounding like a diatribe on the universal connection of all things or the bounty of the Earth Mother or something, let me make this one point clear:  Alligators are dangerous and they breed pretty fast. When their population explodes they expand into new territory and they have no particular fear of humans. They’ve been known to hunt dogs and kill people, and the only way to keep their population under control is to keep it culled. What we were witnessing was neither a crime nor a sin, I just don’t think anyone should take pleasure in killing anything, so I wanted to approach the telling of this story with a certain reverie.

                The hunters stuck their knives in the bullet holes and bore into them as deep as they would go just to be sure. You can’t be too careful, I guess. The gators were still moving, but I think it was some kind of spasm. They looked like they were deflating as their bodies relaxed, like a tire losing air. I took my friend’s camera and snapped some pictures as the blood pooled on the concrete floor. It’s ghoulish, I know, but I consider myself a collector of experience. A thing like this should be documented because a description after the fact would simply be insufficient.

                What happened next was something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Once the gators were cut loose, one of the hunters pulled a chain down from the ceiling with a giant hook at the end. Rigging them to this chain in a manner I must admit to having not watched,  they hauled the carcasses up off the ground. After a few more pictures, the doors to another room swung open and they dragged them into it by means of a track along the ceiling to which the chain was attached.

                If I’m lucky in this life, I will never see what happens in a room like that. The hunters took the gators in and closed the door, and to my knowledge there was no further spectating or picture-taking from that point on.

                “That’s the fast-track to fucked-up,” I told my friends solemnly as the gators disappeared from view. I took pictures of the blood on the floor until they hosed it back out into the swamp.

                One of the girls taking pictures was a painter looking to make this moment the subject of future works. We all laughed about the strangeness of it, which is what people like us do in such situations.

                “Isn’t this how horror movies always start?” she asked.

                “No doubt,” I agreed. “Bunch of kids, a weird house in the woods, something fucked up happens, then it’s here come the hill mutants.”

                But there weren’t any hill mutants. The people there were all friendly and inviting. They had given us nothing but food and hospitality. And as gruesome a thing as this gangland-style slaying of the alligators may sound, they had probably made life a little safer for the people in the area.

                I’m not a hypocrite. You can’t eat the meat off something’s bones the way we tore into those ribs and then turn your nose up at the method that was used to procure it. I’ve been shark fishing before, and pulled one out of the water so it could be beheaded and gutted right there on the beach (it is necessary to clean sharks immediately because otherwise they will urinate through their skin and spoil the meat, I was told). I could not have been happier to take it home and cook every last bit of it and eat it. And sharks have lasted the test of time just as the alligators. But just the same, the spectacle of it was unsettling for me. And as is custom when witnessing something unsettling, I am now inclined to share that experience with you.

                After this everyone retired again to the lodge, where some of the guys set up instruments upstairs and started playing music. My exhaustion was finally setting in, so I sat back on a couch and nearly fell asleep. We headed out shortly after.

                Looking through my friend’s camera, we laughed at the dichotomy of sentiment the pictures stored there represented. Half of the pictures were from the wedding we had attended that same weekend, followed by one really cheery snapshot taken before embarking on this excursion. The rest documented the carnage of the gator killing.

                “If we were killed in the woods and this camera were all they found,” I said, “that would tell quite a story.”

                The ride home offered the horror movie landscape that had earlier been promised. Where the road was not consumed by the overhanging foliage it simply disappeared into the darkness.

                “I’d love to have a place out here,” my friend said merrily. It was pretty cool. Not terribly convenient to work though.

                This is the kind of place where werewolf sightings happen, I thought to myself on the way back. The swamp seemed perfectly suited to serve as the backdrop for a backwoods testimonial where some hayseed is insisting that whatever he saw wasn’t a bear because it was walking on two legs.

                “I’m a hunter,” they always say, “I know what a bear looks like, and this was not a bear.”

                We bantered on this point a few minutes until we were safely returned to the familiar civility of the highway, then we made our way back home without incident.