Friday Freebie

A little teaser ...

THE FEEDSTORE CHRONICLES - Chapter One

Most coming-of-age stories are fraught with symbolism, hidden

metaphors, and a heaping mound of other literary devices. Not this

one. Not mine. You see, I came of age while working at a dusty

Texas feedstore. A place where To Kill a Mockingbird involved a

twelve-year-old and a BB gun. Of Mice and Men was a problem

easily solved with rat poison. And David Copperfield was nothing

more than a dude that made shit disappear.

In the spring of 1989, I was a rosy-cheeked boy of sixteen.

Doyle Suggs was a twice-divorced, thirty-year-old high school

dropout. On the surface Doyle and I had little in common, yet his

involvement in my life changed me in drastic and dramatic ways.

Doyle ran a feedstore in Amarillo, Texas. A joint called Pearl’s

Feed and Seed. Working there provided me my first paying job,

my first taste of how fun life could be, and … my first brush with

real danger.

Pearl’s Feed and Seed was named after Doyle’s mother.

Originally she ran the place, but by the time I hired on, Pearl had

long since hightailed it back to her ancestral home in Oklahoma.

Nearly all of Doyle’s family hailed from the same rural

Oklahoma town. A town famous for hosting one of the world’s

largest rattlesnake roundups. You have to wonder about an entire

town that considers it high entertainment to track down and capture

vast quantities of poisonous snakes. I don’t know how the practice

got started, but let’s hope it was a group of teenage boys that first

hit upon that idea, since it’s a proven fact pubescent males are the

least intelligent demographic of human beings. A demographic I

solidly belonged to when I hired on at the feedstore.

Even with the ignorance of youth working against us, neither

I, nor any of my high school buddies made a habit of seeking out

venomous snakes. My friends were content to while away their

time with the three F’s – Football, Fighting, and Fornication.

They washed it all down with six-packs of beer.

That brings us to me. Despite the fact that I towered over most my

age, I was too lazy to be any good at football, too accommodating

to get in many fights, and too scared of my female classmates to

find a willing partner for the latter.

But then, in the spring of ‘89, I went to work at Pearl’s.

Like all sixteen-year-old boys, my desire for cold hard cash was

rooted in a swelling appreciation of the opposite sex. Foolishly, I

believed a steady paycheck, and all the imagined things I could

buy with my minimum wage windfall, would separate me from the

pack. In my warped fantasy land, I envisioned hundred dollar bills

bulging from my pockets and girls clamoring for my attention.

Actually, I didn’t care about girls in the plural. I wanted only to

gain the affection of one : Samantha Blake.

I’d been harboring a crush for Samantha better than a year, but

given her elevated stature in the halls of Caprock High School, I’d

never acted upon my infatuation. Samantha was a cheerleader; I

was a cowboy boot-wearing rabbit raiser. She was graceful, petite,

and beautiful; I was a six-foot-three sophomore who hadn’t quite

mastered the coordination of my man-sized body. She was one

of the most popular girls at our high school; I’d lost my bid to

become FFA president.

Turns out not even Scott, my best friend, voted for me. Not

that I blame him. After all, my opponent to head up Caprock’s

Future Farmers of America was Destiny Hayes. Destiny had been

wildly popular with all of the guys since the fourth grade, when

she was the first girl to grow a set of boobs. There we were in high

school, and the other girls had yet to make up for Destiny’s head

start. Scott had been in love with her, or at least her bra size, since

elementary school, but as I said, there was only one girl for me.

Samantha Blake wasn’t like the superficial and pretentious

cheerleaders you see in movies. She was sweet, kind, and possessed

long black eyelashes that left me tongue-tied every time they

fluttered in my presence. Scott maintained that other girls in our

class were just as pretty. A point I might have conceded, except . .

. none of those other girls made my heart accelerate with a single

word. None of them made me lay awake at night thinking about

their big brown eyes. None of them were Samantha Blake. Okay,

so it wasn’t her eyes I stayed up at night pondering. My thoughts

were of a more libidinous and lusty nature. I was a teenage boy

after all. Nevertheless, my sleepless nights and unacknowledged

attraction for Samantha paled in comparison to my boss’s brand

of lady troubles.

Doyle had three women in his life. His first wife and the mother

of his three boys, Pamela. His second wife, Laura, whom he was

in the process of divorcing when I hired on and last, but not least,

Snuggles.

Snuggles was an English Bulldog. Her fur was brown and white,

and she was one of the laziest, not to mention nastiest, canines to

ever down a bowl of kibble. Snuggles possessed runny, pus-filled

eyes, a loud, raspy breathing pattern, reminiscent of an asthmatic

Darth Vader. Her stubby, bowed legs that barely kept her flabby

gut from dragging the ground. She also happened to be Doyle’s

most prized possession.

Ninety percent of the time, Snuggles curled up on her doggy

bed behind the counter and refused to move. Too bad for me if

I needed something from the cabinet her fat body was pressed

against. Once or twice per day she would hoist her smelly carcass

from the fleece pad, only to use my pant leg as a depository for

her snot-crusted eyes. A nasty habit to be sure, but that act beat her

other habit all to hell.

Doyle lived for the times when Snuggles went into heat. Having

read an ad in the Thrifty Nickel for English Bulldog pups fetching

thirteen-hundred bucks a pop, mining Snuggles’ ovaries became

his life’s mission. I, however, dreaded the arrival of the dog’s cycle.

For this glorious week, Snuggles wasn’t merely content to wipe

her eye boogers on my jeans. No -- she also felt the animalistic

calling to drag her butt across the store’s concrete floor.

Guess who cleaned up the crimson snail trails. Me.

The only good thing about these visits from Mother Nature was

the entertainment they provided at each failed attempt by Doyle to

produce a litter of grandpups. Doyle whored Snuggles out to every

male bulldog within a three county area. Too greedy to share in the

potential booty of a litter worth several grand, Doyle always opted

to pay upfront stud fees rather than give up a higher share should

she actually conceive by paying with pick of the litter.

For each arranged rendezvous, Snuggles would shack up with

the chosen doggy Don Juan. Three or four days later she’d return

from her tryst looking as happy and satisfied as a fat man leaving

a Vegas buffet. Given the price of bulldog pups, Doyle projected

Snuggles and her uterus to be good for an easy five grand per year

and by his calculations, she only needed to have two litters of two

pups to accomplish that goal.

Along with the dog, Doyle was also raising three boys. Three

mean little hoodlums that I wagered would make him a grandpa

long before Snuggles ever did. Never mind the fact that Austin,

the oldest, was only eleven. Their father’s genes were too strong

for them not to find trouble of some sort and given Doyle’s

track record, some of that trouble was bound to be of the female

variety.

To this day I still can’t fathom how Doyle sweet-talked so many

women into the sack. Women you would never expect a man who

lived in a double-wide on the outskirts of town to coerce into a

sleepover.

Women like Dr. Croft.

When pimping out Snuggles failed to work, Doyle turned to

artificial insemination. The procedure was pricey, but each time

Snuggles came into heat, he’d reach for his credit card, load the

pooch into his pickup, and head for the vet’s office. This went on

for better than a year, and I never suspected Snuggles wasn’t the

only one getting her jollies at the appointments.

Then came the day I was in the back, sacking up some hen

scratch for Mrs. Esparza. Doyle had taught me how to up-sell so I

was in the middle of trying to convince the woman a bit of oyster

shell and a bag of laying pellets would raise her egg production.

“As hens get older,” I said, “they really need the extra calcium

they gain from oyster shells.”

“No, no, no. No hay falta con mis gallinas.” Mrs. Esparza

wagged a finger in my face. She was a regular customer, so I

knew my chances of selling her anything extra were over once she

turned to responding in Spanish. Next she would pretend not to

understand anything I said.

“Yo, Travis!” Doyle’s voice came over the intercom, saving me

from continuing what would have been a futile effort.

“Yeah,” I yelled back.

“Hurry up and get Mrs. Esparza loaded. I have an important

mission for you.”

I carried the hen scratch out, loaded it in Mrs. Esparza’s Buick,

and headed back inside to see what Doyle had in mind.

“John’s bringing some papers by for me to sign, so I need you to

take Snuggles in for her AI appointment.”

John was Doyle’s lawyer. Between the divorces, the subpoena

when Doyle’s bookie got popped, and other brushes with the

justice system, they had a close working relationship, so I didn’t

think anything of his explanation.

“Okay,” I said, “But I’m taking your truck. I don’t want your

dog wiping eye snot on my seats.” My pickup had been a recent

gift from my grandfather, and despite the ‘76 Ford’s battered

appearance and age, I was still quite proud of the vehicle. Grabbing

the keys for the store’s flatbed Ford off the pegboard, I snapped a

leash on Snuggles and drug her fat butt out the door.

To read how it all went wrong for Snuggle and me, along with the rest of my comedic coming-of-age tale click here to purchase a paperback copy of THE FEEDSTORE CHRONICLES.