Karl Kranston's "Where's the Wonderful?" (Week 5) Ted Kennedy R.I.P.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:31PM Where's the Wonderful?
Karl "The Dutch Elm" KranstonI'll be. A true giant has passed and Ol' Karl is feeling a bit mournful. Edward Moore Kennedy died yesterday and while The Dutch Elm did not agree with him politically on most things, I did respect the man as a person, a customer (I'm in the medical equipment/prescription drug racket) and, dare I say, a friend.
My fondest memory of "Eddie Baby" was the weekend we spent together in Juarez at an international health care conference. La Casa de Los Gringos had overbooked the convention and we were forced to share a squalid, rat and roach infested room for the duration. You can get quite close to another man under such conditions (the liquor helped) and Ted and I hit it off from the get go.
We grabbed a gristly steak (I'm assuming it was beef), sipped ańejo tequila and paid whores to dance around our table and impersonate gay celebrities of the era. Alan Seuss was Ted's favorite. When Carmella got up on the bar, put on that yachting cap and started mincing about... well... Ted could barely control his bowels from laughter. His incontinence would become a serious issue later in the night, but that's another story for another time.
The continuous debauchery of the evening led us to a barn on the outskirts of town where the locals and conventioneers assembled to engage in games of chance and sexual acts of a peculiarly bestial nature. The cockfighting had gone smoothly enough where Ted had won over 500,000 pesos (about $12.37 I think) on a bandy rooster he nicknamed "Nixon" for the bird's remarkable ability to come back from the brink of sure death and feast on the entrails of his opponents. Ted's cheeks were glowing and that distinct Kennedy grin was on full display. Suddenly, a low, unearthly groan came from the other side of the barn where a young woman was indulging in prurient acts of fellatio with a diseased burro. The smile disappeared from Ted's face and his cheeks turned ashen. He walked over, elbowing through the crowd, to the girl lying on the ground. She had vomited and was convulsing in pain. He knelt beside her, lifted her head and cradled it in his arms. She looked up at him sadly and whimpered. Just then, and I will never forget this moment as long as I live, a solitary tear fell from Ted's eye directly onto her forehead. He then reached down and baptized her with his salty issue. She smiled and kissed him.
"Usted es un hijo de Dios", he whispered gently to her.
They both rose to their feet and walked out of the barn, hand in hand.
It was the last I saw or heard from "Eddie Baby" until years later when the incident at Chappaquiddick occurred. I remember reading the morning paper and looking down at the photo of Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman who drowned in the river.
The young woman from the barn.
My phone rang. It was him. My old drinking buddy from Juarez.
"It was an accident", he said.
"I know", I assured him.
A click, and the line went dead.
I never heard from him again.
Rest in Peace, Old Soldier. You will be missed.
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Now, let's get down to the business at hand. This week's compendium of insights, observations and grainy plains wisdom:
Despite all beliefs to the contrary and her telling you otherwise, there are many moments in life when your Mother simply does not love you.
Tyra Banks is no Lola Falana.
I recently took one of those business profile tests to see where I fell on the "managerial style" spectrum. I'm not sure how I should feel about the results. I plotted in between "adversarial totalitarian" and "unipolar depressant".
My wife "Happy" insists on them, but for the love of Jesus Christ Our Lord I can't figure out the purpose of bed skirts.
That Larry King lives a charmed life. I wouldn't mind a job like that. You know, without those god-awful suspenders and the Semitism.
A heck of a lot of what's wrong today can be directly attributed to the lack of Bob Seger's music on the radio. Any darn fool can see that.
Sometimes I put patches of duct tape over my nipples and wear them around the house for hours. Then, I rip them off real fast so that the small hair follicles around my areolas pull out of my skin, causing pinpricks of blood to ooze out of the tiny wounds. The pain is searing and I nearly always black out and hit my head on something sharp, inducing more pain and increased blood loss. Only then do I know the hurt that the American Indian must have felt when the white man betrayed him.
If they must persist in putting those small "inspected by" stickers on every piece of produce I buy, could they at least use an adhesive that does not leave a gooey residue on my fruit skins?
What is with these kids and their "texting"? Has it all of sudden become cool to want to type more? Am I missing something? Jeepers, we used to stomp the queers who took typing class when I was in school.
Am I the only one aroused by the automated female voice in the self-checkout lanes at Dillons Grocery? That is a disembodied siren of lust if I've ever heard one.
I've never found anything humorous about men dressing in women's clothing. It is a psychological disorder. Can someone please explain to me why that's funny?
There's a big difference between city people and country people and I think it mainly has to do with their respective views on sodomy.
There was an intensity to Judge Reinhold that I think the general populous never fully appreciated.
"A stitch in time saves nine." Nine what exactly? And how does one go about "stitching" time? I think Ben Franklin may have been one of our most overrated Founding Fathers.
I always thought Who Moved My Cheese was a slang term for prison rape.
Despite the ideal of Nordic comeliness we find today, I'll go out on a limb and say that Viking women were most likely very unattractive creatures.
By gosh men are getting soft these days. Do you think pirates worried about being nurturing fathers or spending quality time with their families? I don't.
I believe a woman does have a choice in regard to her own body but I don't want to get on a slippery slope here. I mean, what's next? Does she get to decide what restaurant we go to? Or what movie to see? Does she have access to the TV remote? These are things that concern me when people start dispensing rights willy-nilly.
They just don't make good "SS Gestapo Women" films anymore.
When asked to list my strengths for an online dating site (shhh, don't tell Happy) I entered: 1.) A gift for physical comedy 2.) A keen sense of smell (my own musk is particularly pheromonal) and 3.) An ability to delegate authority. That ought to seal the deal!
The Dutch Elm has grown tired. Must rest now.
Reader Comments (3)
Cheating at Harvard, supporting the Soviets against his country, continually attacking those not to the manor born, who tried to earn their own betterment, supporting in his twilight a dissolution of American freedom however possible...what a superb legacy. From Chris Matthews giving him posthumous blowjobs to Shep Smith on Fox mewing that "this was a good man", I wanted to enjoy thunderous bloody diarreha all day just to distract me from a logic vaccum so big it threatened the time-space continuum. The most affect-neutral I could come up with was that this was a man who for his long and storied career, supported dishonorable notions that sought to aggrandize the emotions of some through the efforts of others. In his beliefs, his goals, and his actions, he was thoroughly anti-American. Oh, but he cared.
Fitz? You are an ass.
How did the celebration of Teddy's death go last night? Did you drooling, mouth-breathers on the right gather 'round - high-five each other, drink scotch mixed with the blood of poor black children, piss on some homeless people, light cigars with hundred dollar bills, drag some immigrants behind your Hummer, crash in the skulls of homosexuals and jerk off onto your shrines for Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand????
Hell yeah we did, and it was good!