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  Cedrick said, “You think you’re a soul brother?”

  Yancey said, “You know you’re a bigot?”

  Cedrick wrinkled his nose. “Boy, you stink,” he said. “What’s that smell?”

  Yancey stood at the counter, his change in his hand, trying to think of a comeback. But then he remembered that he was not alone.

  “Hey man, you take care.”

  “Say what?” said Cedrick. He seemed disappointed, but Yancey had remembered his sister begging him to pick just one person to be nice to.

  “Have a good night. Nice talking to you. Hey, I love your store.”

  “Boy, get the fuck out of here now before I call the law on your smelly ass.”

  In the car the odor was worse. Yancey rolled down the window. He zipped up his windbreaker. He put the change back in his grandmother’s purse. He did not need the beer to do what he was about to do, but it would not hurt. At least it was what his father expected of him. He did not want to disappoint his father.

  Yancey drank the first beer before he even reached the city limits. He tossed the can in the floorboard at his grandmother’s feet. He burped, then excused himself. Out toward Beamon’s Wood, the tight series of S-curves beckoned. He finished his second beer and threw the can out of the window near Pope’s Pond, accidentally. He thought about going back to get it, but it was dark and he was talking to his grandmother. Some days it seemed he was still talking to her, still in the car, high on Schlitz Malt Liquor, driving around the back roads, had been for twenty years. Often he was confused about what he’d told her recently and what he’d said back then, which wasn’t really a problem as this was the nature of time — collapsible, flexible, unreliable. He told her how wonderful it would be to get everyone together — all the people he’d failed, the ones he’d loved and who had loved him however briefly — and have a big party in the woods. I would like to feel, just as long as the party lasts, the attraction that drew me to them in the first place, and them to me. You know, before things fell away. Before whatever it is out there in the air, that thing you people call heart, turned back into dive-bombing mosquitoes and swamp fog and dust kicked up from the tractor trailers on the highway. Grandma, how do you make anything last? He chugged his third tall boy as they approached the tightest switchback out by Beamon’s Wood. He’d been obeying the speed limit and actually slowed down as they entered the curve. It wasn’t as if he wanted to die, too — though to be honest he did not really give much thought to what injuries he might sustain. Whatever happened was fate — even though he engineered it. The contradiction did not bother him because it was his fate, according to his father, to screw things up. But how could it be his grandmother’s fate to be killed by a fat blast of organ, bass, and drum? She deserved better. The road curved to the left, but Yancey and his grandmother, engrossed in conversation, drove intently into the pine forest.

  IV

  There was something deeply sexy to Yancey about telling someone you maybe love and whom you want to love you back your darkest secrets. Like sex following funerals and excruciating hangovers, the love you make after such a revelation is punctuation, an impassioned if desperate attempt to prove you are, in fact, very much alive. Therefore Yancey, in the silence that followed his answer to her question, moved in close to Teresa, trilled his fingers sweetly in the gaps between her ribs, as if striking a complicated chord on an instrument of which he was an acknowledged master, and listened with his entire body for an answer.

  She still hadn’t said anything. He had always found it odd that the others had merely accepted the end of the story as offered. Oh, they had their questions, the ones Yancey had hoped Teresa would not ask, but they’d finished the story for themselves, jerking Yancey out of the car, having him run back to his aunt’s house, frantic and shaken, where they had him tell his father exactly what happened and nobly suffer the consequences. And he had never bothered to correct their version, which meant that he could not stay with them.

  Teresa, well, she did not pull away from his touch. But nor did her body encourage his. It occurred to him that she might think his interest in her at this moment creepy, inappropriate, but he was willing to take that risk, for the moment he described had taken place twenty years earlier, and if it had ruined his life it was only because he had let it. If, in this silence, Teresa were pulling slightly away from him — so slightly she did not even realize it, as if his story, like rain atop a mountain, had begun an erosion that would ultimately wear them down to nothingness — well, what could he do about it?

  Yancey thought of what he did not tell her. It was something she wouldn’t believe, something so freaky he often wondered if he’d made it up. As they’d come to rest against a pine tree, the car, miraculously, was still running. Some part of one of them — his grandmother’s arm, Yancey’s knee — had nudged the tape, which he’d ejected at the stop sign, back into the player. Yancey’s head had hit the windshield hard, leaving a spiderweb of splinter cracks; his forehead was warm and wet with blood. His grandmother had come unlodged from the position he’d taken such pains to place her in earlier, and was also bleeding, her neck twisted crazily so that she was inclined toward him, looking at him expectantly. How could he ever share with anyone that moment when “Hot ‘N’ Nasty” took right up where it had left off, in midlyric, as if every day had its own irrepressible sound track, and this song, however inappropriate, belonged to Yancey and his grandmother on the day of her unscheduled departure. They sat there listening. Yancey’s legs throbbed. Later he would find that he’d cracked a femur and broken a leg and bruised three ribs, but the pain, at that point, was not located so much in the body as outside the car, in the woods, in the world. There it mostly remained, so many years later, despite Yancey’s attempts to bring it back inside, to inhale it and let it out like the synchronized breath of lovers.

  “Hidden Meanings, Treatment of Time, Supreme Irony, and Life Experiences in the Song ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman’”

  IN THE SONG “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” by Joe Tex, the speaker or the narrator of this song, a man previously injured before the song’s opening chords by a large, aggressive-type woman in a disco-type bar, refuses to bump with the “big fat woman” of the title. In doing so he is merely exercising his right to an injury-free existence thus insuring him the ability to work and provide for him and his family if he has one, I don’t know it doesn’t ever say. In this paper I will prove there is a hidden meaning that everybody doesn’t get in this popular Song, Saying, or Incident from Public Life. I will attempt to make it clear that we as people when we hear this song we automatically think “novelty” or we link it up together with other songs we perceive in our mind’s eye to be just kind of one-hit wonders or comical lacking a serious point. It could put one in the mind of, to mention some songs from this same era, “Convoy” or “Disco Duck.” What I will lay out for my audience is that taking this song in such a way as to focus only on it’s comical side, which it is really funny nevertheless that is a serious error which ultimately will result in damage to the artist in this case Joe Tex also to the listener, that is you or whoever.

  “About three nights ago/I was at a disco.” (Tex, line 1.) Thus begins the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” by the artist Joe Tex. The speaker has had some time in particular three full days to think about what has occurred to him in the incident in the disco-type establishment. One thing and this is my first big point is that time makes you wiser. Whenever Jeremy and I first broke up I was so ignorant of the situation that had led to us breaking up but then a whole lot of days past and little by little I got a handle on it. The Speaker in “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” has had some time now to go over in his mind’s eye the events that occurred roughly three days prior to the song being sung. Would you not agree that he sees his life more clear? A lot of the Tellers in the stories you have made us read this semester they wait a while then tell their story thus knowing i
t by heart and being able to tell it better though with an “I” narrator you are always talking about some kind of “discrepancy” or “pocket of awareness” where the “I” acts like they know themselves but what the reader is supposed to get is they really don’t. Well see I don’t think you can basically say that about the narrator of “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More . . .” because when our story begins he comes across as very clearheaded and in possession of the “facts” of this “case” so to speak on account of time having passed thus allowing him wisdom. So the first thing I’d like to point out is Treatment of Time.

  There is a hidden meaning that everybody doesn’t get in this particular Song, Saying or Incident from Public Life. What everybody thinks whenever they hear this song is that this dude is being real ugly toward this woman because she is sort of a big woman. You are always talking about how the author or in this case the writer of the song is a construction of the culture. Say if he’s of the white race or the male gender when he’s writing he’s putting in all these attitudes about say minority people or women without even knowing it, in particular ideals of femininity. Did I fully understand you to say that all white men author’s basically want to sleep with the female characters they create? Well that just might be one area where you and me actually agree because it has been my experience based upon my previous relationships especially my last one with Jeremy that men are mostly just wanting to sleep with any woman that will let them. In the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman,” let’s say if you were to bring it in and play it in class and we were to then discuss it I am willing to bet that the first question you would ask, based on my perfect attendance is, What Attitudes Toward Women are Implied or Explicitly Expressed by the Speaker or Narrator of this Song? I can see it right now up on the board. That Lindsay girl who sits up under you practically, the one who talks more than you almost would jump right in with, “He doesn’t like this woman because she is not the slender submissive ideal woman” on and on. One thing and I’ll say this again come Evaluation time is you ought to get better at cutting people like Lindsay off. Why we have to listen to her go off on every man in every story we read or rap song you bring in (which, okay, we know you’re “down” with Lauryn Hill or whoever but it seems like sometimes I could just sit out in the parking lot and listen to 102 JAMZ and not have to climb three flights of stairs and get the same thing) is beyond me seeing as how I work two jobs to pay for this course and I didn’t see her name up under the instructor line in the course offerings plus why should I listen to her on the subject of men when it’s clear she hates every last one of them? All I’m saying is she acts like she’s taking up for the oppressed people when she goes around oppressing right and left and you just stand up there letting her go on. I’m about sick of her mouth. Somebody left the toilet running, I say to the girl who sits behind me whenever Lindsay gets cranked up on the subject of how awful men are.

  Okay at this point you’re wondering why I’m taking up for the speaker or narrator of “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More” instead of the big fat woman seeing as how I’m 5′1″ and weigh 149. That is if you even know who I am which I have my doubts based on the look on your face when you call the roll and the fact that you get me, Melanie Sudduth and Amanda Wheeler mixed up probably because we’re A: always here, which you don’t really seem to respect all that much, I mean it seems like you like somebody better if they show up late or half the time like that boy Sean, B: real quiet and C: kind of on the heavy side. To me that is what you call a supreme irony the fact that you and that Lindsay girl spend half the class talking about Ideals of Beauty and all how shallow men are but then you tend to favor all the dudes and chicks in the class which could be considered “hot” or as they used to say in the seventies which is my favorite decade which is why I chose to analyze a song from that era, “so fine.” So, supreme irony is employed.

  As to why I’m going to go ahead and go on record taking up for the Speaker and not the Big Fat Woman. Well to me see he was just minding his own business and this woman would not leave him be. You can tell in the lines about how she was rarin’ to go (Tex, line 4) that he has got some respect for her and he admires her skill on the dance floor. It’s just that she throws her weight around, literally! To me it is her that is in the wrong. The fact that she is overweight or as the speaker says “Fat” don’t have anything to do with it. She keeps at him and he tells her to go on and leave him alone, he’s not getting down, “You done hurt my hip once.” (Tex, lines 25–27.) She would not leave him alone. What she ought to of done whenever he said no was just go off with somebody else. I learned this the hard way after the Passage of Time following Jeremy and my’s breakup. See I sort of chased after him calling him all the time and he was seeing somebody else and my calling him up and letting him come over to my apartment and cooking him supper and sometimes even letting him stay the night. Well if I only knew then what I know now. Which is this was the worse thing I could of done. Big Fat Woman would not leave the Speaker in the song which might or might not be the Artist Joe Tex alone. Also who is to blame for her getting so big? Did somebody put a gun to her head and force her to eat milkshakes from CookOut? Jeremy whenever he left made a comment about the fact that I had definitely fell prey to the Freshman Fifteen or whatever. In high school whenever we started dating I was on the girl’s softball team I weighed 110 pounds. We as people nowadays don’t seem to want to take responsibility for our actions if you ask me which I guess you did by assigning this paper on the topic of Analyze a Hidden Meaning in a Song, Saying, or Incident from Public Life which that particular topic seems kind of broad to me. I didn’t have any trouble deciding what to write on though because I am crazy about the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More” and it is true as my paper has set out to prove that people take it the wrong way and don’t get its real meaning also it employs Treatment of Time and Supreme Irony.

  One thing I would like to say about the assignment though is okay, you say you want to hear what we think and for us to put ourselves in our papers but then on my last paper you wrote all over it and said in your Ending Comments that my paper lacked clarity and focus and was sprawling and not cohesive or well organized. Well okay I had just worked a shift at the Coach House Restaurant and then right after that a shift at the Evergreen Nursing Home which this is my second job and I was up all night writing that paper on the “Tell-Tale Heart” which who’s fault is that I can hear you saying right now. Your right. I ought to of gotten to it earlier but all that aside what I want to ask you is okay have you ever considered that clarity and focus is just like your way of seeing the world? Like to you A leads to B leads to C but I might like want to put F before B because I’ve had some Life Experiences different than yours one being having to work two jobs and go to school full time which maybe you yourself had to do but something tells me I doubt it. So all I’m saying is maybe you ought to reconsider when you start going off on clarity and logic and stuff that there are let’s call them issues behind the way I write which on the one hand when we’re analyzing say “Lady with the Tiny Dog” you are all over discussing the issues which led to the story being written in the way it is and on the other if it’s me doing the writing you don’t want to even acknowledge that stuff is influencing my Narrative Rhythm too. I mean I don’t see the difference really. So that is my point about Life Experiences and Narrative Rhythm, etc.

  The speaker in the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” says no to the Big Fat Woman in part because the one time he did get up and bump with her she did a dip and nearly broke his hip. (Tex, line 5.) Dancing with this particular woman on account of her size and her aggressive behavior would clearly be considered Risky or even Hazardous to the speaker or narrator’s health. Should he have gone ahead and done what you and Lindsay wanted him to do and got up there and danced with her because she was beautiful on the inside and he was wanting to thwart the trajectory of typical male response or whatever he could have ended up missing work, not bei
ng able to provide for his family if he has one it never really says, falling behind on his car payment, etc. All I’m saying is what is more important for him to act right and get up and dance with the Big Fat Woman even though she has prior to that moment almost broke his hip? Or should he ought to stay seated and be able to get up the next morning and go to work? I say the ladder one of these choices is the best one partially because my daddy has worked at Rencoe Mills for twenty-two years and has not missed a single day which to me that is saying something. I myself have not missed class one time and I can tell even though you put all that in the syllabus about showing up you basically think I’m sort of sad I bet. For doing what’s right! You’d rather Sean come in all late and sweaty and plop down in front of you and roll his shirt up so you can gawk at his barbed wire tattoo which his daddy probably paid for and say back the same things you say only translated into his particular language which I don’t hardly know what he’s even talking about using those big words it’s clear he don’t even know what they mean. I mean, between him and Lindsay, my God. I loved it whenever he said, “It’s like the ulcerous filament of her soul is being masticated from the inside out,” talking about that crazy lady in the “Yellow Wallpaper” (which if you ask me her problem was she needed a shift emptying bedpans at the nursing home same as that selfish bitch what’s her name, that little boy’s mother in the “Rocking Horse Winner.”) You’d rather Sean or Lindsay disrespect all your so-called rules and hand their mess in late so long as everything they say is something you already sort of said. What you want is for everybody to A: Look hot and B: agree with you. A good thing for you to think about is, let’s say you were in a disco-type establishment and approached by a big fat man. Let’s say this dude was getting down. Okay, you get up and dance with him once and he nearly breaks your hip, he bumps you on the floor. Would you get up there and dance with him again? My daddy would get home from work and sit in this one chair with this reading lamp switched on and shining in his lap even though I never saw him read a word but “The Trader” which was all advertisements for used boats and trucks and camper tops and tools. He went to work at six, got off at three, ate supper at five thirty. The rest of the night he sat in that chair drinking coffee with that lamplight in his lap. He would slap me and my sister Connie whenever he thought we were lying about something. If we didn’t say anything how could we be lying so we stopped talking. He hardly ever said a word to me my whole life except, “Y’all mind your mama.” Whenever I first met Jeremy in high school he’d call me up at night, we used to talk for hours on the phone. I never knew really how to talk to anyone like that. Everything that happened to me, it was interesting to Jeremy or at least he acted like it was. He would say, “What’s up, girl?” and I would say, “nothing” or sometimes “nothing much” and I would hate myself for saying nothing and being nothing. But then he’d say, “Well what did you have for supper?” and I’d burst into tears because some boy asked me what did I have for supper. I would cry and cry. Then there’d be that awful thing you know when you’re crying and the boy’s like what is it what did I say and you don’t know how to tell him he didn’t do nothing wrong you just love his heart to bits and pieces just for calling you up on the telephone. Or you don’t want to NOT let him know that nobody ever asked you such a silly thing as what did you eat for supper and neither can you come out and just straight tell him, I never got asked that before. Sometimes my life is like this song comes on the radio and I’ve forgot the words but then the chorus comes along and I only know the first like two words of every line. I’ll come in midway, say around about “No More No Big Fat Woman.” I only know half of what I know I guess. I went out in the sun and got burned bad and then the skin peeled off and can you blame me for not wanting to go outside anymore? She ought to go find her a big fat man. The only time my daddy’d get out of his chair nights was when a storm blew up out of the woods which he liked to watch from the screen porch. The rain smelled rusty like the screen. He’d let us come out there if we’d be quiet and let him enjoy his storm blowing up but if we said anything he’d yell at us. I could hate Jeremy for saying I’m just not attracted to you anymore but hating him’s not going to bring me any of what you call clarity. Even when the stuff I was telling him was so boring, like, then I went by the QuikMart and got seven dollars worth of premium and a Diet Cheerwine he’d make like it was important. Sometimes though he wouldn’t say anything and I’d be going on and on like you or Lindsay and I’d get nervous and say, “Hello?” and he’d say, “I’m here I’m just listening.” My daddy would let us stay right through the thunder and even some lightning striking the trees in the woods behind the house. We couldn’t speak or he’d make us go inside. I know, I know, maybe Jeremy got quiet because he was watching “South Park” or something. Still I never had anyone before or since say to me, I’m here I’m just listening.