GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

I've been writing a series of short stories and tidbits called "The Horse Hockey Chronicles." They have been popular elsewhere, and I thought I would post a couple of them here.

An Introduction To The Town Of Doohickeyville

Welcome to Doohickeyville in Onion County. Call it the average small town, anywhere U.S.A. Perhaps, rather, we should call it a below average town. Nobody famous has emanated from there. No famous events have happened there. People don’t go there to find fame or fortune, and the famous and fortunate seldom pass through.

Doohickeyville sprang up along the railroad in 1851. The town’s original name was Whatchamacallit, but the name was hard to spell and was often confused with something not worth remembering. The town’s name was changed in 1922 after a fire that burned the entire town to the ground.

The fire occurred on the fourth of July of that year. Most of the townsfolk turned out that evening to watch the annual fireworks display. About a third of the way into the show, a rocket misfired and shot into the box containing the rest of the fireworks. The entire contents of the box went up at once, and for a few moments the people roared their approval thinking the resulting blast was the intended grand finale of a much shorter than usual display.

Unfortunately a bottle rocket flew into Milo’s Tavern, where it set off a particularly potent batch of Milo’s A-No.1 homebrew. Another batch was brewing in the back, and as the fire crept toward it the fire department hurriedly came to the rescue. Nobody thought to stand watch along the railroad after firemen ran their hoses across the tracks and it just so happened that that night for the first time in living memory, the 9:30 from Chicago was right on time. Suddenly the fire department found itself in possession of eight medium length hoses and four itty bitty ones instead of the four long hoses they had earlier in the day.

Milo’s second batch of A-No.1 was even more impressive than the first, and the barrel took off like a missile straight toward Howard’s brand new service station, which was next door to the hardware store.

One of the local farmers had ordered a case of dynamite at the hardware store the week before to remove several tree trunks from a field he was clearing. He had planned to pick it up Friday. Unfortunately it was Thursday. The resulting blast sent the store’s brand new toilet shooting through the roof and as the population looked on in horror, the commode arched its way through the night sky and landed in the lobby of the First State Bank.

Meanwhile, Howard’s brand new gravity feed gas pump went off like a roman candle. As did the gasoline tanker next to it which lumbered off down the street straight into Maud’s bakery. Inside the bakery, several large barrels of flour were sent airborne. When the flame from the gasoline hit the airborne flour it created a small mushroom cloud that blew the roof off the building, dislodging several bricks in the process.

One of the airborne bricks sailed through the open door of the Dongbanger and Sons blacksmith shop, where it just happened to land on a shovel that was protruding from the furnace. This launched several coals into the air, which started that building on fire.

In the middle of the square, the townsfolk looked on in a mixture of shock and awe as the town went up around them. Before it was all over the entire downtown was gone and to this day old timers still wonder how in the middle of the chaos nobody was injured.

Like a phoenix, today’s town of Doohickeyville rose from the ashes.


Copyright - Mary Rae McPherson

The Cow Noise Tragedy

Elbert Henderschott was traveling through the Kansas City area when he encountered an individual who mounted a P.A. speaker behind the grill on his minivan. This man had an affinity for cow noises, and his van was known for mooing at innocent bystanders.

Elbert thought that was a great idea, and it may have been… well, at least the P.A. part. Elbert went to the local Radio Shack and bought the parts he needed, spending a weekend installing the equipment in his beat up ’72 Duster.

With his new found wattage under the hood, Elbert’s temper tended to get the better of him. His beat up Plymouth became known throughout the county for spewing streams of profanity at all the idiot drivers he came across.

Now, we are fairly certain that getting shot wasn’t high on Elbert’s list of priorities. However he took his sharp tongue into a bad neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.

Flowers can be sent to Cochrane’s Funeral Home and Tanning Salon in Doohickeyville.

Of Lamps And Men

Annabelle Harris and Fannie May Smith were sitting at the lunch counter at Fred’s Bar-B-Q and Taxidermy one afternoon. Fannie May had been out and about that morning visiting the junk stores around Onion County, and she had found a lamp that caught her attention.

“I think it has potential. It’s a bit dirty, but I can clean it right up.”

“So what does it look like?” Annabelle asked.

“It’s one of those lamps with the painted glass shade on it. All you have to do is touch it and it turns on.”

“Kind of like my husband,” Annabelle said.

The Moped Copper Caper

Facing a chronic budget shortage, the city council in Doohickeyville decided on a unique method of pinching pennies. On orders from the council, the entire vehicle fleet of the local police department was sold at auction. The proceeds were used to purchase a new fleet of law enforcement mopeds.

“We are doing our part to do the people’s work by cutting spending,” Mayor Wilfred Dongbanger said in a prepared statement. “We believe our police force will become a national model of efficiency.”

Despite backslapping politicians’ claims to the contrary, problems with the new police vehicle fleet soon became apparent. Police converged on Rack Your Balls, a popular downtown bar, on night after reports of a brawl involving several people. Six arrests were made before officers realized they had no way to transport the offenders to the county lockup.

The matter was brought up at the next city council meeting. Unfortunately, the city had mistakenly spent the money from the vehicle auction on twenty thousand cases of toilet paper after the city clerk misread a police department requisition. The clerk got a new pair of glasses the following week, however there was no money left in the budget to purchase a police transport van.

Mayor Dongbanger instead suggested the police use money from petty cash to purchase rope and several sets of roller skates.

The Great Chase

Officer Barney Wayne joined the Doohickeyville police department in 2005, after moving to Onion County from Centralia, Illinois. Barely a year after joining the force, Barney found himself being asked to fill the vacant police chief’s job after it became unexpectedly vacant.

Wayne’s predecessor in the police chief’s role was John Fife, who was forced into early retirement after suffering a nervous breakdown. The cliché is that some people have a shoot first and ask questions later sort of attitude. This was quite literally the attitude that Chief Fife began to develop. Unfortunately in a town where jaywalking and speeding made up a large part of the police workload, the discharge of a firearm was mostly uncalled for. Fife currently resides in the George W. Bush Home For the Criminally Insane in Loda.

Chief Wayne had hardly had time to settle in to his new position before the city council decided to sell off his squad car fleet. As one would assume, he wasn’t particularly thrilled with the idea.

“Well hell. Why don’t they just give us some of those Buck Rogers space helmets with the flashing red lights on top to complete the package,” he said to a friend one afternoon at Fred’s Bar-B-Que and Taxidermy.

He was being cynical at the time, though it turned out that one of the city council members just happened to be sitting nearby and overheard the conversation. After she checked the price tag of a motorcycle light package against that of the Buck Rogers helmet, she introduced an ordinance to the city council to purchase a couple of cases of the toy helmets. It passed unanimously.

So that brings us up to one Sunday morning as Barney cruised about town making his morning rounds. He had just pulled up to a four way stop sign next to Henderson’s Adult Bookstore and Mortuary when a shiny red Corvette with out of state plates sped through the intersection without even slowing down.

Barney grabbed his radio.

“Unit 1, I’m in pursuit of a red Corvette southbound on Division. Request backup.”

He reached up to the top of his helmet and switched on the rotating beacon. At the same time the siren on the helmet began blaring away; kind of pointless as the thing could barely be heard for twenty feet.

Barney took a deep breath and began pedaling as hard as he could. After a few seconds he kicked the moped into gear, and the engine made a sound not unlike the results of Rosa Hallowell’s three bean chili as it sputtered to life. Three other units had already given chase before Barney caught up.

Now put yourself in the place of Harvey Anderson, the driver of the Corvette with out of state plates, for just a moment as he looked in his rearview mirror to see a squad of cops riding mopeds and wearing dark glasses and Buck Rogers space helmets giving chase. Mr. Anderson can hardly be blamed for his reaction to the absurd image in the mirror; he laughed. In fact he blew nearly an ounce of Coca-Cola from his fountain drink out his nose, a good portion of which blew back in his face as he was driving with the top down. His vision temporarily obscured, he swerved off the road and took out Manny’s hot dog stand.

“Unit 1, suspect vehicle may be a D.U.I.,” Barney yelled into his radio as he ducked an airborne corn dog.

While Harvey felt bad about the hot dog stand, and even worse about the ketchup splattered all over his leather upholstery, this situation was too ridiculous to not have a little fun with. After all, what was the chance one of those rinky-dink mopeds catching a Corvette? The scene that followed reminded some of the O.J. Simpson low speed chase, with a growing fleet of law enforcement mopeds following a red Corvette around all over town.

Arnie Ledbetter had just awakened out of a deep stupor when he staggered out the front door of Rack Your Balls. Seems he had passed out in a bathroom stall again, and the bartender had just left him there when he closed up shop. Arnie had stumbled into Division Street when he was nearly run down by a red Corvette with out of state plates, followed by no less than nine mopeds ridden by police wearing Buck Rodgers space helmets with rotating red beacons and emanating a pathetic excuse for a siren.

“Hell with this,” Arnie slurred and stumbled back to the Rack Your Balls bathroom where he promptly passed out again.

At the wheel of the red Corvette Harvey did his best to keep a straight face as he drove just fast enough to keep the police motorcade right behind him.

“You’ll never take me alive, coppers!” he yelled as he waved one half of the peace sign for good measure.

Now leading the pack, Barney was growing more and more angry by the minute. It was obvious that this asshole he was chasing was just fooling around with him and his men. It was time to take decisive action.

Steering with one hand, he fumbled around a pack he had installed behind his seat for just such an occasion. There it was! He pulled a spike strip out of the bag, handling it carefully to avoid blowing one of his own tires out. The Corvette was heading down a street which ended in a “T” intersection. Barney knew this was his chance. He had a fifty-fifty shot. If he guessed which way the driver would turn and cut the corner, he might just be able to get the spike strip down in front of the car.

Barney guessed right. As the car turned right, Barney tried to jump his moped over the curb and cut it off by riding over the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he found the suspension on a moped is sorely lacking for such a maneuver.

The moped bucked like a bronco and Barney lost hold of his spike strip, which flew through the air and landed on the ground right in front of him. With a loud pop the front tire blew, and the rear of moped jumped up in the air. In a fraction of a second, Barney found himself airborne. He did two complete summersaults in midair and somehow landed in the passenger seat of the Corvette as it went by.

“Shit!” exclaimed Harvey as Barney pulled his weapon.

“Pull over,” said Barney.

The Smoking Dumb

It was another fairly dull trip as the train rocked and rolled southbound through the night. As usual, Conductor Ed Waller was in a state of semi-consciousness between station stops. Across from him, assistant conductor Annabelle Harris was reading a book. The book made reference to a drink called “Fart in the Ocean,” which was ironic as Ed’s gastrointestinal emissions earlier in the evening had been threatening to ruin their friendship.

Suddenly the siren call came…

“Conductor to the lounge car, conductor to the lounge car.”

Thinking that it might actually be something serious, the two of them jumped up and headed toward the rear of the train. As they entered the lounge car, the faint odor of cigarette smoke hung in the air.

“Two guesses what the problem is,” Ed muttered.

Ed was down the stairs into the lower level of the car first.

“What’s the problem Bill?” Ed asked the lounge car attendant.

Bill gestured as though taking a drag off a cigarette, and pointed to a late middle aged woman sitting at one of the tables.

“I told her three times, but she keeps right on lighting up in the bathroom.”

Ed rolled his eyes and strode up to the woman as Annabelle came down the stairs.

“Ma’am, this is a non smoking train.”

“Not even in the bathroom?”

“Come on. Bill told you three times already. If you light up again, you are getting off the train.”

“I didn’t do nothing wrong. It ain’t like I was smoking crack or something. And besides, I gots to smoke when I go doo-doo.”

Ed and Annabelle’s jaw simultaneously dropped as Bill looked up from his book incredulously. Ed and Annabelle just looked at each other for a moment, taken aback by this declaration. Annabelle was surprised, and not only because of the woman’s disseminating unneeded information concerning her bathroom activities. She didn’t know about Ed, but she had never heard an adult use the word doo-doo in that context before.

In the end, the fact that this dingbat was the caretaker for her 85 year old aunt was the only thing that kept her from getting chucked off the train at the next stop.

“You know,” Annabelle said as she and Ed headed back to the crew lounge, “They should have kept the smoking lounge and banned the booze. I never saw someone smoke one too many cigarettes and start raising hell.”

“Well,” Ed said, “That makes too much sense. They’ll never think of that.”

Chili And The Dog

Legendary throughout Onion County is Rosa Hallowell’s three bean chili. It has been a staple on the menu at Fred’s Bar-B-Q and Taxidermy for years. Equally well known, though usually unsaid, is the aftermath of the aforementioned cuisine.

Many a church sermon was ruined Sunday morning by the fallout from Fred’s famous fare from Saturday night. In fact there was so much of an uproar from area clergy that the county board passed a law banning the Saturday sale of Rosa’s potent mixture.

David Ledbetter and his wife Cheryl had decided to have an evening on the town last summer. The two of the had been married for twenty-four years after all, and needed to do something out of the ordinary every now and then. So when David got home from work, the two of them got dressed up (which in Onion County tends to mean jeans and a CLEAN T-shirt) and headed over to Fred’s.

“Oh no, David. You’re not going to order THAT again,” Cheryl said as David’s eyes focused on the chili on the menu.

“Oh, come on honey. You know I like it, and I don’t have it very often.”

“Yes, but you remember what happened last time.”

Well, David went ahead and had his chili. After dinner, the couple headed to Loda to catch a movie at the theater. A pronounced feeling of discomfort was beginning to overtake David as the movie ended.

“Better keep your window down,” David said as they got in the car to drive home.

“Oh, God,” Cheryl groaned.

It was a few hours later when David and Cheryl were ready to go to bed. Cheryl was already getting comfortable as David came out of the bathroom and got into bed. Moments later, a flying furry missile landed on David’s head.

“Dammit Bubba,” David muttered as the couple’s cocker spaniel burrowed his way under the covers and curled up around the couple’s feet.

It took only a few minutes for Cheryl to fall asleep and David was almost out himself, when a sudden rumble in his gut got his attention. For a few moments he tried to fight it off, but to no avail. He did his best to keep the noise down, but the low rumble struck him as similar to the sound described by survivors of the Titanic hitting the iceberg. For a few moments all was silent.

Suddenly, poor Bubba began to whimper and whine. Under the blankets he jumped to attention, and scampered toward the head of the bed in a frantic effort to escape. He burst out from beneath the covers, whimpering as he charged out of the room.

Cheryl snapped awake.

“Oh Jesus Christ, David.”

“Sorry honey. I’d better change. I’ll be right back.”


Copyright 2008 - Mary Rae McPherson

Birthday Bash

Ed Waller hit the big five-oh last year. He tried to argue that the day he turned fifty would be nothing more than just another day. His wife Sarah, however, would have none of it.

“Now dear, you only turn fifty once. Let’s make it a day to remember.”

Sarah suggested he take a trip off from work and they get a hotel room for the occasion. Ed, always game for playing hooky from a trip on the train, agreed. So on Wednesday night they headed to Loda and checked into a room at the Dewdrop Inn.

Sarah had made a birthday cake for Ed, and put it in the trunk of the car along with their overnight bag. She also brought 50 birthday candles to put on the cake. She had considered getting candles shaped like the numbers “5” and “0” or simply arranging several candles to spell out 50, but that seem just a bit too clichéd.

After checking in, Sarah and Ed went out for dinner at Heavenly Helpings. While they had a nice time, they noted the place had gone downhill since the new owners took over. After dinner, they headed back to the hotel. Sarah wanted it to be a night to remember.

It was.

Sarah waited for Ed to go into the bathroom to change. When he did, she brought the cake out and hurriedly placed all fifty candles atop the cake. Realizing that she would need a whole lot of matches to light all those candles, she instead brought a butane grill lighter; the sort that can be adjusted to send several inches of flame out.

Sarah waited to time it just right. After Ed had been in the bathroom for several minutes, she decided to light the candles so they would be waiting when he emerged. She turned the little knob on the lighter up all the way and clicked the button, only to find herself holding a miniature blowtorch.

It only took a few seconds to light the candles, which covered the entire surface of the cake. She almost set fire to the drapes and the table in the process with her little flame thrower of a lighter. Disaster averted, she sat down and waited for Ed to emerge.

And waited. And waited.

After a few moments, Sarah heard the sound of Ed singing coming from behind the bathroom door. Then she heard the water start running.

“Of all times to take a shower!” she muttered and went to blow the candles out.

Sarah huffed, and puffed, and blew on the candles as hard as she could. She nearly got half of them, and drew in another deep breath. As she did, she paused in amazement as fire spread back across the surface of the cake as the candles reignited. It seems that with fifty candles spread across the cake, the candles were just close enough together for one candle to reignite the next all the way across the cake.

This was not good.

Sarah drew in an even deeper breath and let the cake have it. This time wax from the candles blew all over the cake and the table. Maybe twenty-five candles went out this time, only to spring back to life as flames popped up across the cake like a wildfire marching through the forest.

Ripples of heat surged upward from the cake. Wax ran off the candles and pooled onto the surface of the icing, hardening into a thin blue crust. Sarah tried again with similar results. She tried again. Same result.

By now the candles had burned down to little stubs protruding from the icing of the cake. The icing was starting to run from the heat of the candles growing ever nearer. In desperation, Sarah tried one last time as the candles retreated down into the cake, which began smoking.

From the bathroom, the running water had stopped. After a few moments, the door began to open as Ed appeared.

“Honey? Is something burning?”

Ed stepped into the room, which was rapidly filling with smoke from the smoldering cake. At just that moment, the sprinkler system activated. Ed, Sarah, the cake and the entire room was instantly soaked.

Sarah stood there, drenched to the skin with water running down her face. She smiled at Ed.

“Happy birthday, dear,” she said as the sound of sirens began to be heard in the distance.

Sarah and Ed Waller have been banned from the Dewdrop Inn for life, but at least Ed’s fiftieth was one to remember.


Copyright 2008 - Mary Rae McPherson