Life Its Ownself Read Online Free PDF

hello.
    "Quasimodo, how you doin'? A little trouble up on the bell tower, huh?"
    It was the witty voice of my sympathetic wife.

TWO
    Somebody once described marriage to me as one year in Heaven and twenty years in the Light Heavyweight Division.
    It couldn't have been my Uncle Kenneth who said that. He stored up a backlog of ex-wives for sure, but he never stayed married long enough to know their bathroom habits.
    Not that my uncle was ever torn up when the ladies walked out on him, usually in a foaming rage over some domestic misunderstanding.
    Uncle Kenneth would just shake his head, light a Winston, and say, "There goes old Connie. God help the world if she'd been born twins."
    Having been raised by my uncle in Fort Worth, I was privileged to watch a steady stream of bimbos go in and out of our duplex apartment.
    Some of their names were easier to remember than others.
    Dorothy was the one who had hair the color of V-8 juice. Ina Fay ran up the department-store bills. Patsy had an epileptic brother we used to imitate. Teresa played the radio loud and jitterbugged around the living room in her shortie nightgown. Bobbi Lynn had trouble with fever blisters.
    All of Uncle Kenneth's wives knew how to cook butter beans. They had jobs. They either answered the phone for optical companies or licked envelopes stuffed with freight invoices.
    They looked like funeral wreaths when they dressed up to go somewhere. None of them drove air-conditioned cars.
    Connie was the one who could outcuss Uncle Kenneth.
    She was kind of attractive for a woman whose hair was always in a blonde beehive and whose skirts were too tight, but she wasn't too pretty when she was displeased with my uncle.
    If Uncle Kenneth would come home late from a hard day of betting football games at the pool hall, and if he happened to have a can of Budweiser in his hand, and if there was the normal amount of vomit on his tasseled loafers, Connie's lecture would have a little something extra in it.
    She would say:
    "Fuck you, Kenneth, and everything your lightweight ass stands for! You smell like four kinds of turds in a Goddamn fillin'-station toilet! What whore's ass did you crawl up and die in tonight? You think you're a slick cocksucker, but you ain't no slicker than two snakes fuckin' in a barrel of snot! Don't come near me, you limp-prick motherfucker, unless you want to wear that beer to the emergency room!"
    Uncle Kenneth learned not to step up the backtalk with Connie. He would just stroll quietly across the room and stretch out on the pink chenille spread that covered the day bed from Montgomery Ward and turn on TV to watch what he called the "ambulance news."
    Once he had responded to one of her tirades with "Connie, are you sayin' my poem don't rhyme?"
    That was the night she whapped him on the ear with the metal bar from a Eureka vacuum cleaner.
    I used to wonder why Uncle Kenneth kept getting married. It always turned out the same. One day I put the question to him at the Texas Recreation Parlor.
    "Aw, I don't know, Billy," he said, studying a tout sheet, trying to figure out why Purdue came 3V2 over Duke. "I think you have to blame it on Wilbur. You can't talk no sense to him."
    Wilbur was the name of my uncle's dick.

    My momma and daddy split up when I was six years old. As Uncle Kenneth liked to tell it, my dad, Steve, unfolded a Texaco road map one evening and laid it out on the kitchen table. He drew a vertical line down the middle of the United States. He then turned to Dalene—that was my momma's name—and said:
    "You take this side and I'll take this side right here."
    "Fine," Dalene said. "Are you sure half the country's enough room for you to chase after your little girls with the yellow curls and the merry eyes?"
    Steve said, "That's what I'll be looking for, fond as I am of your hair-curlers."
    "Butt Hole!" my momma shouted. "If you don't get what you deserve in this life, you can thank God for His kindness!"
    Steve said, "What I'll thank