Western Book Roundup

Funny Lines from 2010 Books

By Jenny Shank, 12-29-10

I like the funny ones best.  That statement applies to everything, really—people, bears, hats—but especially books.  Throughout the year, I try to make note of the funniest lines and passages I come across in my reading.  Sometimes this proves problematic, as with Brady Udall’s funny-all-the-way through book, The Lonely Polygamist.  When I was typing out my selections from that one, my husband asked, “Why are you retyping that entire novel?” So here’s my second annual list of funny passages from the western books I read this year.  This one goes out to everyone who proudly sports a blue smear of a tattoo that once read “Charlene.”

• From Kevin Canty’s Everything

“She came inside as ever with her basket and jar and several other bags and bundles.  She moved though life in the middle of her own rummage sale, surrounded by rummage.  Some of it was knitting, some of it was food.”

“RL used to love the hippie girls—yes, he did—before they all turned thirty and became strict and sour.”

“She was good for her age but it was not a good age.”

“The girls were scattered from here to San Diego, and the two boys among the grandkids were soft little suburban kids.  Dorris loved them as much as any of the rest, but he couldn’t’ help wishing they were different, wishing they were interested.  He took them out killing gophers a few years back, when they were nine and ten, took them to a hayfield on the old Lindbergh place that was nothing but gopher holes from one end to the other and gave them each a .22 rifle and a box of shells and both of them quit before that first box ran out.  A kid who didn’t like killing gophers.  Dorris didn’t even want to understand.”

“Even the tattoos on the punk girls look expensive, sharp and fresh.  As opposed to Montana barfly tattoos, the blue smear that once said Charlene.”

• From Sam Shepard’s Day Out of Days

Here are some passages from the hilarious story “Costello,” which begins, “I made the great mistake of returning to my hometown after not being anywhere near the place for over forty-five years.” The narrator goes to sit in an old haunt, a donut shop, and watches the clientele.  But then when he’s studying a gangsterish character holding a copy of Racing Form, he realizes he’s been caught.

“I prefer not to be stared at when I’m furtively staring at others.”

The narrator ponders the gangsterish character: “This guy could be anybody, I thought.  What if he’s part of some cartel.  Some ring of evil.  You never know.  Out here on the edge of nowhere.  This is exactly the kind of territory they like to operate in.  Semirural.  All kinds of agricultural pesticies available.  Fertilizer.  Methamphetamine.  Bombs.”

“‘Mind if I sit down?’ he said, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.  He crouched right across the Formica able from me on the edge of the seat, as though any second he might make a lunge for my throat.  He folded his hands neatly in front of him, stitching his thick fingers together.  I could feel his eyes boring into me but I couldn’t look him in the face.  I kept all my focus on his hands, hoping this whole encounter would pass as quickly as it had started.  I’d never seen such a collection of rings like that on a grown male.  Every finger glimmered.  Even the thumb on his left hand was entwined by a silver serpent with tiny ruby eyes.  This thumb kept rubbing slowly over the knuckle of the opposing one in a smooth hypnotic rhythm as though preparing for a strike.”

In “Cracker Barrel Men’s Room (Highway 90 West),” the narrator tells the story of the poor soul who was trapped in a Cracker Barrel Men’s Room overnight, forced to listen to Shania Twain songs on an endless loop.

After the night of torture, Shania herself appears to him, a vision “towering before him in her spectacular body, her spectacular red hair, her spectacular lips, her spectacular tits.  She was singing her head off.  She was singing like there was no tomorrow.  She didn’t seem to notice the man on the floor, bleeding to death.”

• From The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

“Outside, Ervil LeBaron was barking out scriptural condemnations at an astonishing rate, calling the folks watching from the windows a perverse and stiff-necked people, going on at length about abominations and whoredoms and bilious cankers on the holy church of God.”

“As far as Rusty was concerned, instant pudding and graham crackers with Aunt Trish was as good as it could possibly get, better than cherry popsicles on a yacht with Wonder Woman.”

“Last Saturday night had been Rose’s turn to cook.  This time, she had decided to try a dish that had become fashionable among the women of the church: meat loaf with Lipton onion soup mix.  Rose, who did not have any of the Lipton mix and figured soup was soup was soup, mixed several cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle into the ground beef.  The result looked and tasted like a mass of earthworms encased in a brick of steaming industrial sludge.”

“They had all moved into Big House together for a few weeks with the idea that a mass consolidation would make everything easier, but with all the wives in either the last stages of pregnancy or the aftermath of a difficult birth, Golden, with the reluctant assistance of a couple of the older girls, was left to be nanny, cook, maid and disciplinarian.  Instantly the place fell apart.  Children ran wild, scavenging whatever food they could find and splitting up into guerrilla factions that carried out raids on each other, finally sectioning off and declaring different parts of the house their own sovereign territories.  The Three Stooges, it turned out, were all cranky, colicky, insomniac, or some perfectly evil combination of the above, and the never-ending late-night shriek-a-thon was enough to break the most hardened prisoner of war.”

“Someone, usually Apostle Lambson, would bring up the fact that their lifestyle was, technically, illegal, and to go out proselytizing might induce the authorities, as they had in the past, to swoop in, throw the men in jail and leave the women and children at the mercy of Social Services.  Apostle Jensen would inquire agreeably if this wasn’t fear and doubt talking, and would Jesus have brought His truth to the world if He had given in to fear and doubt?  Apostle Lambson would remind Nels that for all the wonderful things Jesus had accomplished, He did, let’s all remember, wind up getting Himself into some fairly serious trouble.”

“Rusty regretted the cherry bomb, even though it made the most incredible sound ever, you should have heard it—Ka Wong!!!  He did it because his scientific mind had always been intrigued with this question: What would a cherry bomb sound like if it blew up inside a dryer?”

• From Aryn Kyle’s Boys and Girls Like You and Me

From the story “Economics,” the reflections of a college girl:

“In the evenings, I sat on the balcony and smoked cigarettes, watching people come and go on the sidewalk below, looking for someone I could imagine myself falling in love with.  The boys were all narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, wearing baseball hats and T-shirts advertising sports teams and brands of beer…Sometimes I tried to picture myself kissing one of these boys or lying naked with one of them in bed, and then I would picture myself committing suicide.

Am I exaggerating?

I’m mostly exaggerating.”

• From Ivan Doig’s Work Song

“I do not normally partake,” Morris, the main character, tells an Irish miner who is pouring him a glass of whiskey at a wake.

“Nobody else does it normal at a wake either,” the miner replies.

• The Wilding by Benjamin Percy

Paul, Percy writes, “is not the sort of father who goes to church and plays golf and whistles Christmas songs year-round. He is the kind of father who enjoys saying things like, ’Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

• From Melanie Sumner’s The Ghost of Milagro Creek

Melanie Sumner tells her story from a number of perspectives.  One of the most engaging voices is that of Layton Scroggins, a sweat-lodge leader and Ignacia’s neighbor, who notes, “It takes some people a week to build a lodge, but a bipolar man can do it in a day if he leaves his pills in the bottle and catches himself on the upswing.” He tells the story of a particular sweat lodge he conducted in which Rocky, Ignacia, Mister and Tomás participated, as well as “a woman from Santa Fe who called herself Rising Dawn.” Scroggins remarks, “She looked somewhat older to me, more like Early Afternoon.” Ignacia wore a traditional flannel nightgown, while Rising Dawn wore a bikini.

“‘In the Rainbow Tradition,’ said Rise and Shine, ‘We do the sweat sky clad.’

‘Naked?’

‘Nude.’ She looked over Ignacia’s beat-up old nightgown like maybe moths would fly out of it, and then she put on a sharp little smile that went like a claw into my own heart.

‘I’m Apache,’ said Ignacia.  ‘And we do it decent.’

‘Is that right,’ she said.

I knew then that it was going to be one hot sweat.”

• From Thomas McGuane‘s Driving on the Rim

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun.”

“I looked away as I always did when women’s purses were opened.  I always felt they contained things it would be improper to see.  The contents were so baffling as to be sometimes downright scary, as was the witchlike way their owners found things in the chaos.”

“They both beamed at me with the intense curiosity which we save for people we suspect might not be stable.”

“I once read in an Icelandic book, ‘The world has never taken the tears of a plump woman seriously, and a fat martyr has always been considered contrary to the laws of reason.’”

“Dale ostentatiously picked the pineapple off his side of the pie, and then separated a wedge to eat, indenting it skillfully in the middle with his forefinger so that the mozzarella wouldn’t run off.  Dale had good pizza technique and I was not above copying it as we fell to.”

The town doctor turned house painter suits up for a painting job:

“…still in my rumpled white coveralls, I walked to the cemetery, pruning shears in my pocket and wearing a paper hat I had picked up at the paint store from a bin of promotional paper hats.  I chose one with a Rottweiler on the front (I liked dogs) without realizing that it advertised a condom popular with the hip-hop culture and urged the viewer, ‘Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’’ on one side and ‘Get yo freak on’ on the other.  In fact, I was oblivious until I noticed the excitement it created among young people along my way to the cemetery.  I went on wearing it out of defiance despite the great urge to throw it away.  I wished I had picked the ‘Do yo thang’ hat I’d first spotted, but it lacked the dog picture.”

Happy New Year, everyone.  Go ahead—get yo freak on or do yo thang, whichever you prefer.

• Last year’s funny lines.

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