Uncle Skillet spray-painted the plumes on pampas grass growing along the road an iridescent pink color. When Dad turned into Skillet’s driveway one spring day, I spotted him lounging in a rocking chair on the front porch of his trailer house. Dressed in coveralls, a shirt with cut-off sleeves, and a well-worn cap, he looked like Larry the Cable Guy. Skillet delighted in watching cars slow down to gawk at the vibrant blooms. Occasionally, a car stopped, backed up, and entered the driveway, its passengers on a quest for seeds. Skillet directed them to the paint section of the local hardware store.
Five of us kids, ranging in age from three to thirteen, were packed into Dad’s old Ford clunker. It was the pre-seatbelt era, and we hung out of windows and fought over nirvana—the shelf space along the backseat window. As a ten-year-old boy, third in rank, I was generally lost in the shuffle of siblings. Dennis, Daisy, and I were routinely bullied by older brother Dwayne. I called him Doowayne as a measure of disrespect because he had a habit of twisting my arm behind my back until I said whatever word he demanded—words like fart and wingding. Three-year-old Drew was a general nuisance to us older boys. We ran him off by telling him, “Mom is calling you.”
We kids were fascinated by Uncle Skillet, who had a knack for entertaining children. Bending rules was his game. Skillet’s antics placed Aunt Weezie in a frequent state of intervention, like when he displayed Christmas decorations of reindeer fornicating in the front yard. Her occasional verbal lashings had little effect on Skillet’s behavior. There wasn’t much he took seriously, and messing with Weezie was his favorite pastime. He claimed to have married her because she had freckles on her butt and she was purdy. I knew from Weezie’s response to that remark—a fierce glare—that Skillet had crossed a line, although I wasn’t sure what that line was.
To Weezie’s chagrin, Skillet used swear words in ranting, rhythmic strings of dialogue. He defended this verbal dexterity by labeling such words sentence enhancers. He rationalized, “Wawl, if yous sits on a cat or cuts off a leg with a chainsaw, swearing is da only way ter deal wif dat.” He moderated his swearing around children by using nonsensical words like “Oh shirt,” “Dame it,” “Son of a Witch,” or a whole string of babble. I recognized them as bad words, though, from the tone and the circumstances under which they were uttered.
In spite of surface tension in their relationship, Skillet fancied his woman. All he ever wanted was her respect, and he was on the cusp of obtaining it most of his life. He stole her years ago from a well-off boyfriend. Weezie had a taste for the novel, so Skillet’s playful quirkiness and disarming humor won out over the other fellow. Any disapproval she exhibited about Skillet’s antics belied a deep affection. She often said, “Skillet’s bad qualities are a gift.”
Although Mom disapproved of Skillet’s not-so-fine qualities, she harbored considerable affection for him. Her concern was his ability to influence her husband. She complained to Dad, “Skillet could pee on your leg and convince you it’s raining.” She called Skillet “batshit crazy” when he fried up calf testicles and fed them to her misrepresented as something similar to Chicken McNuggets. On another occasion, she called him a bullshit aficionado, to which he responded, “Thank ya, ma’am.”
Uncle Skillet was different from Dad, even though they were brothers. Skillet was an eccentric, zany fellow who saw the novelty in everything while Dad was staid and predictable. They complemented each other, though. Skillet’s enthusiastic quirkiness and marginal good judgment were balanced by Dad’s common sense. As the voice of reason, Dad reined Skillet in when antics threatened to backfire and rescued him when he stepped in trouble. We kids used to say, “Uncle Skillet is c-a-a-r-a-z-y,” Many who knew him would support that position. He wasn’t dumb in the IQ sense of the word. He was just different. I suspect his greatest fear was being ordinary.
Weezie conformed to local customs. Skillet did not. It wasn't in his character to aspire to conquer the hurdle of respectability, so he did things he shouldn’t. He stole things—minor things. He did so as a prank as opposed to any motivation to acquire. In his mind, sneaking away with something was an adrenaline-fueled hoax. He blamed his behavior on “dain bramage” from a plumbing incident. Most people in his small community knew him and didn’t take his antics seriously. Instead, they considered him “a character” and relished sharing tales of his exploits.
Skillet was candid about his obsessions. If asked what kind of Christmas tree he had, he answered, “stolen”—an honest response. He stole balloons from car lots for Weezie’s birthdays and picked flowers from neighbors’ yards for anniversaries. A neighbor lady told Weezie about discovering Skillet tromping around in her flowerbed. When she yelled at him, he responded, “I ain’t stealin’ no chickens” and continued picking peonies. Weezie chastised him about this transgression. He responded, “I’s gots through life wiffn out bein’ arrested. So there’s that.”
Aunt Weezie’s meticulous nature contrasted sharply with Skillet’s messy, helter-skelter disposition. An avid tinkerer, his compulsion to collect things and reinvent them caused the world outside their trailer to emerge as the antithesis of the orderly interior. He called the city dump The Mall, and junk accumulated in sheds. Metal objects dotted the landscape causing the property to resemble the debris field of an airplane crash.
Weezie protected her territory. “Skillet, you cannot store car parts in the bathtub.” Skillet occasionally tested her resolve by introducing one of his treasures into the trailer. He paid a severe price for such transgressions. Weezie retaliated by putting makeup in his tool box.
Not knowing what it was, Skillet brought a basketball scoreboard buzzer home from The Mall and sat it on the kitchen table. A plain metal black box with a plug-in cord protruding from the back, it had sparked his curiosity. Fascinated, we kids hovered around the table, nudging each other for position. Weezie stood by, her hands on her hips. When Skillet plugged the device in, a horrific noise blared forth. Everyone jumped. Kitchen chairs flew over, sister Daisy cried, Dennis fell on his butt, Drew wet his pants, and Weezie launched into a conniption fit extraordinaire. Skillet calmly gave his interpretation of the device. “That’s some noisy doohickey.”
Uncle Skillet was known for such zingers—short, pithy musings that summed up situations perfectly. Following any kind of epic failure, of which there were many in his world, he described the situation with, “Well, that was weird.”
He hit a deer and loaded it into the car to take home and butcher. Turns out the deer was not dead. Skillet scrambled to exit the vehicle as flailing hooves broke windows and tore up upholstery. Finally, the deer escaped. Skillet summed up the deer’s position. “He wanted out.”
Skillet was a mechanic. When he went to a car junkyard for parts, he often bought the entire car. Junk vehicles peppered the landscape around the trailer, to Aunt Weezie’s dismay. When she insisted he stop the madness, Skillet hid cars behind a grove of trees. The leaves fell off in the fall, and Weezie had a conniption fit. His collection provided the equivalent of an auto parts store. When a car he or Weezie drove failed, he moved on to whichever junker was easiest to fix. That vehicle became their mode of transportation until the next mechanical failure. None of the tires on his cars matched, upholstery was optional, and the paint color of doors, hoods, and trunk lids often contrasted with the rest of the body.
Skillet named his cars. Delbert, an old Ford, was rigged to be steered by a tool attached to the steering column. He could remove the steering wheel, hand it to a passenger, and deliver a zinger, “I’m tired of driving.” An old Plymouth, Flow, was rigged to dispense Jack Daniels through a dashboard spout.
One old car was gutted except for the front seat. We kids loved crawling into the trunk space, which Skillet named The Vaginia (as in almost vagina). This caused both Mom and Weezie to have an impassioned fit. Skillet came as close to an apology as I’d ever heard over that. He explained his faux pas, “I’s has drain bamage." The trunk was re-named Anus, which drew a similar response. Finally, he named it Pluto-Uto-Noono, a moniker that met the women’s approval and resinated so well with us kids that we gave the name to one of our farm cats.
A bully on the road, Skillet was merciless at intersections. Everyone had a nicer car than he did, so he always had the right of way. Drivers braked and glared. After close calls, Skillet announced to unnerved passengers, “I’ve got a whole passel of cars.” He celebrated close calls by singing “King of the Road.”
Kids loved Skillet. A neighbor boy had a habit of ringing the doorbell and asking Weezie if Skillet could come out and play. The kid had a limp because his dad ran over him in the driveway when he was a toddler. With extreme irreverence, Skillet named him Speedbump, which amazingly caught on with the kid’s family and probably scarred him for life.
“Follow me, kids,” Skillet would say. “Let’s turn the toolshed into the Cook County Jail.” He convinced Drew that a skunk roaming the property was a cat named Eeeew. He climbed into our treehouse and pulled the ladder up, leaving us pacing below. He demanded a password. Vaginia and Anus were unsuccessful. Fart worked, and we were admitted, except for Drew whose mom was calling him.
Speedbump didn’t believe it when Skillet told the boy he had a twin brother named Bucket. “The only way folks can tells us apart,” Skillet said, “is that I’s wears my cap frontwards and Bucket wears his backwards.” The kid was not convinced, so Skillet suggested Speedbump check out Bucket, who was working on the other side of the barn. The boy headed off to do so. Skillet dropped his shovel, turned his hat around, grabbed a pitchfork, and ran to the other side of the barn. Soon thereafter, he darted back, dropped the pitchfork, turned his hat frontward and picked up the shovel just as Speedbump rounded the building. I decided Uncle Skillet was some sort of god.
When our family visited Uncle Skillet and Aunt Weezie that early spring afternoon, we were allowed to run amuck, as usual. We poured out of Dad’s Ford that day and scattered like a covey of quail. Obsessed with cleanliness, Weezie herded us one-by-one into the bathroom where she scrubbed away crusty farm dirt. We exited covered with red blotches and smelling of Jergen’s Lotion. Mom tolerated Weezie’s fastidiousness. It wasn’t that Mom didn’t want her children clean. She did, but she was an overwhelmed farm woman with chores and five kids. And she was pregnant again.
While Mom and Aunt Weezie puttered in the kitchen, I hung around long enough to steal a cookie fresh out of the oven. I overheard Mom tell Weezie she got pregnant helping Dad quit smoking. I didn’t know how that worked, but Dad did stop smoking.
Skillet showed Dad his latest invention in the workshop before leading him to the backyard. We kids tagged along, bouncing off each other like pinballs, except for Drew, whose mother was calling him. There we discovered a new deck constructed of wooden pallets stolen from the alleys in town. On the deck sat a charcoal cooker made from a converted barrel (a dump find). A brisket mounted on a rotisserie rod (a dump find) attached to an old Black and Decker drill (a dump find) rotated at a remarkable speed over charcoals. Dad’s jaw dropped when he saw the apparatus.
Meat juice flew everywhere, splashing against the trailer and coating a mutt named Rufus (a dump find), who made a valiant effort to catch liquid morsels midair. Barnyard cats hovered on the fringes of the action, looking confused but anticipatory.
“That meat is going to be dry,” Skillet said.
“You think?” Dad responded.
When flames began shooting out of the barrel from grease splattered onto charcoals, Uncle Skillet attempted to close the lid to smother the flames. This caused the drill to break loose from its moorings and vibrate against the metal barrel, creating a thunderous noise. Weezie and Mom rushed from the kitchen just as the drill escaped the barrel, tumbled to the ground, and flopped around like a chicken with its head cut off. We children froze in a state of shock and awe as our supper thrashed around in dirt and grass. Cats slunk backwards as Rufus went nuts, barking as though he’d treed a coon. The women’s admonitions complicated the scenario but had little influence on Skillet, who relished the slapstick nature of the situation.
Rufus managed to sporadically latch onto the brisket, but the drill put up a good fight. For a minute, it appeared as though the drill and brisket team would win. Skillet danced a jig while dodging the ramped-up canine and pursuing the flailing drill. After several attempts, he landed the contraption and turned it off. He removed the dirt and grass-encrusted meat from the rotisserie rod and tossed it to Rufus, who eyed encroaching cats menacingly as he gnawed away. Skillet announced, “It woulda been a lots better fight if’n there was mud.” Weezie entered the trailer, slamming the screen door—hard.
As Uncle Skillet drove to town to buy roasted chicken for supper, we kids and Rufus tagged along. Riding in Uncle Skillet’s car was often an adventure. Anytime we piled into one of his vehicles, he announced, “We’re off to St. Louis.” I harbored grand illusions of someday actually going to St. Louis, wherever that was.
As Skillet sang his favorite song, Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, Stinkin’ to High Heaven, we passed a neighbor’s house. Their dog, Dixie, dashed out to chase the car. Uncle Skillet slammed on the brakes, bringing it to a skidding stop, throwing a wide-eyed Drew out of the back window and onto the floor of the back seat. Dixie, having had this experience before, followed her customary protocol. She circled the car, jumping up again and again as though on a trampoline, peering into windows. This provoked hilarious laughter from us kids and drove Rufus into a frenzy.
Eventually, Dixie gave up and slunk away, looking back occasionally, a scowl on her face—at least as close to one as a dog can get. She plunked down on her belly, panting profusely. Skillet said, “Watch this.” He peeled out, and Dixie resumed the chase. Little faces peered out of the back window as she galloped desperately through the dust, her long black coat rippling in the wind as she faded into the distance. On the ride home, my siblings and I occupied ourselves with keeping Rufus out of the roasted chicken. During supper, Uncle Skillet boasted that the chicken didn’t suck.
He asked Doowayne to help pull up marijuana weeds growing wild along the south fence line. With the excitement of a biology freak who found a tarantula in the bathtub, Doowayne soon had the weeds stacked in a pile in the yard. It was then that Skillet explained, “Them wild weeds ain’t got no buds, boy.” Later that evening, as Mom checked a disappointed Doowayne for ticks, he said, “I like Uncle Skillet anyway. I like Aunt Weezie, too. She has freckles on her butt.”
One night Dad got an urgent call from Weezie. She wouldn’t say what was wrong but pleaded, “Come quick.” We rushed over to discover Uncle Skillet stuck upside down in the belly of a steel commercial furnace in the front yard. The old, rusty apparatus resembled a huge upside-down funnel, narrowing to a peak at the top for a chimney hookup. Legs protruding from the top were all we could see of Skillet. Swear words echoed from inside. It sounded as though his head was in a bucket.
Skillet had acquired the old furnace from the dump and used it to keep Rufus from getting at orphaned baby pheasants he was raising. Weezie explained, “He came home drunk, removed the screen from the top to feed the pheasants, and fell in headfirst.” His stomach stopped his descent. Skillet could have died if she hadn’t looked out the window and spotted his flailing legs.
As the fervor of Skillet’s rant faded, Dad’s adrenalin kicked in. He located a tire jack to elevate one side of the funnel. This provided enough leverage for him and Doowayne to tip the monster over.
They still couldn’t extricate Skillet, so Weezie put a foot on each side of the furnace opening and pulled hard. Soon Skillet popped out. She said, “I feel like I just birthed a baby when I didn’t even know I was pregnant.” Skillet sat on the ground—red faced and legs splayed out in front of him—looking dumbfounded. When he rallied enough to speak, he said, “I gots drunk, and den dis happened.”
Soon a confined Rufus barked and banged against the toolshed door as we kids caged pheasant chicks in a cardboard box and carried it into Weezie’s kitchen. She was pouring coffee down a plastered Skillet—who should have been contrite, but was not. She glared at him for a moment before launching into a ranting, raving conniption fit. Suddenly, her voice quivered. Tears streamed down her face. Skillet got up and hugged her. It’s the only time I ever saw them hug. Dad said, “Let’s go.”
I was fifteen when Uncle Skillet got sick. He made the mistake of saying he wanted to die. Weezie, a large, well-endowed woman, threatened to throw herself on him and smother him. Hearty laughter was out of his grasp, but he managed a grin, “I’ll look forward to that,” he said. Skillet died soon thereafter. We all sang “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” at his funeral.
Dad and we kids spent hours loading stuff from the debris field onto trucks to be hauled off. The place sold quickly to some man who admired the pallet patio. Aunt Weezie moved into an apartment in town. We visited her there often.
Much older now, I’m married with kids. I often promise them a trip to St. Louis when they get into the car. We’ve had several generations of cats named Pluto-Uto-Noono. I planted pampas grass on my property this year and spray-painted the plumes iridescent pink, which caused quite a stir in the neighborhood. I would have taken some to Weezie, but I worried they would make her sad.
Dad created a decked-out street rod from one of Skillet’s old cars. He and Mom take it to car shows. He named it Zinger after rejecting my suggestion that he name it Anus. Drew drove his girlfriend to the prom in it. When we “kids” ride in it, we sing “King of the Road.”
I stop in occasionally at the apartment for a Weezie fix. I help her with odd jobs and a jigsaw puzzle, being careful not to find too many pieces and steal her thunder. She hides a puzzle piece to assure she gets to put in the last one and declare, “I won,” just like Skillet used to do, except she doesn’t jump up and run around the table.
No longer under the shadow of Skillet’s big personality, Weezie has blossomed. In a sense, she has taken over for him. Her chitchat is flush with zingers and robust memories. On my last visit, she asked, “Remember when Skillet bought me a huge teddybear to carry around at the fair? When someone asked where he won it, he said, ‘At Sears.’”
I laughed. “Remember when Skillet and we kids ran around in a hail storm with buckets on our heads? It’s a wonder we didn’t get struck by lightning.”
Weezie sat thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “Skillet never got arrested, but he sure was an ornery old SOB.”
“Weezie, you swore!”
“I just used a sentence enhancer is all.” A pensive look followed.
We sat silently for a moment. My throat tightened as I fought back tears.
She asked, “Can you bring me a few of those plumes from that pampas grass you planted on your place?”
My throat clamped up even tighter. I couldn’t swallow. Tears filled my eyes. “They’re pink.”
Weezie’s face lit up. “Oh, I must have some.” Another pause, and then she said, “Skillet’s bad qualities were a gift.”
“Yeah. A gift.”
