Mama Towed Me There'd Be Days Like This....

Saturday was big, big fun and big, big fucked up.

THE BIG, BIG FUN PART ::

Getting in touch with my flea-bitten, trailer-park roots

If you check back a couple posts ago, you'll see Malkovich's breakdown of our entry into the wacky world of Stinker's Truck Stop. This bar is the 1933 Group and Bobby Green's new creative piece in Silverlake. I call it a creative piece because just like Saints & Sinners, Bigfoot Lodge and The Little Cave, everything these guys do is pretty much like a work of art....there's a theme. There's gonna be some costume wearin', some hot babes fire blowin', some skunk asses fog pumpin', bartenders CB screamin', some bats a'flyin', fireplaces in log cabins a'burnin' or SOMETHING you won't see at any other bar in Cali....it don't stop with these guys.

So of course the theme for Stinker's Truck Stop is....a truck stop. If the bartenders in overalls or the movie posters of Smokey & The Bandit don't give away the theme there are a couple things that might help you get a clue. The first is the big life sized glossy embossed picture of Burt Reynolds in full cowboy regalia on the door of the men's room. The seconds is his equally startling counterpart, Daisy Duke, on the ladies room door. By the way, I love Daisy Duke, and I always have. I had a Dukes of Hazard action figure set, with the General Lee included. I used to make my Daisy Duke check the engine ALL the time homie. I go way back with this shit. Which leads me to my next point...

Cooper called me a few days back to tell me the big cheeses were thinking about adding me on to the Stinker's saturday with Malky, so they had to try me out for a night. I played it cool, but I was a little shocked. I was thinkin' to myself, "Try me out? They don't think big Sum has what it takes to rock a truck stop?"

But then I had to chill and look at it from where they're standin'. For all they know, I'm the Black dude who moved here from Brooklyn with the hip-hop aura that just happens to be pretty handy with wielding the Rock 'n Roll sword. But they aren't thinkin' that I could naturally rock a Truck Stop. Why would they? That doesn't make ANY sense. But bein' me aint never made too much sense.

I'm from a small town in North Carolina. At age six I lived in a rural trailer park just outside of Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base, the world's largest military base and home of the 82nd Airborne (the Navy Seals of the Air Force). In layman's terms, GRAND CENTRAL REDNECK STATION. I lived in the Whitest of trailer parks and went to school in the Blackest of hoods, right around the time crack smoke started pouring out of those little abandoned houses we used to play in after school. Our trailer looked kinda similar to this, except it was brown. Oh, and there were 10,000 fleas inside because our crazy soldier roomate, Russell, refused to clean his disgusting cat:

This is back in the days when I would eat a pot pie for dinner (my only meal for the day), hop on my bike and look for other brown kids in the vicinity...but there were none. So my neighborhood friends were little White kids with names like "Austin", "Jud" or "Delilah" with no shoes who were smoking cigarrettes before they were 11.... what some of you uppity folks might call "White Trash" or "Trailer Trash", but those are words I don't really use because those folks were cool to me when they didn't have to be. So I can't really diss em. Hell, we were all poor.

I'd visit Austin and Delilah and play Connect Four while their parents got beer drunk, watched NWA wrestling and played the crunchiest of bluegrass, red-blooded country music, and classic rock. I'd hear it outta pickup trucks all day, my baseball coaches with the glorious mullets would blast it during practice. When I got older, my pale-skinned buddies would chew dip and play that shit to wind down after track practice.

My cousin Charles from Montgomery is a trucker. He'd come to family reunions, get blasted on cheap whisky and bathtub moonshine, and tell wild stories and crazy jokes he picked up on the road. If you've never known a trucker, the greatest thing about em is all the folktales and legends they tell, especially about Appalachia and West Virginny when you wind up through the mountains. I've taken those drives many a time and it's some spooky shit goin' on up in those mountains man. Imagine driving a semi on a road two-inches wide on the edge of a mountain in pitch black night. Now imagine that mountain was where countless Natives and African slaves got massacred and dumped, drunk and broken-hearted truckers drove off to their death and all kinda ancient American mojo sleeps. The nicknames for roads like "Tombstone Mile" or cities like L.A. (they call it "Shaky"...go figure) come with tall tales a mile high, and I used to hear 'em growin up...at actual truck stops that sold boiled peanuts and tin spitoons, with actual real live truckers inside.

When I was in college, my car broke down on I-85 between Georgia and North Carolina on a ride back to school...I had to hitch a ride with a trucker 100 miles back to Charlotte in hurricane weather and the shit that came out of his mouth was golden. I don't remember too much about it; that was over a decade ago, but the way they talk to each other over the radios had me dyin'. Kind people, those truckers...

So thank you Stinkers, for allowing me to get back in touch with that quaint, country, Southern nougat at the center of my city-boy exterior. That was BIG FUN. But then came...

THE BIG FUCKED UP PART ::

Getting my car towed so some shmoe could run HALF a marathon

After pounds, hugs and hip-hop sets

Malky and I left the bar

To grab us some grub and head back to Palms

But these bitches done TOWED my car!!!!

SHIT! Aint that a bitch....Silverlake, why so unkind?

Apparently, the City of Angels HALF Marathon was scheduled to go down on Sunday morning. So slick ass City of L.A. put up some signs AFTER I parked that said

"NO PARKING FROM 1.AM-10AM"

Luckily, the kind and lovely Cooper and her beau, Greg, were gracious enough to take us to the pound so I could retrieve my chariot. The scene when we got there was fucked up for two reasons:

1) These mufuckas had the nerve to have a pint-sized German Shepard on a leash barking like MAD at anybody that set foot near the building. And when I say barking, I mean like....they stuffed a little ball of safety pins up the dog's booty and made it eat hot sauce RIGHT before we got there. Total insult to injury, man.

2) There was a line of people there who we saw earlier chillin' AT THE DAMN BAR. So you know we got hoodwinked. These are people who go to the bar every weekend, and they're from the neighborhood, so they KNOW the local parking rules. And they STILL got towed. But you gotta hand it to Silverlake kids, if they're doin it, they're gonna look hip doin it...even if it's pickin' up a towed car.

The girl at the counter is wearing some kind of thrift shop gun holster, the tall modelesque blonde walked straight out of a MGMT video, the chick in short sleeves has a furry collar, and the chick with no sleeves looked like Aeon Flux if Aeon Flux was a dude. Depending on how you look at it, these fools kinda manage to make it look like they're waiting for drinks at a bar. A bar named "Butch's Tow Truck Stop".