April 23: Tucky

My uncle lives in a small town in Indiana just off of the Ohio River and within minutes of the border to Kentucky and Ohio. He's lived there his entire life where he raised cattle and farmed corn, tobacco and soybeans. He is one of the nicest and most intelligent human beings I have ever met and he will do anything for anyone. He will literally drop whatever he's doing to help someone else, but he also happens to be the biggest hillbilly hick that I have ever met in person. Larry the Cable Guy is nothing in comparison to my uncle. My uncle is the guy that Jeff Foxworthy is talking about with his "You might be a redneck if..." routine.

It wasn't until I was forced to hang out with him for a week with nothing to do in the dead of winter that I changed my mind about his redneck status. Tucky was a short and grotesquely thin man with greasy black hair and missing fingers. When he cackled his smokey, raspy laugh, his dark pockets of missing teeth peered out from his lips. His scratchy, deep-woods accented voice was, I'm sure, a result of years of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day.

The first time I met him, he drove up the gravel drive in an old, beat up blue sedan. He stepped out of the car with a half-empty can of beer in one hand and a burning cigarette clinging to his dried and cracked lips. The scent of smoke and alcohol overpowered his pungent body odor and overall lack of hygiene as he entered the small shed where my uncle, his friends, and I sat trying to stay warm.

Apparently everything he owned was stuffed into his car. He had just burned down his apartment (a scheme that my uncle was convinced he used to get insurance money) and he was forced to live out of his vehicle until he could find another place to call his own and burn down. From the passenger side of the car, he pulled out an antique kerosene lamp that he had just purchased for ten dollars. He was positive, however, that it was worth much more which is why he felt it necessary to show it off to my uncle and his friends.

After convincing my uncle to buy it for twenty dollars (which my uncle later sold for fifty) the conversation somehow moved to the multiple girls that Tucky had been with. (Can you tell, yet, that my uncle and his friends considered Tucky the town idiot and kept him around for nothing more than a good laugh?) Being in the presence of such a repulsive individual, one can only imagine how disgusting his sexual achievements must have been which is precisely why we encouraged him to give us stomach-turning details of each one.

Three cans of beer and two cigarettes later, we were being entertained with stories of what his girls liked and how they liked it. Before I knew it, Tucky was pulling a paper grocery sack from the trunk of his car and bringing its mystery contents into the shed. Dildos of varying size and color, a string of anal beads, a clear tube with an accompanying pump, and other random toys and instruments fell out of the bag when it was overturned by the eight-fingered man. Tucky then carefully lined up the dildos by height as my uncle, his friends, and I laughed uncontrollably. The line was finished with the biggest, blackest rubber dick I had ever seen. The thing was the size of the eucalyptus logs we had been feeding into the shed's furnace!

Like any good comedian, Tucky didn't let our laughter stop before moving on to his prized piece: the clear plastic tube; also known as the penis pump. He then began to explain how it worked and if we had let him, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have dropped his pants on the shed floor and given us a visual lesson.

My uncle is a hillbilly hick, but he's got nothin' on a raspy voiced, greasy haired, yellow toothed town idiot with missing fingers and a sack full of fun. My week in Indiana was long, cold, and boring, but Tucky's visit somehow made the trip worth it. I've tried telling the story to friends and family. I'm trying again with this post, but I don't think I could ever do genuine justice to the man with the penis pump.