HUnky Dunk
by
Bill Schmalfeldt
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Bill Schmalfeldt on Smashwords
Hunky Dunk
Copyright © 2010 by Bill Schmalfeldt
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of my older brother Jack. He knew which parts of this story are true… and which are not.
1.
I Should Write a Book
Pap always said I should try not to think so hard. “Bad things always happen when you think too hard,” he used to say. And he was right. I guess that’s why I was against the idea of writing this book at first. Not that I’ve never actually written a book before, and you could count the number I’ve read on one hand. Even if you have some fingers missing.
Anyway, Jake says I should write a book. Why? Who knows? Books are something I’ve had very little use for in my personal life. I’ve never really been much of a literary sort. Now that’s not to say I’m an uneducated man. I’ve been all the way through high school. I spent nearly a month in the Navy. I’ve been pretty near all the way around the world. I’ve seen a few movies. I know a thing or two about the universe, mostly from what I’ve picked up by watching TV. So it’s not that I have anything against books, mind you. To me, reading just seems like a waste of time.
For one thing, it takes practically forever. You have to sit there in a quiet room and look at all these words on a page and try to figure out what each word means, which usually isn’t that much of a problem in itself unless you come across a really long word or something. Then you have to get up and drag out a dictionary if you want to find out what the word means, and that’s just too much of a hassle. Then you have to string all these words together in your mind and try to keep track of the characters and the story and somehow resist the temptation to turn to the last page to see how the whole thing works out, which it usually does in a way that makes you feel like you just wasted time and effort on a book your dog could have written just as well if not better.
Give me TV every time! It’s just so much easier to watch what’s happening and to let the characters on the show speak for themselves. I can usually follow along and figure out what’s going on and if I can’t, well, there’s a bunch of other channels to turn to. My second choice would be movies, which is almost like TV except there aren’t any commercials. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. For instance, when you’re watching TV and a commercial comes on, you can take advantage of the moment and duck off to the pisser to take a leak or pop into the kitchen and whip up a baloney and bread sandwich or a bowl of cereal. Of course if you’re not hungry or full of pee, then a commercial is a pain in the ass. But when you’re at the movies, sometimes you wish a commercial or two would come on so you can drain off that 32-ounce soda you sucked down earlier and maybe grab a bag of Sugar Babies without missing anything. I guess that’s what they call a trade off. My third choice would be radio, but that’s a distant third because there ain’t any pictures. Books would be near the bottom of the list, after magazines, billboards and the advertising signs they put on city transit busses.
Anyway, I’m probably the last person in the world who should be writing a book. If you could sum up my life in one word, it would probably be “largely book free”. That goes back to my high school days. Round about the time you get to high school, they expect you to choose books to read based not on the number of colorful pretty pictures inside, but on the content of the story. Now, to me nothing helps move a story along better than well-placed colorful pretty pictures, but I don’t make the rules. Someone in the school does. I think it’s the principal.
Take some of those books they make you read in school. One I remember was called “Moby Dick.” The title made me laugh when I first saw it and that’s why I decided to read it instead of just taking the “F” like I usually did. I thought it was about something entirely different than what it was about. Instead of being a funny – and by that I mean dirty -- story about boys and their parts, it was about how a sea captain was all pissed off at a big whale for nipping off his leg. But it wasn’t good enough to read all the way through. That put me at a considerable disadvantage when the teacher wanted to know what the meaning behind the story was. I read enough of it, I guess, to know that on the surface it’s a story about some sea captain who gets pissed at a whale for biting off a leg, and how he’s all set to go through hell and high water to find that whale and teach him a lesson about biting off people’s legs, and he don’t care who he drags through the crap pile with him just so long as he gets to kill that damn whale!
But you know how public school teachers are. They want something more than a simple explanation. They want to know about metaphors and similes and the deeper meaning behind the words. This one teacher came up with the apple-headed notion that the story of the sea captain versus the whale was actually the writer’s way of talking about “the eternal struggle between Man and God” or some other such horse poop. That’s another reason why I don’t much care for reading books. If I have to dig deep to get the meaning of something, then it wasn’t worth the effort of picking up in the first place.
(By the way, just the other day they had that “Moby Dick” movie on the TV – the one where Gregory Peck plays the sea captain and he looks just like Abe Lincoln. And even after watching the movie, I still think it’s mainly a story about a crazy man who’s pissed off at a whale and that’s all there is to it! Hell, a few dirty stories about boys and their parts would have made it more interesting I think.)
So, I wonder about my qualifications for writing a book. If I don’t like reading them, what the hell would I know about writing one? Jake says all I have to do is just tell the story the way it happened and the book should write itself, no problem. Seems like a lot of work to me.
Still, I’ll give it a try. Since we decided to go back to the simple life, we ain’t got a word processor no more, let alone even a typewriter. All I got is this tape recorder we first did the song into. So I’ll just talk into it and someday, if we ever get one of those agent fellas again, I’ll let him listen to the tape and he can get it all typed up pretty and proper. So if you happen to be that agent, I hereby apologize in advance just in case my language gets kind of salty. I’m not what you would call the most refined person in the world. But I do have a good memory. And one thing I want to make perfectly clear from the start. I don’t want nobody cleaning up my language to make it all grammatical or nothing. If I gotta write a book, then I’m gonna write it the way I talk. But I will try to keep the most filthy profanities to a minimum. I feel I owe it to the women and kids who might be forced to read this book in school or something.
Now that I think about it, maybe there could be something to be learned by what happened to me and Jake. As I sit in this comfortable chair in the kitchen, looking out the window across the yard to the slough, it seems hard to believe that we went from dead broke to billionaires in the span of something less than two years. And it was all because of the song.
It’s been called everything from “a pleasant little ditty” to “a metaphor about society as it plunges headlong into the post 9/11 milieu,” whatever the hell that means! I didn’t have any lofty, high-minded ideals in mind when I wrote the thing. I just thought it was just a cute idea for a catchy little song. That goes back to what I was saying a little while ago about looking for the deeper meaning in stuff. Sometimes, no matter how far you dig, there just ain’t anything there but what you saw in the first place. If you dig through a cow flop looking for “deeper meaning,” all you’re going to come up with is more cow flop. And then you’ll have to wash your hands before you eat.
Everything happened so fast that I suppose it stretches the imagination some to believe that such a thing could have actually happened as quick as it did. But it pisses me off more than just a little bit when I hear or read reports that say the Klemper Brothers were just lucky is all
I mean, it’s not like we got the right six numbers in the lottery or anything like that, so you can’t say it was pure luck. I suppose I can understand that it might look that way to some, but I just can’t say that luck had all that much to do with how things turned out. There was some effort involved after all. Somebody had to write the song, and that somebody was us – Mud and Jake Klemper!
Now it’s not I think that we were really anything special. I mean, we certainly weren’t the sharpest nails in the hardware store or anything like that, if you know what I mean. And I suppose that some of our success had to do with being at the right place at the right time and all. I suppose you could wonder if breeding had anything to do with it. One thing us Klempers are real proud of is the fact that we are Klempers. There’s always been something special about me and my brother. Pap said there was a special glow in the air the night Jake was born, and same thing for the night I came into the world. It was even wrote up about in the paper. Scientists said it was probably swamp gas or something. Pap said it was just a coincidence, not the fuckin’ Star of Bethlehem or anything like that, but still a guy can’t help but be proud when the sky lights up on the occasion of his birth. We’ve always sorta felt set apart from the folks that surround us. We try not to let it go to our heads or nothing, but that’s just the way it is. We’re Klempers and we’re proud.
I guess most of that attitude comes from our father, the late Luther Klemper. Our Pap was a proud man. And he had a lot to be proud of. His family came over from some country in Europe back in the 1800s and decided to settle in the rich farmlands of eastern Iowa. Now that might seem kinda peculiar since none of the pioneer Klempers had farms in Europe or even knew so much as a tinker’s damn about dirt, except for the fact that it tended to gather under their fingernails. They were mostly beggars and criminals, truth be told. And the further truth is that they left Europe because it was either that or go to jail. But they had it set in their minds that they were gonna be the most successful cotton farmers in the whole state of Iowa.
Well, as it happened, they were a mite flummoxed at first to learn that the rich, black soil of eastern Iowa ain’t exactly the kind of dirt that’s best suited for cotton growing. And after a few bleak seasons where more than one of my early ancestors died of starvation or was carried off by wolves (some say it wasn’t wolves but just some big, hungry dogs but what the hell’s the difference when you’re the one being eaten?), one of the neighbors who had been there for awhile finally took it upon himself to drop by the Klemper farm and suggest that they might try growing some corn instead.
And that’s where the family split came in. Great Grandpa Otto Klemper turned to his brother Gunther and accused him of not doing the proper research into what kind of crop they should grow when they got to Iowa. Well, Gunther wasn’t the kind of man to just sit there and take verbal abuse, so he asked Otto why he didn’t do the research his own goddamn self if he thought it was all that important. “And besides, what the hell is wrong with cotton? Everyone likes cotton!” he is reported to have said, to which Great Grandpa Otto is believed to have said something like, “You can’t eat cotton,” at which time Gunther Klemper said, “Oh yeah? Eat this!” and he stuffed the sleeve of his cotton flannel shirt into Great Grandpa Otto’s mouth with a fist attached at the end of it. And one thing led to another and the next thing you knew the knife blades were flashing and one of Otto’s ears was lying on the hardwood floor and Gunther was learning how to make do with only one eye. (That’s another thing about us Klempers. We tend to be real quick to go to the knives when we’re pissed. Or drunk.)
So Otto kicked Gunther off the farm and Gunther took his family to the little town of Low Dell on the western edge of the county and both families grew and prospered and basically disavowed each others’ existence. And the family split continues to this day. For instance, Jake and me – the only remnants of the Slope Oak branch of the clan – we spell the family name the way it was meant to be spelled – “Klemper” – where the Low Dell branch of the family thought to gussy-up the name a little by adding an “f” – “Klempfer”. Hell, I guess if they want to carry around an extra consonant in their name, that’s their business. And to their credit, they haven’t come sucking around for money since Jake and me stumbled into our fortune. Not that they’d get any, of course. They probably know that. At least not until they got rid of that extra “f”.
Anyway, Great Grandpa Otto brought forth a number of strong dimwitted sons and agreeably fertile daughters. One of those sons turned out to be my Grandpa Johan. I never knew him – he died back in 1945 of some kind of blood disease. But it was him who built the house on Roosevelt Street in Slope Oak, which was the closest town to the original farmstead.
If the ancestral Klempers were poor farmers, they were friggin’ “Old MacDonald” compared to Grandpa Johan. He couldn’t grow grass! Now, whether or not he was actually booted off the farm or decided by himself to move to the city depends on which version of the story you believe – the story about how he either accidentally or on purpose blinded his brother Friedrich.
If you believe the “nice Grandpa” story, then you believe that he was just cutting shoelaces out of a strap of leather when Uncle Friedrich came up behind him to see what he was doing and caught the blade of Grandpa’s buck knife in the left eye. In the “bad Grandpa” story, he just jabs the blade in his brother’s eye because he didn’t like the way Friedrich was looking at him. Well, they didn’t have the Blue Cross or those HMOs back then, so the family just sort of let the eye take care of itself – which was admittedly a bad idea since the stabbed eye started to smell bad and the infection spread from the bad eye to the good eye and both eventually had to come out.
And here’s a side note. Don’t go feeling too bad about Uncle Friedrich. For one thing, he outlived Grandpa by about thirty years. And he had a pretty good life for a blind guy. The government bought him a nice little house up the road on Garfield Street with an outhouse and a water pump in the front yard. And Friedrich learned how to make do. I remember sitting on his side porch with him, watching him pick off mud ducks on the nearby lagoon with a .22 rifle. Honest to God! He could sight them in by sound alone and pick ‘em off with a single shot! He lived to a ripe old age until one day he shot himself through the heart with that same .22 rifle. Grandma Genny said it was an accident. He was cleaning the rifle and it went off. But Jake and me, we think he just got tired of waking up every day.
Anyway, Grandpa (for whatever reason) left the farm and moved to Slope Oak where he got a job as a steel shaver at the local lock factory. He met a sturdy Polish girl from Minnesota named Genny Klavko and married her. Then he built the house on Roosevelt Street where we all lived until recently. Grandpa Johan and Grandma Genny had a few sons (no daughters, oddly enough) and one of those sons was Luther Klemper – our Pap.
Pap went to school all the way up through the sixth grade, decided it just wasn’t for him, and got a job following Grandpa around at the lock factory sweeping up the metal shavings. When Grandpa died, they gave Pap his job. In fact, Pap had to miss the funeral on account of they wouldn’t let him have the day off to go to it. But that’s how things were back then. If you had a job, you held on to it no matter how many members of your family were getting buried on any given day.
In 1950, Pap took a shine to a high school girl he met at a football game. Her name was Mary Anderson. She came from a family that was just about as society as you could get in Slope Oak, which meant you couldn’t generally tell what they had for dinner by looking at their shirts. And her daddy, my Grampy Stu, was understandably horrified when his only daughter announced that she was gonna marry that “apple-headed nincompoop from the north side” she had been sparking around town with. Grampy Stu came around to Pap’s way of thinking, however, when Pap went over there one afternoon – all stinky from beer – and threatened to hurt parts of Grampy Stu’s body with a ball peen hammer if the old man didn’t shut the hell up about it.
The union of Pap and Momma produced just two children, which is two more than they had coming to hear Pap tell it. One of the first things Momma told Pap when they started dating was that she couldn’t never have kids on account of her womb was tilted the wrong way in her belly and that a doctor told her she’d never be able to catch pregnant. Pap never did take much stock in doctors, so he got her pregnant twice! Jake came first in 1953. Poor Momma was in the hospital for nearly six months after Jake was born – she didn’t even get to see that glow in the sky I told you about earlier although she did read about it in the paper. She lost a lot of blood and required an operation and the doctor told Pap that he’d better take special care to make sure she never got knocked up again. Well, I told you about Pap and doctors. So sure enough, two years later, I came along. They didn’t have no more children after me on account of the fact that Momma bled to death in bed the day after I was born. So I never knew her and Jake says he has only the vaguest memories of her. Now you might think that Pap blamed me for her death, but to his credit he never told me nothing like that. He wasn’t the warmest, most affectionate dad in the world, but he never beat us with anything harder than a hunk of wood unless we really had it coming.
Like I was beginning to say quite some time ago, it was him who instilled us with what I like to call “Klemper Pride.” It’s a family trait that goes hand in hand with what some have called the “Klemper Temper.”
I remember a cold February evening in 1964. Pap had been kicked out of Del Turpin’s bar earlier than usual, so he was home drinking his own beer from the fridge which is something he didn’t much like to do because the fridge beer was his emergency stock against the sudden reappearance of prohibition, which is something he feared in the same way little kids are scared of ghosts. Anyway, he turned his attention towards us as we played on the living room floor. Jake was prying up hunks of wood from the floor planks with his new pocketknife – the one that said “Goldwater for President” on it. I was making a pile of wood hunks from what Jake pried up with the mindset of making a nice little smoke fire later on.
Jake and I both happened to turn toward Pap at the same time. His baggy features were highlighted by the electric glow of the black and white TV.
“You boys know anything about pride?” he asked. We just smiled and nodded which was the best thing to do when Pap was all beered-up.
“Like hell you do,” he muttered, setting his beer down on the phone book he used as a coaster. “I’m taking about PRIDE,” he slurred, lurching to his feet and for a minute I thought we were gonna get a whipping on account of all the floor prying we had been doing. “I’m talking about being PROUD of who you are,” he said, taking a few staggering steps toward us. “Proud because you’re a KLEMPER! Proud of your FAMILY! Are YOU boys PROUD?”
“I love you, Pap,” I squeaked. Jake just kept nodding and smiling.
Pap snorted. “A Klemper, which is what you boys are, can do ANYTHING he sets his mind to just because he’s a KLEMPER!” We just kept smiling and nodding. Pap pointed to the back door.
“Jake, run your ass out to the garage and bring me back a good two-by-four.”
Jake hopped up and scampered out to the garage and I wondered just what he was figuring to do with a hunk of board as he had never hit us with anything quite that big before. Jake crashed through the back door with a good length of board.
“Good boy, Jake,” Pap said. “Now, the two of you put that board between two of them kitchen chairs.”
I trotted to the kitchen, pulled two of the old wooden chairs out from under the card table and Jake balanced the board between the two seats.
Pap shook his head angrily. “No, not like that,” he said. “Balance them bastards on the TOP of the chairs!” We did like we were told. Pap sauntered into the kitchen with the air of a man who knows he is just about to perform a great deed.
“Now I’m gonna show you boys about how it is to be sure you can do ANYTHING! I’m gonna bust that board in two with nothing but my fist. Believe me?”
More smiling, more nodding.
Pap grunted a satisfied grunt. He walked to the board and studied it close. “You boys each grab an end and hold it steady,” he slurred. Again, we did like we was told.
“Now watch this,” he said. He reared his big, hammy fist into the air, held it there for a second, then brought it down with the force of a jackhammer onto the board. The board bent all the way to the floor, popped back up into the air, wobbled like a cartoon diving board, then fell to the floor from the tops of the chairs.
Jake and I stared at the board on the floor, then we turned to look at Pap. He was rubbing his fist with a quizzical look on his face. Then he turned to Jake.
“Boy, did you bring me a wet board?”
Jake shrugged. “Felt dry to me, Pap.”
Pap shook his head. “Damn, a wet board,” he said. “If that bastard had been dry, I’d have busted it right in two.” He turned to us again. “You believe that, right boys?”
More smiling, more nodding.
“And why do you believe that?”
Jake looked panicked. But somehow I knew what it was Pap was fishing for.
“Cuz you’re a KLEMPER, Pap! And a Klemper can do ANYTHING!”
Pap smiled his stinky, toothless smile. Then he rubbed my hair (with his good hand – the one that hit the board was already beginning to swell up like a balloon). “You boys is good boys,” he said as he staggered to his bedroom. The next day, he had a cast on his hand and it didn’t come off for six weeks.
Jake and me learned a lesson that we’d never forget – not through the good times or the hard times yet to come.
Now as I sit here telling you about this, I have to wonder about what Pap would think about the way things turned out if he hadn’t have caught that blood clot in the lung and keeled over in a bowl of breakfast cereal back in 1983. I wonder if he’d like what we’ve done with our lives, or if he’d think the whole thing is just sort of goofy. I try not to think about that too much. Like I said, I’ve always been told it’s best not to think too hard. Makes my head hurt and bad things happen.
But then, I was just getting started to tell you about the song that got the whole thing started.
But it really was a cute idea for a song. And I still remember how I got the idea. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I got an idea. It was more of an inspiration.
It was a summer day -- hotter than a lot of them, not as hot as some, and definitely not very humid. It helps to remember that fact. Sometimes here in Slope Oak the summer afternoons are so hot and muggy you feel like you could grab yourself a handful of air and just wring the dirty water right out of it.
But this wasn’t that kind of day. It was a dry, hot day. And I was sitting on the rocking chair on the front porch. There must have been a loose board or something under one of the rockers, because every time I rocked back and forth, the chair and the board made kind of a “hunky dunk” sound. Sort of like this…
HUNK-ee-dunk
HUNK-ee-dunk
Now, if it had been a humid day, the board wouldn’t have been dry enough to make that sound. And if it had been rainy, I would have been in the house and not on the front porch rocking and hearing that “hunky dunk” sound over and over again. Funny, ain’t it, how a twist of fate can hang on something so simple as whether or not it was humid, dry or rainy outside? Life is full of stuff like that, I’ve come to learn.
It was such a nice day and since it was Sunday, I didn’t have to work since the gut factory was closed on the Lord’s Day. I had absolutely nothing on my mind and nothing to do but drink cheap beer and rock the hot, dry afternoon away on that front porch rocking chair. For hours I sat and drank and rocked and sat and drank and rocked with my mind a total blank and that “hunky dunk” sound just sort of working its way into my subconscious.
And I started sort of repeating that sound in my head as I was rocking. “Hunky dunk, hunky dunk,” you know how it’s like when you get an idea that just won’t go away? So anyway, I was just sitting and rocking and saying “hunky dunk” to myself when I just started to, I guess, make stuff up. I mean, only an idiot would just sit there hour after hour saying “hunky dunk” to himself in his head without trying to make some kind of sense out of it, right? So I figured I’d try to make up some words to go along with it.
I suppose it’s because I was feeling pretty good that day. None of the neighbors had been mad at us for a while. Jake was busy in the kitchen whipping up a nice apple pie to go with the chicken we were having for dinner, and it was such a bright, clear, hot sunny day that everything seemed pretty much OK. And then I decided that “hunky dunk” might be a pretty good word to describe such a feeling as I had.
So, as I rocked back and forth, I just started adding words to the “hunky dunk” sound the rocker and the loose board were making.
“Clear blue sky is hunky dunk.”
“Apple pie is hunky dunk.”
“Birds and bees are hunky dunk.”
“Cherry trees are hunky dunk.”
Yep! That’s where those Grammy Award-winning lyrics came from. And I started singing them out loud. I must have been getting pretty carried away with myself, too, because Jake came out and yelled at me to shut the hell up.
“You sound like a fucking idiot,” he said.
So I told him he was just my older brother and not my father and I could sing any song I wanted to. And just to make him mad, I called him “Chicken Jake.” Make him mad? You bet! I’ll tell you why later. He busted right through the screen door and pushed me off the rocking chair and that was all for the “hunky dunk” noise for that afternoon I can tell you.
Now I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that me and Jake hate each other or anything like that, because it just ain’t true. Jake is the only family I got left. And me and Jake, we don’t really fight hard when we fight. We just kind of tussle around on the grass and mush up each others faces with open hands and stuff. Years ago if one of the pups had made a poop nearby where we are fighting, one of us might grab it for a weapon, but that was only when we were really mad. And this time we weren’t really all that upset with each other. It was an artistic disagreement, not like he had said anything about my scabby bald head or anything like that. Besides, it was just that kind of carrying on that got the neighbors mad at us, so at that time we were trying to keep the front yard fighting as little as possible.
We didn’t live in some kind of crappy neighborhood or anything. Nope. These were mostly real nice folks that lived around us. For one thing, there’s Doctor McWherter right across the street. He’s a dentist for kids. And the nun house is about three down from us on the same side of the street. And we even had a city councilman who lived in our neighborhood. But I can’t remember his name. Yes sir, it was a fine neighborhood. One of the finest and oldest neighborhoods in town. And our house was older than any of them.
At the time all this was happening, we had lived in that old house all our lives. And I ain’t gonna sit here and tell you that our house was as nice and fine as some of the other houses in the neighborhood because it wasn’t. Like I said, our house was built by our Pap’s dad back in the early 1900s, and it didn’t look like anyone had done much more than slap a little paint on it from time to time since then. It was a nice, big, two-story house, much bigger than two bachelors like me and Jake really needed. But it all balanced out since there were several rooms on the second floor that you wouldn’t want to go into because the floorboards were pretty rotted.
The neighbors were always helpful with suggestions about how we could make the house look better, things like “mow the lawn” and “paint the house.” And they were all pretty good suggestions, too, but back then money was pretty slender. Not like it is now. It was all I could do to make ends meet with my job at the gut factory. And Jake was busy enough around the house with getting a meal on the table by the time I got home, not to mention his other various and sundry household duties like keeping the dogs out of the garbage. So it’s not that I didn’t appreciate the suggestions we got from the neighbors. It’s just that there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Funny thing, most of the neighbors seemed pretty shy about talking to us in person back then. Usually if they saw us walking down the street, for some reason they’d cross the street and ignore us if we waved at them. No, when they made their suggestions about how we could make our house look better, it was usually with an unsigned note taped to our front door or a certified letter from some lawyer.
It wasn’t until we got our hands on some money that I was able to give some serious thought toward fixing the place up. I figured I’d start with the porch and tighten up those floorboards, like the one that went “hunky dunk” when I rocked on it.
Oh yeah, the song. I was telling you about how I came up with the idea.
The night after Jake and I tussled over whether or not “Hunky Dunk” was a stupid idea, I started writing down the words that were in my head. And that’s how the song was written. Well, mostly. By 10 o’clock Jake had pretty much drained his nightly quart of J.W. Dant and he asked what I was writing. I told him he didn’t want to know because it was too late to have to go outside and fight and besides it was raining. So he reached out with one of his big, old, knotty, wart-covered hands and grabbed the paper off the kitchen table and read it. By that time, I had all the lyrics written out.
Clear blue sky is hunky dunk!
Apple pie is hunky dunk!
Birds and bees are hunky dunk!
Cherry trees are hunky dunk!
Hunky dunk is where you want it.
If you got it, you should flaunt it.
Every squirrel and lamb and skunk,
Likes to get his hunky dunk!
So if you’re sad and feeling blue,
Take this tip we bring to you!
The school of life you’ll never flunk,
As long as you stay Hunky Dunk!
Jake was frowning as he read what was on the paper. “More of that ‘hunky dunk’ shit?” he asked.
“Since you must know, yeah,” I said. “I think it’s kind of catchy.”
See, that’s just how Jake is. If it ain’t his idea in the first place, he tends to be negative about it. If Wilbur and Orville would have had an older brother Jake, he would have told them that their airplane looked silly and it probably wouldn’t work anyway so why did they want to go making fools of themselves?
But this time he surprised me. Jake put the paper back down on the table. “So, how do you think it should go like?”
So I sang a little for him. And you know what? It seemed like he kind of liked it some. He didn’t say as much at the time. He didn’t even really smile or anything. Of course, with Jake, any facial expression that ain’t a downright scowl should be considered positive. Instead of saying anything, he just went and got his harmonica.
Here’s where I should tell you about Jake and his harmonicas. He’s got more of those damn harmonicas than the Pope’s got prayer books. Ever since he was a kid, and that was quite some time ago, whenever Jake got his hands on an extra few bucks that didn’t need to get spent on J.W. Dant, he’d trot himself down to the music store and come back with a new harmonica. “This one’s in the Key of E,” he’d say or some stuff like that which really didn’t make that much sense to me as all of his harmonicas looked the same, except for some were bigger and some were smaller.
So anyway, he comes back with a harmonica (I don’t know what key it was) and starts tapping his foot on the floorboards. Then he starts playing a little something. Then he tells me to start singing along. Well, when Jake’s in one of those moods, you pretty much just do what he wants unless you want to be rolling around in the front yard, and I already told you how we were trying to keep that sort of activity as little as possible. So I just tried to follow along some.
And you know what? Jake liked the song! He liked it so much that he ran back upstairs to his music room (it was really just a closet, but it’s where he kept his harmonicas and other music stuff) and came back down with a cassette tape recorder, the same one I’m talking on right now.
“C’mon, Mud! Let’s get some of this on tape.”
Here I should tell you that Mud ain’t my real name. My real name is Lester, but Jake always called me Mud ever since I can remember. He even told me why once. He said it’s because I was dumb as a mud fence. I would have slugged him there and then, but for some reason the idea of a mud fence trying to cipher out some third grade arithmetic kind of struck me as funny, and I guess the name just sort of stuck.
So anyway, we played the song again and got it on tape this time. It sounded pretty good. We played it again that next morning and it still sounded pretty good and we were even sober by then. And that’s the true test, because – to tell you the truth – either one of us would be likely to sign off on some really harebrained ideas when we’re juiced.
We listened to it again and again and again. Then I had to go to work. Jake must have listened to it a bunch more times when I was gone because when I got home that night the first thing he said was that we oughta take the tape to the radio station and see if they’ll play it. So that’s just what we did.
2.
From the Gut Room to the Recording Studio
Now, we only got one radio station here in Slope Oak, Iowa. Back then they weren’t much for playing music. Usually they’d have these radio shows where these folks who think they know a whole lot more than you do take phone calls from a bunch of people who got problems that they don’t know how to solve for themselves. Why anyone would want to go on a radio show and tell the world what a dimwit he is, well, that is just beyond me. I think that’s what’s wrong with a lot of the world today – we got too many experts who think they know it all and not enough people who are willing to roll up their own sleeves to solve their own problems. But that’s just my opinion for whatever it’s worth which is probably a whole bunch of nothing.
So we thought maybe this radio station might just want to have a peppy little song like “Hunky Dunk” (which is what we called it) to liven things up a bit between shows. But they didn’t. And they weren’t very nice about it either. In fact, they said they’d have the cops on us if we didn’t leave quietly.
So we decided to drive down to Davenport. They have five or six radio stations down there, and neither one of us had ever been arrested down there before so the threat of calling the cops didn’t weigh quite as heavy on us. We managed to visit all five or six stations that afternoon and none of them wanted to hear the song either. So we did the only thing we could do.
We started going to some of those “open mike” nights they got at some of these nightclubs in town. And when it was our turn, we’d go up there and sing and play. And people seemed to like the song. So we recorded it a bunch of times on Jake’s tape recorder and started selling the song for about $2 a pop when we’d go to these open mike nights and such. After awhile, we’d make a whole bunch of tapes and sell practically most of them.
Then, one day, a guy who worked at one of those radio stations in Davenport called and said he had been at one of those “open mike” nights and he liked the song, and he asked if Jake and me wanted to come on his show and do the song live on the radio. Well, you can just bet we did! I even took off work the next morning. Jake didn’t have that problem to deal with since he had pretty much been on county support ever since he hurt his head at the Boys’ Home when the tractor threw him when he was 16.
Well, I guess there’s a few things you should know about my older brother before we get too deep into this thing. I’ve mentioned he doesn’t like to be called “Chicken Jake,” and I’ve mentioned that he’s been to the Boys’ Home. But I don’t want you should get the wrong idea about him or anything like that. Jake is good people. He’s just a mite bewildered is all. Lost in a world that wasn’t made for people like him might be a good way to put it. He can get mean, he can get violent, and he’s subject to mood swings all-of-a-sudden like. But he’s got a good streak a mile wide. Especially for animals and such. He’s got a way around them. Especially the chickens.
When we were kids, we would spend a good part of the summer at Uncle Eldon’s farm out there near Elvira. My job was taking care of the livestock, which was a lot of responsibility for a boy at the tender age of six as I was. But every morning I had to milk the cows and see to it that the hogs had the proper amount of slop to keep them growing fat and sassy.
Jake? He took a shine to the chickens. By that, I mean he started to like the chickens in the same way the Pope likes praying. He’d spend hours on those hot summer days just sitting with the chickens. Pap and Uncle Eldon didn’t seem to take much notice of this at first, but I couldn’t help but think it was just a little odd. After all, there was this nice swimming creek near the farm house and you could jump in there on a hot summer afternoon and cool off real nice, but you didn’t want to stay in there for any real length of time because then you’d have the leeches all over you, which is why I wished I could have had Jake down there with me from time to time to help peel off the leeches before they got a good set. But he wasn’t interested in swimming. He just wanted to be with those smelly cluckers.
He was really close to the chickens. He even started acting like them, which is when the trouble started. Uncle Eldon and Pap went out there once to drag Jake in for dinner, and they saw something that set the heart crossways in their chests to hear them talk about it. They saw Jake there in the pen strutting and scratching and making this godawful peeping sound as he followed the hens from corner to corner. Well, as startled as they were at first, the sight of Pap’s eldest son scratching around in the chicken yard soon had the both of them to laughing fit to bust a gut.
Jake tried to explain himself. He said the chickens were his friends and he wanted to talk to them in their own language, but that just got Pap and Eldon laughing even harder. Pap called him “Chicken Jake” and Eldon started clucking and flapping his arms and it was all poor Jake could stand, because he lit off for the machine shed (which is where we slept during our summer visits to the farm) and would not come out or eat or talk to anyone until we went home on Monday.
But the embarrassment of the chicken pen did nothing to cool Jake’s fondness for poultry. He started Junior High that fall and took the opportunity to join the FFA. He built this ramshackle chicken coop in the back yard and saved up his pop bottle money so he could order a box of chicks. Then he went to the library and read up and learned everything there was for a young boy to know about chickens.
And this behavior carried right over into his studies. Every class project somehow involved chickens. Every paper, every subject, Jake would find some way to work in chickens. This, as you might imagine, garnered a great deal of attention from Jake’s teachers and classmates. Most of it was negative. In fact, since I must have mentioned to one of my young friends or another about the chicken coop incident at Eldon’s, by the time he was finished with the 9th grade, all the kids we knew called him “Chicken Jake.” Some even called him that to his face, but they never did it more than once.
That’s how Jake earned himself a trip to the Boys’ Home. Well, part of the reason anyway. He beat up more than his fair share of classmates that year. But the thing that really landed him in the home was what happened that next spring.
The first I knew of it was when Billy McWherter told me that the police had come to the junior high school to take Jake away. I thought it was because the latest kid to get a swollen lip as the price of calling him “Chicken Jake” was Jimmy Sneed and he was the mayor’s son. Well, the real reason was because of what the police found on Roosevelt Street that morning. And on Harding Street. And for two blocks either way on 27th and 28th Avenues North. There were dead chickens scattered across half the neighborhood. Some had no heads, others were just ripped apart. It was a hell of a mess. Jake had just put himself out of the chicken raising business just because he got tired of the teasing and the fighting.
Well, he got charged with cruelty to animals and that bought him a trip to the Boys’ Home in Eldora until his 18th birthday, and that’s where he got hurt on the tractor and the next time I saw him he had the metal plate in his skull and a strange assortment of tattoos. The most prominent one is on his chest. It shows a Rhode Island Red, an egg and a question mark. The rest are sort of indecipherable but I’m sure Jake knows what they mean and maybe someday I’ll even ask him.
Another thing different about his was the warts and bumps all over his hands and forearms. The doctor at the Boys’ Home said it was some kind of virus thing – something he caught from playing with the chickens. Every time Jake would cut one off, a new, bigger, uglier one would take its place. So he just left them be and his hands and forearms started taking on the appearance of a knotted up hunk of old tree wood.
He came home from Eldora a different Jake, one with tattoos and warts, a metal plate in his head and a talent for the harmonica. Besides that, he learned how to hold his liquor like a man.
But since the tractor accident he’s been somewhat clumsy and accident prone which made it impossible for him to hold a job. I recall it was the first summer since he got out of the Boys’ home when he went and fell off a cliff up by the park. All he did was break one of his hips and tear a hunk out of a kidney, but he pulled through much to everyone’s surprise. Pap said Jake probably wouldn’t have been so dumb as to try climbing down the cliff if he hadn’t have hurt his head like he did earlier. “It’s the metal plate that makes him do things like that,” Pap said. But, that’s Jake for you.
Hell, it ain’t like I would want to call anyone else dumb my own self. Would a smart guy be doing the kind of job I had been doing for the 25 years before “Hunky Dunk”? Not hardly.
Talk about dumb. I joined the Navy so I could be a truck driver. Pap was in the Navy, and that was the only military service he could see allowing his boys to get into. Of course, any kind of military service was out of the question for Jake, what with his metal plate and criminal record and all. Since most of my offenses at the time were minor misdemeanors, I was able to get in OK. I told the recruiter I wanted to be a truck driver, and he smiled and said he’d see what he could do if I would just go ahead and sign the papers and all, which I did. So three days after I graduated high school (an honor which, in itself, set me apart from any of the other male Klempers in the family), I was in a bus heading for Great Lakes, Illinois, where the Navy Boot Camp was.
Talk about scary! Me and a bunch of other guys on the bus got herded into this big room which sort of looked like a classroom at school. They told us to sit at these desks, which we did. And just as we were starting to chat amongst ourselves, this strange looking little man ran to the front of the room and started screaming at us. He said his name was Petty Officer Orville Kemp and that he was gonna be our Company Commander. Then he started talking to us like we were criminals instead of America’s finest young men in the new volunteer Armed Forces in those post Vietnam War days. He said we were his personal property from that moment on. He said we shouldn’t bother calling our mommies and daddies as HE was gonna be our mommy and daddy from now on. He was gonna be our brother and sister. He was gonna be our aunt and uncle. He was even gonna be our girlfriend! “I may even fuck you,” he said.
Well, needless to say, I thought that was just a little bit over the line, so I shouted, “No you WON’T!” This drew his immediate attention.
He came up to where I was sitting and asked what my major malfunction was. I told him I didn’t have one that I was aware of. Then he asked me if I liked him. Swear to God! He put his face right up against mine and asked me if I liked him. Well, honestly, I didn’t know how to answer that question. So I told him that I really didn’t know him well enough at that point to have an honest opinion, but that I was willing for the moment to give him the benefit of the doubt.
You’d have thought I just called his mother a hooker or something. He went to screaming and hollering and waving his arms all around about how I was gonna be a special project for him for the next eight weeks, how he was gonna pay special attention to me and all, and how him and me were gonna end up as real good friends.
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “But there ain’t gonna be no fucking!”
That got him even madder than before, and I ended up having to do push ups, right there on the classroom floor until my arms felt like they were gonna break into pieces.
I didn’t last in the Navy very long. For one thing, Petty Officer Kemp seemed to go out of his way to find things to be pissed off about as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t even walk right, to hear him tell it. I always got stuck with extra duties and such, and the other fellas in the company seemed to take offense to all the extra attention I was getting.
There was the one night when we were supposed to fold up our mattresses so that Petty Officer Kemp could see whether or not we had dusted the bed springs. He had a powerful thing about dust and dirt, did Petty Officer Kemp. One fella, a girly little guy that the other guys called “Sea Pussy” seemed to have trouble getting his mattress to stay folded over so he could dust the bed springs. A couple of the other guys tried to help him, but nobody could get it to stay – it kept flopping back over, and we all knew Petty Officer Kemp would be fit to have pups if he came in and saw a mattress that wasn’t folded up.
So I offered to help. “Sea Pussy” folded his mattress over, and I told him to hold it there for a second. Then I thought real hard at the mattress. I thought about it staying right where it was. I guess I thought about 500 pounds of pressure on it, because when I told Sea Pussy to let it go, it stayed right put.
Well, that did the trick, and for the rest of the time I was there, nobody made fun of me or called me names. Except for Petty Officer Kemp, of course, but that was his job after all.
Anyway, soon thereafter we had to go to what they called classification. That meant they were gonna tell us what our jobs would be. Of course, I told the guy I wanted to be a truck driver. He asked me what in the hell I was doing in the Navy if I wanted to be a truck driver, and I started to tell him about Pap being in the Navy and that was the only service there was, as far as he was concerned, but he told me to shut up. Then he said I had to be a deck ape. Another guy in the company said that meant I would have to mop decks, which is what they call floors on those Navy boats they have. So I said fuck a bunch of that, and I didn’t want to be in the Navy any more.