THE BIRD

by Randy Reynolds

(Photo: Uncle Bobby, 1955)

I was a first-grader the first time I saw my teenaged Uncle Bobby naked in the bathtub. The sight of him sent me running through the house with my first news bulletin: “Mother, mother, Bobby’s got a mustache!”

To my surprise, she greeted my news with a laugh instead of horror and explained that Bobby was not a freak, that everybody has hair down there—which was news to me, because I sure didn’t have any yet. I found out how that worked five years later when Kenny Fussell explained to the sixth grade boys at Lee Road School that the only way to grow body hair was to shave the area where hair was desired. Every time it was shaved, he said, it would grow in thicker. To hear him tell it, this simple trick was helping him grow underarm, chest and pubic hair like Sasquatch and he exhorted us—if we wanted to keep up with him—to shave those areas. I don’t recall how many times I did so, nor do I know if following his advice is why my chest hair is not exactly in the Robin Williams category. (Have you ever seen that freak?) Mine is more like Tarzan’s—which is my wife’s nickname for me. (Gee thanks, Kenny.)

Uncle Bobby spent a few months in our household when I was six and he was fourteen. He had gotten into some kind of trouble, or wasn’t getting along with his parents, or something, so he’d been sent to live with his older sister Violet and brother-in-law Gene and their little family until things blew over. After staying with us a while, he must have been relieved to get back to whatever trouble or tribulation had driven him from home, because I didn’t exactly make life easy for him.

I was his shadow. His paparazzi. My reporting at the time included:

“Daddy, Bobby’s smoking cigarettes behind the church and he smokes Winstons.”

“Daddy, Bobby’s cussing—he said dookey.”

“Daddy, Bobby says there’s such a thing as a pink elephant.”

My biggest scoop was showing my daddy the bird. Daddy was lying in bed with Rick and me after Mother had sent him in to calm us down. He had just mesmerized us with an Uncle Remus story and we were lying there talking about first one thing and then another, when I felt compelled to tell him something he didn’t know. I stuck out my middle finger and used my other hand to bend back the fingers next to it and said, “Do you know what this means?”

He paused. “No. What?”

“Funk,” I said.

He sat bolt upright. “Who told you that?”

One of my friends across the street was the guilty culprit (this was years before I met Kenny Fussell) but I didn’t want to get my friend in trouble so I said, “Bobby.”

“Violet, come in here!” shouted Daddy.

Poor Bobby had no way of defending himself; he and his mustache and his Winstons were gone a few days later.

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My mother's brother, Ensign Bobby Cecil Appling was the first official “rocket scientist” in our family. Bobby wanted to be a fighter pilot, but flying made him dizzy and he became a rocket scientist instead. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/rocket-scientist.html