Tell us what's happened to you recently (that's interesting)

My condolences, Nixxter. May the memory of her light the path ahead, and may you find joy in her legacy to make up for the sadness of her absence.

My condolences Nixxter, thanks for sharing, your mom sounds like she was quite the woman.

Thank you all! Ok I’ll share one Mom story from better days. She’s probably mid 30s. Driving my dad’s orange Carrerra. Wearing a squirrel fur coat (mostly white with some black markings). And black wraparound shades. Hair up in a beehive covered by a scarf. Pullled over by IL state trooper for speeding. And he thought - what? Obviously - that Mom was a hooker!

And there was mom just being mom. Cool. I hope she yelled at him.

That reminds me of something that happened to my grandmother, kind of similar - anyway, she learned to drive late in life, after my grandfather died, so she could be self-sufficient. But my grandmother was probably just a bit shy of 5’ tall, and she was one of those apocryphal grannies that could barely see over the steering wheel. So between those two facts, you can imagine that my grandmother had a very idiosyncratic approach to driving, and didn’t pay a bit of attention to her relationship to all those damned lines in the road. Anyway, one time I was riding along in the backseat doing my thing, and she was pulled over by a trooper who questioned her under suspicion of being under the influence. Oh man, that guy did not know what he was in for. I give him points for taking his tongue lashing like a man, though.

I’m pretty sure Mom’s reaction was cold, distant and aloof. She had nothing to prove to people. She might have been a tiny bit flattered, there weren’t many women who had her sense of style in the 60’s and the trooper didn’t know what he was looking at.

Another Mom driving story comes to mind which is probably not that infrequent but I’ll always remember. She’s “tooling” along on a Chicago area expressway. She looks over at the work truck next to her on the left. It has a sign on the door or side as trucks do. I expect the guy was in the steel business. Or construction. And a wicked sense of humour. He’d named his company (and his little head apparently) “Monumental Erections”. Which she found to be funny as I’m sure most of us do.

ddd I’m glad you survived your driving with your granny!

So. . . my cousin was just arrested for accessory after the fact.

He was always a pretty shitty human being. Massively abusive toward me during the summers I’d spend down in Louisiana. Killed small animals, loved to play with weapons and torment people and be a bully. When he got older he flopped around between cook jobs while getting hooked on a succession of drugs, got hit with possession a few times. He inherited by grandparents’ old family home and turned it into a drug den. And then some poor teenaged girl got murdered there and per the cops he probably helped hide the body to cover for one of his “pals.”

I’d wanna stick up for the guy, defend him, say he got pressured into it or was forced but. . . everything I’ve ever known about him makes me actually a little surprised he wasn’t the one getting charged with murder outright.

So. . . yeah.

JFC, my man. JFC.

I don’t mean to be flippant about your situation but man, if you’ve got family in Louisiana then you probably know someone who has helped dispose of a body. I’ve got an uncle who’s pretty … well let’s just say colorful. And to hear him tell it, hey if your friend shows up with a body in the trunk, you’re not going to just leave him twisting in the wind am I right?

I actually have surprisingly little family down there. Dad’s family just produced three kids, and we weren’t ever close to the extended family from mawmaw and pawpaw’s siblings (what little there was). My other two cousins down there wound up being cops, ironically enough.

And it’s not so much as had a body in the trunk as, you know, murdered her in the next bedroom over and casually strolled over to ask what’s up, how we handlin this brosef?


That said, yes, everything I’ve observed about rural Louisiana over the decades tells me you’re not far from right.

Nixxter’s story about his mom being mistakenly confused as a hooker reminded me of this one time in band camp. . .er, wrong story. I left work at midnight, my dad’s drive-thru, it was winter, lots of snow, cold as hell out, and I see a little old lady walking. So I pull over and ask if she needed a lift somewhere. She gets in, starts steering me where she needs to go as we make small convo. Pretty soon she turns to look directly at me for a few moments, and then asks if I’m a cop. I say no (hair was short since I was in the guards). She then asks if I want a date. And my stupid, naive butt sat there for several long seconds wondering why this little old lady wanted to date a big young guy, until it finally donned on me what she meant by ‘date’. So in an effort to cover for the delayed response and my rural ignorance, I tried a joking, “You couldn’t handle me in bed.” To which she replied, “Honey, you’ve got nothing I haven’t already had.”

I wasn’t sure which of the two of us I felt the worse for at that moment, and I changed the subject. I ended up taking her to her destination, a house, even though every cell in my body was screaming to kick her out of the car. I then went home and told my girlfriend about it (now wife). She still likes to tell the story about how her husband picked up a street prostitute in downtown Springfield, Ohio, combined with how years later I stupidly ran over to a group of prostitutes in broad daylight who were waving at me while we were in Austria because I thought they were just regular women who needed help with their car.

Not a recent story, I know, but it sprang to mind and remains amusingly embarrassing enough to tell.

LOL, that’s fantastic! How did that end up?

Hey, now your story reminds me of my own weird prostitute story. See this one time at Mardi Gras (story is even seasonally appropriate y’all!) I was walking from my friend’s place out to the French Quarter for a night of, you know, Mardi Gras.

Well I walk around the corner with a friend and we are passing a couple of dudes in cowboy hats and boots along the sidewalk, and we both kind of converged on this older woman sitting on the steps of an apartment. She calls out to one of the Cowboys, who I hear say to his friend, “Looks like we got ourselves a working girl”, his friend laughs in agreement.

Well this woman didn’t care for being laughed at and she yells at their backs as they walk away. Then she turns to look at my friend and I, tried to get our attention as we avert our eyes and pick up the pace. We hear her yell, “don’t you walk away from me while I’m talking to you” and she comes after us. We walk a little faster, she walks a little faster, so we start to run and she pursues. Before long we find a crowd to lose ourselves in but I still find that memory funny. Some aggressive prostitutes out there.

With the girls talking to me and not knowing English themselves. So a bit of tugging on me, me slowly realizing what was going on, my wife and the rest of our group laughing their butts off at me, and me sheepishly walking back over to them. Not exciting, just another, “John and his inability to spot a sex worker.”

Now, a better story is this once in a gay bar with friends and some dude I’d never met before trying to be my pimp and telling me how much money we could make if I’d be willing to have sex with older men. I was young, I needed the money. . . . . j/k That guy was incredibly persistent in his sales pitch, at one point responding with a, “You have d*ck written all over your face,” after I’d told him I wasn’t gay, I was just there with friends. I literally had no response to that comment.

I was talking to my dad last night. He was getting ready to go to a show. “Going to go see Janis Joplin…she’s in her seventies so well see” i said, dad she died back in the 70’s. He was confused. I said it’s probably a tribute.

I was right.

Is your dad in his 70’s? :)

So many great stories here, I can’t keep up!

Unfortunately, I have no prostitute story. :(
I’m kind of surprised that @RichVR hasn’t chimed in with one. :)

That’s classic!

Back in 1993 (age 33), I bought myself a brand new full-sized gray on white 4X4 Chevy Blazer, all loaded out. The thing was absolutely gorgeous and cost me a fortune (nope, can’t find a decent photo online). I was very proud of the thing, and washed it nearly every day at first.

One evening, I had taken my girlfriend out for supper. When we came out of the restaurant, we headed for my pride and joy in the parking lot near the street. Like I always did, I opened the passenger door first to let the girlfriend in. As I shut the door after she’d got in, I backed up to admire my new Chevy once again.

About then, an older man and woman walked past on the sidewalk, and the man waved and called out to me, “Chevrolet is not dead!”

I wasn’t prepared for that, so, not knowing how to respond, I thrust my fist in the air triumphantly and yelled back, “Long live the king!”

As I walked around to my side of the vehicle, I noticed that both of them kept turning around as they walked away, giving me a funny look.

As I climbed in behind the wheel, my girlfriend, who had overheard everything through the closed window, said, “That was a nice thing for him to say.”

I was now confused. “What nice thing?”

“About you opening the door for me.” Slowly, it dawned on me what had happened. By now they were a block away, still glancing backward, and I was sorely tempted to get out and run after them to try and explain.

That made me laugh, awesome!

That was funny. :)