Stupid People Make Me Drink - Part II
by Harry Flashman

The Modern Day Proletariat, Illustrated

It's hard to believe that I was a socialist in college. But I was, and fairly rabid too. I wasn't your flaccid Swedish or Canadian version, either. I was damned Marxist-Leninist about it.

I read all the obligatory philosophy: The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, Lenin, even the discredited Trotsky. My emerging adult mind imprinted on communist concepts and brushed aside more troubling concerns about the effect of nationalism on a universal socialist brotherhood, or even the misapplication of Marx's theories to an essentially agrarian society as in the case of Tsarist Russia. No matter. It was quite revolutionary and attractive to me, suburban middle class boy that I was.
Those theories came to me, however, before I had a chance to fully appreciate the true nature of the proletariats, who, as you may be aware, are conspicuously absent from the college lecture halls.

Following my undergraduate career, I took a job with the local sheriff as an emergency dispatcher and fill-in jailer. Rather soon after, my socialist underpinnings began coming loose. In fact, I think we can trace my abandonment of Marxism-Leninism as a true political philosophy (although not completely discarded for its ability to pick up a few stray bints here and there) to one man in particular: Harley J. Hattabaugh, III.

Mr. Hattabaugh was a 30-something itinerant bricklayer, roofer and general pain in the ass who lived in a small town within the county. He was not a vagrant, nor was he insane - two classes of persons who might deserve special care from the governmental authority.

No. Mr. Hattabaugh was simply white trash. He was a strapping lad, a good 6 feet tall and about 17 stone, with long blond Bon Jovi ringlets, heavily muscled but with an appalling taste in clothes.

The first time I saw him, he had emerged, somewhat worse the wear from a fight with his estranged wife (or as he would refer to her his "ex-old lady"). Although he had managed to get in a few good belts to the chops, she had savaged him with a frying pan and broken his nose. He was brought into the jail, raving, and it took six of us to restrain him using modern correctional institution techniques and at least one good kick in the nuts.

As a poster boy for the American branch of Lumpenproletariat International, Herr Hattabaugh exhibited every mandatory interest. He was keen on engines, particularly loud ones. Never fond of "fancy book learnin'," he was, ironically, a voracious student of anything to do with alien abductions or the second coming of Elvis, although books, articles and printed matter covering those subjects remained difficult for him to completely master unless they were copiously illustrated.

Auto racing and drunken brawling were his two main hobbies, and if a brawl was not forthcoming, simple drunkenness formed an acceptable substitute. His taste in women mirrored his personal fashion sense and he appeared to be attracted to anything vaguely female, human, and fecund.

His ex-old lady, Tonya, was a 35 year old termagant, with an early 1980's hair helmet, thin as a rail, but with a top hamper that could only be described as preternatural. She had a perpetual cigarette slurring the stream of profanities that flowed effortlessly from her dentally unhygienic yap, and the inevitable brood of four boys, the eldest barely 8 years younger than her.

With a bit of powder blue eye shadow and a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on her forearm, she was the very picture of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. As far as I know, her principle form of employment consisted of administering corporeal punishment to Harley and her four sons. Public intoxication ran a close second.

It was an on-again, off-again, fiery courtship for those two love birds, let me assure you. But in the first few months I worked at the Sheriff's Department, both of them had been arrested half a dozen times, invariably for beating up the other, although Harley, in a rare burst of creativity, did manage a drunk driving rap completely on his own.

Starry eyed with LUV, Tonya dutifully appeared at the jail that night to bond him out and the entire jail staff was deeply touched to see them reunited, hand in hand, as they strolled through the sallie-port, her in a shimmering pair of cut-off shorts and a halter top, and Harley in his very best "I'm With Her Because She Gives Good Head" T-shirt.

I voted for Reagan that year.

-www.kcdrinker.com- ã2003 All Rights Reserved

Harry Flashman is the classiest guy he knows. He's a certified (and certifiable) snob, a die-hard conservative and an unrepentant rat bastard with a sense of humor bordering on the sociopathic. He resides in Columbia, MO with his five fraternity brother roommates and an alcoholic dog named Horace. In his spare time he enjoys combing city streets for Hispanic women under the age of 15.