This man walks into a bar on Mother’s Day and finds himself perched on a barstool between an alligator who’s obviously had too much to drink and a born again Christian woman. Not having had much experience with born again Christian women sitting at a bar at eleven o’clock in the morning, on Mother’s Day, no less, the man turns to the alligator and says, “Hey, how’s it goin’?”
The man has had experience with alligators in bars (although never on Mother’s Day, he thinks to himself), and knows enough to know that you better say something when sitting down next to an alligator, because if there’s one thing alligators hate, it’s being ignored.
The alligator swivels on his barstool, and it’s quiet enough in the bar that you can hear his tail scraping along the floor as he turns, which might alarm some people, particularly those who’ve never heard the sound of an alligator tail dragging across a dirty, barroom floor, but like I’ve already said, this man has had some experience with alligators in bars, and barely pays it any mind at all. He watches as the alligator slowly raises his beer to his lips, peering at him over the top of his glass with unblinking eyes, then watches as the alligator takes a deep drink that leaves foam sticking to his upper lip and several glistening and pointy teeth that don’t quite tuck in.
“Don’t worry about me, friend, “the alligator says to the man, “I’m on the wagon,” then swivels back on his stool and says to the barkeep, “Barkeep, how about some nuts.”
“Right there in front of you, alligator,” the barkeep says from the far end of the bar as he wipes out ashtrays with a dirty towel, stacking them one by one into three, neat piles.
It’s about this time that the born again Christian woman slides a big, black Bible across the bar towards the man. “Don’t you go worrying about him, honey,” she says, patting the Bible with one hand and his forearm with her other. “God’s got your back.”
She flashes him a big, toothy smile, which somehow seems ironic, the man thinks, sitting there as he is between an alligator and a born again Christian woman, but then again, he reminds himself, he doesn’t really have any experience with born again Christian women in bars, and maybe it’s not ironic at all, so instead of wasting any more time thinking about something he doesn’t know anything about, he tries to catch the barkeep’s eye to get himself a beer, wishing that he could raise up his arm to flag him over, but can’t because the woman is still busy patting it. This all happens just about the time that the man is caught off guard for the first time since walking into the bar, when the woman stops patting momentarily, looks him straight in the eye, and asks, “Buy me a drink, honey?”
Now, apparently mostly fools find themselves sitting at bars on Mother’s Day, because as the man sat there thinking about the woman’s question, it began to occur to him (much too slowly, I might add) that he had had his back turned to the alligator for quite some time now, which the alligator was sure to interpret as being ignored, and which, as has already been pointed out, something that alligators tend to dislike.
And this, I guess I’ll also point out, was just about the time that the man, for the second time since walking into the bar on Mother’s Day, was taken off guard.
“If you’ll excuse me for just a moment,” the man says to the woman, “I just need to --”, which was as far as the man got with his sentence when the alligator leaned over on his barstool and chomped off the man’s head with a single bite. The woman’s hand, I’ve been told, did stop patting the man’s arm as she watched his head disappear in mid-sentence, but her other hand, I’ve also been told, never missed a beat on that Bible, but of course, this may or may not be an exaggeration, considering the natural tendency barroom stories have for changing as the years pass, and this story, if what I’m told is true, happened many, many years ago.
“Ugghh,” the alligator says as he spits the man’s head out onto the floor. “These aren’t nuts!”
“Not that one, you idiot,” the barkeep says, continuing to stack the ashtrays neatly from the far end of the bar. “The other one.”