COLUMN: Citizen's Arrest in the Pop Bottle Caper

By Tobin Barnes
My old man hated flies...for one thing.
   
Uh huh, you say. Okay, but doesn’t everyone hate flies, even the kinda pretty ones that are metallic blue and metallic green? Like, what good are they other than processing dead stuff?
   
Yeah, but not like my old man hated flies. At the motel, he hated them viscerally, like flydom was after him personally. Like they could buzz into his pocket and fly away with his money if they wanted to.
   
And he thought that’s they did...metaphorically speaking.
   
Back then, people drank their pop out of bottles. Wooden pop cases that fit onto wire stands were left beside pop machines so people could leave their empty bottles in them. And that was our setup at the motel, too.
   
Most people left their empties behind because they were worth only two cents apiece for trade in. Yeah, two cents. Big deal. Had to be a miser to hoard pop bottles for the prospect of someday cashing them in for maybe a buck or two.
   
Heck, that’d be thinking like my old man. That’s right. He loved pop bottles, but I’m telling you right now he hated them, too, almost as much as flies. After all, he had to sit there and worry about losing those pop bottles.
   
Maybe kids loved pop bottles as much as he did. Ten bottles were twenty cents for a kid back then, and twenty cents could buy a couple gobs of penny candy or even the big stuff like five cent Snickers or Milky Way bars. That made pop bottles worth stealing for some kids.
   
And so we had a problem with pop bottle theft at the motel. That’s right, we were suffering shrinkage in our projected pop bottle inventories. Drove my old man nuts to lose this kind of cash flow to delinquents.
   
So another one of my jobs as a seven-year-old at the motel was to keep an eye out for pop bottle looters.
   
Well, it so happened that one day I looked out the window while the old man and I were watching Jeopardy and sure enough, I saw crime in progress. So I dropped the dime to my old man who was sitting on the couch, and skewed justice was instantly set in motion.
   
He blew off that couch and through the door like someone had finally touched off the big one. That poor kid--a guy now, I assume--is probably still in therapy trying to get over seeing a 250-plus-pound former pro football fullback come roaring after him like someone had just hiked the ball.
   
Despite the shock of seeing a pin-striped, bibbed-overhauled ball of fury eating up ground in his direction, the kid made a pretty good effort at escape, bottles clanking around in the baskets of his bicycle.
   
He was just about to hop on the bike seat when my old man planted a perfect punt right in the seat of the kid’s pants. The kid instantly turned into a screaming mess, but, vengeance taken, my old man let him ride away with the bottles.
   
Thereafter, my old man suffered and hobbled a good week from the impact of the kid’s butt on his already inflamed ingrown toenail.
   
Enough said, I guess, except a grown man would probably find himself in jail if he pulled something like that today...bottle thief or not. 
   
So you can see my old man loved his pop bottles, but he also hated them for reasons other than worrying about losing them. It had to do with those pesky flies.
   
I’ll tell you more about that next time. (Sorry. I guess it’s going to be a while before I get to my perfect kid-job from which all this subsequently grows. It’s a therapeutic process, after all.)

Best Late Night Jokes

COLUMN: Life at the Bates Motel

By Tobin Barnes
My world of work began as a seven-year-old at the motel my parents leased in my hometown. Eventually I graduated into my perfect kid-type job suggested, offhand-like but clairvoyantly, by Rocky the car dealer.
   
Among my first jobs at the motel, other than sheepishly placing leaflets advertising the motel under car windshield wipers at the World’s Only Corn Palace (would there ever be a reason for another corn palace?), I was the motel’s first switchboard operator.
   
This wasn’t exactly at the dawn of electronic communication, but, yeah, the motel had a switchboard, whereby guests who wanted to talk to the outside world had to first call down to the office to obtain a old-fashioned “line.”
   
And I’m not promoting myself as a mechanical wunderkind, but I, as a seven-year-old, was the first in the family to learn to operate the beast. Then, some short time later, under my patient tutelage, came my mother, and after that, my brothers, who were supremely unmotivated to be clerks, especially since their much younger brother was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about the whole thing.
   
Bringing up the rear--days, if not weeks, later--was my old man. Necessity being the mother of education, he eventually conceded that I might require a life away from the switchboard and finally grew accustomed to the finer points of inserting this plug into this hole and that plug into that hole.
   
Being the seven-year-old disembodied voice of the motel early on and much of the time thereafter, I can only imagine what kind of rinky-dink or child-labor exploiting joint the guests thought they’d checked into. 
   
But then, if they had rented the room through my old man, dressed in striped, bibbed overalls with or without a t-shirt underneath, they might have already thought they were spending a night at the Bates Motel and had prudently blocked their doors with furniture. I’m thinking many a nervous shower were taken in our rooms.
   
Speaking of advertising...well...maybe not just now but at the beginning when I mentioned those leaflets, my old man got another publicity brainstorm. He thought it would be great to put a billboard on the back of the family car informing the motoring public that our motel was three blocks north of the World’s Only Corn Palace.
   
And no big deal there...many businesses still do the same thing. But my old man had a way of taking the ordinary and spinning it into something bizarrely absurd.
   
Anyway, one or the other of my older brothers was ordered to take the car, sporting the billboard, for a spin around town, particularly where tourists thinking about lodging were likely to be and at the time they were likely to be there theoretically thinking these thoughts. Yeah, late afternoon or early evening.
   
Developing this hypothesis one step further, my old man evidently imagined Joe, the average tourist, making this or some-such statement to his wife: “Hey, Marge. See that advertisement up on the car ahead. I’m getting tired and I have no idea where we’re going to spend the night. How about going to that motel three blocks north of the World’s Only Corn Palace.”
   
“Yeah, Joe, maybe we should just follow them there.”
   
Yeah, uh huh, I agree. Well, it gets even freakier. Since I was usually riding along, my old man figured we might be accomplishing another task while we were out trolling for lunkers. He thought I should be checking other motels we drove past to see how many customers they had so he could eat his guts out about how few we had in relation.
   
It got down to where I was keeping a detailed tab on the number of cars in each motel parking lot so I could more accurately report the status of our current upsurge or decline in relation to the competition. Statistically speaking, that is.
   
Now you can see why I was so glad to eventually get the perfect kid-job that I’ll tell you about next time. Maybe.

Monologue | Tuesday night on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on NBC: A lot of people continue to be very upset by the fact that we can’t get Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden? We can’t even get Roman Polanski.

Well, according to a new survey, 49 percent of the people in Iowa want a law like Arizona’s to stop illegal immigration. You know what you call Mexicans in Iowa? Lost.

A Beautiful message About Growing Old:     
      
                  

                             

            Shit ...           I forgot what it was....

(Sent by Roy Wilson)

How About Well Done?

Did You Know This About Leather Dresses?

Do you know that when a woman wears a leather dress,
a man's heart beats quicker, his throat gets dry,
he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally. 

        

Ever wonder why? 






 

---

It's because she smells like a new golf bag

(Sent by Joey Larson)

COLUMN: Working Can Be a Job

By Tobin Barnes
Rocky thought it’d be a good summer job for me.
   
He was more than right. It was perfect. And it would continue to be perfect for four summers when I was a kid. But I didn’t know it yet.
   
Rocky, a local car dealer, and my old man were buddies. They’d known each other from boyhood. My old man liked Rocky because Rocky remembered when my old man was a great athlete even though everyone else had forgotten or never cared.
   
My old man also liked Rocky because he was a BSer just like him. Neither could out-BS the other no matter how much they tried. And, man, they tried. But it was a draw, except in one area.
   
My old man would drop in at Rocky’s office on a whim, and they’d go at it...verbally.  It’d be thick and heavy, and it’d be about everything, whether they knew anything about it or not. I’d sit there amazed, dazzled at their total lack of regard for facts.
   
Only advantage one had over the other that I could ever see was that sometimes my old man would end up driving off Rocky’s lot with a new car. My old man always thought he was getting a deal, and Rocky always knew he wasn’t.
   
Gotta admit, though, Rocky did steer my old man into the best deal of his life. Talked him into leasing a motel. That’s when my old man was quitting his latest job, so he was desperate, didn’t know what to do. Didn’t have any money to do anything other than look for another job.
   
Rocky said he ought to lease this motel. The motel was owned by Rocky’s old man’s corporation. Rocky’s old man was loaded, but he needed someone to take on a motel.
   
Now my old man at the front desk of a motel wasn’t a picture you’d envision if you knew him. He was a big, burly, barrel-chested, former pro football player with a buzz haircut and usually a day or two’s growth of beard, who sported bibbed, striped, Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls and a white t-shirt. Sometimes, on a hot day, he didn’t wear the t-shirt.
   
My old man standing at the counter of a junk yard with a mangey, nicked-up, wild-eyed dog at his feet would have made sense. My old man charming guests at the front desk of a motel three blocks north of “The World’s Only Corn Palace”? Not so much.
   
But, huh, it worked. Turned out that traveling salesmen (no joke coming here) liked to BS, too. Who would have thought? And it also worked because my mom was there to handle the details.
   
I was only seven at the time, but that was the beginning of my work-a-day-world. There would be many chores I would perform around the place.
   
For example, a box of printed hand-bills advertising the motel had been left in the office. My old man thought they shouldn’t go to waste, so he had me take a goodly stack every day three blocks south to “The World’s Only Corn Palace” and put them under the windshield wipers of tourist cars.
   
It was an ignominious job for a shy kid. I soon discovered that travelers didn’t necessarily want some strange little kid putting stuff on their cars. But although I got shooed away plenty, I’m sure there was a tourist or two who upon reading the hand-bill said, “Gee, Marge, now that we’ve enjoyed looking at the world’s only corn palace so much, let’s drive three blocks north to this fine motel.”
   
But only a tourist or two. Thankfully, there wasn’t enough evidence to justify the cost of another printing, so this excruciatingly painful introduction to the world of work mercifully ended.
   
Blessed, little, parochially instructed innocent that I was, it never occurred to me that I could have just as well tossed that stack of ads every day, waited an hour or two somewhere enjoyable, and then showed up back at the motel afterwards.
   
Nope, I was destined to be a truthful, respectful, and responsible worker there at the motel and in my future perfect summer job that I will surely get to next time. But, then, truthfully and respectfully? Maybe not.

Dog Fetches Beer