Maybelline and the Great Pee Scandal

 

 

 

I’ve made a study of the human condition ever since my grandma slapped me down when she caught me peeing on the wall back in 1954. And I know some of you may have an opinion of granny but let me explain. She was born and raised in Shreveport Louisiana which is fairly indicative of the cultural influences that shaped her grandchild rearing philosophy ie the applied slap at the appropriate time. Let me expand the event so that you may understand.

     She owned a house on Laurel Street. There were two sections. The part where she lived, kitchen, bedroom, parlor, porch and there was an adjacent area with a kitchen, combination bedroom/parlor, and these two floor plans were separated by a hallway extending from the front door all the way to the common bathroom at the other end. That would make grandma’s house a shotgun shack in the legal definition of the word.

     I had this little fat dog named Maybelline after the recent Chuck Berry hit and she ran all over the house. Now I had the run of the house and neighborhood. Yeah yeah yeah. I can’t place my exact age but I wasn’t in school yet and in the common bathroom was my potty chair so you do the math. I’d venture out on Laurel Street and down Dunlap imagining that I was Lloyd Bridges from the TV show, Sea Hunt. I thought I was cool, the neighbors thought I was crazy, but if you are born and raised in Shreveport Louisiana things like that don’t take much notice.

     The long hallway had that cheap, 1940s wallpaper that everybody had. So, one day I came back from my Sea Hunt and was heading down the hall to the bathroom when an inspiration came upon me. Observing the wallpaper peeling from the baseboard, and calculating the distance from mid-hallway to said bath, and I had to pee real bad so . . . when in doubt, whip it out! Well, I didn’t actually whip it out. I fumbled with my zipper and did the thumb and forefinger thing but the end result being I peed on the baseboard. Maybelline stood there watching me, wagging her tail like she had good sense and presently we were back in the street Sea Hunting again.

     I will never understand how my grandmother saw or moreover smelled that pee. But she did! And she was waiting at the scene of the crime when Maybelline and I showed up. Standing there with her arms crossed, holding a willow switch, in her depression era long dress, bun on her head, toe tapping, she stared down at us. Then, surprisingly she snatched Maybelline up, beat the dog crap out of her, rubbed her nose in the wallpaper and slung her unceremoniously out the back door where the hapless creature ran in circles and licked her butt . . . a lot!

     You must understand that I knew I’d peed on that wall. But there were two things at play here. One, I saw that willow switch and having been exposed to that child rearing technique I fairly well knew what the projected course of events would be. When Maybelline took the punishment it took my synapses a moment to sort the event but as Maybelline hit the back yard I considered all things and deduced, “That’ll work!” Entertainment was hard to come by in 1954, and this was a tad bit better than Sea Hunt!

     So . . . the next day more neighborhood prowls, return home, pee a little bit more and watch Maybelline take flight. Now I don’t know how long this went on but I do know that I increased the height of the watermark day by day until one day my sins found me out!

I sent a spray almost to the level of my head. Understand that Maybelline was a pug-nosed mutt reaching below my five year old knees. Granny didn’t have a degree but she did have common sense, whereupon she quickly deduced the unlikely event of the dog spraying three feet or more up a wall. Besides that Maybelline was a girl dog. You LBGTQs out there figure that one out.

     Little known psychological fact: When beaten on or about the legs with a willow switch a five year old’s life will flash before their eyes. It just ain’t that long. To her credit grandma didn’t throw me out the back door but that Sunday she did drag me down to the First Self Righteous Church of Shreveport where the preacher screamed I was going to hay-ell whereupon I was scared of Jesus until I was thirty-five years old.