Southern Crazy

By Beth Yarbrough

If you by chance came across us one late afternoon a couple of years ago on the Gulf Coast, wandering down some side street looking a bit twisted up and twitchy, it was because we were in search of a couple of these hats. It had been one of those days. Let me explain.

The invitation had come from a small historical society in a Southern college town. They were eager to hear the story of Jean Laffite. Their credentials looked promising. Never mind that we had driven six hours to get there. The honorarium more than made up for it, and this was going to be fun.

By contrast, many such engagements are not exactly a romp across a field of daisies. Paid organizers frequently have no business in that line of work, as many of them clearly couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag. We had come to expect that. As well, we knew there would be a few “talkers” who would be the source of a couple of good giggles once we were on our way out of town.

Prepared as we were for all of this, however, nothing in our repertoire of past encounters had equipped us to handle the man known simply as Tater. Even today, two years later, we can’t mention his name without smiling.

He was a self-made philosopher. As he put it, “When you go through regular school, law school, and medical school, and come out on the other end with nothing to show for it, then, by God, you at least deserve a title. Hell, I worked an oil rig out in the Gulf for two years and ran a carnival for three - learned everything I need to know about life right there. Should have tried that first.”

We were afraid to ask what happened with law and medicine to disqualify him. In fact, there would have been no opportunity to ask much of anything anyway. The car had barely stopped moving when the passenger door opened and there he stood, already in mid-sentence. We later assumed the first few words had been “Hey, how y’all doing?”, but never mind. By the time we heard his voice, he was already extending his hand and helping Ashley out of the car and talking “philosophy”.

He didn’t look like much of a philosopher (though I probably wouldn’t know one of those at a glance anyway). You could see the remains of what once had been a handsome man, but by the look of his ripped jeans, Grateful Dead t-shirt and flip flops, I would have put him somewhere around Mallory Square in Key West working the sunset crowd as a fire-breather. It just goes to show. The event organizer stood behind him, and finally got a word in to introduce herself.

We circled to the back to open the trunk and begin unloading books. He beat us there. Had the trunk open and two cases of books in his skinny arms before we could catch a breath, talking ninety miles an hour the whole way. As I juggled car keys, the trunk lid, and a tidal wave of words coming out of our new best friend’s mouth, I caught Ashley out of the corner of my eye, being hastily pulled inside the front door of the grand old hall by the organizer.

“I am SO SORRY”, she breathed in Ashley’s ear once they got inside. Frantic, breathless, and panicked, she continued. “Tater hasn’t had his meds!! I don’t know what we’re going to DO. Somebody was supposed to go by his place early this morning and make sure he dosed up. That clearly hasn’t happened.” (His full name was Rand Champion Tait, and yes I made that up to protect us all. Tater was the natural nickname that found him early in life, and now at pushing 70, it had never left).

He had money. All the best lunatics in the South have money. Most of them live in great old houses, too, unless they’re living in a rusty Air Stream up on blocks somewhere near water and a beer joint. In Tater’s case, it was the great old house, and a great old family to go with, seven generations deep in this part of the world. There were enough doctors, lawyers and judges on the family tree to fill a small stadium, though all of them were now gone, dutifully ensconced in the prestigious family graveyard on the grounds of the estate. The family seat these days needed a roof and a coat of paint, but the main feature was dozens of bicycles, used, broken, abandoned and unintentionally curated by Tater himself all over the front lawn.

It’s not an uncommon wrinkle in Southern culture - a distinguished family reaching great heights only to dwindle itself down to one last certifiably crazy seed. And there he stood, all flip-flopped six feet two inches of him, still talking. We headed into our presentation on thin ice. There was a decent chance that Rand Champion Tait was about to steal all the thunder clean away from Jean Laffite.

Setting up for a book talk takes a few minutes of fiddling with Power Point, arranging a sales table, making sure the microphone works. During the course of all that, the Too Much Information tour rolled on.

There had been three wives. The first one was the love of his life. She bore him two children, one of whom was now a State Supreme Court judge, which prompted in us the hopeful notion that the family line might just emerge victorious after all. The other child had drifted off to California and then Singapore - long gone. Wife number two was just after his money and got none of it as she exited the marriage. And ex number three was still trying, though his attorneys had so far been successful in convincing her that the Great Tait Bicycle Fortune was the only meat left on the bone.

Forgetting himself, he then launched into the fling with the preacher’s wife, back before she found the Lord and way before he lost his mind. We were trying to keep up with the tale between crises with the Power Point, and issues with the book table, and were just getting to the good part about the state of their attire (or lack thereof) in the back seat of a 1976 convertible, when one of three others in the room (all men as luck would have it - early arrivals to get a good seat), shouted out “JESUS, Tater! Get a GRIP, for God’s sake!”

The poor little hand-wringing organizer had evaporated into thin air, and yet the room was beginning to fill up in earnest. Someone had found a way to distract Tater in conversation, at which point we split for the ladies room and a glorious five minutes of hysterical, cleansing, knee-buckling, crying out loud laughter before it was time to go on.

Maybe it was our dazzling ability to hold an audience (ahem!), or maybe they had managed to slip those meds into Tater in some sort of an eleventh-hour Hail Mary, but whatever the reason, we got through the show, brought the house down, and sold a few books.

And Tater, miraculously and suddenly, was all ears.

On the way out the door, we received a pair of flirty hugs and an invitation to dinner at the Tait estate. And from the sound of it, once you got past the bicycles, and providing he kept up with his dosage, the man knew a thing or two about good food, (which is, we might add, yet another hallmark of most good Southern lunatics.) But we politely declined, and we sort of hated it, too, because Rand Champion Tait was starting to look more and more like a book begging to be written.

He still does, come to think of it.