Bad Pie in Hazzard County

I’m stupid. I had a girlfriend once, through no fault of my own. After our first date, I became aware that, although she was attending college, she didn’t actually live at the college. She just crashed with other college girls. When the date was over, she stayed…all summer. I didn’t really want her to stay, but I didn’t know what else to do with her. So she became my girlfriend, much to my puzzlement. I am aware, and was aware at the time, that this was not the way it was done, certainly not desirable, but it was one of many things with which I could not cope.

She moved in. This was not a long process, and really consisted of her not leaving. At some point we made a trip to her parents home to pick up some textbooks and clothes. This trip is the reason I mention any of this. Her name was...let's say Daisy.

Like most people, Daisy had no honest mechanism to get attention, so she used tricks. Her tricks almost always failed. For instance, she would fish for sympathy by telling me an anecdote about how she tripped over the dog and fell down the stairs. At least, I thought it was an anecdote, an entertaining one. She seemed puzzled and hurt by my snickering. The trick she used to make the trip to her parents’ house seem more palatable to me, was a picnic. This trick worked, though it accounts for my aversion to picnics. I’d heard her mother and she discussing the picnic but as she hung up the phone she rolled her eyes, sighing “My parents are having a picnic, and I have to bring dessert”. Though we had nothing in common aside from my apartment, I thought I identified with that gesture, which was probably why I agreed to go. Yech! A family thing. She hadn’t told me much about her family. Just that her father had two Maseratis that he was restoring, that her mother and she looked “so much alike”, and that there was a mansion down the street from her that she’d always loved. There were no tip offs, no red flags, no blaring air raid siren and a screaming voice saying “Don’t go to her parents house! You’ll die like the others!” I thought “Okay we’ll go endure it, together.” Nothing in all my experience as a human prepared me for this.

She made a pie. Now, I’m no baker, but I have cooked a meal or two and I’ve even eaten a few things that came out, well, not so good, but as I watched the monstrous, sticky pile of unsavory goo that she poured into a pie tin and called dessert, I knew it was not going to be a good pie. I said to myself, “Don, there is no way that crud is passing your lips”. I think I remember the recipe. For the crust, she mixed flour and water in roughly equal parts, and added a dash of absolutely nothing else. In third grade I made for a school project a volcano from the same ingredients that would have made a more appetizing pie crust. She smeared this wet mortar into a pie tin, sliced some apples on top, gobbed on a few more clots of volcano paste in lieu of a top crust, and into the oven. Twenty minutes later, as the flour had just begun to think about trying to cook, she pronounced it done. I pronounced it a different way. So she couldn’t bake. Who cares?

We packed up the “pie” and set out for the town of Daisy’s birth. Well, at least she had described it as a town, or at least a neighborhood…or at least a place. About 25 miles of rather featureless highway south of the city, we came to the exit. Then two quick rights and a couple more miles. As we drove, I noted that a fog had rolled in, making it difficult to get a handle on the terrain. Was it farmland? It certainly seemed flat. As it turned out, that fog had been obscuring the landscape for years, and had not rolled in, but had actually been generated, by what was not farmland, but swamp. We passed a large dilapidated farmhouse, uninhabited, except for some crows in what had once been a yard, its windows loosely boarded. In white chalk was handwritten “4 sale” on the front door. I didn’t realize the significance of this landmark, until Daisy mentioned “There’s the mansion I told you about.” Already the day had assumed the surreal character of a Vacation movie. I knew that before long I’d meet Uncle Eddie. It was still early.

Another mile or so into the bog, we approached the home of my vagabond girlfriend. To this point, I hadn’t thought of her as a girlfriend and I couldn’t really think of the structure that we were approaching as a home, and the closer we got, the less I wanted either of those things to be true. As I pulled into the driveway time began to slow, seconds passing in agony as though they couldn’t believe what they were looking at. I was down with those seconds, hesitating before slowly ratcheting the keys to the off position. I didn’t hear the ignition click off or the engine go silent. All I could hear were the dogs. I didn’t know how I was going to live through that day. I mustered a significant level of detachment, not the same level as I would later have to muster, but still lots, and got out of the vehicle, the Jeep, my chick machine. I walked to the other side of the car and together we took our first steps through the front yard to the front door. I’m being generous. This was not technically a front yard. A front yard is filled with grass, shrubs, maybe a flower garden, a wishing well, whatever. This yard was filled with dogs. No fewer than four vicious, mangy, rabid, snarling, animal shelter rejects, barked and threatened and showed their yellow slavering fangs as they ran back and forth at the ends of chains secured to steel posts driven into the hard packed dirt. They were spaced at intervals such that the perfectly spherical dirt patches that each had made left a sort of natural walkway of relative safety up to the front door. “What are their names?” I asked. “They don’t have names,” was Daisy’s smiling answer. As the day wore on I would come to wish I had taken my chances with the dogs, but since they never stopped barking, I knew they were always an option.

The house was painted yellow...once. Now it was not really painted at all. And, yes, it was a trailer. The roof appeared to be constructed of a certain type of thick moss, mostly. Clearly, this natural fiber had been used to replace the less hardy shingles that, lets face it, don’t do much except keep the rain out. The garage, set back behind the house somewhat, was a handcrafted affair, which I didn’t get a real good look at until some time later. I was of course looking forward to checking out those Maseratis. We stepped up a double step into the front door (why replace those steps when you can jump?) which led into the kitchen and were soon greeted by Daisy’s mother, whose name was also Daisy. She was an unhappy woman, a woman who deserved better. She deserved to live in a trailer park, a place where you can be proud of your trailer, a place where this trailer would have been run out of town by the other trailers. I immediately liked her. Actually, I immediately pitied her, but I liked her better than my accidental girlfriend. The kitchen I now found myself in had a floor half-covered in speckled green tile. The other half had been pulled up in favor of splintering plywood and used, I believe, to redo the countertops. I can’t be sure, as dirty dishes obscured most of its surface. The problem was obvious. There were too many dirty dishes in the sink to put them anywhere else but on the counter. The removal of the floor tiles may also have been predicated by the large hump that was now where they had been. I’m not sure what caused this hump, more of a mound really. It must have been fascinating to set bits of dirt, unwanted silverware, old bones, and other detritus on its peak and watch as they rolled, tottered or otherwise migrated to the outsides of the room where they now sat, unable to overcome the inexorable force of gravity that had put them there. None of this was quite as horrifying as being introduced as “my boyfriend”. The rest of it had nothing to do with me, but “boyfriend”, that was a term I was entirely uncomfortable with.

We went to collect her books and some clothes. I have no idea what she needed books for, actually. I couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to class. We started down the hall, and on the way to an attic storage area, passed her brothers’ room. Room singular. Brothers’, plural and possesive. She had three brothers. I’m going to call them Enos, Cletus, and Roscoe. At least two of these, let’s say Enos and Cletus, shared a room, which both now occupied. Enos was watching wrestling on a small black and white TV on a shelf at the foot of his bed, while Cletus was playing Nintendo on a slightly larger color set. I have almost nothing to say about them, except that, it’s a good thing we showed up when we did, because later in the day their sister Daisy stuck a Tupperware bowl over Enos’ head and cut his hair in the back yard. The back yard, lacking the pack of dogs, was at least properly termed - it had grass and was in the back. The third brother, Roscoe, may have also had a room, or he may have simply taken shifts with the other boys. In any case I didn’t meet him until nearly dinnertime. When the books and clothes had been suitably secured in a paper bag and set by the door, I heard the unmistakable clank of a rusted out green-primer-colored van of questionable make and origin, filled with broken tools, greasy bolts, gunk, and other objects. Actually, mostly gunk. In truth, the clank could have been mistaken for just about anything, but that was what I expected to see, and that was what I soon saw. The objects in the van were the prized procurements of Daisy’s father, who termed them “still good”. I was certain he was misusing at least one of those words.

When we got outside, Daddy, whom I thought of as Boss Hogg, was unloading the van – that is, he was chucking selected rusty gems from the back onto the pile of junk that covered the sticky black concrete slab forming the garage floor. I remembered the two Maseratis. I couldn’t help wondering as we approached this enormous man, how two classic car restoration projects could fit into a single car garage filled with trash. A quick glance into the rafters of the structure, and I had my answer. There were two go-cart sized, soapbox quality vehicles resting in the normally unused space in the garage roof area. One look told me that they were “still good”. Apparently, in those parts, Maserati is used as a generic term for anything with wheels. As I mentioned, Boss Hogg was an enormous man. He was enormously filthy, enormously fat, and I loathed him enormously. Meeting him was exactly unlike meeting Daisy’s mother. I did not pity him. I did not like him better than my girlfriend. He did not deserve better. His enormous tee shirt was translucent with sweat and coated in much of the same grease as the garage floor. I couldn’t tell whether he had gotten the shirt dirty wallowing on the floor or the floor dirty wringing out the shirt. It didn’t matter. He soon removed the shirt to expose his filthy bloated hairy back and belly, and got an enormous beer.

The time between then and dinner was less remarkable. We walked the grounds. Since there were no neighbors, it was difficult to tell where the estate ended and the swamp began. I was pretty sure that homesteading here was just a matter of finding a bit of boggy land slightly higher and drier than the rest, parking the trailer and staking out the dogs. Who really cared? I’m not sure what we did for the rest of the day before the mosquitoes descended and we had to retreat inside, but I know I hated it, and I know also that it required me to, at several junctures, muster more detachment.

Dinner, on the other hand, was remarkable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it was that anyone lived. Because there were so many of us - Daisy, her mom, Boss Hogg, Enos, Cletus, Roscoe, and me – there were not enough chairs at the kitchen table for everyone. The kitchen table had been placed directly above the mound in the floor. I think this was to keep the kids from climbing to its peak and plunging to their deaths. In any case there weren’t chairs enough for the seven of us, the family being unaccustomed to guests. In fact we were two chairs short. Maybe I wasn’t the only guest. The seating dilemma was handled neatly by, I think, Roscoe, the third brother. He secured two white plastic buckets, formerly used to hold spackling paste, which I assume had been wasted somewhere in the house, but had no doubt given its all. I was spared from actually having to sit on either of these overturned buckets, but it was clear that Roscoe bitterly resented my getting a “real” chair and angrily coveted my seat. He simply glared at me through the whole meal, which I was able to easily endure, by thinking of the story I could one day write, if I ever escaped the swamp.

The meal consisted of three items. There was a package of frozen mixed vegetables prepared in the following manner: heated. There was a grey meat bundle, which, before it had met with a 450-degree oven for about 7 hours, had once been beef, probably. And then there was Daisy’s pie. To avoid this conclusion as long as possible, I ate slowly, thoughtfully considering each morsel, taking ridiculously small bites. I chewed using only my canine teeth. I knew that when I finished my slab of meat, which was completely unseasoned but for the questionable sauce of my appetite and tough as an uncooked antler, I’d have to face that pie. I prolonged it as best I could by forking up individual peas onto one tine of my fork, which, through an earlier mutilation, stuck out like a compound fracture, ignoring the other tines which lay roughly parallel. I further processed the vegetables. I cut the corn niblets in quarters. I peeled the lima beans. When the peas were gone I used my defective piece of garage sale dinnerware to impale the quartered corn, the carrot chunks, and finally even the inner lima bean paste and the empty lima hulls. God how I wanted to avoid that pie. I even took seconds on the antler meat. “Mrs. Hogg, I’d love a second helping of the…uh…meat.” But it was not to be. There was no way I was going to avoid that pie. The Hoggs were quick eaters. Soon the pie was on a plastic plate in front of me, staring at me, mocking me, punishing me for being too weak to bolt for the door earlier, too polite (or whatever it was) to drop this girl off back at the stop light where I’d found her, and too unimaginative to trick her into leaving on her own. I finally knew what the term “just dessert” meant. I sucked it up, mustered the last bit of detachment I had, and dived in. I greedily accepted the refill of my water glass. Without it I couldn’t have survived. I picked up slow forkfuls of that crippled pastry, swallowed the uncooked fruit whole and then pretended to chew with my empty mouth. It didn’t matter. I could just feel those slimy blobs of raw flour, swimming in my unwelcoming stomach like lumpy apple gravy. My gut wanted it out of me, but I was committed, committed to survival. Though I’m here to tell the tale, I’m pretty sure that bad pie is the most horrid food on the planet. I refused pie seconds, though I know it hurt Daisy terribly. I had a third glass of water, though I had real misgivings about what came out of the tap at this place.

I had to go. I made excuses that I really needed to get back to the city, work the next day, something that I don’t remember, but wasn’t true. Daisy, clutching her paper sack full of things, and I choking back regurgitation, said our thank-yous and good-byes. I climbed into the driver’s seat of my Maserati and sped off through the fog, leaving the hovel in the swamp behind forever, knowing that as determined as I was to rid myself of this girl, it wasn’t her fault.

I also knew that it wasn’t my fault, so she had to go. A week or so later, we parted ways. She called me a few times subsequently, telling me she had fallen down the stairs, shut her head in the door – something. I was unmoved. I didn’t want to be just friends, or even just acquaintances, so I took as few of these calls as I could and soon she, and her pie recipe, were gone forever.