I said, “I’m kidding. I know what you’re talking about. Yeah, I’m still in that book, from what I understand,” though to be honest I bought the latest edition each September and looked for my name. “It’s plain called the Guinness World Records book, by the way. Most people call it the Guinness Book of World Records, but they’re wrong. It’s the Guinness World Records book, and then a year after it.” I didn’t go into how a few of the new editions had special features, like how the 2008 anthology had glow-in-the-dark sections, and 2009 featured “all new 3-D photography.” Personally, I thought the Guinness people should go back to a plain old black-and-white format, but that’s just me.
“Tell me how many times you got stung,” Adazee said. I thought, oh, I get it: A to Z. Her parents were idiots.
I said, “Do you want to come in?”
Adazee didn’t move. “I work over at Tiers of Joy bakery, and we’ve been remiss in sending you a cake. No one’s ever made it official, but we’re like Calloustown’s Welcome Wagon, especially now that we don’t have a florist anymore.”
“I forget how many stings,” I said, and hoped she didn’t bring up how some guy named Johannes Relleke got stung 2,443 times by bees back in 1962. First off, that was in Rhodesia, which isn’t still around. Two, a bee’s stinger is probably one-third the size of a bald-faced hornet’s. I said, “I still carry some stingers beneath my skin, they say, so the official count’s not exactly official.”
Beneath her apron spilled out on her chest an A and a Z, left to right. I wouldn’t know until later that she wore one of those tourist shirts from Alcatraz, with a number beneath it, as if the old famous convicts wore such garb. Adazee said, “Buzz something. Your name is Buzz something or other.”
I shook my head. “I was just thinking about cake, I swear to God,” I said, but didn’t go into details about how I’d been shaking and wanting booze.
No, I thought about how I got called Buzz, all right, from the moment I returned from the burn clinic in Augusta — I still have no clue as to who thought that would be the proper setting for a boy with a thousand-plus hornet stingers in his body — to my desk at Calloustown Junior High, then right up until I understood that I needed to vacate my hometown’s limits, go to college, get married, attempt to change the world, lose my job due to “unprofessional behavior and insubordination,” then return half-heartedly without my wife to settle my mother’s affairs.
My father, still alive, couldn’t work as the executor seeing as he lived in prison for selling bald-faced hornet nests to the Chinese without fully understanding antitrust laws plus forgetting to pay taxes over twenty years, among other questionable practices in the realm of business ethics.
“Buzz Munson? Buzz Harrell?” Adazee said, hopeful, smart enough to know that since ninety percent of Callous town’s population ended in a “Munson” or “Harrell” she would likely hit the mark.
Man, by this point there with lovely Adazee — I had already experienced my near-daily flashback of standing beneath a paper hornet nest that hadn’t gone inactive, mid-November, my father aiming for the slight branch that sagged from the gray orb’s weight, the shot’s crack, my perfected soft catch, and the hornets streaming for neck, face, hands, and bare arms — I jonesed for booze worse than a stung boy yearns for a slather of saliva-enhanced cigarette tobacco atop his wounds. I looked at my wristwatch and said, “If you ain’t coming inside, how about you show me the closest bar in town? I need a drink. I’ll buy.”
Adazee smiled. “Here you go,” she said, handing over the cake. “It’s the freshest we had. Well, it’s tied for freshest with six others that no one came to pick up. Ever since they changed the requirements for high school graduation, not everyone quite made it, I guess. Or their parents forgot what they ordered, but I doubt it.”
She handed over a cake that read MISTY: CLASS OF 2010! CONGRATULATIONS! in gray and black frosting, the school colors for the Calloustown High School Fighting Ostriches.
I said, “I don’t get it,” because I wondered if she meant to bring the cake to someone else. “I’m not Misty. My real name’s Luther Steadman.”
Adazee said, “Seeing as we’re not officially the Welcome Wagon, we just give out cakes that we either messed up or that the people didn’t come get.”
I flipped back the cellophane-windowed cover, scooped out about two thousand calories, and shoved it in my mouth right there on my parents’ old front porch. I’m talking I scooped up MISTY with my bare hands and funneled her in. My teeth hurt from what refined sugar scraped against my enamel. I tried to say, “I am Luther Steadman” again, but blew crumbs out of my mouth.
“So, they’re saying that you might be moving back for good, and that you’re wife isn’t coming with you,” Adazee said. “And do you really think you should go back to drinking? I always heard that you had a slight problem, and that it started right after you got stung over a thousand times.”
I don’t know if any psychologists have delved into this, but if you ask me there’s nothing but trouble that can happen to a person who comes from a small town, gains notoriety that’s deserved or not — which causes locals to either hate said person or treat him like a celebrity — then have that person move away, return begrudgingly, and try to fit in. I don’t know if there’s something called You-Think-You-Too-Good-for-Us-Now-Son? syndrome, but there should be. I left Calloustown for college, found out that most guys on my hall didn’t care about how many times I’d been stung, didn’t care that I was the only person at the college with his name in about one-point font inside the Guinness World Records book, sulked for a few years, graduated, and immediately got a job at the college in the admissions office as a “recruitment specialist.” Someone there figured out that I might be valuable as a recruiter of prospective students in the Carolinas, say things like, “If someone like me can graduate, then you can, too!” all giddy. It should’ve been “like I can graduate,” I know, but the higher-ups didn’t want me coming off like I had an IQ over 96.
On top of this great job, which kept me on the road meeting some of my state’s more low-bar scholars, I made money on the side as a pitchman for various exterminator companies doing well enough to buy radio and/or TV ads. “You don’t want to end up in the Guinness World Records book like me, so call up Perry Connor’s Pest Control and have him come snoop around your eaves for wasp nests. Annual check-ups might keep you from getting stung!” Stuff like that, which, too, should’ve been “in the Guinness World Records book like I,” but most people who hired out Perry probably went to my alma mater. Hell, my work even bled into areas having nothing to do with hornets. It’s my voice saying, “I got stung by so many hornets that it didn’t look like I had a future. Remember, people, that you can’t spell ‘furniture’ without ‘f-u-t-u-r-e.’ So go on down to Crazy Mike’s and tell him, ‘Who needs IKEA!’” which I’m surprised they didn’t make me call “Me-KEA.”
Then my father got thrown in prison. Then my mother died. Then some people starting talking about things I said to prospective students about how perhaps they should move out of state, or work at McDonald’s. Then a lot of overblown stories went around about drinking I’d committed in prospective students’ hometowns — I’m pretty sure these rumors emanated from Calloustown — and the next thing you know I got released from my college job and the radio spots evaporated. Sometimes, when I’m trying to dig out a long-standing stinger from my inner bicep, I wonder about all the cause-and-effect types of features in everyday life and wonder if maybe the answer showed up in a course I once took in existentialism. It’s not like I could fully pay attention in that class. The professor was one of those nature guys who made us sit in a circle outside most warm days, and with bees buzzing by, or Weed Eaters going off in the distance, I pretty much sat around cross-legged expecting another swarm of hornets while trying to keep my sphincter from shaking hands with my uvula.