Dillinger & Holmes

In August, during the Annual Turtleturd County Fair, Little Dickey expected bumper sticker sales to spike dramatically. Since the fair grounds were held in the meadow behind Jeb Dullard’s barn, and since Jeb Dullard’s barn was only two miles up the road from Knucklenutt, the two week period of the fair inundated Knucklenutt by visitors from as far away as Mud puddle Point. To the residents of Knucklenutt, the County Fair was right up there with New York’s Time Square on New Years Eve, New Orleans’s during Mardi Gras, Daytona Beach during bike week, Panama City Beach during Spring Break, and Las Vegas during Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Even Ida Mae Thumpthingle, owner of Knucklenutt’s only cot-and-breakfast establishment, was able to scoop up money by increasing her rates from the two dollars per night she usually charged to ten and still fill all five of her cots. Little Dickey, knowing from past experience just how many people would be visiting Knucklenutt, had enough foresight to set up additional displays of the bumper sticker’s in the bar, the barbershop, the fix-it shop, and the post office sections of his store. Unfortunately he didn’t take into account that five displays were four to many for him to keep an eye on. The first week he chalked up an amazing 343 bumper stickers sold, which was offset by 2, 415 that were stolen. To add injury to insult, Homer Hump had set up a display at the fairgrounds selling bumper stickers that read “It’s in your pants, stupid.” By the time the fair ended Dickie was down by 4,000 bumper stickers.

Three days after the fair had ended life had more or less returned to normal in Knucklenutt. Little Dickie had taken down the four additional displays and had gotten back to his habit of taking naps on his stool during the slow times during the day. It was during one of these naps that Zeke Wattlebun walked in to pick up a supply of pouch tobacco. In a loud voice he said. “Hey! They found BIG Dick!”

Little Dickie opened his eyes, and once they had focused on Zeke’s homely face he rubbed his eyes and said, “Say what?”

“I said, “I don’t know how much you paid to get these doodads printed up,’ and then you woke up,” Zeke said, “but since you was asleep when I said it, maybe I ought’a start again so’s you hear the whole thing all in one whack. I don’t know how much you paid to get these doodads printed up, but it seems to me that you’d get better sales out of ‘em if you advertised. Mind if I open a Billy Beer?”

“Go ahead, and while you’re at it pop me one too. I have a feelin’ that you’re goin’ to give me some advice and I take better advice if I have a beer.”

After opening the two beers Zeke continued. “Make up flyers and stuff them in everybody’s mail slot. Call people on the phone and tell ‘em you got ‘Where’s my Dick?’ bumper sticker’s for sale. Things like that. Oh, and you shouldn’t that be selling them for a dollar, either. To make ‘em sell better you gotta have a 9 as the last number. If you reduce it to 99 cents or goose it up to $1.99 they’ll sell better.”

“How’s your lawn coming along, Zeke?” asked Little Dickie sarcastically.

“Oh, it’s doing OK,” Zeke answered as he took a swig of beer from his bottle. “By Spring it should be all healed if’n the gophers don’t come back.” Sarcasm apparently didn’t work on someone with low I.Q. like Zeke, Little Dickie realized.

They talked some more about this and that, and when Zeke finished off his beer his waved at Little Dickie and headed home. After he’d left Little Dickie added 99 cents to the price of his bumper stickers, and within an hour he had sold two. Within an hour he had sold two.

That night while he was watching midget wrestling on channel 10 out of Birmingham, Little Dickie began thinking about some of the other advice that Zeke had given him. Before getting into bed he’d decided to visit the Knucklenutt Public Library and use their phone book to get numbers to call. Between customers he could easily call twenty to thirty people a day and although it wasn’t a lot it sure beat sitting on his chair and waiting for someone to stop in.

After everything I’ve told you about Knucklenutt you probably have a fairly good picture in your mind of the library. They had 14 books –three of them by Dr. Seuss, three by Steven King, the obligatory dictionary, a one volume condensation of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a book on hunting, a book on fishing, the Holy Bible and “Gone with the Wind” by Scarlett O’Hara. They also had three phone books, each for a different county. Unfortunately for Little Dickie, the phone books were in the reference section and Marion, the librarian, wouldn’t let him check them out. Not losing his resolve, Little Dickey asked Marion, the librarian, for a pencil and a piece of paper which she reluctantly gave to him. For the next twenty minutes Little Dickie diligently wrote down the names and numbers of the first thirty listing in the book for Turtleturd County and when he was through he thanked Marion, the librarian, and whistled all the way back to his store.

The first listing was AAA Farm Tools. Undaunted, Little Dickey dialed the number. “Yes, May I please speak to Mr. Tools,” he asked the girl who answered the phone. The girl laughed and told him that there was no Mr. Tools. Embarrassed by his mistake he quickly hung up the phone.

He didn’t make another phone call for thirty minutes. The next entry he had on his list was AAA, which was the Automobile Association of America in Bubblebutt Hollow and he had to figure out to make the call without embarrassing himself again. He was afraid of calling and he was afraid to skip it as well. It was 9:30 in the morning and he’d only copied down thirty numbers. At this rate he’d either run out of numbers to call or he would have to return to the library again.

When his dimness finally unclouded he realized that it really didn’t matter WHO answered the phone, did it? You could never tell who might have the information he needed, and as long as they had eyes that could see and ears that could hear they could help him look and listen. He dialed the number and when he heard a female voice say “Good Morning! This is the Automobile Association of America, Bubblebutt Branch. May I help you?” he immediately began talking.

“Yes, my name is Little Dickie Dillinger. About six months ago I lost my dick and I was wondering if perhaps you know anything about it.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘I lost a dick last year and I’m trying to find it. I thought perhaps someone you know may have found it.”

“May I have your Membership Number?” she intoned.

“Uhh…I’m not a member.”

“Would you like to be one? It only takes a few minutes to fill in an application. I can take your information over the phone and you can verify it when you come in to pay for the service. May I have your name, sir?

“My name is Little Dickie Dillinger. I thought I’d already mentioned that.”

“Oh, that’s right, you did. OK, so it’s D-I-L-L-I-N-G-E-R as the last name. First name is L-I-T-T-L-E. Do you spell your middle name D-I-C-K-Y or do you spell it D-I-C-K-I-E?” In the background Little Dickie could here the clicking of keys on a keyboard.

“It’s D-I-C-K-I-E, but it really doesn’t matter, does it? My first name is Dickie and Little is only what people call me. Why do you have to have all this information?”

“We do everything backwards here, that why. Dillinger, your last name, is always placed first in our alphabetical files because last names are less common than first names. Can you imagine how hard it would be to pull up a file if it was filed under first names? We got more Elmer’s and Goober’s and Rufus’s than you can shake a stick at. Now, are you male or female?”

“Male, of course. Do I SOUND like a female?”

“No, Sir, you don’t, but when you said you didn’t have a dick it just made me wonder.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t HAVE a dick. I said I LOST a dick.”

“Well, if you lost a dick you wouldn’t have one, would you?”

“I didn’t lose MY dick, I lost BIG dick.”

“Well, you don’t have to lose your temper, Mr. Littledick. We at the AAA are very open minded when it comes to penile enhancement and replacement surgery. We even have customers who have had sex change operations.”

“I don’t WANT to have a sex change operation. I just want to find Big Dick.”

“Well for that you would have to contact a hospital. We at AAA are dedicated to helping you get to where you’re going, but we can’t ‘sell you the car’, if you get my drift.”

“STOP! You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

“I certainly have. I’ve listened to everything you’ve said, and if you yell at me one more time I’m going to call my supervisor.”

“I’m sorry, but damn it you’re driving me nuts.”

“Now you’re talking about your NUTS? FRANK! FRANK! I GOTTA ANUTHER FUCKIN’ PREVERT ON THE LINE!”

Little Dickie hung up the phone and began to quiver. How was he to ever find Big Dick if no one would co-operate with him. He looked at the remaining numbers twenty-eight numbers and all but one were businesses. He picked up the phone and tenuously dialed the number.

He found himself talking to Antonio Ababacaderio, a Sicilian who had immigrated to the United States in 1969. He had been an assassin in Palermo, taking orders directly for Vito “the Vulture’ Vasconinininini, but when Vito had order him to assassinate an assassin called Antonio Ababacaderio, Antonio decided it might be time for a change of scenery. Within a week he had made his way to America, the land of opportunity and anonymity. Finding no listing for assassins in the New York Times Help Wanted pages, and fearing that Vito ‘the Vulture’ had alerted American Mafia Society, Inc. to be on the look out for him he set his sights a little lower and opened a shoe shine stand in Harlem. “It was the wronga business in the wronga side of town,” he told Little Dickie, “Anda I wasn’ta the righta kinda color for a the job”

He made his way Birmingham the next week only to find the same kind of competition so he folded up his shoe shine kit and headed southwest. He eventually made it to Stinky Hollow, a relatively nice hollow as hollows go if you could tolerate the stink, and he made the decision to stay. “Nobody herea wants me toa whacka nobody, and I canta doa mucha shoe shinin’ herea causea nobody seems to weara the shoes,” he told Little Dickie, “Buta the towna Stinky Hollow hasa beena very, very kinda to me.”

Little Dickie listened patiently while Antonio told his amazing story, and when he was finished Little Dickie bridged the gap and began telling him about the missing dick. Antonio began by listening to Little Dickie as patiently as Little Dickie had listened to him, but when Little Dickie mentioned the lost dick Antonio shouted ‘I don’ta knowa nothin’ about no missing dicks! I assassinateda people and nota no dicks!” and then he hung up.

It would have been easy for Little Dickie to give up at this point, and had he known how it would all turn out he would have, but Little Dickie wasn’t a quitter and he continued to stumble along in hopes of finding his granduncles’ dick. Every morning before opening his store he would go to the library and copy down anywhere from thirty to fifty names and phone numbers, depending on how energetic he felt on that particular morning. The days turned in to weeks and the weeks turned into months and on Nov. 27th, 1992, a year and three months after beginning, he had reached the last name in the last of the three phone books in the Knucklenutt library.

It was now time to do the arithmetic. Not counting the business numbers (many of them called and many them not) he had begun with Aaron Abbram in the Turtleturd phone book and finished with Vladimir Zypthero and had made an astronomical number of 42,914 calls (not counting the number of calls made to numbers he wasn’t able to reach on the first try). He had categorized each call at its completion and now that the calling was completed he began adding up the results. It was not a spectacular success. A full 52% were either numbers that had been disconnected for some reason or another, or numbers that had been called over and over again and never reached because they were a) always busy or b) never answered. As for the 48%, 19% thought he was making an obscene phone call and kept him on the line for what seemed like forever, 11% threatened him with bodily injury, 7% were as sweet as sweet could be and tried to talk him into joining their weekly Prayer Meetings, 4 % thought he was going to go to hell and tried to talk him into joining their weekly prayer meetings, and 3% seemed overly eager to describe their own dicks and wanted Little Dickie to describe his in return. The remaining 12 % were evenly split between those that he couldn’t categorize and those that believed him and wanted to help. From this latter group he had even found a few who were actively making calls in his behalf.

(Yes, I know what you’re going to say, but blame Little Dickie, not me. He wasn’t a very good mathematician, but what do you expect from a Turdturtle?)

On the morning of November 30th he walked into the library as usual, but instead of going to the reference section like he had always done he approached the main desk. Marion, the Librarian, was busy stamping the return date on “Horton Hears a Who” for Grandma Tittle who lived in the second trailer on Peepiddle Trail. She had nineteen grandkids and this was their favorite book. After Grandma left Little Dickie turned to Marion, the Librarian, and said, “I guess I won’t be in anymore. I finished the third phone book last night and you only got three.”

Marion, the Librarian, looked over her wire glasses at him “You talked to everybody in all three books?”

“Not all, but most. I kept trying to call all the ones that didn’t answer the first time until I realized that some never answered. I finally gave up on those.”

“You must have talked to a lot of people. I’m surprised that there wasn’t more complaints than there was.” Little Dickie looked more confused than normal.

“Complaints?”

“Didn’t Maynard Scrubbs talk to you about that? He’s come in here three times since you first started calling people, and each time he tells me about the complaints he gets from them.”

“About ME?” Little Dickie said. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong. What’re they complaining about?”

“Your telephone calls. They don’t like all the dirty talk you use when you call them. Maynard said that one woman complained that you talked like that to his twelve year old daughter. He had a hard time talking her out of going over his head and complaining to the Governor.”

“Why didn’t Maynard tell me?”

“Why don’t you ask Maynard?” She paused for a moment and then said, “It’s none of my business, Dickie, but you’d better be a little bit more careful. It wasn’t so bad when you was only calling the folks around here in Turtleturd County – most of them already know the story of Big Dick- but once you started calling people in Bumpbelly and Stinkwater you were bound to start getting complaints.”

Little Dickie was starting to get confused again. “The farther away I get the more chance of finding it,” he finally answered. “That’s why I ordered all them bumper stickers that nobody bought. I was hoping that people would put ‘em on their cars and help me advertise. The further away a car went the more people would see the sign. The only reason I only called those three counties is ‘cause that’s all the phone books you got.”

“Why don’t you drive over to the main library in Stinkwater? They got phone books from all over the world. You could probably cal all the people in China if you wanted to, providing they had telephones and they used the kind of numbers that we do.”

“Now you’re telling me to keep up my calling? You just said I was getting in trouble. Wouldn’t that just get me in more trouble?”

Now it was Marion, the Librarian, who began to get confused. After thinking it through for a long time she said, “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe you SHOULD quit looking for the dang thing, but you don’t really want to, do you?”

“No, Ma’am”

After a long period of silence Marion, the Librarian, said “If I was you - which I ain’t, of course, - I’d keep on calling people, only I’d call folks that lived a long, LONG way away. The further away they were, the less likely they’ll be to complain since they wouldn’t know who you were or who to complain to. Half the fun of getting a dirty phone call is telling a friend about it, that just human nature. Just think of the possibilities. If you called a person and he told his friends, and then his friends told THEIR friends and their friends told THEIR friends and…..well, you never know. Maybe before too long the whole country would be on the lookout for Big Dick. Have you ever thought of offering a reward?”

“If I sell all my bumper stickers I plan to, yes, but it don’t look like I’m going to sell them all. In the meantime I can’t afford a reward. The only thing I got left is my store and I don’t particularly want to give that away.”

All of a sudden Marian, the Librarian, had a epiphany. “I’ve got the answer. If you want to find a dick you go to where people idolize them. I’ll bet a dollar to a gunny sack full of mullets that whoever swiped Big Dick off your counter was some city slicker who was passing through. And I’ll bet you another dollar to a twenty-pound bag of boiled peanuts that he’s got that bottle sitting on the coffee table in his front room and he’s showing it off to his friends right this very minute.

And I’ll bet you another dollar to a little poke in the back room that it’s in one of four places. It’s either in San Francisco, West Lost Angeles, Fire Island, or the Vatican.”

Little Dickey shocked beyond words. He had never spoken to Marion, the Librarian, before today and already she was talking to him about poking. Just the thought of poking her was enough to drive him crazy with lust.

“You really think that’s where it is?” he asked after his poor heart had calmed down and his blood pressure was back to normal.

“I’m certain,” said Marion, the Librarian. “Drive on over to Turtleturd and find yourself a good phone book. The best one to start with would probably be the one for San Francisco. I doubt that any one there would complain if you started talking about a dick.” She giggled a little and Little Dickey’s blood pressure went up again.

When she began to realize what effect her language was having on him she scaled it back a little. She certainly didn’t mean to give him the wrong impression. “I don’t usually say words like…like ‘dick,’” she said as she blushed, “but what other word I could I use? I hope you wasn’t offended.”

Little Dickie didn’t know how to respond to her apology so he simply ignored her. “Maybe I will take your advice. Maybe I’ll go tomorrow.” Little Dickie thanked Marion, the Librarian, and then made a hasty retreat. He wanted to stay and steer the conversation back to poking but he didn’t know how to get started.

That night, as he lay in bed, Little Dickie thought long and hard about what she had said. He assumed that the Library in Stinkwater would have their phone books in a reference section too, and he didn’t particularly want to write down names and numbers all day only to have to make the drive again in a week or so. Stinkwater was more than 60 miles away and the tires on his car were getting bald. He made up his mind that if he couldn’t check the book our out he would steal it.

The next morning, after eating his morning bowl of Fruit Loops, he put on his best pair of bib overhauls, put two dabs of Brylcreem in his hair instead of his one, filled his 1952 Ford Pickup with gas and pointed it towards the road that led to Stinkwater.. Little Dickie was not the quickest horse in the slowest race, but he still had the presence of mind to stop by the drug store in Bumpbottom Hollow to purchase a straw wig, a Bozo sized plastic nose, and one of those fake beards that you see at Halloweeen parties. He tried them on immediately, and when he saw himself in the rear view mirror he was satisfied that no one would ever recognize him.