I’ll tell you about the Bowling Green Massacre, because I was there and it was real.
Three things I’ll never forget: the first time I saw Rudy, those batting cages in Tampa where I was born again in Christ, and the Bowling Green Massacre.
Here’s what I’ll say for Bowling Green, Kentucky. That community supports one of the most authentic and out-of-sight Sino-American buffets I’ve ever set my size thirteen Cole Haan beige loafers in. I mean, they put Red Gold ketchup right on the table so you don’t have to ask for it. If I ever return to Bowling Green, Kentucky, it will be to take a hot, wet plate off the dish stack at Bart Wong’s All You Can Fit.
Here’s what happened:
In 2011, I was in Kentucky promoting my book Come Get Some, Then: Fighting Your Dad and Other American Rites of Passage, and after I wowed a horde of my avid supporters with a reading at a local Kiwanis, I was drafted to participate in the Warren County Fair’s annual pie-eating contest as a celebrity entrant.
It got fugly.
Look, I don’t know what in the name of the good Lord came over me that afternoon, but my blood was running thick and I was frenzied. They just kept sliding ’em down the pike and I kept plugging ’em. No questions posed. I don’t even know what was in there: could’ve been blackberry, could’ve been huckleberry, raspberry — hell, it might’ve been dingleberry for all I know, but I’m not a friggin’ botanist like my ex-sister-by-law Lynn Beth, so sue me sideways for enjoying a sweet, flaky treat without hitting my knees and burning some incense first to thank the doggone berry for giving its life so that I could show some yokels how the hell to crush crust.
(You’re on my list, botany. As soon I get done with these PC fruitbars, you’re getting scrubbed right on out of the The American Way. Steel wool and elbow grease, buster. Scrubbed.)
Anyway, I was just absolutely gassing these fools. Part of it, I realized, was that none of these fellas wanted to take off their John Deere ball caps to eat, so their munching range was extremely limited by the caps’ bills tapping the table before their mouths could hit paydirt. I don’t wear hats ever, because my hair is so thick that hats just pop right off from the pressure of the burgeoning follicles. I haven’t slipped up there even a scudge. In fact, my hairline started coming further down my face after my fiftieth. I shave my forehead now. Bet that.
As I was finishing up my fourteenth pie — fair record — the emcee, a guy whose name was Darnell but who pronounced it “DARN-uhl” because phonics hasn’t made it to Kentucky yet and that’s why we need DeVos, got onstage next to my seat and hollered, “ISSA MACKSKER! UH MACKSKER ROT HEER EN BULLN GRAIN!”
The name stuck. They’ve been talking about the Bowling Green Massacre ever since. They even do a pageant at the Warren County Fair every year depicting my achievement.
But here’s why I’m hacked off: not nobody, outside of the Bowling Green Daily News’ four-day coverage of the feat, said a peep about it. No pictures. No interviews. Not a single second devoted to the Massacre on cable news. Instead, that whole week they chose to cover whatever was happening in Libya with the guy who wore the hats and stuff.
Dishonest liberal media agenda.
You’re not going to hear about it from those bums, but you’re hearing it from me. And let me say this: the Bowling Green Massacre was one of the best days of my life.
