Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (20 page)

 

Such a wondrous bird is the pelican.

His mouth can hold more than his belly can.

He can keep in his beak

Enough food for a week.

I am wondering how in the hell he can.

 

*(Unless otherwise noted, the following epitaphs were composed by their subjects.)

 

The epitaph of William Shakespeare:

 

Good
Frend
for Jesus sake
Forbeare

To
Digg
the Dust Enclosed
Heare
.
Blest be Ye Man
Yt
Spares
thes
stones And Curst Be He
Yt
Moves My Bones.

 

The epitaph of Benjamin Franklin:

 

The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents worn out, and
stript
of its lettering and gilding), lies here, food for worms.
Yet the work itself shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by its Author.

 

The epitaph of academy award-winning stage and screen actor Jack Lemon:

 

Jack Lemon

In

 

The epitaph of Winston Churchill:

I am prepared to meet my Maker.

Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal

Of meeting me is another matter.

 

The epitaph of Mel Blanc, Warner Brothers cartoon vocalist, the voice of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et.al.:

 

That's all, folks

 

The epitaph of William H.
Bonney
(not his own composition):

 

Truth and History.

21 Men. The boy bandit king.

He died as he lived.

William H.
Bonney
.

Billy the Kid.

 

The epitaph of an otherwise nondescript gentleman named George Johnson, d. 1882, buried in
Tombstone
,
Arizona
(not his own composition):

 

Here lies George Johnson

Hanged by mistake, 1882.

He was right

We was wrong.

We strung him up

And now he's gone.

We're sorry.

 

The epitaph of Alexander the Great (not his own composition), reportedly
engraved on his alabaster sarcophagus in
Alexandria
,
Egypt
:

 

A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough

 

The epitaph of Nicolas Copernicus, astronomer, mathematician, proponent of
heliocentrism
(not his own composition):

 

STA SOL NE MOEARE
(translation: Stand, sun, move not)

 

The epitaph of Arthur, King of the Britons, unearthed near Glastonbury Abbey
(not his own composition; the authenticity of this epitaph is disputed):

 

HIC JACET ARTURUS

REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS

(Translation: Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.)

 

Robin Hood, rebel and outlaw, d. 1247 (not his own composition; the authenticity of this epitaph is disputed):

 

Here underneath this
laiti
stean

Laiz
Robert Earl of Huntingdon

Nea
arcer
ver
az
hie
sae
geud
,

An
pipl
kauld
im
Robin
Heud
:

Sic an
utlaw
as hi
an
his men

Will England
niver
si
agen
.

-Obit 24
Kal
,
dekembris
1247

 

(Translation:

Here underneath this little stone

Lies Robert, Earl of Huntington.

 
No archer was as he so good,

 
And people called him Robin Hood.

 
Such an outlaw as he and his men

Will England never see again.

Died on the calendar December 24, 1247)

 

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other stories:

 

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And laid me down with a will

 

This be the verse that you greave for me:

“Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.”

 

And, of course, the venerable old epitaph, found in graveyards all over the English-speaking world, in numerous variations:

As you are

Once was I.

As I am,

So shall you be.

There are certain tales, true stories, which are so, well, indecent and/or vulgar that it would be completely inappropriate (not to mention actionable) to relate them in a public school classroom. (And the sensitive, impressionable minds of innocent adolescents should be protected from them as well.) But many such stories just cry out to be told, and what follows is one of them. Though I now teach college, where basically anything goes in the classroom, I have never had occasion to tell this tale, a tale I have been
dying
to tell for over a decade. Well, here it goes:

In 1999, President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House and subsequently tried (and acquitted) by the Senate on a number of charges, the most important of which was perjury. Clinton had had a sexual relationship with a young woman named Monica Lewinsky, and had lied about it under oath. (He was scared of his wife, apparently, and thought he could get away with denying it. He didn't.)

Of course, as a History teacher, I was glued to the TV set during the entire impeachment and trial, and thus watched the following incident live on cable news. (I do not name the cable news station because, number one, its identity is obvious, and number two, I don't want to have to pay for permission to relate specifics.)

During the impeachment proceedings Republican Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) was exiting the Capitol when a young reporter, the ink on her newly printed diploma from the Columbia School of Journalism doubtless still wet, accosted him on the Capitol steps. Thurmond, a genial and flirtatious man of advanced years—he was 96 at the time—was always willing to take the time to speak with a pretty young woman, and the look of enthusiasm on her face bespoke the great sense of excitement she was feeling. (I mean, here she was, in her early twenties, in what was probably her first post-college job, on what was probably her first major assignment,
about to interview the longest-serving senator in U.S. History on live TV!)
Her glee was palpable. What she had not taken into account, possibly because she was unaware of it at her tender age, was that when people get old, I mean
really old,
they say whatever they damn well please, and to hell with the consequences.

“Senator,” she asked into her hand-held microphone, glancing at the cameraman with a grin, “do you have anything to say about today's proceedings?” She then held the mike up to Thurmond.

“Well,
Ah'm
probly
gonna vote guilty, but Ah think the whole damn
thang
is a waste a
tahme
,” the South Carolinian responded.

Oh boy, she probably thought. Controversy! “And why is that, sir?”

“
Cawse
all he
hadda
do was jus' come clean in the first place, and we
coulda
avoided all this nonsense. He woulda got in hot
watah
with his missus, but so what? None o' this
wuz
necessary.”
 

The young lady had probably studied the Watergate scandal in college, because she then asked (using a well-worn phrase from that era), “Do you mean that the cover-up was worse than the crime?”

“Yep,” Thurmond answered, and then paused and furrowed his brow. “Now that y'all mention it, this reminds me of
somthin
that happened back in Jackson County South Carolina back when I was a
youngun
. The sheriff of Jackson County was a fella name of Billy Bob
McGillicuddy
, and Billy Bob got
hiself
elected an re-elected sheriff
evy
yeah,
cawse
he was friends with half the country and was kin to the other half.”

The reporter nodded eagerly, smiling and glancing again at the camera.

“The
otha
party got itself sick and tired of
havin
to waste
tahme
, money, and
effit
tryin to defeat Billy Bob, so they got
theyselves
a plan one yeah. They hired
theyselves
a
prositute
, and they had that
prositute
tell Billy Bob to meet her at her hotel room that night.
Unbenowenst
to Billy Bob, they
wuz
gonna have
reportahs
alayin
in wait.”

She nodded and smiled again. Scandal!

“That night,” Thurmond went on, “Billy Bob
McGillicuddy
showed up at the hotel in the wee
owahs
of the mornin, and the
prositute
invited him into her room. The
reportahs
waited a little
tahme
, and then they kicked open the
doah
and found Billy Bob and the
prositute
in fragmentary delicious.” (Author's note: he meant
in flagrante
delicto
, “
in the midst of an indecent act.”) “An seconds
latah
, the flash-bulbs was
aflashin
, the
prositute
was
alaffin
, and Billy Bob was
agrabbin
his trousers and was
arunnin
down the road.”

I recall the reporter bouncing up and down slightly on the balls of her feet as Thurmond spoke. A political career in ruins because of sex with a hooker! Fantastic!

“Three days went by,” Thurmond continued, “without a word to anybody from Billy Bob
McGillicuddy
. An then the word went out that he was
agonna
have a
meetin
with the
reportahs
, what nowadays we'd call a press
confence
, the next day, one week from election day. An the next day at twelve noon, Billy Bob
McGillicuddy
walked down the steps of the county courthouse of Jackson County and said to the assembled
reportahs
, ‘Ah got jus three
thangs
to say to you boys. The first
thang
is that Ah am not gonna … Ah say, Ah say, Ah am
not
gonna drop outta this race! The second
thang
is that one week from today,
Ah'm
agonna
be re-elected sheriff of Jackson County.'”

She nodded as Thurmond paused, and said, “And the third thing?”

“The third
thang
, the last
thang
, Billy Bob
McGillicuddy
said was this,” Thurmond went on in a serious tone of voice. “‘
If you set a trap for me, and you bait that trap with pussy, you're
agonna
catch me
evy
tahme
!'”

I did a double take when I heard Thurmond say those words. The reporter did a quadruple take. She then stood frozen, an expression of stunned disbelief on her face, as Thurmond turned to the camera and said, “An one week
latah
, Billy Bob
McGillicuddy
was re-elected in a landslide!”

After a long moment, the reporter herself turned to the camera with a sad, sick look on her face, and said weakly, “Back to you, Bob.” The TV screen faded briefly to black.

I jumped from my seat, thrust an 8 hour VHS tape into my VCR, and began to record on extended play, but for obvious reasons the cable station did not replay a tape of the interview.

As noted at the beginning of this little book, all of this is History. You can't make this stuff up, folks. Nothing is stranger than reality.

Auf
Wiedersehen
.