Bubba McCoy had made himself so thoroughly supine in the leather-torn recliner that the peak of his potbelly was on a plane with the bib of his ball cap.
He said he'd get up to greet me but there was no crane handy.
I asked what he'd do in the event of a customer.
"These ol' boys over here sell themselves," said the veteran proprietor of the iconic Bubba's Auto Emporium east of the White River. "I just sit back here and look at CNN or Fox and let 'em look around, particularly if it's a hot day. If they see something they want, they'll come in. At that point it'll be worth my while to begin the ordeal of relieving 270 pounds of pressure on this old chair.
"Sometimes I can't get enough leverage to lower the footrest so I just kinda slide out real slow.
"By the time a guy gets in here, he'd take the vehicle even if it didn't have an engine. Cars aren't sold by the way they run. They're sold by how they look, how they feel, and how they make you imagine yourself in 'em. By the time a guy does a test drive, he's just thankful it starts, because he knows he's gonna take it. The only time that doesn't work is when a kid wants the vehicle and his dad is with him. I need the buyer and the imaginer to be the same person, and the one with the down payment."
I asked Bubba what the old boys were going to think when they read about themselves by such cynical analysis in the newspaper.
"You mean on the iPad," he said. "And most of 'em don't read the paper. And fewer still read your column. Some can't read at all. And the ones that do read it will think I'm referring to someone else."
Bubba said he'd been expecting me. He said I always wander over on weeks before a Monday holiday when I must produce an extra column.
"For Memorial Day weekend, it was either you or the arrows," I admitted.
"I'm better'n the arrows," he said.
I said maybe I should let him do the arrows, starting with Donald Trump.
"Up," he said. "The economy's good. These farmers over here think tariffs make them patriotic; that they're sacrificin' for their country. But they can afford to think that because he'll run up the deficit some more to bail 'em out. And he's not in jail. And Melania hasn't left him yet, so far as I know."
Tom Cotton?
"He's up if you're talking about getting re-elected, and down if you're talking about having a personality."
Asa Hutchinson?
"I guess he's all right. All anybody thinks about anymore is national politics. We get plenty of that on Fox and CNN and less and less of that out of Little Rock--except on the iPad. The wife has one of 'em and she says she likes it. She says she can enlarge the type. She prints your column and I look at it but mainly just to see if I'm in it."
I told Bubba that there's a rumor percolating in Little Rock that, for 2022, Sarah Huckabee Sanders will come back to the state and run for governor. I asked what kind of an arrow he gave that idea.
"Up. Way up," he said. "Anybody who can put up with Trump this long is not squeamish. And anybody who goes out to speak for him to the media while he's watching is brave and tough."
Finally, I wondered if Bubba knew about a new program in his county in which all the service providers--government, schools, courts, law enforcement, churches, nonprofits--had formed a cooperative effort and comprehensive safety net to intervene when necessary to meet the needs of poor and at-risk young children.
"Wait a minute," he said. "The wife is doing this thing for some little first-grade girl--tutor, or something. They asked for volunteers at church, and she volunteered."
That's part of it, mentoring, I told him. Good for her. Now what about Bubba doing some mentoring?
"I didn't have anything to say to my own boy and lost him to drugs. What do you think I'd have to say to some 6-year-old boy today?"
That you care about him. That you're happy to listen to him. That he can hang with you here at the car lot until grandma gets home from cleaning houses, if grandma says it's OK.
"Don't go all Hillary on me with that 'it takes a village' stuff," he said.
I told Bubba he was going to do it, whether he was ready to admit it or not, because I could sense I'd reached his heart, which was as golden as his ball cap was ragged.
"Go on, get out of here," he said, which was confirmation.
I gave Bubba an arrow-up on the visit.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/26/2019