With the primary over and a long Memorial Day weekend ahead, I called Bubba McCoy over at the car lot on Wednesday. This was for the traditional holiday-weekend purpose of tapping his rural wisdom to produce an additional column in a week's time so that I and the editor could enjoy a day off.
I asked for whom he'd voted. He replied, "In what?"
I said the primary.
"Oh, hell, I forgot," Bubba said.
"The missus tried to get me to go vote with her. She was going to vote Republican this time against Sarah Sanders because she can't stand her. But I can't stand any of 'em.
"The doctor over at Memphis says I need to avoid aggravation in my life. So, all I do anymore is sit here iced down with air conditioning watching 'Gunsmoke' reruns while I wait for somebody to come in for a used vehicle because the new car market is all gummed up.
"I paid a kid the other day to climb up on my sign and put letters up there saying, 'These vehicles have all their computer chips.' I've had a half-dozen people stop in to say they love the sign and three of 'em wound up buying. With what I got from selling the inventory last year and from the dole and what I'm making selling two or three cars a week, I ain't never had it so good."
Dole? What dole was he on?
"Oh, you know. Social Security," he said.
"I'd hate to have to live on just it. But it's good living to have a nest egg and then sell a few cars every month and then look at your bank statement and see a government deposit you had forgotten about. That socialism can be a good salary supplement."
How were his IRA and mutual fund doing? "Fine as long as I don't look at 'em."
Did he blame Joe Biden for economic troubles? "I think I just blame him for being such a general screw-up," he said.
"As I understand it, he decided there was no pandemic anymore when it came to requiring illegal border-crossers to wear masks. But they're telling us legal citizens that the virus ain't over.
"And then the other day the old boy who cuts my grass knocked on the door and, when I went to open it, I found him leaning against the stoop saying he was dizzy. I sat him down and got him some water and told him not to worry about the grass.
"He said it was his eighth job of the day and he'd gotten a late start because he and his wife were out of formula for their new baby and he'd had to drive over to Stuttgart first thing in the morning because a friend had some for them.
"Let me ask you: How did we all of a damn sudden find ourselves unable to feed our babies?"
I told him I'd read that it was because our baby-formula manufacturing is too consolidated, like everything else, and one of the big plants got found with contamination. So, I said, maybe we need to import more baby formula, that maybe Wuhan could turn out some.
He paid no attention to my dark sarcasm.
"I got this idea for a cartoon," Bubba said. "It's a map of the United States. And inside the outline of the country there's just one thing--a screw upside down.
"Get it? We're screwed up."
I told Bubba to stay in the car business.
"So," he asked, "what do you think is going to become of the US of A?"
I told him the question reminded me of that renal specialist who, when my mother with a failing kidney told him all she wanted was not to end up on dialysis, replied that she needn't worry about that because, with her cardiovascular condition, she'd die of a heart attack first.
In other words, I told him, he and I would be dead before the full American meltdown from an imploded two-party system with one party anti-democratic and the other incompetent.
"But I got a granddaughter," he said.
Oh, yeah. Sweet. Smart. Social worker. Has that same-sex partner.
"No, she's back with some guy now. She's bringing him to a cousin's fish fry Monday.
"She told me we're all some of both and that she had just experimented. She said she might be gay of heart and mind, but it didn't seem like she was in the lower region."
What you might do, I said, is put as much of that piled-up dole and nest egg as could be spared into a trust or your will for that beloved grandchild.
"Way ahead of you on that," he said.
"She's getting' the house too. If I drop dead still in the car business, she's getting that too. She can change the name of Bubba's Auto Emporium to Bisexual Motors of the Delta."
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.