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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2007 > December > 24
Monday, December 24, 2007
View from the cop’s Christmas memory: Uncle Dewey and the North Georgia Rockettes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I hope you all have a great holiday and get everything you want.
This reminds me of my Uncle Dewey who used to sit by the campfire and tell us stories of Christmas and how he had the world’s greatest Nativity scene set up in his yard every Christmas season at his home, lot 21 at the Deer Valley Mobile Home Community just outside of Coal Mountain.
Everyone liked Dewey’s Nativity scene for the first couple of Christmases until he started expanding the whole “scene” of Nativity, going with a different theme each season. The response was okay at first but when he added stuff like the pink flamingos and the live Elvis impersonator, they stopped coming.
The next Christmas Dewey changed gears, promising a lavish Christmas Parade with none other than the North Georgia Rockettes, dressed in red Santa costumes with dresses trimmed in white fluffy fake fur, wearing high heels and dark stockings.
The Rockettes were composed of some nice women he met at the American Legion Halloween party a few weeks earlier. They were supposed to arrive in the volunteer fire truck but Skeet Patterson, the volunteer fireman on call, had to let them off while he took the truck over to Red Bill’s house to put out the fire on Red’s stomach after Arleen, his common-law wife, squirted lighter fluid on it while he was passed out in his recliner and then set him on fire.
This of course was in retaliation for the time Red got mad at her for smoking his last pack of Tareytons. He tied a rope around her and then drug her around the yard with his pickup truck. Neighbors said that Arleen, who had a low raspy voice, thanks to her two-pack-a-day habit, sounded like a chain saw as she bounced up and down the hills in the field , behind Red’s truck, on the other side of the road from the duplexes.
Red was not an easy man to put a fire out on. For one thing, he woke up and realized he was on fire and like most of us would, he started running in no particular direction. The problem was that Red was so awful drunk that he wouldn’t stop running long enough for Skeet to douse him with the fire hose. Skeet now wished that he had kept at least one of the North Georgia Rockettes on board to point the hose.
Skeet finally drove up ahead of Red and stopped, pulled the fire hose out, but then had to drag it back some twenty feet after Red ran smack into a phone pole and knocked himself out. Skeet got the flames doused and then left one of those BellSouth orange traffic cones next to Red so the cops would know where he was, and then headed back to find the North Georgia Rockettes.
In the mean time, The North Georgia Rockettes walked about a mile to a convenientce store and passed the time playing video poker and drinking beer, courtesy of Bobby Winkfield, the young employee on duty, who thought that he had died and gone to heaven.
By the time Skeet found the North Georgia Rockettes, they were drunker than a box of frogs. He loaded them up but twice had to stop and pick up a Rockette who had fallen off the back of the volunteer fire truck. When they finally arrived at the Deer Valley Mobile Home Community, Skeet parked the truck so he could explain to Dewey and Dewey’s neighbors, why he was an hour and a half late.
The North Georgia Rockettes, tired of sitting still in the truck, and still drunk, decided to take the truck for a ride. As Dewey, Skeet, and the other neighbors of the mobile home community watched, the Rockettes drove the volunteer fire truck, with lights and sirens going full blast, down the main road and outside the gated entrance to Deer Valley. The neighbors, not knowing that this was not supposed to be happening, cheered and clapped and waved to the Rockettes who were hanging off every corner of the truck as they drove past the mobile homes and out the front gate, and slowly disappeared down Highway 53 and into the darkness.
Skeet and Dewey assumed the worst and prepared for it by stepping into Dewey’s mobile home for a conversation with Mr. Jack Daniels. It wasn’t long before they heard the cheers of Dewey’s neighbors. When they stepped back outside of Dewey’s mobile home, they saw, in the distance, the volunteer fire truck coming back up Highway 53 toward the main gate, the red lights and sirens blasting. They pulled into the main road and as they drove by, Rockettes waving and yelling and Dewey’s neighbors yelling and clapping, Skeet noticed that no one was behind the wheel.
It was, therefore, no surprise to him when the truck slowly, made its way off to the right side of the main road and into the recreational pond alongside the dumping station. The truck sank to about halfway up the driver’s door, its siren, now underwater, sounding like something between Godzilla and the Loch Ness Monster. The red lights were still rotating, sending a red glare along the surface of the water. Floating Rockettes, swimming in no particular direction, gave the effect of a poorly choreographed water ballet as they sort of swam and then waddled back onto shore, all to the applause of the residents of the Deer Valley Mobile Home Park.
Uncle Dewey was hailed as the master of all Christmas celebrations, a title he held for only a short year as a result of the North Georgia Rockettes and Skeet Patterson’s refusal to ever participate in anything that had to do with Uncle Dewey again.
Still, he has his Christmas moment, even if it was a bit hard to believe.
Have a good Christmas moment or two!
Merry Christmas!
