By John Brummett
A woman called out Bubba McCoy on Twitter the other day.
Using the 140 characters permitted by this social media service, the woman issued an all-points plea to me to get in touch with Bubba and relate how he was negotiating the recession at his used car lot — Bubba’s Auto Emporium, it’s called.
So I drove 90 or so minutes east and found the facility occupied by a Christmas tree sales lot.
The man attending said Bubba had shut the car business down in summer. Since the first session of duck season was over and since Bubba didn’t go to the deer woods anymore, the man speculated that Mr. McCoy might be over at the grill.
That’s where I found him, booted, ball-capped, camouflaged without purpose, taking heavy doses of de-caf and holding forth.
Before he saw me, I overheard him tell the other three or four old boys that he’d kept looking at Obama the night before, declaring that intensified war in Afghanistan at West Point, and trying in vain to view him credibly as commander in chief.
“Oh, Lord, did you hear that?” Bubba asked when he saw me. “Now you’re gonna put in the paper that I’m a racist. So let me just ask you this: Which part am I racist about, his half-white part or his half-black part?”
I told him I would not venture there. I told him I’d been to the car lot and was worried about him.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Dogs have their day. Then their day is over and they just lay around in the corner scratching themselves. I made more money than I deserved selling pickups and SUVs. Then gas prices started to kill me and then the recession pretty near ruined me. So I unloaded my inventory wholesale and cut my losses and went on Social Security.
“I’m 62 now, you know. I decided I’d better take Social Security early to stand a chance of getting it at all. It’s gonna be a close race which happens first — my dying or the country going broke.”
Three years ago Bubba told me he’d become a millionaire — that his IRAs, his mutual funds, his individual investments, his equity in the house and what the car lot was worth over expenses had, or so he’d just figured, topped that million mark.
Did he mind my asking where those holdings were now?
“About half,” he said. “Fortunately, I’m down to where I don’t have many expenses except health insurance. And that takes pretty much everything I get out of Social Security. I’m just trying to make it to Medicare.”
What did he think about health care reform?
“I think the only thing that could be more screwed-up on health care is if the government took over.”
I didn’t mention that the Medicare he was trying to get to was government health care. That debate is so wearying.
“Let me tell you something,” Bubba said. “The only good thing about being this age is that I probably won’t live to see the inflation that this country is headed for. You spend a trillion more than you got and there’s a piper to be paid.”
Enough of that. How was he doing, anyway?
“Blood pressure down by pills. Cholesterol down by pills. Then I had to have a bunch of places burned off my face because all farm boys spent most of their life in the sun.”
Mrs. Bubba? “Fine. Had to have her gallbladder out. All that did was get me closer to my deductible. She spends most of her time over in Memphis with Yvonne and the grandkids.”
Petrino? The Hogs?
“We’ve got us a football coach now. We’re gonna do something next year, I think.”
Pelphrey? The basketball Hogs?
“The only thing that got me through cold weather all those years was Eddie Sutton’s team and then Nolan’s team. Now I go to bed by 8:30, after I lay out my pills and count what little money I’ve got that Osama hasn’t got hold of yet.”
He meant Obama. I think.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
