The Girl From Panther Burn

I used to know a girl from Panther Burn. Panther Burn is a little town in the Mississippi Delta, outside of Leland, which was outside of Greenville, between Greenville and Yazoo City, which is not far from Kosciesko, where my grandfather was born. Her name was Elizabeth Dean, but we all called her Bus. Bus taught me many things, and we had many adventures together.

She taught me a funny trick. You should try it. If your friend is drinking from a long-neck beer bottle and you’re drinking from a long-neck beer bottle, all you have to do is tap the top of their bottle with the bottom of your bottle, and a couple of precious sips of beer will bubble out of their bottle onto the floor, and then everybody laughs. She did it to me so many times I had to buy another beer.

Armed with this new trick, I decided the time had come to try it myself. I saw my friend Alvaro Valenzuela at CS's, a well-known beer-serving, hamburger-cooking, and pool-playing establishment near Millsaps College, across the street from the Kappa Alpha Mansion, which was decorated in the front with what we were told was an actual Civil War era cannon, which it was, but turned out to be from the wrong side. Al was drinking a long-neck beer, just like my long-neck beer, so I put my plan in motion.

Now, my opinion on "lightly tapping" my long-neck bottle on the top of my friend Al's long-neck bottle differed considerably from how my friend Bus saw it and taught me the trick. Bus was at most 5'3" and considerably less than a hundred and twenty pounds. I was closer to two hundred and sixty pounds and doing my best to become the Mississippi regional bench press champion. You see the difference.

"Lightly tapping," or at least my version of lightly tapping, Alvaro's freshly purchased Bud Light long-neck beer caused the heavy glass bottom of his long-neck bottle to shoot off like a pistol and the entire contents of his recently purchased Bud Light beer, so far completely untasted, dumped into his lap in one fell blast. There was no foam coming out of what was left of the bottle, as was my plan as per the instructions from the girl from Panther Burn. It was still pretty damn funny but in a completely different way.

The moral of this story is that girls from the Delta are no goddamn good, and you shouldn't do what they say, no matter what. I also had to buy Al a beer, which he drank with wet pants the rest of the night.

Now that I’ve told this story, I should probably confess that, for a good long year of my life, Elizabeth “Bus” Dean was one of the most beautiful creatures I ever knew. I would easily have traveled to the moon to procure a piece of cheese had she wanted one. Bus was my traveling companion for a good while. I have probably fifty stories about her; curiously, they nearly all involve beer.