Andy Walks With Me … Andy Talks With Me

The "Un" Real Texas By Steve Bussiere, humorist

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I had the opportunity to sit with my good friend Andy, recently.

Andy is very likely, the most intelligent person I know. I have absolutely no idea why he likes to sit around and pass the time with me, but apparently he does, and I'm grateful for that little blessing in my otherwise turbulent existence.

When I first saw Andy, he was sitting by himself, enjoying a cold draft beer and some overpriced, exotically flavored, potato chips, while valiantly attempting to make some kind of sense out of Judge Judy. Haute cuisine at it's finest, enhanced by entertainment directed lethally, at the lowest common denominator.

I think he does this to rest his brain and rejuvenate himself. It's his version of intellectual yoga or something of that nature.

Andy is on the cutting edge of a lot of things, but to be truthful, fashion isn't one of them. I love the way he dresses, but it is, admittedly, a little off the runway. Oh heck, …. it isn't anywhere even approaching the "Area Code" of the airport.

Just like Bob, Andy has "ideas". But unlike Bob, Andy's ideas actually turn a profit, which to the best of my knowledge, is a good thing.

He's made a lot of money with his ideas over the years. Money he apparently has spent wisely, rather than wasting it on frivolous items such as fashionable clothing.

One time, way back when gas prices were still within the means of us "poor people", Andy saw something on the news that planted a seed in his mind.

Andy only watches the news after his "Judge Judy", intelligence stretching exercises. Mental calisthenics, designed to insure that you don't strain your brain, or tear a mental muscle, while digesting CNN's daily, blue plate special.

Andy had completed his mental warm up routine, when he saw something on the blue plate special which caught his attention. "Steve" he said to me, "do you have any money?" "Enough for a couple of the one dollar draft specials." I replied. "Why? Are you planning on going to The Shop For Men or something?"

Andy laughed with me, .. or maybe at me, I'm not really sure which. "No.' he replied, "But there's trouble percolating in the Middle East sand, and I think if you bought a couple of tankers full of gas and parked them for a few weeks, you could sell them back and turn a tidy little profit."

I have absolutely no idea how he clairvoyantly sees these things, but I figured, a couple of weeks later, that had I been astute enough to take him seriously, I would have been sitting pretty, in the finance department.

Ever since that time, I pay attention to everything he says.

Well, almost everything. I am still hanging on to my own fashion sense, which after watching "Judge Judy" the other day, has me questioning that decision.

Being the halcyon days of Crawfish Season, (or would that be Seasoned Crawfish?), we discussed in depth, the sanity of paying three dollars a pound for a commodity that yields about 2 ounces of edible tissue as a return on investment. And those suckers are growing everywhere.

You don't even have to feed them, unlike the goldfish I used to buy for my daughter when she was young. Those babies would last about a week, which would be followed by our burial at sea service, at which time we would place our hands over our hearts, drop the fish, (which I told her was sleeping and dreaming of going back home because it missed its mom), into the commode, say goodbye, and reverently pull the handle, sending it home to mama. Very touching!

So Andy and I decided that it might be a financially prudent move, to go into the "Crawfish Business". But we're going to do it better. Crawfish are messy eating, due to all the guts and stuff that go flying about during the dining phase of the season. So we devised, what we are certain is a better idea.

At first we thought that perhaps, a "Crawfish Fondue", would be kind of cool, until we remembered that they have to be cooked "live", and the stabbing with the fondue fork, and the ensuing, deafening screams of pain they would surely emit, might be construed as cruelty to animals, and we'd have those PETA folks after us. So we placed that idea on the back burner.

But then we arrived at a better idea. A big "thank you", to Judge Judy and all our friends at CNN.

We could "purge" them prior to cooking, thereby getting rid of that yucky yellow stuff, and enhancing the entire dining experience. "Yeah, but we'd need to buy one of those jewler's eyepiece things to do the enema. It'll be tough to get the hose up there, and it might be kind of labor intensive. We'd need to get about fifty bucks a pound, which is a little on the "dear" side, even for Cajuns." I said.

So we placed that idea toward he back burner, (right next to the fondue), until we had what, (if I do say so myself), may conceivably, evolve into the idea of the millennium.) ("Lord it truly is, hard to be humble.)

I looked at Andy. "Hey, they usually boil the buggers. Why don't we just put them in water full of Ex-Lax prior to the big boil, … and let'em purge themselves!"

As I mentioned at the beginning of all of this, Andy is brilliant, so not much gets by him, even on a bad day (and this had been looking like one of those bad days, prior to the idea of the millennium thing.)

Andy's eyes lit up, and he smiled sagely at me. "Great idea Steve!" he said, and then added,
"Then we could rinse them off before boiling them, so people don't end up getting loose bowels from the purging solution."

As I said, Andy is a brilliant man, but even "brilliant men", miss something once in a while.

"Why bother rinsing them?" I asked. "Cook them like that. The purging water would be like the Cajun equivalent of "Picante Sauce." "Besides, look at the spicy crap they put in the water normally. Everyone who eats them is gonna end up with a mild case of diarrhea anyway, so what's the big deal?"

That was when he stood up, and grabbed his 4 pounds of crawfish from the table, straightened his straw fedora, smiled and said, "I like it!"

Then he started to walk away with a smile on his face.

A few steps removed from the table, he turned back toward me.

"Well we need to be careful Steve. We don't want to get sued for copyright infringement or something."

"What copyright infringement?" I asked.

"Well I was at the seafood store last week."

"They already sell something they call Crappie."

Hearing someone call my name, I turned away for a mere second and when I turned back toward Andy, he was gone.

"Who was that?" my friend asked, as he pulled up a chair.

"That was Andy." I replied.

"Well he sure disappeared in a hurry. … but he left something on the table."

"What?" I asked.

"It's just a lone, silver fondue fork."