A Day at the Races Ain't Always Funny

When I was younger, not much younger, but younger than I am now, I went to my friend Sammy's house and we watched that Marx Brother's movie, A Day at the Races. Sammy was a year older than me, but we weren't at that age yet where a year meant anything, where a year meant that you had to act older; you know, where one of you is in the eighth grade and the other is a freshman in high school?

Anyhow, we watched that movie and the first thing Sammy said to me was that he loved the guy with the mustache, Groucho, and the first thing I said to him was that I loved the guy with the white hair, Harpo. Sammy liked Groucho because everybody liked Groucho even though Groucho had been dead forever. I liked Harpo because a week before we saw that movie, Stir Crazy, with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and Harpo's hair reminded me of Gene Wilder's hair and I loved Gene Wilder in Stir Crazy. We weren't supposed to watch Stir Crazy, but we did anyhow, switching the channel between Stir Crazy and some fishing show on ESPN every time Sammy's mother came into the den where we were watching TV.

"What are you guys watching?" She asked, sing-songy, like a real TV mother.

"Fishing," Sammy'd say and he was good at switching it right over to ESPN every time. He had a knack for knowing when his mother was going to step into the den. His fingers were on auto-pilot, my friend Sammy.

Of course, the only reason Sammy wanted to watch Stir Crazy is because he wanted to see tits and every rated R movie has tits in it, right? There were some tits but not nearly as much as Sammy liked, but the rest of the movie was really funny so it didn't matter.

The reason I spent all of my time at Sammy's watching movies was because my mamma was out looking for a job. We had been displaced since the hurricane, and my mamma decided to take us out here to Los Angeles, after spending the winter and spring in Houston, because there was a program for folks like us. The program worked so that I got a place to hang out at during the day while my mamma went looking for a job and then at night she came to pick me up or Sammy's mother dropped me off and then I'd go right back to Sammy's the next day.