I was firmly ensconced on my favorite rickety stool at Bubba’s Bar, sipping on a Miller. Neon signs promoting a catholic collection of cheap brews glowed and blinked in the Stygian gloom.  Squeaky overhead fans reshuffled the virtually visible oxygen and the collective odor of hops, hamburger grease and hair tonic.  A crowd of farmers, truck drivers and a scattering of hard-eyed women mingled at the pool tables and shuffled around the dance floor to a mournful Merle Haggard “drankin’” song. I was trying without much success to get into the mood of the moment when a gravely female voice cut through the atmosphere like a shovel through cow plop.

            “Well, well, if it ain’t the know-it-all college sprout!  Hell, Sonny, you got your mother’s permission to be suckin’ on them suds?”

            Of course, it was my latest, if not most memorable, encounter with the predatory/amatory Pulpwood Annie, self-styled queen of the south Georgia truck stop and honky-tonk whores.

 “Geez, Annie, who let you out of jail, and how many johns did you drain to make up your bail money?” I replied breezily.          

“Up yours!  I ain’t been in jail!  I been down to Floridy!  Want me to tell you about it?”

Without waiting for a reply, much less an invitation, Pulpwood Annie hoisted herself onto an adjacent stool, including in the effort her patented spread-legged, see-all-the-way-to-Sunday-morning sprawl that tested both the tensile strength of her miniskirt cloth and the savoir faire of some gaping guzzlers at a nearby pool table.  She scratched someplace high on her right thigh, near the tattoo of a rabid-looking rose, rearranged her less-than- voluminous bosom and flashed me her best Two-Bucks-And-I-Am-Yours smile.

            For reasons best known to God Almighty, I had become a favorite of Pulpwood Annie’s.  Maybe it was because she had some kind of feral admiration for anybody who had advanced beyond the eighth grade, which was her high-water mark. However, it probably was because I was the only man south of Macon, west of Augusta, east of Columbus and north of Folkston who hadn’t sampled her limited but well-known sexual menu.  Since most of her early customers had been yahoos driving trucks loaded with logs for the coastal pulpwood mills, I guess she acquired her working name more or less by osmosis.

 Occasionally when I came home for a weekend from the University of Georgia, and lacking access to beer in my normally “dry” home town, I would hop in my car and drive over to Zenobia, an equally small cracker community but with beer, wine and whiskey for sale.  Symbiotic developments from this economic and social blessing were the various bars, joints and honky-tonks that sprang up just south of the intersection of U.S. 23 and fabled U.S. 1, the old tourist road that runs like a curly black snake from the Canadian border to Key West.  Nailed together with more zest than craftsmanship and adorned with long tubes of garish red and green neon tubes, these dens of “entertainment” offered imaginative and sometimes truly surprising outlets for the mill workers, pulpwooders, undiscriminating tourists and curious novices to manhood who populated their premises.  And all were grist for the ever-churning erotic mill of Pulpwood Annie.

            A woman of indeterminate age, although well on the wrong side of thirty, Annie boasted the usual south Georgia dishwater blonde hair, squinty eyes and a rather lumpy figure that was not helped by various bruises and tattoos from former boyfriends and rough trade.  Her legs were somewhat shapely, although the calves needed a bit more exposure to a feedlot, as they say in Texas.

 Annie had a modernist approach to what she wore in that she endorsed the minimalist ideal.  It was long before the days of Velcro, and I often wondered if she kept those bits of cloth and string strategically attached to her body with liberal applications of Elmer’s Glue.  Added to this sometimes malodorous package was Annie’s unrelenting insensitivity to propriety.  It was widely rumored throughout south Georgia that on the day God was issuing couth, Annie was checking out the Blue Light Special at K-Mart.

            Anyway, something within the freckled breast of Pulpwood Annie stirred the first time she laid eyes on me.  She walked over, asked me how my hammer was hanging and began cadging me for a beer.    I responded with my usual collegiate suavity by gagging on my drink and nearly spewing a mouthful on her dress. 

After a somewhat foamy introduction, I agreed to add one more Miller to my tab, and Annie plopped down beside me.  The rest is history, especially her unrelenting effort to lure me into her somewhat technicolored arms.  That I managed to resist with some degree of civility-—not always!—-apparently added to my allure.  In time, a sort of truce evolved in which she would flirt and tell me the most outrageous stories involving her or some of her soiled-dove friends, and I would somehow evade the inevitable invitation for a tryst.  To be honest, my usual weasel-worded excuse was that I wasn’t ready quite yet to run the gamut of social diseases and exotic biological life sure to be encountered by probing her nether regions with my still-healthy manhood.  As for the collection of tattoos located all over her well-used torso, I expressed a most philistine attitude of disinterest.  “I know art when I see it,” I told her, “and you are not it!”

            Nonplussed, Annie would shrug off my evasions and, like the loser of the annual Tech-Georgia football game, would predict overwhelming victory next time.  As for me, I considered my dodging and twisting to be signs of my adroit mind, if not of my unpredictable libido.  I guess it was the time spent that mattered, and Annie usually soaked up sizable chunks of my weekends with her weird stories, all of which she swore were true.

            “Shore did enjoy my trip to Floridy,” she exclaimed, working on the somewhat faulty assumption that I was listening rapturously.  “’Course, it was all a mistake because of that drunken SOB Gene Talmadge Minyon.  He come in here the other night, flyin’ high, talkin’ loud and throwin’ money around like it was on fahr. Cuttin’ to the chase, he said he had to go to Atlanta and axed me if I wanted to go, which naturally I did.”

            Throwing caution to the winds, I hazarded an interruption.  “He axed you?  Like what Lizzie Borden did to her step-mother and father?”

            “Don’t know nothin’ about any Lizzie Whatever.  Which truck stop did she hang out at?  Maybe she blowed in from Ohier or come along before my time,” she mused.  “Now, shut up and let me talk.  Cigarette me, bartender.”