
My mom and stepdad (before they were married) used to have an antiques store that was housed in what had once been a restaurant called Heath's Smokehouse. I guess the restaurant also sold smoked meat in mass quantities (portions?) for people to take home and put in the freezer. Anyway, there was this huge walk-in cooler that we used for storage -- furniture and whatnot. My late, lamented band Dry Heave also used to practice in there.
In this walk-in cooler, there were dozens of big, scary-looking meat hooks hanging from rails just below the ceiling. For some reason, my friends and I (who were teenagers at the time) thought these meat hooks were really cool. We all grabbed some and put them in our cars (who knows why), only to find that we had absolutely no use for them. There just aren't a lot of legitimate uses for meat hooks when they're removed from meat coolers.
One day, however, Wes and I were riding through town in his car, and I pulled a meat hook from underneath the seat. As we came to the stop light by the Salvation Army, I saw a woman about to enter the store. I quickly rolled down the window, reached my arm out, and started shaking the meat hook at the woman.
"Hey! HEY! Look at this meat hook! Just LOOK at this MEAT HOOK!"
Puzzled, the woman yelled back, "What that's for?!?"
After pausing for a moment to construct a suitable answer, I replied, "For meat!"
"For ME?!?" she shrieked.
I've never been able to figure out how that brief conversation ended up with that woman saying that. OK, maybe "meat" sounds like "me," but if I had indeed said "me," then I would have been referring to me -- Chris -- right? Totally inexplicable.
Wes and I often had these weird encounters with people on the street when we were in the car. Once, we had found a bra in our friend Heather's car, and we snagged it. (Again, don't ask me why. Who knows?) A couple of days later, we found a use for it. We were driving through downtown, with me at the wheel this time. I was making a right turn when Wes told me to slow down. He reached out the window and started whipping some old guy with the bra. I eventually came to a complete stop, and there's Wes using this bra to pummel this poor coot who was just trying to cross the street.