It Didn't Seem Funny At The Time

By David Scott, Jr

A wicked funny collection of short stories eminent of the best work of humorists like Jean Shepard and James Thurber.The stories are written purely to amuse and entertain and it is fact that most people who read them laugh.They are by turns eccentric, erratic and ridiculous. There is parody and satire here as well represented in a hard boiled dim witted Detective story. An absurd science fiction story which examines the nuance of sex and gender and other stories written in variety of styles designed to elevate the reader's mood and perspective from the sane and mundane to the hysterical.There are stories of the awkward passion of adolescent sex, the epic first beer consumed in adolescent innocence. Bedpans broken bones and exploding bowels in hospitals. Drunken bulldozer driving, terribly dysfunctional family gatherings, alien sex, and other tales of the ridiculous and absurd.
These are stories charged with the sacred lunacy of truly fine comedic expression; a celebration of dysfunction,idiocy, embarrassment, the absurd and perhaps even a bit of truth.The collection includes as well a short biblical parody which will no doubt send the author straight to hell. But hey it's funny, and we all love to laugh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Scott, Jr
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301433841

Book preview

It Didn't Seem Funny At The Time

By David W Scott Jr.

Copyright 2013 David W Scott Jr.

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Table Of Contents

My Brother's Broken Arm

Sam Simile Private Dick, Danger With A Double D

Snapper's Rib

Homesick Like A Bulldozer In A Ceramic Garden

One Bad Day

An Elementary School Story

The Blackman Brothers' Brief Newspaper Career

How I Met The Pascavani Family

Hate And Lust In Wheeled Tin

The Lawnmower

Home For The Holidays

The Tortured Artist

Jesus Heals The Heckler

My Brother's Broken Arm

Looking back on it now, I suppose the highlight of my life as a boy growing up in Wallingford, Connecticut, happened the night my brother Andy broke his arm. Singular broken bones are certainly not infrequent occurrences most people have at one time or another broken a bone, everyone it seems has a story to tell about a broken limb. These tales usually involve leaping horses, fogged ski goggles or slipping car jacks and the like. But my brother Andy's broken arm was more than any of these, much more. Thinking about it now it seems like it were more like art, although the events that occurred that night seemed to crash together with such perfect symmetry that the phrase religious experience comes to mind. Whatever it was, it had a strong hand in shaping my later life .Indeed I sometimes feel jaded for having witnessed such a spectacular event so early in life .I was 14 at the time. I can only hope that before I leave this planet I may witness on the same scale of greatness and divine serendipity as that fateful summers night that my kid brother broke his arm.

He broke his arm when a rope swing he was riding on broke and sent him briefly soaring,then earthward, helplessly entrapped within an old tractor tire that was the swing seat.

The tree to which the rope swing was attached to was a giant maple that grew in our backyard dangerously close to the new addition my father had just built to house my grandfather, who had recently arrived to stay. The tree had been dying for some time, and the old man talked routinely of cutting it down.

Hell, I guess I'll have to take that old tree down this year, he would announce to the family over supper. This would elicit a chorus of wails and moans from my brother and me, as the tree had become a playground of sorts for us since we had added the swing. Yet my father had good reason to want it cut down. It would have flattened my grandfather new apartment like a pancake if it ever fell. But my grandfather, who had the largest stake in the matter, was far past caring about a mere tree. He had bigger fish to fry you could say.

My grandfather and his brain were getting on in years and had of late come to some rather strange conclusions about life and the world's future in general. Hen believed, for instance,that another world war was imminent, but that in the next war the enemy would be not of this world but that dark scourge from beyond space as he called them or it. He was convinced that the skies were packed full withfoo fighters and UFO's that were just biding their time, waiting for the right moment to strike their cruel blow to the planet earth and the human race.

Believing this as he did, he had taken it upon himself to be the first line of defense against such an alien attack. He spent days clad in battle fatigues and a civil defense helmet, scanning the skies relentlessly, hoping for a glimpse of the enemy. Often times he would come racing into the house screaming for us to grab an club, as he had just spied a flotilla of them landing over the hills. At times like this it took my mother an hour or so to calm him down and prevent him from calling the white house, something he did when there was no one there to stop him.

One other conclusion my grandfather had come to concerned the nature of the enemy itself. Bullets won't stop 'em he claimed. He never explained to anyone exactly how he had arrived at this conclusion, except to remark about the variety of baseball bat, golf clubs and old swords that littered his apartment, all within easy reach should the crisis arrive.

Easily the most exotic piece of alien defense equipment my grandfather ever owned was a thing called a UFO detector that he bought from a mail order house in Chicago for forty dollars. It turned out to be a little tin box with a series of colored lights on the top. Once it was plugged into a wall socket, it could detect alien craft within a five mile range and it was a constant source of amazement to him that the device never went off. But all that was to change the night Andy broke his arm.

One more item in his defense arsenal bears mention here--a marine type air horn that he had recently purchased to be used in conjunction with his UFO detector.The air horn was a powerful little device designed to be used at sea, and it issued a fog-horn blast that could literally be heard for miles. My mother had sternly warned my grandfather never to use it, except in case of fire. My grandfather argued that his equipment should be tested. My brother Andy ended the argument by sounding a tentative blast on the horn one evening just before supper that caused my mother to send a forkful of tuna casserole flying across the kitchen to splatter against the electric wall clock, which ceased to function properly several days later. A direct result, my mother always maintained, of my brother's foolish curiosity.

A word or two about the house we lived in at the time is perhaps in order here. It was an old two storied New England farmhouse complete with barn, chicken coop, hand dug well and even a tractor with disk harrows which my father had sold soon after he bought the place.As a matter of fact, the tire in which my brother was launched upon his fateful flight into destiny was actually an old tractor tire my father had dug out of the chicken coop.

My father bought the house in the early 50's and immediately went on a remodeling jag which lasted twenty years,more or less, until he sold it in the early 70's. He had some rather strange tastes in architecture,it seems to me now. He once stripped all the branches from a birch tree, painted it white, and flew a huge American flag from it. Of all the additions and remodeling work he had done, however-- and he had done whopping amounts--easily the most spectacular piece of work he had ever finished was our back-porch pillared facade.

The facade consisted of two massive southern mansion type fluted pillars he had found somewhere and erected in front of our back porch steps. The overall effect was less than thrilling, but in his eyes it became the crowning touch in his remodeling career. So thrilled was he,in fact, that he wired a spotlight to the roof of the chicken coop, which bathed his creation on some nights in a garish beacon of light, in his mind much like the lights which play across the exterior of the White House at our nations capitol.

The effect of the spotlight was not entirely lost on my mother either, as it turns out. She came to believe that the lighted backyard would someday serve as a site for gala late-night garden parties, where penguin suited men and women in long flowing dresses cavort waltzingly about the lawn, petitely munching catered hor d'oeuvres and engaging in clever conversation.

None of this actually came to pass, of course, and the only real use that ever came of the spotlight occurred every winter when the pool of water there above the septic tank froze, forming a small lighted skating rink of sorts.

Of the seven of us who lived in the house at the time, it was probably my older sister, Sharon, who was the most normal of the group. She occupied a room on the second floor of the house directly over the roof of my grandfather's new apartment. She was 16 or so at the time and one of those nerdy students who is constantly receiving academic awards and joining brainy type clubs. She also played the viola a constant source of amusement to my brother and me.

As is the case with most siblings, my sister and I were locked in intense mental combat throughout the time we lived together. To be honest I never seemed to gain the upper hand in this eternal war we waged. But I had evened the score lately by discovering that she had taken up smoking without our parents knowledge or consent. It was a brilliant piece of Generalship on my part and easily swung the tide of battle at last in my favor. I can still see her eyes crossed in pain across the supper table as I calmly announced to my parents that it was some strange boy from not around here who had shattered the front porch window that I had recently broken with an apple I had ricocheted off my brother's head in full view of my sister. Often times if she failed to treat me with the respect I now deserved, I would drop subtle hints across the dinner table. is something burning I would ask my mother, or, It certainly is smoky in here, I would say sniffing the air while across the table my sister's eyes shot daggers towards my innocently questioning little face. She always swore she would get even if it took the rest of her life.

Sharonas I have said occupied a room above my grandfather's apartment and my little sister Becky slept in a room adjoining Sharon,s that had at one time been a porch attic. Becky was just a dink at the time, maybe 4 or 5 years old and I doubt if she remembers any of what went on that night. She slept through most of it. But she too played a role as did we all did that night.

One distinguishing characteristic about the room Becky slept in was an endless source of worry to my mother. There was a trap door in one of the closets that had at one time led by ladder to the back porch. But the old man had recently remodeled that section of the house and the trap door was now a just a hole in the floor that led nowhere but ten feet straight down to the porch floor below. This was a major safety hazard to my mother's way of thinking, and she was constantly after my father to board it up, but he never did. That awful hole as my mother came to call it was such a source of worry and concern to her that sometimes hearing a sound in the middle of the night, she would wake my father convinced thather baby had fallen down that dreaded hole.

My father tried to sleep or pretend to sleep through these nocturnal alarms but every once in a while she would rouse him and insist he go check on Becky. She never went to see herself because she didn't want to be the one see her baby's twisted body there on the porch floor. My brother and sisters and I had come to recognize the nights on which this had happened and stayed away from him the next morning as he wasn't a sound sleeper and after being waked up often could not get back to sleep.Being around my father on the morning after a sleepless night was what I imagined life must be like behind the Iron Curtain that my teachers were always telling me about.

My brother Andy and I, along with my parents slept on the third floor, which had once been the attic that my father had remolded into two bedrooms. My parents room