"Give 'Em Enough Rope, Brah"

More Notes From the Back Seat---

Freddy, the short spare verminous wight who they caught asleep in his beat-up flat-bed truck surrounded by baggies containing "pharmaceuticals" and miscellaneous stolen plunder and a switchblade close to hand...

This was Freddy, who so wildly over-reacted when they took him to the old back-seat, like they were going to kill him when they just offered him a cigarette. Maybe Freddy thought Dog Chapman was like the Krays, who would similarly offer a foeman a cigarette, and when the foeman opened his maw to take the cigarette a Kray would punch him in the open mouth, breaking his jaw in twain. It's a handy trick to know, no doubt. But Duane Chapman is no Reggie Kray.

Freddy was being dramatic. Beth said he was "an old-style convict," which is to say institutionalized and paranoid. He thought that they were going to beat him green and yellow when they were only offering to loosen his cuffs.

YOUNGBLOOD: Freddy, are you hungry? You want something before we go in?

FREDDY (THE PERP): I'll take a rope.

YOUNGBLOOD: Nah you don't need a rope. Listen, you know what... you never know what's gonna be tomorrow.

[PAUSE]

FREDDY: No, I know what's tomorrow.

YOUNGBLOOD: Nah, brah, a rope is, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem... The only advice I can really tell you, brah, is to start praying about it.

[Camera cuts to the harrowed, sober look on DUANE LEE'S face.]

[DOG bounces onto the back seat.]

DOG: My brother said you said something about a rope. Don't be stupid.

FREDDY: I'd let you shoot me, you know that?

DOG: But brother, I wouldn't be the one to do that. Right? I'm the guy that helps you out of the water when you're drownded. So I can't be that kind of guy.

Dialogue like this you can't buy. You couldn't make it up! My wife, who used to gamely chuckle and gasp along at the various antics and saws and cutting up and sich a gittin upstairs of Dog and his family, now haughtily disdains it as "vulgar, coarse, white trash" and "a libel on the good people of Oklahoma." Never mind that Duane Chapman was born in Colorado and the show is set in Hawaii. My wife has lost her sense of humour. Acts all hoity-toity like just watching this show will lower her IQ. Now she watches High Society and has taken Jules Kirby as her guru. Then she flips bloops and flops across the channel wavelengths and settles on watching The Hills.

I don't even hate The Hills. I find its vapidity freeing in a zen-mass-mind-ultra-suicide sort of way. Watching The Hills you know positively that no matter what befalls you hereafter it can't get worse than this moment right here sitting on the couch watching Spencer and Heidi canoodling and crooning unparalleled bollocks.

My least favourite character is Audrina.

To return to Dog, The Bounty Hunter: The difference between Dog and The Hills is that the viewer shall find illumination (nearly wrote humiliation) along the back-by-ways and the dirt-paths as we goe through the show together. Like The Amazing Race it opens up your skull with new and radical experiences. It doesn't simply confirm what you already knew (that Spencer and Heidi are voidoids and Brody Jenner is a horse's ass.) I would not likely run into a Hawaiaan wife-beating meth-gulping string-bean scum-bag on the streets where I live. In Greenpoint our wife-beaters are Polish and drink paint-stripper. Of course in Williamsburg, on Bedford Avenue, everybody seems like a character off The Hills. Plus The Hills is scripted so you shan't find folk saws like those that generously dot the above dialogue.

That said...

They should totally have a cross-over, brah.

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I liked how in this one episode Beth broke Dog's pinkie finger half in two and he goes "The fuck's that for?" The editors and the censors missed that because they kept it in.

Brah I laughed dude.

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Speaking of calling people "brah," when is the prop'rest time to do so prithee? I saw on one episode a man called his own wife "brah". I said to my wife, "Wife - brah - is it right to call your wife 'brah'?"

I thought "brah" was short for "brother" but wife reckoned it was Hawaiian for something more profound.

Da kine.

Urban Dictionary says:

"This is the slang term for "bro" which is slang for brother..a slang inside a slang. THIS ORIGINATED IN THE STATE OF HAWAII! for those who think that it originated in Southern California or where ever, your are miss informed [sic- E.N.]. It is the pigeon (English-Hawaiian slang) word that is used state-wide in Hawaii not only by surfers but by all people born and raised in Hawaii of all racial groups. And it pains me when I hear cali haole [sic - E.N.] tourist say it.

[Examples:]

sup brah
howsit brah
a' brah we go beach
ho brah where you stay

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brah

Subsection 4 states: "Meaning: My brother/ close associate/ cousin/ or Kama'aina (person FROM HAWAII)."

Subsection 2 says: "Hawaiian Pidgeon Talk for friend. Orgin: 60's Hawaii

In kauai my cousin started it! ha!"

The people on Urban Dictionary are always useful for penetrating the hitherto murky mysteries of vernacular. One subscriber signs himself "Da Kine Fish OutaH WataH."

Subsection 13 says "brah" is: "How one tool refers to, or greets another."

Let this be the end of this worthy meditation. I still find it peculiar that a male biped might refer to his female spousal helpmeet as "brah". It's like when Ed Long used to call his girfriend Emma Halling "man".

"Emma man, what's for dinner brah?"

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Tough old convict though he was, bedraggled and hellbound a vulture though he was, however vile a killer he was I say, by the end of the journey Dog was literally dabbing tears away from Freddy's bleary eyes. As Dog said later, with fading sensitivity, "That was sad. Ker-BLAm, ker-BLAM."

I laughed at one point when the talk descended somewhat from the arcane old hobo folk-talk noted at the start of this entry, to the transcendental-bathetic bushwa we know all too well from previous late-night back-seat bull sessions. "Tough convict at first," Dog said (sounding rather like Herbie Popnecker), "then you mentioned his little girl and all he could do is cry. Very surprised."

And here was the key, don't you see?; Dog "mentioned his little girl" and the old-style small-time hood fell quite to pieces. "How old is she Freddy?" Dog goes. "Eight," sobs Freddy. "Seven!" coos Dog, who forgot his ear-trumpet that day. "Eight," says Freddy, clearer now and through grit teeth. "She's eight years old, pretty soon she'll be thirteen," Dog carries on. Well, Dog, I think I can be more precise than you in this instance. In five years she will be thirteen. Freddy should have said, "Yeah, and...? In fifty years we'll all be dead but what's that got to do with anything?" Unfortunately Freddy was pretty much a broken man by this point, reduced to lowest, vilest plankton, and he had nothing new to add to the banter.

It's really a crying shame he didn't say that, because it's true too - - - in fifty years we probably will all be dead.

Except for Heidi and Spencer.