He couldn’t play what he wanted to at home, not at the Reverend’s home, where blues was considered devil’s music.

So, with shoes shined, his best shirt buttoned to the collar and suspenders holding up loose trousers, he would slink off to juke joints every Saturday night.

He’d stand below a window or to the side of a crooked porch and strum along, eyes closed, humming…

This one time, when he was a teenager, his old man came home from work with a big pooched-out cheek.

They never shared much outward affection and certainly never laughed in tandem, but the kid was feeling uncharacteristically frisky because he’d gotten his driver’s license that day.

And so when his old man passed by the kitchen table, the kid reached up and pushed the…

For what seemed like eons leading up to his laptism, he pretended to be a rock instead of a sponge whenever his buddies talked about doing IT. 

At 16, he’d thought so long and so often about IT that he could string enough words together to fool anyone who hadn’t actually done IT, which, unbeknownst to him, far outnumbered those in his small circle who had.

It’s a wonder…

Inside his dimly lit Main Street hardware store, he flips through the numbered ticket books his high-school-sweetheart wife disdains.

“Mama,” he calls her, doesn’t think they should sell on credit anymore, this being 1993, and she wants to trade the old cha-chinging cash register for a computerized one.

“My darling,” he says daily, usually with a hug from which she…

She says she’ll give you a hummer if you can get her into the infield at the Talladega 500, maybe more if you can introduce her to Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Otherwise, you’d better make a date with your right hand -- maybe the left one, too, if you’re really in a lather.

Waitressing and tending bar at the pub in Table Rock, Neb., has taught this hollow-eyed vixen a thing or…

Subtitle: Five-letter word for “prejudiced”

Unlike her hot-tempered, boisterous Lebanese husband, a man who didn’t need a college education to sell a truckload of Vitalis to bald conventioneers, she never breaks a sweat.

This pale, blue-eyed Greek grandmother behind Coke-bottle lenses seems content to let him do the yelling for her, rolling her eyes as…

He was as kind, unremarkable and as soft-spoken as they come, a white bread sandwich without condiments or meat. 

His ginned-cotton drawl was almost as lyrical as gold digger Melanie Griffith’s in “Bonfire of the Vanities;” his blue eyes never cried in the rain; and he’d had the same myopic barber his whole life.

Maybe 5-foot-5, he wore suits off the Sears rack and…

She seems to know every-goddamn-body, their goods, bads and uglies, like a priest whose parishioners still honestly believe the confessional is their ticket into heaven.

It would not surprise me in the least if the Governor, who accepts “love offerings” for guest preaching engagements, strolled into her living room, got down on a knee, and told her he’d once sucked dick and liked it.

 …

He loves looking at perky nipples and shaved pussies, and he undresses every pretty woman who strolls within his periphery, falling completely out of conversations while the blood that used to cascade south flows north to his ears.

The only other holes that concern him are the business ends of his many handguns, which he’s certain Obama wants worse than sex with a white woman.

 …

He stands 6-foot-2 in flip-flops and carries a turtle-shell belly atop drumsticks not meant for 327 pounds, which he blames on the slow metabolism of a sexagenarian.

Truth: All the unsweet tea in the world can’t counteract affinities for La-Z-boys, candy bars and full plates the size of car hoods.

The man looks at you with smiling blue eyes, like he’s drinking every…