Bourbon, Bullets, and a Broke Down Truck
If you’re lucky, the universe will deliver to you a lifelong friend who is your complete opposite. For me, that person is B. Floyd.
B. Floyd is a blue-collar Southerner who hails from Kentucky and Tennessee. He gave college a shot, realized it wasn’t a fit, and started changing oil in our hometown. It wasn’t long before he got a union job as a pipefitter (i.e., plumber), and he’s been toiling as a tradesman ever since.
My friend is opposite me in every way. He’s into NASCAR, and I’m into golf. He’s a cigarette smoking bass fisherman, and I’m a cigar chomping fly fisherman. He wears blue jeans, and I wear corduroy. He drives an F-250, and I drive a 530. But it works.
In fact, it works so well that it makes no sense trying to understand it—like flipping a switch and the lights come on. Do I really need to understand how electricity works? No. I just need the lightbulb to light.
B. Floyd and I have been on many adventures—the majority of which are impromptu and his idea. They usually start with a phone call and a simple question: “Whatcha doing Saturday?” and end with me replying, “Whatcha got in mind?”
And every time one of these boondoggles starts, no matter how big or small, there’s one thing I can guarantee you—B. Floyd is hiding something. GUARAN-DAMN-TEE.
He’s always got something cooking—some harebrained idea he knows I’d never go for. So he keeps it to himself, knowing damn well this ain’t my first dog and pony show, that we’ve agreed without saying so that I’ll find out the real plan when he drops it on me at the last second.
On this particular trip, it was definitely the case. And I knew it. I knew something was up, but I always get roped in. Besides, who turns down an invitation for a road trip to the Bourbon Capital of the World?
This was the story I was told:
His cousin, Jethro—who is known throughout Bardstown, Kentucky, as a master bullshitter—was selling a truck named Fatal Attraction, which, in and of itself, was warning enough to decline the invitation.
B. Floyd was buying it and wanted to know if I was interested in a road trip—which he knew I’m incapable of saying no to.
Simple enough, right? Drive up, get the truck, spend the night at Uncle Kenny’s, and drive back to Atlanta. Only a moron would believe it would be that simple. When you’re dealing with the Floyds, nothing—and I mean absolutely nothing—is simple. But that’s why I love ’em.
This is the same family who, a few Thanksgivings ago, sat down with their mother’s new boyfriend—only for B. Floyd’s brother, drinking straight from a bottle of Jim Beam, to pull a pistol at the dinner table to settle an argument.
Anyway, on we went to pick up a piece-of-shit pickup from his slippery cousin. When we arrived, Jethro was nowhere to be found. Surprise, surprise. So where do you start the search when you’re trying to find a degenerate cousin? Simple: sheriff’s office. If anyone knew where Jethro was, it was the law. From what I understood, this guy had his own cot in the county jail.
By hook or crook, we eventually found him—without a shirt on and doped up on only God knows what. I knew we were in trouble when he rattled off three different stories at once about why he didn’t have the title to the truck. All he knew was someone else was to blame, and if we wanted to buy him a drink.
B. Floyd had a Come-to-Jesus talk with his half-naked cousin. I don’t know what was said, but Jethro assured us he’d handle everything if we gave him 24 hours—which, at that point, meant we were at his mercy—so we drove through Bourbon Country, which was stunning.
We visited My Old Kentucky Home and the Maker’s Mark distillery, where B. Floyd bought a bottle and dipped it in a vat of red wax. It’s still in his collection to this day.
Maker’s Mark Distillery
I’ve traveled all over this great nation of ours—been to 47 states and visited every major city—and I can assure you that next to the majesty of the Rocky Mountains and the beauty of Northern California, Kentucky is one of the prettiest parts of America.
There’s no way to understand what bluegrass looks like until you’ve driven past farm after farm—all impeccably manicured—in the rolling hills of Kentucky.
Bardstown, in particular, is a charming town to visit. In addition to a quaint downtown, its countryside is blanketed with ancient warehouses that sit patiently, as barrels of bourbon expand and contract with the seasons until they’re aged to perfection.
As afternoon turned to night, Jethro said he’d taken care of everything and, in a gesture of goodwill, invited us to his buddy’s trailer for an evening of bourbon drinking.
As we pulled into the trailer park—complete with rusty singlewides and too many cars on cinderblocks to count—I became hyper-aware I wasn’t in Athens anymore. Gone were preppy Southern boys from wealthy Atlanta families; in their place stood hardened sons of the Confederacy, with thick beards, muddy boots, and tattoos—some acquired while incarcerated.
B. Floyd introduced me no differently than he would’ve anyone else he knew, and to the credit of the guys, they welcomed me in like family. In no time, I was sampling their bourbons from decades-old moonshine jugs they proudly collected.
We smoked cigarettes and traded stories of Kentucky basketball and Georgia football—all the while getting extremely intoxicated. We left after a few hours, with a promise from Jethro that he’d meet us in the morning with the title to Fatal Attraction.
B. Floyd and I went to his Uncle Kenny’s new wife’s house in downtown Bardstown to crash. I’d heard stories of this uncle for years—the main one being how half the stories in Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck If… were based on Kenny.
So, as you can imagine, I was caught off guard when we pulled up to a historic house and were greeted by his wife—who, from what I could gather, was a genuine Southern belle.
Her house was tastefully decorated, past issues of Architectural Digest were neatly organized, and the only dirt was on Kenny’s boots, which were in the garage. Clearly, Uncle Kenny had nothing to do with this place.
Once we got settled in, Mrs. Kenny suggested we walk a few blocks to The Old Talbott Tavern for a nightcap.
The Talbott Tavern has been around since 1779 and has hosted Abraham Lincoln and King Louis Philippe (during his exile), and Jesse James shot a few holes in a wall in a drunken stupor.
The Old Talbott Tavern
Following in the footsteps of Jesse James, B. Floyd and I opted to pick up where we left off in the trailer—spending the evening buying rounds for strangers and having a grand time, never relinquishing our grasp on a highball full of Kentucky’s finest.
The next morning, we woke up to a hearty breakfast by Mrs. Kenny. We laughed about our evening at The Tavern before meeting Jethro—who, to his credit, came through with the title… and one of the biggest pieces of shit in the history of American automobiles. There sat, in front of us, an old Chevy with a bumper sticker that said Fatal Attraction.
We got the title in B. Floyd’s name and started what was supposed to be a six-hour drive back to Atlanta. But when the dumpster fire of a pickup wouldn’t drive faster than forty miles an hour and was fighting like hell over the Tennessee mountains, it became clear we weren’t getting back before the sun set.
At one point, we were going ten miles an hour—I shit you not. Blinkers on, arms waving cars to pass us, this malfeasance of a deal was proving its worth in spurts of black smoke. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the damn thing was on fire. Jethro knew good and well he’d tuned it up just enough to get us over the state line before it left us stranded.
We ended up getting ahold of B. Floyd’s girlfriend, who drove several hours to pick us up. We spent the better part of the evening at a gas station table with three bucks to our name. It didn’t take long to run out of cigarettes as George Jones quietly sang “Why Baby Why” in the background.
That damned old truck ended up running for a few years before B. Floyd had to junk it. And he went out of his way to keep the Fatal Attraction bumper sticker from peeling off.
Twenty-five years later, our trip to Bardstown occasionally comes up in conversation, with my buddy—true to form—only remembering the good times.
“You remember ol’ Fatal… that sumbitch was one helluva truck.”
“Yeah, it was a son of a bitch, alright.”
*Composed, Edited, and Published in Atlanta, GA
