“You’ve Told Me This Joke Before”

It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials. In between, the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s deliverer, or mail carrier set down on my front porch a Cuisinart blender, a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble, an ottoman, a six-pack of Yankee bird feeders, one vintage ukulele from a place called Imperiala all the way out in Santa Ana, California, plus enough Venetian blinds to darken one of those French cathedrals. There might’ve been other things. On days I found nothing misdelivered, I blamed porch pirates from one of the new modular-home-filled subdivisions up and down what was once, twenty years earlier, a country road. Everything delivered had the correct address—my address—but a name I didn’t know: Edmund Conyers. I’m talking the washer/dryer, ottoman, ukulele, blinds, etcetera, they all showed EDMUND CONYERS, and then the exact place where I lived on Carolina Ponyfoot Road, Cannonburg, SC. I kept all these unordered gifts and even used the toaster and ukulele until I happened to watch one of those cable series shows about crooks that involved harboring stolen goods. Harboring might not be the correct term. On the show, the dude kept taking on people’s swiped sailboats. Receiving stolen goods, I guess. I didn’t want to be charged with receiving stolen goods—but if I did, I planned ahead of time to bring in the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s person, and mail carrier as accessories. Oh, I had it planned out. Anyway, I got paranoid about bringing things I never ordered into my den, opening the boxes, then staring at them, these things Edmund Conyers needed, evidently. I imagined a man with his feet up, strumming his four-string, looking out at the birds through a bunch of slats, petting his dog, thinking about making one of those healthy green slushies, lulled by the rumble of a dryer while awaiting the time when he could drive off on Michelins. That’s me. I thought of those types of things. I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but it occurred to me that perhaps one Edmund Conyers used to live here at 111 Carolina Ponyfoot Road, maybe thirty or sixty years ago. I’d bought the house, back when I was married, from, I don’t know, someone named Lagrone or Lagroon. I forget. We bought the place, I worked my job, my wife worked her job, she fell in love with her boss at the law firm and left me, and so on. “This is starting to take up too much room,” I said to myself. I thought about moving, or at least calling a licensed contractor to add a nice twenty-by-twenty room at the end of the house. I’d like to say that I stood out front, awaiting the UPS woman, in order to say, “Hey, this isn’t mine.” But I did the opposite. One time I stood outside staring at a dying citronella plant when one of those people showed up, and I ran back inside and stood at a place in the kitchen where no one could see me if they peered in. Ten minutes later, I walked out on the front porch to find a box of vitamins, supplements, and such—A, Bs, C, D, folic acid, milk thistle, all the rest. A few of those bottles, I learned after doing some research, concerned memory problems. And that’s when it hit me: someone used to live in this house, they’ve forgotten, and they keep ordering shit and sending it to their old address. Somebody named Edmund Conyers has forgotten where he lives now. Oh, how sad, I thought. I thought, I need to run down the Conyers family and return what was theirs. Listen, I’m not a detective. My last job happened to be as a door-to-door salesman selling welcome mats. You know how I did it? I put down a mat that read welcome, stood on it, then rang the doorbell. This was back when I had all my teeth. I smiled bigger than possible. Whoever answered the door, man or woman, always looked puzzled until I took my right forefinger and pointed downward. “Don’t you think you need something like this?” I might say. “Don’t you want people showing up and feeling like they belong?” Things started falling apart when people ordered their welcome mats online. I knew it because of the misspellings. There were too many people who kept mats that read things like the sinclair’s or the funderburk’s. Is there no one at the welcome mat store who contacts buyers and says, “Do you want me to add house or front porch at the end of this?” Though even then, it would only be the domain of only one singular Funderburk. Like I said, I’m no genius, but I know the rules of the apostrophe. Sometimes, driving around aimlessly, I saw such spellings on mailboxes and knew to keep going. It’s not just mats that read welcome. I had a trunkful, all different shades, one of which read GO AWAY, ha ha ha. If I’d’ve had that particular mat on my front porch, maybe I’d’ve not gotten all the unsolicited packages that Edmund Conyers deserved. For the religious folk, I urged them to buy one that read, in tiny font, IF NO ONE ANSWERS, WE HAVE ANSWERED THE CALL OF THE SECOND COMING. It might’ve been my best seller. For the record, I’m only missing one back molar, but it caused all my other teeth to space out like a worthless picket fence. People won’t buy welcome mats, evidently, from a guy with such spacing. * I walked over to my neighbor’s house, maybe two hundred yards away. Two hundred steps, I know, because I counted. We normally didn’t talk. Sometimes I got his mail, sometimes he got mine. He flew flags on a pole in his yard, ones I didn’t cotton to. But that wasn’t the worst problem with him. His name’s Pinson Plemmons. Two last names, which usually means trouble, like quarterback Peyton Manning, or Confederate general Braxton Briggs. Dylan Thomas. There are others, a whole lot of others, usually enrolled in high-priced private schools. Pinson studied geography in college, even after we had fifty states. Who studies that? I mean, what kind of job can one get with a geography major? All the maps have already been printed out, and Texaco stations don’t even offer up those great foldout kinds anymore. I’d understand if maybe a new continent got discovered and they needed someone to go over there and point out the rivers, streams, creeks, and mountains. Or if this new continent had people living there who’d already platted out Elm and Main Streets. But what else? Anyway, besides the guy flying a Confederate flag, his geography background absolutely ruined him when it came to telling jokes. Here’s how Pinson told a joke: “These three guys walk into a bar. One is from the Piedmont region of South Carolina, right about where we live, elevation 984 feet, the temperature usually between 34 and 89 degrees Fahrenheit. Fairforest Creek runs through the middle of downtown. The second guy is from Muskegon, Michigan. There, it’s only 617 feet above sea level, and the average low in January is something like 21 degrees. They got Lake Michigan, but also Mona Lake to the south. The third man who walks into the bar…” I’m saying, Pinson ruined jokes with all these unnecessary asides. Who cares? What the fuck did these three guys do in the bar? Every one of his jokes starts thusly. I quit visiting Pinson when I was still married. “Hey, Pinson, it’s me. It’s Ebert,” I said through his open window. Most people who fly Confederate flags in their front yards are a little too paranoid to leave den windows open wide, but not Pinson. I think he wanted someone to show up and yell at him about the Civil War. He wanted to offer up the nuances of the MasonDixon Line, maybe some fun facts about Richmond, Virginia. “I ain’t got any of your mail, man,” he said from the couch. I could see him sitting there. He watched The Price Is Right. Pinson kind of looked like that hit man or fixer on that show about crystal meth in New Mexico. I liked that show. My ex-wife didn’t. That’s another little problem we had. I said, “No, I’m not here for that.” I said, through the screen, “Do you know anything about the guy I bought my house from? You knew him, right?” I said, “Wait, I mean, who did that guy named Lagroon or Lagrone buy the house from, back in the day?” “Edmund Conyers,” he said. “People called him Ed. I called him Edmund Conman. He was a contractor, and he built your house all by himself.” I caught a whiff of the backyard. Pinson ran a highly successful port-o-potty rental company for street festivals, outdoor concerts, some kind of steeplechase up around the state line in North Carolina. Construction sites. When those port-o-potties weren’t out being used, he kept them—he had more than a hundred—parked on his back acreage, in rows. Again, this is out in the country, with no zoning laws. Some people call them port-a-lets. Some people call them port-o-loos or port-a-johns. I don’t want to get all Karl Childers on this, but I call them port-o-potties. Pinson Plemmons’s port-o-potties. My ex-wife didn’t like the movie Sling Blade, either. Another crack in the marriage commitment. Pinson got up off the couch and came to the front door. He opened it slightly but showed no intention of letting me in his house. In the background I heard his wife yell out, “Your pudding’s going to be ready around noon.” It’s a sentence I’d never heard anyone say in the past. I said to Pinson, “I keep getting things delivered to me.” I told him everything. I’m pretty sure I got it in order, from toaster to Michelin tires. If it were a joke, and I wanted him to understand, I might’ve said, “FedEx, which is situated in Memphis—on the Mississippi River, which is the longest river in the United States,” and gone on from there, including mean temperatures, population, and other general facts. I said, “I never even met the man I bought the house from, much less Mr. Conyers. Was he old? I mean, is he old now? I’m thinking he might have some kind of dementia, and he’s forgotten his address. I’ve heard about that kind of thing happening to people.” The air smelled like Pine-Sol mixed with chicken farm. Pinson turned his head back toward his wife and yelled out, “I’ll have my pudding after the Final Showcase. If they got a Kia hatchback or a six-night trip to Nashville, I got the answer this time.” He looked at the TV, then back to me. He said, “I forget where they moved. You don’t look that old. Have you heard about a little thing called the internet? Look them up. Type in Edmund Conyers’s name. There’s a thing called the Google. Type it in there. If you don’t have a computer, a Dell computer goes for $599, according to this show.” A commercial came on for that mechanical chair people sit on when they can’t climb a set of stairs. Pinson pulled about, oh, four hundred hairs coming out of his left nostril, then threw them on the floor. He said, “Hey, I ain’t seen you in a while. Did I tell you about the three guys driving through west Texas, when they seen a sheep stuck halfway into a barbed wire fence?” I said, “Yeah, you told me, maybe ten years ago.” “So one of them is from Birmingham, one from Jackson, and one from Tennessee.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, I remember. You told me this joke before. I got a computer and internet, and I know how to look people up on Google.” I tried to edge off the porch. “Guy from Alabama—which has a huge old iron background—says, ‘I wish that was Sophia Loren stuck in that fence.’ He said, ‘Alabama has a bay in Mobile, but there are some tail-end Appalachian mountains there that reach about twenty-four hundred feet, I swear. But I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that.’” “Uh-huh,” I said. “I know this joke. You told me.” “And the guy from Mississippi—a great cotton state, also known for its rich delta soil, elevations anywhere from sea level to about 295 feet—says, ‘I wish that was Brigitte Bardot.’ He said, ‘This Texas place is exciting! I wish we had this where I’m from.’” I said, “You told me this before. Guy from Tennessee says he wishes it was dark outside. So no one could see him having sex with a sheep. The end.” I don’t know why I thought it necessary to add on, “Guy from Tennessee probably had a degree in geography.” Pinson shut the door in my face. I stood there for a while, thinking he’d reopen and laugh. He didn’t. I heard his wife yell out, “I got your favorite pudding spoon.” * An hour later, after I’d tried to wash the smell out of my nostrils from visiting Pinson Plemmons, I found Edmund Conyers on the internet, alive in a fancy assisted living place downtown, one of those situations where one moves from duplex to apartment to hospital ward to grave. I don’t know what it cost to live at Cannonburg Sunset, but they offered an Olympic-sized swimming pool and pickleball courts. Conyers appeared to be in the apartment stage, so I couldn’t figure out what he wanted with the washer/ dryer combo. And certainly he wasn’t allowed to drive anymore, so what was with the tires? I went to the main entrance, introduced myself to a receptionist, and she sent me to a woman named “Ms. Rebecca.” Later on I would Google up Ms. Rebecca Bishop, because she seemed like the kind of woman who’d cherish a welcome mat, and I had a couple left over in the trunk of my Buick. Plus, she might’ve been the most physically attractive woman I’d ever seen, outside of a block of wives I came across in the town of Landrum, back in my door-todoor days, all horse-riding women. Anyway, I introduced myself to Ms. Rebecca, who seemed like the kind of woman who, growing up, led food and clothing drives for the poor each winter. She might’ve been thirty-five, she might’ve been fifty. She wore a nice business suit, with a cloisonné pin on that read we care! She kind of looked like any number of Red Cross posters from the World War II era, her reddish hair up in a bun. I said, “Hi. I’m here today because I’m worried about one of your residents,” and tried not to show my spatially scary teeth. She said, “Are you a relative?” I shook my head. I said, “I’m just afraid that one day I’ll be getting a gun in the mail,” which wasn’t true. I hadn’t even thought of that. She said, “Oh, my,” in a way that reminded me of that actress in Bull Durham—another movie my ex-wife didn’t like. Who doesn’t like Bull Durham? Eventually, after I’d asked Ms. Rebecca if she’d ever taken some kind of metal arts classes and made that we care! pin all by herself, she took me outside, and we strode to Building C in order to visit, or confront, Edmund Conyers. He answered the door in his boxer shorts but with a nice Oxford dress shirt and tie. I don’t know how or why, but he too watched The Price Is Right. Maybe it showed up On Demand from the cable company, or maybe he knew more about technology than I did and had it on DVD. After he’d opened the door and said, “Hello,” his wife yelled out from somewhere in back, “Someone’s at the door.” Ms. Rebecca said, “Hello, Mr. Conyers. This here is Ebert Rawlings. He lives in the house you built many years ago.” She spoke slowly, as if to a stray dog. And loud. He said, and I quote, “I ain’t responsible for any problems. I hired out a guy to do the wiring, and another to do the septic…” I yelled out, “Hey, Mr. Conyers. Do you remember Pinson Plemmons? He was your old neighbor. He told me where you now live,” which, of course, wasn’t true, but I thought it might take his memory back to the actual house he once built, the area where he and his wife lived thirty or forty years earlier. In the back, Mrs. Conyers called out, “Handbags cost a lot more than they look like,” I guess responding to The Price Is Right. “Pinson Plemmons lives off his daddy’s fame. You know what his daddy invented? I’ll tell you. The incineration toilet. Ha! I knew that man, too, Percival Plemmons. Couldn’t keep a job anywhere. His wife lit a fire under his ass, and the next thing you know, he’s invented the incineration toilet. Ha!” Spittle came out, then stuck to his chin. I could never work at the state fair guessing ages, but Mr. Conyers had to be nearing a hundred. His gnarled hands looked as though they still gripped a nice framing hammer. Ms. Rebecca said, “Have you been ordering things online, Mr. Conyers? Mr. Rawlings here keeps getting things delivered to your old house, addressed to you, and he wants to make sure you get them back. He’s being a good citizen and doing the right thing.” The back of her neck looked like a long creamy waterslide. I wasn’t doing the right thing. Her neck looked like a Creamsicle, and I forced myself to hold back. Edmund Conyers said, “Well?” I said, out of nowhere, “If you want, I can rent a U-Haul and bring everything over here.” I listed off all that now took up space in my den and garage. Ms. Rebecca said, “You know we have our storage units available, if you wish.” Edmund Conyers shook his head no vigorously. His wife yelled out, “She hit a dollar on the wheel!” To me, Conyers said, “I know this trick! We’re not ready for the hospital yet,” and slammed the door. * Ms. Rebecca sighed. She said, “Let me get your phone number, Mr. Ebert. I might try to track down Edmund’s credit card company and see if I can get these charges dismissed, or something. Let me see what I can do.” I said, “If you want, you can come over to my house and look at all these things,” being sly, you know. I thought, if she sees some of the nicer things I own, she might be willing to go out on a date, or something. She might like my garden, where I grow enough tomatoes, peppers, and okra to take down to the farmers’ market on Saturdays. Or the barn that could easily be converted into an art studio should she want to make more cloisonné pins on her own. Maybe she’d show up when the wind blew away from all those port-o-potties. I said, “And please don’t call me ‘Mr. Ebert.’ That sounds weird. Does everyone around here go by Mr. or Ms., and then their first name?” We walked back toward her office. She said, “It is kind of kindergarten-y, isn’t it? I don’t know why people do that around here.” She said, “Ebert. Okay.” I said my phone number out loud, and she put it in her cell phone contacts. I thought, It pays to be nice and do the right thing. She went inside, and I walked back to my car. Then, I don’t know why, instead of heading to the exit, I drove halfway around Cannonburg Sunset and parked right there in front of Edmund Conyers’s apartment. I looked at my watch. The Price Is Right should’ve just ended, if they started at the top of the hour. This time Edmund Conyers answered the door wearing a pair of Ban-Lon slacks, a wife-beater T-shirt, no shirt or tie. He said, “Come on in, man,” and walked backward. He said, “They’re both dripping. In the kitchen, in the bathroom. I put in new washers, but it’s something else with those spigots.” He didn’t recognize me from fifteen minutes earlier, obviously, and thought I worked as the retirement home’s on-call plumber. I walked in, what the hell. Mrs. Conyers sat in front of the TV, watching the Weather Channel. She said to both of us, I guess, “They’re calling for a thunderstorm later this afternoon.” On the walls I saw two shadow boxes. One appeared to be filled with commas, the other empty. I pointed at them. Edmund Conyers said, “That first one’s mine. Those are the fangs from copperheads and rattlesnakes I’ve killed all my life.” He said, “Where are your tools?” I wondered if any of those snakes once lived on my property. I said, “What’s the empty one all about?” Edmund Conyers said, “That one’s for all the pearls my wife here has collected from oysters. Zero. She’s allergic to shellfish.” I couldn’t keep up the ruse of being a plumber, so I explained how I’d just been there with Rebecca, and so on. I said, “I can’t keep all these things you’ve bought.” He sat down on the couch. I could tell his mind worked like a Rolodex, trying to remember our previous conversation. He said, “It’s been some years. You can’t try to sue me for those open graves in the backyard. We had a lot of dogs and cats. There’s nothing worse than having a dog die, then having to dig through that hard clay with your dead pet waiting for burial, right next to you, wrapped in a sheet.” Ms. Conyers blurted out, “It’s flooding in Kentucky! I told you, Edmund. You owe me a dollar.” I said, “No, I didn’t fall into a hole. Listen. You’ve ordered a bunch of things, and they’ve ended up at my house. I just want you to have what you deserve to own.” I looked over at their kitchen counter. “You need a toaster, right?” “Damn right,” Edmund said. He got up from the couch in about three heaves and looked as if he might walk over and punch me in the nose. He said, “Oh! It’s all coming back to me now. You were just here, talking about my old neighbor Plemmons, right?” I cannot explain how relieved I felt. I said, “Yes! Yes, yes, yes.” He said, “Plemmons with his port-o-johns out back.” I said, “Well.” I didn’t want to swerve him off subject about how I called them something else. To his wife he said, “You remember Pinson, right, Drema? I’m talking Percival Plemmons’s boy.” She held up her hand, either to show that she remembered or she wanted her husband to shut up. Me, I got all obsessed with her name being Drema. I’d never heard that name before. Edmund Conyers said, “Hey, I heard this one the other night at bingo. This grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says…” I’d heard it before. But I didn’t say anything. I smiled and nodded. I wanted those tires out of my den. Edmund Conyers said, “Wait. I forget what the bartender says.” The joke goes, The bartender says, “We named a drink after you,” and the grasshopper says, “Okay. I’ll try it. Give me an Andy,” or something like that. Edmund Conyers said, “Goddamn it. It was a good joke. I forget how it goes.” He looked sad. There, in his wife-beater shirt, no longer looking as if he wanted to punch me, I could see in his eyes that he understood how he and Drema would be moving to the next stage of the retirement home soon. There they’d be, side by side on single beds in the hospital wing of Cannonburg Sunset, staring at a wall-mounted television set. On good days one of them might start singing a Frank Sinatra song, or a campfire song, and the other would join in. I don’t want to get maudlin, but I wondered if—should things go the way I wished—Rebecca might come sit on my back deck, help me drink martinis, and we, too, might enjoy singing together, or at least swapping jokes neither of us had heard. I thought about telling Edmund Conyers that he should order a tiller, seeing as I could use a new one. I could’ve used a riding lawn mower, too, and a better window unit air conditioner. Instead, I gave him my last business card, thinking he might buy a couple welcome mats, which would come straight back to me. I hoped he’d order the one that read you are here, or go away—this isn’t your house, or my wife left, and so should you. Then I got to thinking of all those jokes about people with no arms and no legs—on the beach, out in the ocean, splayed out in front of a door, nailed to the wall, in a frying pan, in the dishwasher, in the middle of a poker table. __________________________________ From Wounded Boarders by George Singleton. Used with permission of the publisher, DZANC Books. Copyright © 2026 by George Singleton.