A SMUTTY KICKER

What S.M.U.T. Means to Me

A response to Laurel B. Miller’s prompt

Before I was a Brownie or a Girl Guide I wore a Pepto Bismol mumu and called myself a Spark. Then this wise ole woman named Brown Owl — who liberally sprinkled her fist-sized cupcakes with Zoloft — sat me on a toadstool and officially declared me an Ember.*

*This is, of course, the newest, politically correct alternative to Brownie.

What does this have to do with smut?

My uncle, Billy Buck, lives deep in the Nashville Basin of Tennessee. He and our gorgeous second cousin, “Shakin MaFlaps”, and their 16 offspring are livin’ large in a bitchin’ semi-wide.

Shockingly in his hamlet, there were no Boy Scouts or Girl Guides.

Instead, there were three cool clubs from which to choose: the Christian Crusaders, the Small Medical Units Trainees, or the Ku Klux Klan. His ma abandoned religion when the priest defiled her stuffed seal. Thereafter anything church-y was out of the question. She flipped a coin to decide which club would babysit her kids every Tuesday night and S.M.U.T. won out over the KKK.

As part of S.M.U. T. Billy Buck spent almost two decades wrapped in saran wrap.

Put away your privilege card — uniforms are expensive.

For 20 years he played doctor with siblings and cousins, learning anatomical body part names as they recited passages from Playboy interviews.

He learned how to perform minor surgeries. He discovered defibrillators, trepanning braces, and how to treat STIs using crushed ciggie butts and Coors Lite. He acquired confidence and bravado.

So while smut may mean something completely different to me, and maybe to you, Billy Buck would argue otherwise. He would agree with Laurel B. Miller when she says that “Smut is something that rules.”

To him, smut means the opportunity to play a mini-doctor and get to know his future wife Shakin on a much deeper level. And that’s more than I got out of Sparks, Embers, and Girl Guides.

©Jennifer J. McDougall 2023