Medela (me-de’-la): When you can’t deny or defend friends’ faults and seek to heal them with good words.
Bill was the worst. He smelled like marinated onions topping a piece of boiled cabbage. Every other word was fu*k or fu*kin’. He borrowed money from me and never paid it back. He tried to talk me into doing crazy shit, like planting opium poppies in my back yard, or robbing a convenience store: “Steal those scratch-offs. You’re bound to hit it big. Do it!” I almost did, but my wife talked me out of it.
Everybody tried to talk me into dumping Bill as a friend, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He had saved my life several times and I owed him. Somehow we ended up together in the 173rd Airborne in Vietnam. We were pulling an all-nighter on a listening post. We had been given doses of speed to keep us awake. It had a powerful effect on me. I couldn’t sit still and I kept laughing maniacally. Bill thought it was funny to tell me his “best of” knock-knock jokes and see me roll around on the ground laughing hysterically. Given my state, he was going to radio back to camp to have me extracted. That’s when we heard the unmistakable sound of AK 47s locking and loading. 4 VC popped out of the underbrush with weapons aimed straight at us.
I still couldn’t stop laughing. One of them asked in broken English “What the hell you do? I hear way over there.” Bill said “I tell jokes, make him laugh.” Then he unloaded a knock-knock joke. The VC who could speak English translated and the four started laughing hysterically, until one started choking. The other three dropped their weapons and went to help him. How stupid. Bill picked up his weapon and shot each of them once, making sure to give them non-fatal wounds. Under the circumstances. He couldn’t bring himself to kill them—they were obvious raw recruits who had been turned loose with no training.
Bill radioed and we were extracted and didn’t say anything about the VC. We probably would’ve been Court Martialed if we did. So, Bill’s jokes saved my life. I’ll never be able to repay him.
Another time, we were getting drunk in a biker bar in Salinas, CA. Foolishly, I told this biker his girlfriend looked like well-plowed field. I don’t think he understood what I meant, but he got really mad. He said “I’m gonna kill ya, ya little piece of shit.” He pulled out a 10-inch stiletto. Bill grabbed the basket our nachos had come in and held it up like a shield between me and the biker. The knife got stuck in the basket and I was saved. Bill was carrying a .45 auto and it helped us get out of the bar alive. We sped off in Bill’s red Corvair. I looked out the back window and we were being followed by at least twenty bikers. I fired a couple of shots at them and they peeled off. Saved again! There are a lot more examples, but these two should suffice make my point.
Despite Bill’s ghastly smell and hellish demeanor, and all the rest, I owe him my life, and I’ll be his friend forever. So, leave him alone.
Just ask him to tell you a knock knock joke.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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