By Brett Stayton
She was a beautiful, top-heavy blonde girl whom I first met around the same time that I declared war on the varmint that regularly ransacked the trash cans in my backyard. On a warm spring night back in college, those two storylines would seamlessly intertwine to script an elegant redneck love story only possible in a place like Kentucky.
On this fateful night in history, my fraternity had partnered with two sororities to host the annual “Delta Draft,” a campus-wide tradition in which the ladies pick their dates just like Uncle Sam once drafted young men to send off to war. We dressed the part with mil-surp camo, army helmets, and red, white, and blue bandanas. Some of us even rocked shemaghs to pay respects to the soldiers fighting overseas in the global war on terror.
Make no mistake about it, though, this was not stolen valor. There was absolutely nothing valorous about the debauchery this party entailed. However, the spirit of our costumes wasn’t lost on us as we raised a toast at the pregame party to the brave heroes overseas.
My buddies and I lived next door to our fraternity house in a residential home that had been transformed into something straight out of “Animal House,” with a giant neon bar in the dining room and a putting green and archery range in the big fenced-in backyard.
Draft Day
However, in the weeks leading up to the biggest party of the year, our piece of paradise was being soiled by what we first suspected to be a raccoon. The critter was routinely raiding trash receptacles and strewing garbage across our backyard. After multiple unsuccessful stakeouts with the BB gun and a few nights with an empty have-a-hart trap, the nuisance pest was winning this battle. That all changed the night of the Delta Draft, though.
The night got off to a good start, and I was successfully wooing the date who drafted me with a combination of charm, intellect, and my ability to binge drink. She had a raspy, hot southern accent that immediately drove me wild, and the sight of someone so refined and ladylike smoking a drunk cig on the back deck with my buddies was enough to rev my engine. Impressing her enough to take her clothes off that night was going to be a challenge, though.
However, the varmint I had been hunting for weeks was about to present me with an opportunity to showcase the kind of machismo that no heterosexual woman can resist.
I had gone inside to grab some cold beers from the fridge when a buddy burst inside like Paul Revere riding through New England. But instead of the “British are Coming,” he was shouting, “Get the BB Gun—there’s a ‘possum out back!”
I quickly responded, “Forget the BB gun, I got something better.”
Seducing the ‘Possum Princess
I ran up the staircase to my room with the speed and agility of an SEC slot receiver, quickly retrieved the compound bow stashed underneath my bed, descended the stairs in a single bounce, hurdled a couch like an aspiring Olympian, jumped over a beer dice game on the coffee table with a vertical leap that Coach Calipari would have recruited, and spilled out onto the deck raising my bow and knocking an arrow in a single motion.
I had spent countless hours standing in that very same spot, slinging arrows towards a bow bag propped up against the back fence of our backyard. That’s how I knew it was almost exactly 30 yards from our deck to the trash cans that the ‘possum was about to ambush.
I steadied my pin and let an arrow fly.
THWACK!
In the blink of an eye, the expired possum was stuck to the fence like a dart to a board with a single arrow through the neck.
A roar of applause erupted from the dudes smoking cigs on the deck. Meanwhile, most of the girls who saw the scene unfold had immediately bolted back indoors, dismayed and disgusted by the primal act they’d just observed.
However, the beautiful lady who had drafted me to be her date just stood there with a Marlboro Red burning between her lips and looking at me with the kind of eyes that made it obvious she was melting in the presence of my machismo.
Though that party was the first time she and I had ever actually met, we didn’t make it through the night before we gladly consented to both being nothing but mammals and proceeding to do it like they do on the Discovery Channel. That’s how a beautiful southern belle and the president of one of the most highfalutin sororities on campus got nicknamed the ‘Possum Princess.
