War Hammer

"What in the hell happened to your head!?" I heard my cousin/roommate say as he walked through the front door, home from work. My uncle, my mom's sister's husband, formally know as Ateff, had come up for the night to do some sort of woodworking in the garage which evolved out of him and my cousin investing thousands of dollars into topnotch equipment and tools to transform the entire garage into a fully functional woodsmith workshop. With promising plans of making beautifully crafted cedar furniture from the cedar trees cut down on the country farm my uncle had spent his childhood. Two years of planning and countlessly rearranging the garage, hundreds of cases of Natural Light drank, thousands of hours of my uncle bumbling around the shop, all resulting in the workmanship of a small cedar judge's gavel (with sticky fingerprints covering the glossy finish), a "war hammer"(a large judge's gavel), and a small round coaster.

My uncle, God bless his soul, with a golden heart and a pickled brain, is nothing short of your classic balding, beer bellied, slobbering drunk, vulgar, racist, ignorant, outspoken, redneck with an amazing large vocabulary if you can understand a single hillbilly word of his slurred belligerent language known as Ateffenese. Ateff, not being his real name, resulted from him somehow maneuvering his way to yahoo's mail page to create his own account, the email address he wanted was unavailable so yahoo suggested others in alphabetical order, the first choice being Ateff, which he picked, and the name was made.

My uncle's visits are never uneventful, from the time he passed out drunk while standing straight up in the kitchen for 40 minutes before falling flat on his face, to the time he passed out drunk while standing up on the the second story deck and fell head first down a flight a wooden stairs, head injuries didn't seem to phase him like they did other people. It was just another Tuesday night for him. If his belligerent mishaps weren't entertaining enough, there was always the gallons of spilled beer tied into the, oh so lovely, default conversation of him publicly bellowing out his ungodly longing for me and my brother's wife. When we all cringed at the thought he would squawk out in a wet slur "We aint blood related you sick f@#kers!"

When I heard my cousin shriek, I ran upstairs from my room to see what my he was talking about. Ateff stood at the top of the steps and the entrance from the garage covered in sawdust, a beer in one hand and some carving tool in the other. At first I didn't see anything but a little blood on his shirt. Then my eyes led up to his head where I didn't notice much except for a big piece up his receding hair sticking up on the top back of his head. It looked a little awkward but then the realization set in that his hair was not nearly long enough to stand that high. It was a chunk of scalp the size of a jelly jar lid that was sticking up!
"Oh my God!" I cried from the stairwell.
"What? It aint that bad." Ateff leisurely said as he lifted his sawdust covered hand and blushed the flap over, meaning to brush it down but brushing it in the opposite direction exposing a graveyard of where hair follicles go to die.
"AHHHH" My cousin and I cried out simultaneously gagging in disgust.
"You need to go to the hospital right now!" I demanded.
"Naaaaaf, its fine." He said walking to the kitchen and opening another beer.
After my cousin and I drank a beer to calm the anguish, we had another to help us better interpret and decipher, through a newfound dialect of Ateffenese, what exactly had happened. No one can ever know for sure, but after an hour of listening, it sounded as if he was using some electric tool and didn't have his wood clamped down well enough and the vibration of the tool loosened the wood sending it shooting out of the clamp, smacking against the ceiling and then hammering directly onto his head.
My cousin was dying laughing "You're the only person in the world dumb enough to scalp themselves with a piece of wood!"
"I seriously think you need to go to the hospital, you probably have a concussion! Seriously!" I begged. But with no affect.
"Ahll I nee es amendid!"Ateff slurred.
I looked at my cousin questionably. "I think he wants a band-aid" he said. We searched the house and found nothing but an eye patch so after I forced him to clean the wound, Ateff, happy for the attention, stuck the eye patch on the top back part of his head. As he got up to get another beer from the fridge he said in a quirky slur with his back to us "I mothin'oo."
I looked at my cousin again with no clue. "I think he said, 'I'm watching you.'" My cousin could barely get it out before busting up laughing.