Mark Twain once wrote, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” I have always wanted to be a pen hooker. What a glorious and exciting life! When I was growing up, I knew a few pen hookers, but the one I knew and liked best was David Banner, even though he favored Chevrolets. Most pen hookers think the sun comes up just to hear them crow, but David was kind and generous, and he invested time in getting to know me. David was a milk truck driver and I’ll never forget the time he took me down east somewhere to pick up a truck load of milk to bring back to Morganton. Since, sadly, it seems that few people nowadays know what a pen hooker is, I should explain.
The profession of pen hooking is the perfect expression of capitalism. A pen hooker is a livestock investor who buys and resells animals. The key is to buy cheap and sell high and to avoid any storage and feeding costs. Of course, the effective pen hooker should be able to: quote the Scriptures; have a firm grasp on the field of psychology; possess expansive knowledge of everything or be able to convince others that they do; drink hard liquor without wincing; smell good and have the ability to charm women; and, have disposable income. Pen hooking requires a pickup truck, a trailer, a small barn and pasture with a place to load and unload animals efficiently, and as many starry-eyed adolescent helpers as possible to do all the work.
The crux of the effective livestock deal is to know your inventory. It’s healthy to think of your clients, those who buy and sell livestock, as your minions who pay the costs to feed and care for your animals. In truth, they all work for the pen hooker and he owns all the animals already (even though this reality is often unknown to the person who is caring for your stock). The effective pen hooker for example, observes and remembers the stock. He’s sort of like a medical doctor in that just as the doctor delivers the baby and diagnoses the dying, a pen hooker sells the animal to the caretaker and ultimately buys it back in the end, making profit from each transaction. He knows who has the bulls and who needs the bulls. He knows the vulnerabilities and the strengths of each customer. For example, Simmental bulls, being such excellent sires, are an easy sell whereas a Holstein bull is practically an unwanted liability due to widespread tendencies towards artificial insemination in dairy breeds, not to mention their uncanny capacity to eat three times as much as most beef cattle. Similarly, a lame sow won’t easily sell for ferrying, but the sales barn doesn’t care. The pen hooker must always reserve a handful of customers for those more difficult sales and be prepared to do the groundwork to maintain these potential buyers. This could include remembering to bring along a pack of cigarettes as a gift, visiting to cultivate future interest, and making idle chat to keep them on your side. You just never know when you might have to dump a Holstein bull on an unsuspecting 4-H club family.
My pen hooking idol was David Banner. Whenever he came around to visit, something exciting was almost always to follow, and at the very least, we got to put down our hoes and stand around the truck for a while and shoot the breeze. One afternoon when I was about 11 years old, my dad let us know that David would be coming by the next morning before school to pick six pigs to take to the sale. For those who aren’t familiar with farm life, this meant that he would be arriving while it was still dark and very cold outside. A pig wrestling match would ensue while we chased hogs around, trying to get them to walk up a precarious ramp and submit to a road trip to their next home. If you ever want to see a pig bow up like a Banty rooster, try to force it to step across a gap between the loading ramp and the trailer bed. You’re better off to just move the truck.
On this particular morning, the fighting was intense as the pugnacious, 150-pound pigs seemed to be well-rested and particularly belligerent. We used yellow pine slabs to separate the pigs and try to crowd the pigs into the chute. A word to the wise, if a hog can get his snout into a hole, his head will soon follow, and pigs are formidable, strong, and intelligent foes. You may have heard of “chasing a greased pig,” but please allow me to share that a pig doesn’t have to be greased to be tough to catch. Hogs in distress are quick to call on their fellow swine warriors, and their appeals never go unheeded. While you’ve got one hog cornered, you must watch for the biters coming up from behind. Hogs all over the farm contributed to the chaos in squeals of solidarity, trying to escape their fences to defend their kind.
After about an hour-and-a-half of going at it like killing snakes, pulling, dragging, and trying to separate six hogs from the herd, the truck was loaded. We were all were covered in mud and sweat, but not David. Remember, pen hookers don’t actually do the work. Triumphant, but worn slap out, we investigated the trailer load of panting swine and David began to evaluate the stock. As he counted, he was careful to identify each as either a gilt (female) or a barrow (castrated male). Much to our surprise, David soon identified that one of the pigs was ambiguous, that is to say, it was a hermaphrodite with both male and female sex organs. This caused much consternation and dismay among both the sellers and the buyer as we had never even noticed the now obvious contradiction. David insisted that the questionable pig was wholly unacceptable and that it would need to be replaced. I was already feeling anxious because I sure didn’t want to miss school and besides it wasn’t immediately clear to me how this inconsistency would affect the resulting sausage.
With his usual charm, David pulled out a five-dollar bill and persuaded me and Glenn to restart the pig rodeo, unloading the unfortunate porker, and replacing the subject with one of its cousins. The pen hooker said he would be willing to drive us to school and drop us off. We were late for school that day, and we didn’t smell that great, but the principal accepted our excusable tardiness with a note. After pulling up to the front of the school that morning with David Banner’s flashy blue and white-striped Silverado, I remember feeling like I was well on my way to becoming a pen hooker. I haven’t forgotten those early aspirations and nowadays, despite my many years at the university, my wife just shakes her head at me when I talk about my retirement plans to be a pen hooker.