Benny Goes Down the Chute
During my freshman and sophomore years in college, I lived in a high-rise dorm at the Ohio State University. It was a twenty-something-story building with microscopic windows which were bolted shut. Floors 1-15 were administrative offices. The dorm floors, 16 and up, were composed of eight-person suites — four rooms of two, arranged around a common den and a common bathroom. Freshman year, we lived on the 20th floor. The next year, most of the same group of eight guys moved up to 21. We got our mail from boxes on 15. And mail, of course, went down the Chute.
My roommate, Ben, started it. For some reason, about a third of the mail in the box was for me, a third was for Ben, and a third was for Oberman Shakrobort. I think I might have known who Oberman was (my British calculus professor called role aloud, and when he wasn’t saying decidedly English things like “Bob’s your uncle,” he was stumbling over a name that sounded like “Oberman”), but Ben didn’t know Oberman at all. So when we got in the elevator to go up from 15 to 20, Benny slid Oberman Shakrobort ’s letters through the slot below the door, sending them to the bottom of the elevator shaft.
He always gleefully announced: “Down the Chute!”
And on it went, throughout our entire freshman year: four or five pieces of mail a week, every week. Ben so enjoyed the sounds of the letters flitting their way down through the cables and pulleys (they skittered and hopped with a sound like whispers) that he soon found that his down-the-Chute needs could no longer be satisfied by Oberman Shakrobort’s mail alone. Our own junk mail could not, of course, join Oberman‘s in the undoubtedly huge pile at the bottom (we might get busted that way!), so the Chute became Benny’s all-purpose trash can.
When fliers were tacked to our door, Benny walked with them to the elevator and said, “Down the Chute!”
When the trash can got full, Benny called the elevator and said, “Down the Chute!”
And when the cafeteria complained that students were stealing silverware and keeping it in their rooms for personal use, and then asked people to return it, Benny said, “Down the Chute!”
“Jeez, Ben,” someone (I think it was Tom) said as the flimsy spoon cacophonously made its way to the pile of Oberman’s mail at the bottom, “don’t you think that might be dangerous?”
“Fah-Q,” said Ben in his personal code. “Down the Chute!”
And then went the fork and knife.
Tom and Andy, the nerdiest of the rest of us nerds, began to study the Chute. They cracked open an audiocassette and tore the full spool from its innards. Andy grasped the free end of the ribbon winding off of the spool’s end and held it above the Chute. The two engineers-to-be then paused to calculate how long it would take the spool to unwind as it fell, accounting for various physical characteristics of the spool, like rotational inertia and angular momentum. Their calculations complete (and yes, they did write out actual calculations), they dropped the spool while holding the end. Somewhere below, it finally reached its end and dangled from twenty floors up.
“The Chute is deep,” Andy announced.
I roomed with Ben again the following year. Since we had a new address and mailbox, Oberman Shakrobort no longer provided us with Chute fodder. Ben was forced to improvise.
“The lunch tray will not fit down the Chute,” I told him.
“Nor would it be advisable,” Matt added.
The tray did fit. It fit very noisily. For days, people were talking about the “ruckus in the elevator shafts.” Ben laid off for a while, allowing Andy a chance to abuse the two elevators.
A lot of people don’t know that if you stick nails into a pickle, wrap the stripped end of a lamp cord around them, and then plug it into the wall, the pickle will buzz noisily and glow in the dark. Fortunately, Andy did know this. I have artistic black and white photos to prove it, his face lit with an eerie glow over a yellow-hot vegetable. After Andy electrocuted a pickle, seducing from it the fine aroma of burnt plastic, he would stick a string in one end and hang it at face-height in the middle of the elevator car.
“A fine thing,” I told him, gazing at the blackened turd in the middle of the elevator. We offered no explanation. We simply reached inside the car, hit all of the buttons, and sent the pickle on a round-trip tour of the dorm’s floors.
I can only imagine what people thought when the elevator dinged and the hanging turd greeted them wordlessly, like an accusation. When it made it to the ground floor, where the ID-checkers were doing their halfhearted duties at the doors, our phone rang.
“Andy Baker,” said someone that neither Andy nor anyone else knew. “Get that thing out of the elevator.” Apparently, Andy’s reputation preceded him.
After a while, Ben returned to the chute. Others got in on it.
“You don’t want to drop that huge fluorescent lightbulb down there,” our resident advisor told us, coming upon a sinister group poised above the Chute.
“We do,” Ben corrected him. “But it won’t fit.”
How Not To Be Manly
I gave blood the other day. I’ve given blood before, you understand. Specifically, I’ve given blood to my doctor’s phlebotomist, who collects it in small tubes. She tells me that I have good veins. Manly veins, large and hearty from all the blood I send through them each day. I am always impressed with my own manliness on these occasions, grinning and chatting while my arm is being tied off. I figured that giving blood formally (into a bag instead of a tube) was the next logical step. No problem, I thought.
When I got to the Red Cross donation center, I was directed to an aluminum chair with a fat man standing beside it like a sentinel. I sat down. He jabbed me. Jabbed again. Said in an aw-shuks voice, “Darn, it’s rolling on me” and then (I think) started sewing.
“I’m going to pass out,” I informed him in a less-than-manly manner.
Then a big Russian came over and tilted my chair back and asked me if I wanted to continue. I whimpered that of course I did. What did he think I was, some sort of a wimp? Meanwhile, someone was draping wet cloths over my forehead. I think the room began to rotate at this point.
(I feel it necessary to add that neither the eighty year-old woman nor the girl with the newborn baby were having problems. They chatted pleasantly, watching my raised feet. I tried to lie still so as not to disturb the woman donating next to me, who was reading.)
By the time I finished, I had realized something. I was not manly.
Of course, I should have seen the signs. I live with my wife, two female cats, and a dog who was neutered so early that he doesn’t know how to lift his leg. Robin has announced that our first child will be hers to indoctrinate into her girlie horse-showing ways. As the family’s main breadwinner, I guess she’s entitled. I do my part by staying home and cooking dinner between writing assignments. Sometimes, she sends me on errands during the day. Like, I get my hair cut and stuff.
Fortunately, my father-in-law Frank is manly. He has all of these tools and teaches me how to turn wood into buildings. He’s got a tractor with four-foot-high tires. It has a variety of manly accessories, like the auger. The auger looks like a huge, evil corkscrew with which we dig holes in the ground. It has a warning decal on it showing someone wrapped around the screw six or seven times. If this has happened, you are operating the auger improperly and should try again.
Other things I have learned about construction: Swinging a hammer tires your arm. Shingles are much, much heavier than they look. You get a really messed-up tan if you always wear deck shoes for too long without proper sunblock. I have also learned that normal hammers are called “finishing hammers,” and weigh 16 ounces. “Framing hammers” are used for building – like Frank’s 20oz, with all of the weight in the head. If you try to use a finishing hammer to drive five-inch pole barn nails, you will look like the weakest person ever to live. After learning this, I ran to Home Depot and bought the largest hammer I could find. It weighs 28 ounces, and using it is like swinging a broadsword. Nobody on our building site save me will use it. It is too powerful for them.
I reported to my stepfather Todd about my hammer, which I have nicknamed “The Punisher.”
“It’s a framing hammer, not a finishing hammer,” I told him.
“Aaaah,” he replied, impressed.
“It’s 28 ounces,” I elaborated. I had purposely separated the hammer’s type and weight to build suspense.
“Woah,” he said. Then, to my mother, who Todd thinks has corrupted me with unmanly concerns such as graphic design: “See? He’s learning about hammers.”
“What?” she replied.
The best thing about doing manly construction work is that my mother-in-law comes over and makes us lunch. We are very dirty and, naturally, manly, by this time. The Leave It To Beaver-style manliness escalates when Carole brings Frank a plate of food. One time, she asked my wife Robin if she was going to get a plate for her own hard-working husband.
“Eh, no,” Robin said.
This did not bother me, because I have a framing hammer. It weighs 28 ounces. It doesn’t matter if I pass out when I give blood; I’m still manly. Let’s see that eighty-year old woman, or the girl with the newborn, or the reading lady swing it. Let’s have them come right on over. No? That’s what I thought. My hammer weighs 28 ounces. You bet it does.