Trouble in the Great White North
My friend Chet McGovernson is one of those people to whom amazing things happen. And by amazing, I mean fucked up.
Chet has never won the lottery. He’s never been “discovered” by a top talent agent for his outstanding ability to… to… eat Kluski noodles, for instance. He’s never found a Rembrandt at a garage sale or discovered a chest full of gold doubloons while scuba diving. In fact, Chet doesn’t own a scuba suit at all. Not even one.
No, Chet is the guy who comes to a stoplight, looks over, and sees a clown in the next car, in full makeup and hair, smoking a cigarette and swearing. He’s the guy who sets the gas cap on top of his trunk and drives off, but then literally stumbles over that same gas cap a week later halfway across town. He’s the guy who sees a band with a spastic singer named Ron House, makes dumb jokes several times a day about Ron House for months, and then sees Ron House in another city, behind the counter at a store, eating a McDonald’s salad.
I think we all know someone who has created homemade Mother’s Day cards, cut and pasted the dictionary’s definition of “mother” into the cards, sent the cards to literally every single mother and grandmother of anyone he even remotely knows, and then discovers only after sending them out that he accidentally included the definition below “mother” as well, which just happens to be “motherfucker.” Chet is that guy, too.
So when I heard that Chet had gotten busted by Canadian customs, I actually wasn’t surprised at all. Not because he was trafficking drugs or smuggling Mexicans, but because he’s just that guy.
Before I go any further, I want to warn you that you are going to think I’m making this story up. I swear I am not.
Anyway, you already sort of know Chet, who I realize now I accidentally called “Chuck” throughout all of this post. You know him because he used to work at Mr. P’s Barn. In fact, the McGovernsons are rather close to Mr. P. for a reason I’ve never been able to uncover, which is probably why they knew that he wasn’t dead. Chet’s mother Stacy used to pretty much run the Barn. I think there might be a fractured love affair in there somewhere, possibly between Chet and bacon.
Or between Chet and Mr. P’s Ford Bronco.
Chet loved to drive Mr. P’s Bronco. So it was actually convenient when, each year, Mr. P. would head to Florida for the winter and leave his Bronco at home. To keep it in shape, he asked the McGovernsons to drive it on occasion. Chet was always happy to oblige. He’d drive it to the store. To Long John Silver’s. To his classes at the university. And to Canada.
Where you’d think the guards would know about him and his random, pointless visits. But they did not.
“Citizenship?” asked the man in the booth.
“American.”
“Are you carrying any cigarettes or alcohol?”
Chet pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Just these.”
“Purpose in Canada?”
Chet literally had no purpose whatsoever.
He told the agent, “No purpose whatsoever.”
The agent was confused. Most people come over to gamble. To shop. To sightsee. To visit. So he asked a follow-up: “How long will you be staying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a half-hour.”
“And you’re going to…?”
Chet shrugged amiably. “I just want to drive around.”
Suspicious, the agent turned to his second-tier questions. “What do you do for a living?”
At the time, Chet was a student. But as he didn’t currently have a job, he said, “I’m unemployed.”
“I see. Is this your car?”
Chet frowned. “Sort of.”
“May I see your license and registration?”
Chet pulled out the registration and his license, and handed them to the guard.
The man in the booth looked from one document to the other. “This is not your car.”
“No. No it is not.”
“Whose car is it?”
“It’s my boss’s car.”
Here’s where Chet’s astonishing ability to fuck things up catches up with him. The guard said, “You said you were unemployed.”
Chet knew by now that his answers weren’t up to par, but he couldn’t put his finger on a way to explain his way out. He could have told the agent that he had a boss during the summers, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “It’s… um… my mom’s friend’s car.”
The guard nodded. “Okay. Where is your mom’s friend?”
Chet answered with blunt honesty: “I have no idea.”
“When will he be back?”
“No clue.”
Chet’s the guy who amazing things happen to. He’s the guy whose two-man ensemble, “Lol’s ‘87 Hairdew,” gets banned from a coffee house because “you make customers go away,” leaving him to cart around a dead amplifier in his freezing truck all winter long. He’s the guy who loses a hundred pounds by biking every day, decides on whim to take a day off, then immediately regains 100 pounds during several months of lethargy.
The customs agent said, “Are you at least insured on this car?”
Chet wasn’t sure. There was supposed to have been a rider, seeing as Mr. P. left the Bronco with the McGovernsons all winter, every winter.
“I think so,” he said.
“Can I see the insurance card?”
Chet pulled it out and handed it to the man, who scanned it.
“You aren’t insured on this car.”
“No. I guess I’m not.”
The agent nodded. “What’s that big piece of expensive-looking electronic equipment in the back there?” he said. Chet turned around and saw the remnant from his Lol’s ‘87 Hairdew experiment, still sitting where he had left it.
“It’s an amplifier,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get it out of here.”
The guard said, and I quote: “Why would you want to immigrate with such a speaker?”
Chet started sweating. Sweating like Ron House eating a McDonald’s salad.
By now, the guard was suspicious. Unemployed American kid. No agenda. Big guy, acting funny. Possible stolen wares in the back seat. The guard craned his neck into the Bronco’s rear and indicated the large Rubbermaid storage container next to the amplifier. The Rubbermaid container that Chet had seen many times at his own house; the one his mother often carried laundry in.
The guard pointed. “What’s in there?”
Chet exhaled, trying to slow his heartbeat. “I think it’s my mom’s laundry.”
“Could you open it, please?”
The guy amazing things happen to. That’s Chet. And by “amazing things,” I mean “catastrophic, epic failures.” Failures like discovering on the spot that Mr. P. also owns a Rubbermaid container, and that it is not filled with laundry. Or food. Or even tools.
Failures like opening a container in front of an already suspicious customs agent and finding a thick yellow rope with large, gore-stained hooks along its entire length. And, for good measure, a huge bloody machete.
At this point, the agent got a lot more interested. Three-hours-in-a-small-room interested. Many-questions-about-the-giant-Ziplock-in-the-glove-compatment-filled-with-unmarked-pills interested.
It was, Chet tells me, a very, very long day.
But, that’s what happens when you try to cross the border in a car that isn’t yours and whose owner is MIA, while carrying pills and instruments of torture.
Fortunately, Chet’s grandmother owns two waffle irons. One of them chirps like a bird when the waffles are ready. And that little factoid has absolutely no relevance to anything, but it can be a ray of sunshine when you’re looking at 30 years in a federal prison.
Chet screwed up. He should have known better. I go to Canada all the time, but I never bring my drugs or murder weapons. And if I did, I’d at least clean off the blood and intestines.
But I would certainly bring waffle irons. Because that chirping is fucking ridiculous.
Jury still out on accidental meat vs. damnation
Sometimes, during the sales rampage that runs from August to December 24th, we forget that Christmas is supposed to be a religious holiday. We fill our yards with plastic Santas and trim our houses with lights. We buy Wii Fits and Kung Fu Joes and receive inappropriate cards from Grandma. We Xerox co-workers asses at parties and drink our various nogs, later achieving various stages of fat and lethargic. And through it all, you can almost imagine Jesus sitting in front of a birthday cake all by himself, shaking his head.
I try to remind myself that Christmas is in fact a religious holiday. Because if I’m not on guard about that, I’m more likely to screw something up.
I’m not anti-religious. In fact, I consider myself to be a fairly spiritual guy. I believe in God and that things happen for a reason. I’ve just never been into the kind of religion that happens inside of a building, although I’m totally in support of those who are as long as they don’t annoy the piss out of everyone.
Nonetheless, I’m dumb about religion. Always have been.
It started back when I was maybe 5 or 6 and my mom took me to one of those animatronic Christmas displays. There were elves and Santas and Rudolph and a lot of lights. And toward the end was a quiet nativity scene, where a group of families were admiring Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus under the Star of Bethlehem.
Now, I’d been to church. I’d done a bit of Sunday School. I knew the Christmas story. But that didn’t stop me from asking loudly, “WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?”
My mom was really happy. Not everyone has had to slink away from a situation while trying to convince onlookers that you aren’t the Devil’s concubine. Unsuccessfully, by the way.
Later, in my first real apartment (just after leaving dorm life and the likes of testicle-blowdrying Jesse Lee), I lived with three guys. One was Andy, the developer of the fruit cannon. Another was Matt, who has lived in this country since birth but still can’t speak English. The third was Paul. The Catholic.
I’m pretty sure that Paul and his family thought that the other three of us were hellspawn. Every Sunday, Paul went to church while the rest of us stayed at home and watched cartoons. His family would come to visit and find my girlfriend (who eventually became my wife) already there on the weekends. Before these visits, Paul would use Post-It Notes to censor controversial items on our fridge (mainly newspaper headlines containing the word “probe”) from the eyes of his younger siblings. And once, when the family celebrated a birthday, we three heathens gained some favor when we helped sing “Happy Birthday to You,” but lost it right back when we reached a second verse we didn’t know was there — the one that goes “May the dear Lord bless you.”
If Paul had some sort of an appointment on Sunday morning and missed church, he’d go at night. I didn’t understand it, but I did respect it. Honestly I did.
So really, I wasn’t fucking with Paul when every… single… year I’d point helpfully at him and say, “You’ve got some black shit on your forehead.”
Every year, he’d look at me solemnly — not with irritation but with the exasperation you’d feel when dealing with someone really slow — and say, “I know.”
This last came out in a sigh, as if he felt genuinely sorry for my abject idiocy. He used the same tone of voice when, every Friday during the following weeks, he’d have to remind us that he’d really prefer to have our collective dinner-out night on Saturday up until Easter.
“Because if we go out on Friday, I can’t order anything with meat in it,” he’d patiently explain.
“Why?” we’d ask.
And then that sigh.
But we’d oblige once we were given our weekly reminder, because we heathens liked our Catholic friend and because we never had other social plans anyway. So during Lent, we’d go out on Saturdays so that nobody would have to be wary of meat.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I’d say. “You can’t eat meat on Fridays, but what time zone are you going by? If you wait until just after midnight here and eat meat, it’s still Friday in Central time.”
“Jesus wasn’t born in Chicago,” said Matt. “Although records from that time were sketchy at best.”
“It’s kind of like the movie Gremlins,” I continued. “After midnight where? And what if your clock is wrong? And when does it stop being ‘after midnight’ and become ‘morning,’ when it’s okay to feed them? These are the things that trouble me.”
“Jesus wasn’t a gremlin,” said Matt. “Although records from that time were sketchy at best.”
I took a bite of my food. “Or would you go by Bethlehem time?” I wondered. “That might make sense.”
“I’m thinking you’d go by Bethlehem time,” Andy agreed.
Matt looked at his watch. It was Saturday, early evening. “What’s the time difference there? Maybe it’s still Friday.”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s later as you go East.”
“Use the place you’re at,” Paul said, rolling his eyes. “Just go by the local time.”
Matt pursed his lips thoughtfully. “What if you’re eating meat on Eastern time just after midnight, and then step over into Central. Do you have to stop eating?”
“I… yeah, I guess.”
“Well, what if you’re flying west? Out of Cleveland. You notice it’s after midnight, so you ask the stewardess for the steak meal. But at some point, you’re going to fly into Central time. But you don’t know it’s happened. You’re still eating meat, but it’s 11:45. Do you go to Hell?
“That’s a dumb scenario,” I interjected. “No airline serves dinner that late.”
Paul put down his burger. “You just… I don’t know, try not to eat when there’s some question about the time, I guess.”
Andy looked at Matt. “Loophole. God didn’t know there would be planes.”
Matt shook his head. “God knows all.”
I raised my hand. “I have a question. What if you eat meat accidentally?”
“How the hell do you eat anything accidentally?”
“Maybe someone sneaks you some meat. Like a wily protestant, eager to bring about your fall from grace.”
Paul rolled his eyes. “Then you wouldn’t know. So you’d be fine.”
“But what if you did know? Maybe you knew about it, but you didn’t want to eat it?”
“How the hell…”
“Someone threatens you,” Andy offered. “Or your family.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “A gunman breaks into your house. Puts a gun to your head and says, ‘Eat a hot dog or I kill you.’”
“Well, you’re being forced…”
“Ooh, ooh, I have one,” I said. “Okay. You’re shopping in a meat market. The butcher in the back just had a full bottle of pep pills or is on meth or something and he gets carried away with the meat cleaver. Meat is flying everywhere. Suddenly, without warning, a lump of beef comes zinging across the market and lodges in your throat. You start to choke, and nobody knows the Heimlich maneuver. But you’re in luck, sort of, because the thing’s real high in your throat. It won’t come up, but you might be able to swallow it. Do you swallow and save your life and be condemned to Hell? Or do you die a righteous choking death?”
I thought Paul was having a stroke. But then he yelled, “YOU JUST DON’T EAT MEAT ON FRIDAYS! YOU JUST DON’T!”
There was a silent pause. Then Matt spoke.
“I think if it was that high in your throat, you could breathe through your nose.”
In the end, maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe faith and ritual mattered more. And maybe Matt was right. Maybe the beef-throat was an unrealistic scenario. I’ve mis-eaten foods many times and had them end up in my sinuses. Seriously. But I’m not Catholic, so I don’t know the spiritual ramifications.
Part of me is struggling to resist calling Paul right now to ask him what would happen if you ate meat on Thursday, got it into your sinuses, and finally dislodged it on a Lenten Friday. But I won’t. Really.
Bits and Pieces: Christmas edition
Some people do spring cleaning. I do not. But I do get a bunch of little odds and ends for ideas that sound funny in themselves, but which won’t really support a full-length post. So around this time of year, when I get lazy, I toss them together and pretend that I’m doing it on purpose when in fact I have already mentally checked out and can really only think about eggnog, which is my favorite nog ever.
So here we go: My late-2008 bits and pieces.
I WAS CONSTIPATED, BUT APPARENTLY AM NOT ANYMORE
I’m signed up for these Google alerts. They let me know when stuff I might be interested shows up on the net. I have one set up for “the economy isn’t happening,” and a week or so ago I got one telling me that “Constipated Santa and the Great Swiss Christmas” was being featured on the Yahoo! page entitled “Everything about Constipated.“
Which was awesome. Constipated Santa has finally made the big time.
I asked my mom to get me a picture of CS so that you all could enjoy his stumpiness. There were some tense negotiations. At one point, she threatened to withhold the photo until receiving a photo in return — of her granddaughter wearing the hoodie Mom knitted for her that makes her look like a Jawa. Fortunately, I was able to deliver. So, you may now enjoy CS, and pity him. And us.
Unfortunately, I’m no longer up there. But there is a Yahoo group called “Constipated,” and the tagline is “Constipation relief. Women getting unblocked the old fashioned way!”
Yeah, don’t click on that link.
GAYNESS: TOO GAY FOR PRIMETIME
I submitted a few of my posts to both ezinearticles.com and associatedcontent.com. I did this in the name of profit because if a mere 1000 people view my articles on Associated Content, I get $1.50 and then I’m totally going to buy a snack-size bag of chips.
I submitted two posts to Ezine Articles. One was “Unfortunately Pants” and the other was”Christmas is Gay.” The first went through with no problem, but then this arrived regarding the second:
But this struck me as odd, because I don’t think I was engaging in hate-speak simply because I used the word “gay.” What if I had used the sentence, “Gay people are super cool and always wear really outstanding hats?” There had to be a mistake. So I responded:
But within a few days, I got this back:
I’m so sorry, my faithful gay readers. I have failed you. I apologize for my controversial use of a term that you use joyfully to describe yourselves. Next time I’ll try to write about the Mexican family that runs this really great restaurant nearby and pick on them instead, like maybe I’ll mention how hard-working and friendly they all are.
(Side note: I’ve discovered that in total, 12 people combined have viewed my articles, and that all three pieces are rated as three stars out of five. I’m so on a roll.)
I HAVE MADE OVER $5 ON MY ADSENSE ADS
In like a month. At this rate, I’ll reach the minimum $100 payout around August of 2010, and then we’ll all get naked and party down.
I’ve decided that AdSense sucks major balls on a site like mine. Nobody clicks on my ads because they’re not targeted enough. When I wrote about how I was no longer Robert Goulet, I got an ad for Robert Goulet’s biography. When I wrote about my baby daughter, I got diaper ads. When I wrote about Constipated Santa, I got ads for Kaopectate and anal irrigation. It’s all very incorrect. I picture a little Google monkey running the whole thing from inside a Wizard of Oz setup and getting all frazzled reading my blog.
I’m considering finding non-contextual ads and just placing the fucking things manually, based on what I imagine you all actually want. So basically I’m thinking hemorrhoid cream and old people porn. Stay tuned.
I’M OPTIMIZED FOR TESTICLES AND WEBELOS
I opened up my Analytics dashboard the other day and decided to check out what keywords people are using to find me on the search engines. And here’s what I got:
Honestly, what goes through my mind most here is curiosity. What compels a person to search for “constipated at Christmas”? I understand searching for constipation in general (and actually, I know of a good reference in the Yahoo! archive about that, especially for women), but why at Christmas? Does something different happen with bowels during the holidays? Do they clench shut in merriment? And who was searching for “osu testicle”? Because he spent nearly 7 minutes here, so it’s probably one of you reading this now. Reveal yourself!
But what amazed me most was the fact that I continue to draw a lot of traffic for the top-of-the-heap Cub Scouts honor “WEBELOS.” I noticed that I had a few WEBELOS hits a while back and attributed it to my Um… words post, and to a fluke. But 18 visits? Not a fluke.
What’s really awesome is that WEBELOS visitors fucking love me. On average, a WEBELOS visitor stays for almost seventeen minutes and reads nearly eight pages. That’s insane. And what’s more, the bounce rate of 0% means that they never leave. Hell, they’re probably still here right now, reading this.
To capitalize on what I’ve learned, I considered trying to optimize my site to pull in more of that loyal WEBELOS traffic (which is no surprise given that the LO stands for “loyal”) and announced that I was altering my website so that I could draw in lots of young boys, but I was told that it was a risque positioning angle.
I HAVE BECOME A CLICHE
Over dinner tonight, when my son was refusing to eat chicken fried rice, my wife told him, “You’re lucky you have food. There are kids in the world who don’t have anything to eat.” We’ve also yelled at him for running with scissors, talking with his mouth full, and jumping on the bed. Today I’ve decided that I’m going to tell him that I used to walk five miles in the snow uphill to get to school and that as long as he’s under my roof, he’ll abide by my rules. Then I’m totally going to tell him to get a haircut.
Thus completes my last post before the holidays, or, if you’re Jewish, my first post during the holidays. Merry Christmas to most of you from the Truant clan, and happy whatever to everyone else. Just remember not to eat the fruitcake, lest you get constipated at Christmas. Because there’s really nothing on Google to help you out with that.
More fun with comic books
Click images to enlarge.
Fast Fruit at the Ohio State University
My roommate Andy — who loyal readers may remember demonstrated that it’s cool to electrocute pickles — knew what he wanted when he started college.
“My goal is that OSU will have to make a new rule because of me,” he would say.
So he showed up one day with several lengths of heavy-duty surgical tubing. He was able to get this because he was pre-med, and we never asked where things came from. He took a swatch of leather as big as an open hand and punched holes at its edges, then threaded the tubing through it. The result was a giant slingshot that took three men to wield. Andy called it “the fruit cannon.”
See, this is the problem with prejudice. Most people hear “engineer” and they think “dork.” But Andy was in engineering, and he was pre-med, and the end result wasn’t so much “dork” as it was “epic awesomeness.” When you understand physics a little bit, you can calculate how many times a pendulum will swing before stopping under normal atmospheric conditions. But when you understand physics a lot — like, to the level of a perverse physical intimacy — then you can make deadly and ill-advised weapons. I mean, look how bad Einstein fucked that up.
• The fruit cannon could launch an apple the entire length of the quad outside our dorms, which was over 100 yards.
• The fruit cannon’s trajectory was high enough to clear teams of beefy guys playing football on those 100 yards, but not by nearly enough. (Andy has the build of Doogie Howser.)
• The fruit cannon, if fired into a wall twenty feet away, would throw citrusy debris thirty feet into the air. You learned not to look up, in order to avoid acid-eye.
A giant horrible slingshot that turned fruit from nutritious to deadly. We should have seen this evil coming from a mile away. After all, we knew that Andy was a mad Norwegian genius with a thing for Britney Spears and a severe scapular dysfunction, and… AND… we knew he played the trumpet. Just like Hitler.
Andy was full of useless knowledge. If you freeze a Corona for 45 minutes exactly and then add a drop of lime, the lime will cause the Corona to flash-freeze from the bottom and create an overflowing beer slushie. And if you dump rubbing alcohol on your nuts, it really, really burns.
Andy had this drinking bird toy, and it made its way onto the table in the common room of our dorm. It soon became a revered fixture for some reason. We began to address it as we passed, calling it “The Great One.” (Which is ironic because I now know that the real Great One is a freakishly strong librarian living in Pennsylvania who can’t spell for shit.) We would tell people about The Great One, introduce him as one of our roommates. Which technically, he was not.
The Great One was knocked to the floor several times. So we did what was natural. We built a platform for him out of cardboard and affixed it to the wall. Then we decided that he needed more regality, so we took a small lamp, stuck a piece of red cellophane over the lens, and duct taped it to the wall above him. This provided him with dramatic rosy lighting.
Andy was behind most of this. Andy also figured out how to pick the lock on the cover to the dorm’s central vacuuming system. He and Terry would put a roll of toilet paper on a spindle, open the vacuum cover, and feed the TP inside. You’ve never seen such toilet paper action. Gone in sixty seconds? Hell, the TP was gone in fifteen.
I had a small black and white webcam. Andy hooked it up to the TV and stuck it to the ceiling. It pointed out into the hallway so that we could see the elevators without having to turn our heads. The girls from the next room used to pick at the asses of their pants while waiting for the elevators, and they totally didn’t know we were watching all of this with rapt interest. Then word got around that we had a surveillance system and the hall director made us take it down.
So Andy of course replied by saying, “Let’s bolt that lamp to the door.”
The University had long ago figured out that students were total idiots, so the dorms were set up in the same way you’d set up a halfway house for the severely retarded. We had these large semi-padded walls made from pubic hair (apparently) because we couldn’t be trusted with drywall. And in the common room, there were small cubes acting as end tables that had large standard lamps bolted to them.
Through the bottom of the lamp was a bolt. The bolt ran through a hole in the top of the cube, and on the inside of the cube was a washer and nut. Andy unscrewed the peep hole in the door to the hallway, put the lamp’s bolt through the hole, and re-fastened the nut and washer on the other side. Then he propped the door open, plugged the lamp in, and turned it on.
“You can’t do that,” said LaTisha, the hall director. “It’s… against the fire code.”
“The fire code says you can’t have lamps mounted to doors?” Andy asked.
“It’s blocking the door.”
So Andy turned the lamp off. “Better?”
This wasn’t a situation LaTisha was used to. She looked confused, then nodded, then left.
Jesse Lee, the roommate from hell, thought all of this was hilarious and used to tell Andy how funny he was. This angered Andy, who had to share sleeping quarters with him and didn’t want the adoration.
“His appreciation undermines the brilliance of the toilet paper vacuum and The Great One,” he’d say. “It denigrates their appeal.”
“Open the door,” I’d say. “I need to use the lamp.”
Andy did what he could to lessen Jesse Lee’s liking of his antics while still pursuing his goal of forcing the college to enact new laws. He jimmied the plumbing access door and turned off the water when Jesse Lee went to flush the toilet. He refused to fry pickles in Jesse Lee’s presence. He and Benny picked the lock to Terry’s room, reversed the vent in the door so that the screws to remove it were on the outside, then removed the vent early one morning, crawled in, and played Revelry loudly. This latter had nothing to do with Jesse Lee, but needed to be done regardless.
“He’s blowing his nose in the shower,” Andy would say in disgust as we listened to Jesse Lee’s snorts among the water noises in the bathroom. Andy would turn off the hot water, and howls would replace the snorts. “And he keeps taking Playboys into the bathroom with him. What’s he doing in there? As if I don’t know.”
Andy would turn the hot water on, then off.
“What the FUCK?” Jesse Lee would howl. To the day he left, he never knew that Andy had gotten the plumbing door open. He just thought the toilet was broken and that the shower had ironic timing. The consistency of both whenever he was involved was both baffling and maddening to him.
Whenever Jesse Lee did discover that a trick had been played on him, he would chortle with a lazy lower jaw, the noise coming from deep in his chest.
“Huh-huh. Huh,” he’d laugh. And Andy would steam with anger.
It was probably Benny who eventually watched Jesse Lee walk into the bathroom with a Playboy yet again and said, “Fruit cannon.”
The way the fruit cannon worked was, two guys would hold the ends of the tubing that were not attached to the central leather ammo pouch — the “forward” parts of the slingshot. They’d need both hands and would typically have to hook their legs around something (in this case, the doorframe to the common bathroom) in order to hold their place. Then Andy would cradle a piece of fruit (in this case, an orange) in the pouch and walk back as far as he could. The doorway to the bathroom was across from the door to Benny’s and my room. Andy got nearly all the way to our back wall before the tension on the tubing forced him to sit down with the payload.
In the stillness, we heard a page turn in Jesse Lee’s Playboy.
“Fire in the hole,” said Andy. And let go.
What you don’t realize is that fruit is actually a ball of congealed juice that mutually agrees to stay in solid form only at low velocities. The orange hurtled across the bathroom and, if Einstein was right, traveled backwards somewhat in time. When it hit the tile at the back of the shower, it quite literally disappeared. All that remained was juice, pulp, and glory.
“What the hell, man?” yelped Jesse Lee from the bathroom stall. “I’m covered in this shit!”
Then Andy turned the water off.
“And this fucking toilet won’t flush again!”
It took hours to clean what remained of the orange from the walls, the mirrors, the sinks, and Milwaukee. It got into the cracks where the mirror met its frame. It got inside the toilet paper dispenser. It got under the nuts holding the toilets to the wall.
The next week, after we had turned the bathroom into an expertly detailed showcase, the cleaning woman left us a note: “Did you guys stick orange rind in between the ceiling tiles for some reason?”
The thing was, Andy never got his wish. The university never made that rule. Nothing about not hanging pickles in the elevators. Nothing about not bolting lamps to the doors. Nothing about high-impact fruit. Nada.
Today, Andy’s a doctor. And I have to wonder what people would think if they realized that he knew how to peel an orange in 1/1000th of a second. Andy has a degree in engineering and one in medicine, making for one of the most impressive educational one-twos I’ve ever seen. Yet he doesn’t have the one thing he always wanted. He doesn’t have an Andy Rule.
Perhaps he’ll make his mark in medicine. And years from now, radiologists the world over will all tell one another, “Now, don’t X-ray your balls while on the job. There’s a very firm rule about that.”