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.”

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