Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (17 page)
Read Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Online
Authors: Jan Harold Harold Brunvand
This piece of Xeroxlore has been around for many years, with or without the spurious memo-heading shown above. The terms “slick chick,” “seductive babe,” and “stag” echo dated slang, yet these words remain in most modern texts, as does the humorous dangling modifier in the second paragraph. Some texts are more graphic in rendering the sex scene, and various different personal names occur, including “Charlie” as the name of the man who borrowed the costume. I’ve always thought that this Halloween legend might be the basis for a successful ad campaign for aspirin. When
Reader’s Digest
ran a sanitized version in November 1988 the setting was a masked ball, but the borrower of the costume was still “Charlie.” The story is also transmitted orally, as is another sexcapade story in which two husbands contrive to switch wives overnight on a camping trip, unaware that their wives had the same plan and had already switched positions in their tents.
“AIDS Mary” and “AIDS Harry”
I
’m scared to death,” said Kristi, 23. She worked at a financial company in Denver with her 21-year-old girlfriend Elise; they were sitting on one of those carpeted seats high above the dance floor, watching the goings-on around them….
“People are going to use AIDS to get back at other people,” Kristi predicted. Then she told me this horrifying story. A guy she knows—the friend of someone she works with—met a girl at a club named Josephina’s. He flirted with her, she responded; and before he knew it, they were at his place, having sex. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. The next morning, he woke up alone, went to the bathroom and nearly fainted. There, written in lipstick on his mirror, was a note the girl had left him. It said, WELCOME TO THE AIDS FAMILY.
A
woman meets a man in a bar. They hit it off right away, and the man asks her to join him on vacation at his beach house in the Bahamas. She accepts and goes with him. They make love, and the woman has never been happier.
On the day she has to leave, the man sees her off at the airport. He gives her a present, telling her not to open it until she gets home.
Back home, she finds a coffee maker inside. A note on it says, “This is for all the lonely nights you’ll be facing. Welcome to the world of AIDS.”
The legend of “AIDS Mary,” as a Chicago journalist dubbed it, began sweeping the country, and eventually the world, in late 1986; the above version is from David Seeley’s article “Night Life in the Age of AIDS,”
Playboy,
July 1987, p. 170. The handwriting-on-the-wall motif seems to be borrowed from “The Licked Hand” legend quoted in Chapter 2. Sometimes the punch line is “Welcome to the world of AIDS,” or “Welcome to the AIDS club.” The legend can be traced to much earlier stories about the deliberate spread of venereal diseases, combined with recent history and folklore about the origins of the AIDS epidemic. Some background to understanding the legend is provided in Michael Fumento’s 1990 book
The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,
Chapter 5, “The ‘Perils’ of Promiscuity.” Occasionally in the story it was a man said to be deliberately infecting women, and by spring 1990 this “AIDS Harry” variation had taken over. The letter quoted above came from a 13-year-old in Millington, Maryland, in January 1992. The curious detail of a coffee maker as a gift derives from versions in which the warning note is presented inside a tiny gift-wrapped
coffin—
sometimes a black, purple velvet, or elaborately carved coffin. Then, probably through misunderstanding in oral tradition, this coffin became a can of
coffee,
and the recipient checked the can, fearing she had been set up to smuggle drugs home from the Caribbean. The above version has converted this detail to a coffee
maker,
with the explanation that it’s for “all the lonely nights.”
I’m embarrassed to
admit it, but when I started to recognize embarrassment as a major theme in urban legends I didn’t know that there was already a considerable sociological and psychological literature on the subject. All
I
knew were a bunch of traditional stories concerning embarrassing situations. Like this one:
A panicked woman who had just checked into a large and elegant New York City hotel called down to the front desk and pleaded, “Please help me! I’m trapped inside my room, and I don’t know how to get out!”
When the desk clerk asked her to explain how she was trapped, the woman answered, “Well, I can see only three doors here. The first one opens to a closet. The second one opens to the bathroom. And the third one has a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign hanging on it.”
To me—a folklorist—that story immediately calls to mind others that reveal a similar misreading of a situation with embarrassing results. Like the one about the person trying to look up something in the subject card-catalog of a library. (This story is precomputer!) At one point in the search, the library patron encounters a card that directs “Go to main entry,” so he shuts the drawer and walks to the main entrance of the library building itself, expecting to find some kind of aid desk there. Or the one about the woman baking bread or cookies for the first time who follows the direction literally to put the dough in the pan, but “Leave room to rise.” She arranges her dough, then leaves the kitchen, tiptoeing back and peeking in now and then to see if the dough has risen. (If you don’t get these two stories, I hope you’re not too embarrassed to ask a librarian or a cook to explain them.)
Two other things strike me about such stories. First, they seem to be a largely male narrative genre, since they’re so often told about females who seem to be one French fry short of a Happy Meal; and second, the stories end abruptly without a second act in which the misunderstanding is explained and the dupe squirms.
What the experts on embarrassment itself have explained, as Edward Gross and Gregory P. Stone did in a 1964 article published in the
American Journal of Sociology,
is that embarrassing situations and stories typically serve to undermine a person’s identity, poise, and confidence. “Exposure,” asserted Gross in a published interview, “is the key thing…. When you’re embarrassed, you’ve committed some kind of public gaffe.” The following story, unverifiable, but convincing nonetheless, offers a good example:
A homeless person tried to get on a bus without sufficient fare, and he was kicked off by the driver. Going around to the back of the bus, the vagrant managed to slip in after someone had gotten off, and he hid behind a rear seat.
A few stops along the bus line a woman got on the bus and made her way back to an available seat in the rear of the bus. Looking over the seat back, she noticed the stowaway crouched there, and said “Oh my God, there’s a bum on the bus.” Her remark was repeated and made its way to the front of the crowded vehicle where the driver misheard her statement as “There’s a
bomb
on the bus.”The bus driver immediately pulled over, opened both doors, shouted to the passengers to jump out, and started honking his horn to attract a policeman to summon the bomb squad.
(Who was more embarrassed here, the woman who inadvertently caused the alarm, or the driver who misunderstood? The legend doesn’t tell us.)
People need strategies to deal with embarrassment in real life. The aforementioned Edward Gross, a University of Washington emeritus professor of sociology, has described the case of a four-year-old boy who fell off the toilet seat and became wedged between the toilet and the wall. “He looked up with rather plaintive eyes at his baby-sitter and said, ‘That’s my favorite thing to do.” A well-known example of embarrassment-recovery from the world of opera is told about a famous Wagnerian tenor who, in a production of
Lohengrin,
missed the timing of his exit on a swan boat that went gliding empty across the stage. Supposedly, the tenor had the presence of mind to ask another person in the scene, “What time is the next swan?” In a similar vein, it is told that when a telephone on a stage set rang at the wrong time during the play, an actor answered it, and then handed the phone to another actor, saying “It’s for you.”
In my opinion, one of the world’s best legends in the category of a horribly embarrassing situation defused by quick thinking is this one about a dropped turkey:
The society guests in an elegant home were seated for dinner. The maid entered, carrying a large roast turkey on a platter. Just inside the dining room, however, the maid slipped, and the bird slid off the platter and onto the floor.
After a moment of stunned silence, the lady of the house said in a calm, even voice, “That’s all right, Lucy. Don’t be embarrassed. Just take that one back to the kitchen and bring in the other turkey.”
Lucy picked up the fallen bird, left the room with it, and soon returned, bearing a roast turkey on a platter. She successfully delivered it to the table before the man of the house, who without comment carved and served it to the guests.
And now let me reveal to you a trade secret of male college professors. One of our worst fears is that someday we will unwittingly step in front of a class to lecture with the fly of our trousers unzipped. How embarrassing!
This may explain why so many men in my profession prefer to lecture from behind a podium. And those who do lecture standing before the class habitually hesitate in their offices just before class for a quick zipper check. The code term to warn of an open fly—something all American males learn in boyhood—is “XYZ,” or “examine your zipper.” And it’s not just male college professors who suffer this fear; the problem of open zipper flies is common enough to have generated several urban legends.
At the simplest level, there’s the story of the businessman seated at his desk who notices that his fly is open. He hastily closes the zipper, not realizing that the end of his necktie is now caught in it. When he stands to greet a visitor, he is nearly strangled.
Slightly more complicated are the unzipped-fly stories told about bus or subway passengers. In one such tale, a man is warned that his zipper is open; he hastily closes it, catching a piece of the skirt worn by a woman standing next to him. An embarrassing extrication follows, as it always does in these legends, with the driver, conductor, and other passengers all joining in the struggle to free the two strangers from the zipper’s firm grip.
Another fly-on-the-bus story tells of a woman who accidentally drops her handkerchief, which lands in the lap of a seated man. She points at his lap, calling his attention to the hanky, and he glances down and thinks his shirttail is hanging out through his trouser fly.
The man eases the zipper down, stuffs the hanky inside, and rezips, leaving the woman speechless. One wonders how he explains the hanky in his pants when he gets home.
The first two urban legends following in this chapter (after the box) are open-zipper stories. Concerning the first story—an international classic of this genre—Robert Friedel in his wonderfully comprehensive book
Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty
(1994) wrote, “the ancient comic elements of mistaken identity, sex, and slapstick are all thrown together, with a readily available zipper in the middle.” Read on.
“Two Painful Nose Jobs”
My cousin’s husband told me that a friend of his was at a wedding once and saw this happen: The bride and groom took turns cutting the cake, and as playful newlyweds often do, the groom started to mash the cake into his bride’s face instead of just gently feeding it to her.
As a reflex, the bride raised her hands to her face, and when she pulled them away they were covered with blood, and her white gown was stained with blood! The groom had pushed the cake so hard that he broke her nose.
One night this guy came into the ER with both hands cupped over his face. He wouldn’t take his hands down until the paramedics promised not to laugh at him.
When he finally took one of his hands down, they saw that one of his fingers on one hand was stuck inside his nose.
He told them that he had been picking his nose while waiting in his car at a red light. Then somebody had rear-ended his car, which threw his head forward and into his steering wheel. His nose had swollen so fast that he couldn’t get his finger out of it, and so he had come to the emergency room for help.
“The Unzipped Plumber (or Mechanic)”
N
ewspaper friend Tom Ungles of Satanta, Kansas, an occasional visitor to Woodland Park, has forwarded a copy of a lighter vein item appearing in a Kansas newspaper.
The item gave us a few chuckles, so we pass it along to
Courier
readers for hopefully the same purpose…. We give you this “believe it or not” from the
Arkansas Daily Traveler:
This story, purported to be true by those who tell it, has its locale in Lawrence, Kansas.
It seems a young wife noticed that the trailer home occupied by her husband and herself had developed a plumbing problem. She informed her husband of this fact and left the mobile home for an errand.
Returning, she found a pair of legs extending from beneath the trailer and, feeling playful, giggled, lowered the zipper on the pants, and entered the door of the house.
Imagine her chagrin when she found her husband lolling on the sofa watching television! When she had recovered her composure enough to explain to her mate what she had done, he in turn explained to her that he called a plumber when he found the repair job beyond his abilities.
Gathering their courage, they ventured outside together to attempt to explain to the plumber below the home. They found the plumber in the same position as before, except that he appeared to be unconscious from a blow to the head he evidently suffered when he reacted to the playful prank of the young housewife by quickly raising his head to see what was happening.
Horrified, the young couple called an ambulance and soon the vehicle with two attendants arrived on the scene to aid the injured plumber.
When the circumstances surrounding the injury to the man were subsequently related to the two attendants, however, they became so overpowered with the humor of the situation that during a fit of convulsive laughter, they dumped the hapless plumber to the ground, breaking his arm.
Imagine, if you can, that plumber awakening in the hospital with a broken arm, and a knot on his head with the last positive memory being that of feeling his zipper being lowered.
We’ll bet that young couple received a bill for $51.88…at least.
F
rom Australia’s
Rockhampton Morning Bulletin:
A central west couple drove their car into Rockhampton Kmart only to have their car break down in the car park. The husband told his wife to carry on with the shopping while he fixed the car.
The wife returned later to see a small group of people near the car. On closer inspection she saw a pair of male legs protruding from under the chassis. Although the man was in shorts, his lack of underpants turned private parts into glaringly public ones.
Unable to stand the embarrassment, she dutifully stepped forward and tucked everything back into place. On regaining her feet she looked across the bonnet and found herself staring at her husband standing idly by. The repairman had to have three stitches inserted in his head.
The first item is from the
Ute Pass Courier
of Woodland Park, Colorado, April 15, 1971, sent to me by Charles Pheasant of Littleton, Colorado. The second is from the “Editorial Report” column of the
National Lampoon,
August 1988 “True Facts” issue. Though somewhat stilted in style, these items illustrate how newspapers borrow legendary material from one another and thus contribute to the spread of folk narratives. This story has had more versions than the victim had stitches on his clobbered head, but perhaps the most “standard” variation has the husband simply working on his car that is parked in his own driveway; unbeknownst to his wife, he enlists a neighbor or a professional mechanic to help him. This legend may reflect, on one level, the male fear of sexual exposure and, on another level, female uneasiness about initiating sex. The laughing paramedics are a typical motif of this and other urban legends about hilarious accidents.
“The Unzipped Fly”
T
he version that I heard in Denmark from my father (in the late 1960s or early ’70s) runs as follows:
A couple is at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. They have stalls and the theatre is packed. The drama has just begun when some latecomers appear, among them a young lady in a big chiffon dress. They have to get past a couple, and as everybody on their row gets up as well, the man notices that his fly is open. At the moment when the festively dressed lady is passing he pulls the zipper and, most unfortunately, the chiffon skirt gets caught. However much he tries, he can’t get it open again, and the woman angrily turns on him as he stammers some explanation. Hushing and irritated whispering is already being heard behind them. Her surprised escort and his confused wife see them go out close together, as he nervously whispers, “We have to get out and fix it outside.”
