Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (8 page)

I didn’t set him up to meet her. This guy had a crush on this girl, a very well known model. He arranged to take her to dinner and the theater. When he arrived at her apartment in the Dakota the maid answered the door and said the young lady was getting dressed, would he go into the living room and make himself a drink. So he went into this big room that had French windows which were open. He saw this enormous Great Dane lying on the floor, playing with a ball. It was obvious that the dog wanted him to play with him. So he goes over, picks up the ball, and bounces it against this big plain white wall. The dog jumps up and grabs it, runs back and hands it to him. He throws it against the wall again and this goes on for about five minutes. Suddenly he throws the ball and it glanced against the wall and went out the window. The dog took one look and followed it right out the window! There was this horrible crash. At just this moment, the girl came into the room saying, “Oh, I’m so terribly sorry, we’re going to be late for the theater.” He was just speechless with horror and didn’t know what to do or say. She kept saying, “Hurry, hurry, hurry—the elevators in this building are slow.” So they went to the theater and he didn’t say a word. She became more and more mystified. Here was this guy who was supposed to have a fabulous crush on her and he wouldn’t even speak to her. During the intermission she said, “I don’t understand what’s the matter with you, but you’re making me frightfully nervous and I’m going home.” Then she said, “I forgot to feed my dog. Did you see my dog?” “Yes,” he said, “I did. And I must say he looked awful hungry and despondent.” She walked out, went home, and the dog was in the courtyard. Along with John Lennon.

From Lawrence Grobel,
Conversations with Capote
(1985), pp. 68–70. Capote (1924–84) told this story repeatedly in interviews and lectures and on television talk shows, including the
Tonight Show,
with Johnny Carson. A particularly detailed version written by Capote appeared in
Ladies’ Home Journal
in January 1974. Carson himself repeated the story in his opening monologue in November 1985, and many other people—some celebrities, some not—have retold the story, both with and without crediting it to Capote. The story also inspired a “lite” beer TV commercial and an episode of
The Jeffersons
in the 1980s. Whether “The Dog in the High-Rise” was original with Truman Capote is impossible to determine, but it should be noted that the Australian-born novelist Sumner Locke Elliott was reported telling it as a personal experience as early as 1974, and another version titled “Fetch!” appeared in
Boys’ Life
in January 1975, later reprinted in a reader for middle school classes.

“Fifi Spills the Paint,” aka “Kitty Takes the Rap”

I
recently heard about a friend of a friend—a FOAF—who is an interior decorator with a thriving business on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore. He had just finished painting an elegant home in Wilmette, and was going around with a can of touch-up paint, making sure everything was perfect.

He finished the last brush stroke, stepped back to admire his work, and kicked the paint can over onto the priceless Oriental rug. What to do?

At that moment the client’s yappy, snappy, obnoxious toy poodle, Fifi, trotted into the room. Thinking quickly, the decorator scooped her up and dropped her into the puddle of paint, at the same time exclaiming loudly, “Fifi! Bad Dog! What have you done?”

I
was attending a seminar in Trial Advocacy, sponsored by the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, held on Nov. 11–16, 1989, in Washington, D.C. One of the featured speakers was a famous Texas trial lawyer, Jack Zimmermann.

Mr. Zimmermann has a wonderful Texas twang, and he gave his speech with a great deal of colorful language. He was speaking on the rules of evidence, and their use in trials. He was critical of the tendency of prosecutors to rely on circumstantial evidence. Then he told a story, which he said was from his boyhood. He said that he and his brother—aged about 8 and 10—had been left in charge of the house while their mother went out to run an errand. She had left a Dutch apple pie cooling on the kitchen table.

The boys were specifically told to keep an eye on the pie, and to make sure that no one touched it or ate any of it. But the pie smelled wonderful, and eventually the aroma became irresistible. Jack reasoned that if he and his brother only took a little bit from the corners of the pie, and then smoothed it over, their mother would never know the difference.

Unfortunately, the boys were unable to stick to their plan, and they ended up eating almost half of the pie. They knew that they could never hide or disguise what they had done. And, just then, Jack heard his mother’s car pull into the garage.

Suddenly Jack got an idea. He grabbed the family cat, and he shoved its face into the pie. The cat’s face became covered with bits and pieces of the pie filling and the crumb crust.

Jack’s mother walked into the kitchen and saw the cat looking up at her, and she didn’t hesitate for a moment. She grabbed the cat, and threw him out the back door into a stream right behind the house (which everyone called “the river”).

At this point, Mr. Zimmermann ended his story, saying, “Now that wasn’t the last cat to be sent up the river on crummy circumstantial evidence!”

“Fifi” was sent to me in 1986 by Susan Levin Kraykowski of Crystal Lake, Illinois. After I published her story in a newspaper column and in
Curses! Broiled Again!,
several professional painters wrote to inform me that this is a traditional ploy well known among painters as a way to shift blame for spillages. The variation, “Kitty Takes the Rap,” was sent by Jim Goodluck of Cleveland, Ohio; I paraphrased it in
The Baby Train
and also mentioned a letter that Jack B. Zimmermann of Houston sent me in 1990 in response to my query. Zimmermann wrote, “For criminal defense attorneys, this story is the perfect explanation of how seductive, yet how weak, circumstantial evidence can be.” But, he continued, “I confess I learned the story from another trial lawyer—one of Colorado’s greatest courtroom attorneys, Len Chesler of Denver.” Another version of the story involving two young girls and some spilled berry cobbler appears in Toni Morrison’s novel
The Bluest Eye,
published in 1972.

“Take the Puppy and Run”

S
o this elderly lady constituent unfolded this complaint to State Sen. Roy Goodman:

Seems she had a Great Dane. She cherished this Great Dane. When he died, this distressed lady knew not how to get rid of her beloved pet, so she rang the ASPCA. Budget cuts prevented them from collecting him, they said. Bring him over and they’ll organize a proper burial, they said. Right, but how, she said. In a suitcase, they said.

She was little and frail. The suitcase was large and heavy. Observing her struggling along the street a stranger offered to carry this cumbersome load. The panting lady stopped, thanked the stranger, and turned the handle over to him. The instant he grasped it, this happy thief ran like hell.

Only in New York, kids, only in New York.

Oh Well, in That Case

A friend of mine agreed to look after a couple’s aged dog while they went on a two-week vacation. Murphy’s Law—the dog died. My friend didn’t know what to do with it, as the couple wouldn’t return for another week, and a stiff German shepherd was hardly the conversation piece she’d always dreamed of.

She called the ASPCA who told her they could dispose of the body if she could get it to their center. Problem number two: What cab driver in New York is going to let someone take a huge dog in his cab, let alone a dead one? She decided to stuff the dog into a steamer trunk and take it on the subway.

Anyone who has tried to get the dead weight of a German shepherd down subway steps quickly realizes that it’s not easy. Seeing her struggle, a young man offered to help her. This is unusual in New York, but she thought it very kind—right up to the time the subway doors closed, with her on the inside and him on the platform, laughing and carting the trunk away.

I would have given anything to see the expression on his face when he opened the trunk to admire his loot.

Janet M. Nordon

Version one is from Cindy Adams’s column in the
New York Post
for January 27, 1987; version two from the “Only in New York” feature edited by John Sullivan in the
New York Daily News Magazine
for February 21, 1988. The latter was repeated as proof that “crime still doesn’t pay” in New York City on the
San Diego Union’
s editorial page, no less, for March 4, 1988. Makes you proud of American journalism. Both versions display features of the breathless style and jazzy format of typical gossip columns. Several readers forwarded me these examples, saying they had heard variations of the same story told in a more conversational style, but—true to these columnists’ claims—my correspondents heard the story “only in New York.” This tale is an obvious localization of the venerable “Dead Cat in the Package” legend quoted in Chapter 3.

The late great
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen, who loved urban legends, wrote in 1971 with reference to them, “old-time newsmen claim there’s no such thing as fables—‘If enough people believe them, they’re true’—and maybe that’s right. I believed a lot of them once. I’m even ready for some more.”

Many urban legends do indeed resemble fables. Like the ancient stories attributed to Aesop, they are short, snappy stories, usually with just a single episode, cast with stereotyped characters, and concluding with a moral that’s either stated directly or implied.

The “truth” factor in fables and legends is not dependent on matching the incidents in the stories to a real-life origin. Instead, fables contain the truth of some universal meaning or moral.

Ancient fables might lead up to a moral like “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” or “Slow and steady wins the race.” Modern urban legends lead up to morals like “Always check the back seat of your car,” or “If it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true.” Somewhere between ancient and folk fables might be placed the usually comic stories with morals written by authors like James Thurber, two of whose original fables conclude “Don’t count your boobies before they hatch” (from “The Unicorn in the Garden”) and “A new broom may sweep clean, but never trust an old saw” (from his version of “The Tortoise and the Hare”). But, unsurprisingly, the fables of Thurber and other authors never passed into the oral tradition nor developed folkloric variations.

A good example of a modern oral story akin to an ancient fable was sent to me in 1991 by Jim Hutton of the
San Antonio Express-News.
He had heard it from his father, who had heard it in a conversation about greyhound racing in Texas:

At a greyhound race track somewhere in the United States, one of the dogs got fed up with endlessly chasing the mechanical rabbit around the track but never catching it. So the dog somehow figured out a better way to go.

One day when the starting gates opened, all the other greyhounds sprinted away, but this clever dog just turned and waited for the rabbit to come around the track. Unfortunately, when the waiting greyhound met the speeding metal rabbit head on, there wasn’t much left of the dog.

I’ll supply a moral for this sad story: Sometimes it’s better to run with the pack than to follow your own path.

Or take this fable-like story that circulated by word of mouth and in the media during the time of the Exxon
Valdez
oil spill in Alaska:

During the cleanup, environmentalists spent a great deal of time, effort, and money to rescue and rehabilitate the oil-coated birds and animals. In order to commemorate their heroic efforts, a group of environmentalists arranged to publicly release a seal that they had lovingly cleaned up and restored to health.

The press and a large crowd of spectators gathered to observe the heartwarming release, and as the crowd applauded wildly, the seal swam happily out into the bay—where it was immediately eaten by a killer whale.

Moral: You never lose your place in the food chain.

A third example of a modern animal fable comes from syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry, who published it just before Christmas in 1991. Many readers who sent me clippings of the column recalled that they had also heard the story told, so it may be an authentic legend, or the story may have become one after Barry publicized it.

Barry, of course, said he was not making up “The Story of the Christmas Goat.”

The goat was the pet of a family in Virginia, and one bitterly cold Christmas Eve they found their goat dead—frozen solid in a standing position. The family couldn’t dig up the ground to bury their pet, nor could they find any agency during the holiday that would take the goat’s body off their hands.

(If this problem of pet-corpse disposal seems familiar, it’s because you just read “Take the Puppy and Run” in Chapter 2.)

As the family was driving around with the frozen goat awkwardly loaded into their station wagon, they passed a Nativity scene set up in front of a church, and they immediately saw the solution to their problem.

Barry claimed that the family added their dead goat to the assemblage of animals around the manger. “So it was a Merry Christmas after all, at least until the thaw came.”

Here’s my moral for this story: Always keep a stable relationship with your pet.

Urban legends differ from fables in that many legends with completely different plots have essentially the same moral. What is taught (among other lessons) in lots of urban legends is that “He/she/they got exactly what he/she/they deserved.” And what “they” get is pretty gross—dead cats, dead grandmothers, a urine specimen, and worse. In only a few legends is
good
behavior rewarded; of course it’s just as poetic that way, too. These brands of poetic justice are illustrated over and over again in modern legends, extending beyond the prime examples of just deserts included in this chapter.

“The Loaded Dog”

It Just Goes to Show, There Are No Lifeguards at the Gene Pool

From a radio program, true report of a happening in Georgia.

Guy buys brand new Grand Cherokee for $30,000 and has $400+ monthly payments.

He and a friend go duck hunting and of course all the lakes are frozen.

These two Atomic Brains go to the lake with the guns, the dog, the beer, and of course the new vehicle. They drive out onto the lake ice and get ready.

Now, they want to make some kind of a natural landing area for the ducks, something for the decoys to float on. In order to make a hole large enough to look like something a wandering duck would fly down and land on, it is going to take a little more effort than an ice-hole drill.

© Tribune Media Services, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Out of the back of the new Grand Cherokee comes a stick of dynamite with a short, 40-second fuse.

Now these two Rocket Scientists do take into consideration that if they place the stick of dynamite on the ice at a location far from where they are standing (and the new Grand Cherokee), they take the risk of slipping on the ice when they run from the burning fuse and possibly go up in smoke with the resulting blast. So, they decide to light this 40-second fuse and throw the dynamite.

Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the vehicle, the beer, the guns, and the dog?

Yes, the dog: A highly trained black Lab used for retrieving, especially things thrown by the owner.

You guessed it, the dog takes off at a high rate of doggy speed on the ice and captures the stick of dynamite with the burning 40-second fuse about the time it hits the ice. The two men yell, scream, wave arms, and wonder what to do now.

The dog, cheered on, keeps coming.

One of the guys grabs the shotgun and shoots the dog. The shotgun is loaded with #8 duck shot, hardly big enough to stop a black Lab. Dog stops for a moment, slightly confused but continues on. Another shot and this time the dog, still standing, becomes really confused and of course scared, thinking these two Nobel Prize winners have gone insane. He takes off to find cover (with the now really short fuse burning on the stick of dynamite)…under the brand new Cherokee.

BOOM!

Dog and Cherokee are blown to bits and sink to the bottom of the lake in a very large hole, leaving the two candidates for Co-leaders of the Known Universe standing there with this “I can’t believe this happened” look on their faces.

The insurance company says that sinking a vehicle in a lake by illegal use of explosives is not covered. He had yet to make the first of those $400+ a month payments.

This story was rampant on the Internet in nearly identical texts during late winter and spring 1997, when it was forwarded to me by several Internet friends. My title is borrowed from the classic version by Australian author Henry Lawson, written about 1899. Jack London penned his own treatment, “Moon-Face,” in 1902, but the basic plot, involving an animal set afire, occurs in the Bible (Judges 15:4–5). Appropriately enough, there’s a similar Aesopian fable called “The Burner Burnt.” Another retold version is in New Zealander Barry Crump’s hilarious 1960 book
A Good Keen Man.
The animal in the story may be a rat, rabbit, raccoon, possum, hawk, coyote, or the like, and there is even a shark version. Underscoring the “Just Deserts” theme is the moral stated in a version published in a book titled
America’s Dumbest Criminals
(1995): “that little coyote, although doomed, had at least managed to give them a small taste of what they deserved.” Less preachy, and much funnier, is a version written in 1990 for the
Lewisburg (Tennessee) Tribune
by columnist Joe Murrey, who claimed that the hunters’ dog was named Napoleon. Murrey’s punch line, from the dog’s tombstone, was “Napoleon Blown-apart.”

“The Plant’s Revenge”

T
here was no way roommates David Grundman and James Joseph Suchochi could have known, on that winter morning in 1982, that their desert cactus-plugging expedition would one day be turned into an anthem by an Austin, Texas, rock band called the Lounge Lizards.

They also could not have known that their outing would eventually be documented for the world by urban-legend sleuth Jan Harold Brunvand.

And they certainly had no way of foretelling that Grundman would meet his ignominious end that day, literally at the hands of a giant saguaro.

Had they known all that, they might have gone, anyway. Such is the world view of cactus-pluggers—dumb shits who make sport out of blasting desert plants with firearms.

The facts of the case, according to Brunvand (who copped an account for his book
Curses! Broiled Again! The Hottest Urban Legends Going
from stories in the Phoenix newspapers), are simple: Grundman shoots saguaro limb. Saguaro limb falls and hits Grundman. Grundman dies. The cactus was approximately 25 feet tall, and likely well over 100 years old. Grundman—in his mid-20s at the time—was described by the Lounge Lizards in their song “Saguaro” as a “noxious little twerp.”

An added wrinkle in this tale was some early confusion over Grundman’s last words. The first news reports of the happy accident claimed that Grundman was yelling “Tim-ber!” at the time of impact, and had actually only managed to spout the first syllable, “Tim…,” when the fatal blow came. Follow-up stories in the papers later speculated that the deceased more likely used his last breath to call out to his roommate, Jim.

From Dave Walker’s article “When Cactus and Civilization Collide: Trifling with saguaros can be hazardous to one’s health,” in the
Phoenix (Arizona) New Times,
March 3–9, 1993, p. 36. OK, I admit that my book
Curses! Broiled Again!
created a legend out of inconsistent news reports and a rock song, but there’s also the parallel theme to the preceding story to consider: both stories illustrate how just deserts may be served up in the natural world. Plus there’s a curious parallel story from Vermont in which a hunter shoots at a porcupine in a tree and the animal falls on him, puncturing him fatally with its quills. As with other people who have learned the story one way or another, I’ve become very fond of the account of Grundman’s demise. Walker’s lively summary appeals to me, too. The article was promoted on the cover of the
New Times
with this wonderful line: “Cactus Courageous: A pointed look at the saguaro, Arizona’s signature succulent.”